Archaeological,Historical, and Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Sewn Boats: past,present, and future

Sewn‐plank vessels have been a pervasive form of ship construction since antiquity. This paper provides an introductory overview of the current state of the field of sewn‐plank studies, with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean. It describes the basic function of sewn‐plank techniques, and then discusses textual references and historical approaches to the topic. The relevant archaeological evidence is reviewed, and prior ethnographic work relating to the topic is outlined. It summarizes numerous experimental sewn‐plank reconstructions that have been undertaken and concludes with a discussion of the current directions of the field and suggestions for the future.     

A palynological and geoarchaeological investigation into Bronze Age farming at Belderg Beg,Co. Mayo,Ireland

This contribution describes the results and interpretations of geoarchaeological and palynological analyses of a soil profile near to a ¹⁴C dated Bronze Age roundhouse in a sub-peat field system at Belderg Beg, north Mayo in western Ireland, which displayed field-scale evidence of tillage in the form of cultivation ridges. This evidence of arable cultivation was supported by the presence of quernstones in the roundhouse, but there was no supporting evidence from other forms of socio-economic analysis. Soil micromorphological analysis was employed to define how the ridges were created and with what tools; pollen analysis was used to characterise the surface vegetation and test the purpose of the ridges. The results unequivocally showed that a phase of ard cultivation was followed after a brief hiatus by ridge-and-furrow tillage. There were tentative indications of possible amendment of the earlier, ard-worked soil, and more definitive evidence of midden material addition to the ridged soil. An AMS radiocarbon assay on the base of peat overlying the ridges indicated that tillage occurred in the Mid to Late Bronze Age.     

Direct evidence of the use of beehive products in pre-Roman Sardinia

Written sources and iconographic evidence suggest that honey and beehive products, used in culinary, medicinal, and technological functions since pre-Neolithic times, were likely known and used in Phoenician and Punic Sardinia. The role of these resources is nonetheless poorly understood because no direct evidence survives on a macroscopic level. Significant advances in the knowledge about beeswax and beehive products processing in the past have been offered in recent decades by organic residue analyses (ORA), an approach that enables the characterisation of surviving chemical compounds or suites of compounds that provide information relating to human activity in the past. The relatively recalcitrant nature of lipid compounds comprising beeswax means that this commodity is among the products that can be unambiguously identified through ORA. Here we present and discuss the results of analyses undertaken on 368 pottery sherds from Phoenician and Punic Sardinia (eighth to third century BCE). These analyses offer direct evidence for the presence of beehive products on the island, suggesting the use of honey for culinary purposes in pots, and possibly connecting one specific vessel category with beeswax decanting during beekeeping and honey production processes. Our results also now clearly illustrate the widespread use of beehive products in pre-Roman Sardinia.     

Ways of Seeing: Sexism the Forgotten Prejudice?

Recent developments in feminism, charted in Gender, Place and Culture over the past 21 years, have stressed the relational, differentiated and contested nature of gender. This has led to the rejection of the unified category women, and with this the right for feminism to make claims on behalf of all women. This paper argues that an unintended consequence of this development in ways of thinking about gender is that patriarchy as a form of power relations has become relatively neglected. It draws on research from a European Research Council project (including biographical interviews and case studies of a gym and workplace) to demonstrate that while the development of equality legislation has contained the public expression of the most blatant forms of gender prejudice, sexism persists and is manifest in subtle ways. As a consequence, it can be difficult to name and challenge with the effect that patriarchy as a power structure which systematically (re)produces gender inequalities,is obscured by its ordinariness. Rather, sexism appears only to be ‘seen’ when it affords the instantiation of other forms of prejudice, such as Islamophobia. As such, we argue that Gender, Place and Culture has a responsibility going forward to make sexism as a particular form of prejudice more visible, while also exposing the complexity and fluidity of its intersectional relationship to other forms of oppression and social categories.     

Understanding Prehistoric Lithic Raw Material Selection: Application of a Gravity Model

Provenance studies can tell us which sources of lithic raw material were used in the past, but can they tell us why? After all, many factors can have entered into a person’s choice to use one source rather than another. Those factors can be grouped into two categories, the geologic/geographic characteristics of the source itself (quality, abundance, size of pieces, etc.), and the human factors (direction of travel, time available, social restrictions, etc.). This paper demonstrates how the geologic/geographic characteristics can be quantified and calculated together to give one value, the attractiveness of the source, which can then be used in a gravity model approach to predict which sources ‘should’ have been used more than others. Deviations from the predicted pattern point to situations where the human factors were of greater or lesser importance. The values are also used to delineate geographical areas within which particular sources would be likely to be used (‘areas of influence’), which gives us a useful new way of understanding the landscape within which the prehistoric group lived.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

Bringing the Prisoner into View: English and Welsh Census Data and the Victorian Prison Population

The 1881 England and Wales census is now available as a fully-searchable electronic file. What can this source of big data tell us about the shape of the late-Victorian prison population? This article explores how the 1881 census compares to other sources of prison population data, and examines how the census can be analysed to reveal the demographic structure of the prison population in England and Wales. We argue that the census enables us to bring breadth of information about incarcerated individuals, identifying the ‘typical’ and ‘atypical’ prisoner, to a depth of information already available through small-scale qualitative research. In doing so, census data provides both quantitative and qualitative data essential for bringing context and scale to social and personal histories of crime.