Jazzing Sheiks at the 25 Cent Bram: Panama and Harlem as Caribbean Crossroads,circa 1910–1940

Both Harlem and Panama were, in the early twentieth century, crossroads of the Caribbean. This essays traces the musical echoes of that fact, arguing that British West Indians had a central but often unrecognized role in the exchanges driving Black cultural innovation in the interwar metropoles. Hundreds of thousands of British West Indians came to and through Panama at the start of the twentieth century, creating a Pan-Caribbean space where the rhythms of son, tango, mento, cumbia, and ragtime rang out. From there many would travel onward. The lives of Panama-born, New York-based performers like Vernon Andrade, Luis Russell, Teófilo Alfonso ‘Panama Al’ Brown, and Estelle Bernier show how British West Indians shaped by the Greater Caribbean’s borderlands crossed boundaries within New York as well. Multilingual and multicultural, they moved easily within Harlem’s ‘Latin Quarter’ of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speakers, helping to bring rhythms and styles from the Hispanic Caribbean to the Afro-American listening and dancing public. Stories of the working-class dance halls of 1920s Panama and of the Latin connections of British Caribbean performers in New York together point to tropical circuits of music and moves rarely recognized as part of the metropolitan Jazz Age.     

Bone Modifications in an Early Holocene Cremation Burial from Palawan,Philippines

Fragments of a single human skeleton recovered from a discrete archaeological context and dating to the Early Holocene from Ille Site, Palawan, Philippines, provided a unique opportunity to utilise anthropogenic bone modifications to reconstruct the postmortem history of a body prior to its deposition. Aside from being burnt, the remains were found to exhibit a combination of cutmarks, scrape marks, and impact scars indicative of disarticulation, defleshing, and hammerstone percussion. The results clearly demonstrate a complex ritualistic treatment of the body prior to interment that, so far, has not been recorded in Southeast Asia. This thus adds to the growing data of varying burial traditions during the early Holocene across the region. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Towards Situated Analyses of Uneven Peri-Urbanisation: An (Urban) Political Ecology Perspective

In this article we develop a novel analytical framework for situated studies of uneven peri-urbanisation that resist further dividing Marxist and Situated (Urban) Political Ecology. We conceptualise uneven peri-urbanisation as a process in which access to the resources mobilised for peri-urban developments, such as water or land, is rendered uneven. In a three-step approach we suggest, first, describing how peri-urbanisation unfolds in the case being studied and distinguish it from other processes, such as suburbanisation. Second, we propose analysing the transformations of nature on which the peri-urbanisation process is based; and third, examining the uneven power relations infusing inequalities into these transformations and consequently into the peri-urbanisation process described. To allow for a situated analysis this approach regards the study of practices as crucial, but they have to be embedded in wider socio-economic, political, and historical processes, since both contribute to transformations of nature and thus shape uneven peri-urbanisation.     

A 28,000 year old excavated painted rock from Nawarla Gabarnmang,northern Australia

We report new archaeological excavations from northern Australia revealing part of a charcoal design likely to be c. 28,000 years old (and chrono-stratigraphically constrained within the period 15,600–45,600 cal BP) on a small rock slab fallen from the ceiling at the rockshelter of Nawarla Gabarnmang in Jawoyn country, Arnhem Land. This represents the oldest confirmed pictograph in Australia.     

The Medieval lead-glazed pottery from Nogara (north-east Italy): a multi-methodological study

The present work focuses on the archaeometric characterisation of 10th–11th-century lead-glazed pottery from Nogara (Verona, north-east Italy), with the main aim of defining the production technology of both glaze and clay body, through a multi-methodological approach.