Gender,Legend, and the Icelandic Countryside in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-Engaging the Archives as a Means of Giving Voice to the Women of the Past

This article addresses the way in which, in spite of their accepted drawbacks (which often include an over-emphasis on male informants), folklore archives can be used to reconstruct the oral traditions of women from earlier times, especially when used in combination with other archival sources that are increasingly becoming available online. In Iceland, the recorded interviews by the folklore collector Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson in the 1960s and 1970s have proven to be a particularly useful source for engaging with the reconstruction of women’s narrative traditions in Iceland. These interviews not only provide us with women’s narratives told in their own voices, but also yield a wide range of additional information about the context of women’s storytelling within the rural society of previous centuries.     

New Excavations at Border Cave,KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

New excavations at Border Cave use high-resolution techniques, including FT-IR, for sediment samples and thin sections of micromorphology blocks from stratigraphy. These show that sediments have different moisture regimes, both spatially and chronologically. The site preserves desiccated grass bedding in multiple layers and they, along with seeds, rhizomes, and charcoal, provide a profile of palaeo-vegetation through time. A bushveld vegetation community is implied before 100,000 years ago. The density of lithics varies considerably through time, with high frequencies occurring before 100,000 years ago where a putative MSA 1/Pietersburg Industry was recovered. The highest percentage frequencies of blades and blade fragments were found here. In Members 1 BS and 1 WA, called Early Later Stone Age by Beaumont, we recovered large flakes from multifacial cores. Local rhyolite was the most common rock used for making stone tools, but siliceous minerals were popular in the upper members.     

Dacura: A new solution to data harvesting and knowledge extraction for the historical sciences

New advances in computer science address problems historical scientists face in gathering and evaluating the now vast data sources available through the Internet. As an example we introduce Dacura, a dataset curation platform designed to assist historical researchers in harvesting, evaluating, and curating high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources. Dacura uses semantic knowledge graph technology to represent data as complex, inter-related knowledge allowing rapid search and retrieval of highly specific data without the need of a lookup table. Dacura automates the generation of tools to help non-experts curate high quality knowledge bases over time and to integrate data from multiple sources into its curated knowledge model. Together these features allow rapid harvesting and automated evaluation of Internet resources. We provide an example of Dacura in practice as the software employed to populate and manage the Seshat databank.     

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.     

Innovations in cultural policy and development in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This essay looks at two major tendencies in cultural policy recommendations in Latin America: (1) the economic contribution of arts, heritage and especially the cultural and creative industries; and (2) cultural rights, with a focus on inclusion, access, empowerment, and the integral development/well-being of citizens. The two tendencies, which are part of cultural development policies, are not easily integrated into an all-encompassing policy because they follow different logics and management strategies. Nevertheless, both of these tendencies, which emerged in the heyday of neoliberalism (the 1990s), continue to provide the major justifications for cultural funding, although the current economic crisis has led to budget cuts. After a review of cultural development policies, this essay examines innovative strategies to compensate for scarce funding, including those that seek to bridge both tendencies. The cases examined below correspond to discussions of cultural policies in Latin American forums with hundreds of policy-makers and analysts over the past 20-plus years.

Abbreviations: BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation; CadenAgro: Centro de Apoyo para el Desarrollo de Denominaciones de Origen y Sellos de Calidad de Productos Agroalimentarios; CCI: Cultural and Creative Industries; CEDE: Centro de Estudios de Desarrollo Económico; CMD: Centro de Diseño Metropolitano; CVC: Cultura Viva Comunitaria; ECLAC: Economic Commission for Latin America; ILO: International Labor Organization; IMF: International Monetary Fund; MDG: Millennium Development Goals; MDG-F: Millennium Development Goals Fund; MICA: Mercado de Industrias Creativas de Argentina; MICSUR: Mercado de Industrias Culturales del Sur; MSME: Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises; SEGIB: Secretaría General Iberoamericana; SELA: Latin American Economic System; UCLG: United Cities and Local Governments; UNCTAD: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; UNDP: United Nations Development Programl; UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; US: United States of America     

The fort in the doctor’s house: using tree-ring growth patterns to discover historic Fort Wayne,Indiana, USA

Local Fort Wayne, Indiana (USA) lore says that the Dr. Merchant Huxford House contains timbers from Fort Wayne, the US military outpost constructed in 1794 by General Anthony Wayne. The wilderness fort played roles in Native American and British conflicts and was the genesis for a city with a current population of more than 250,000. The doctor’s residence was built on the outskirts of the young city, but within 0.4 km of the fort site. Accounts contemporary to the house’s construction describe timbers being recycled from the fort for use in new building projects. This article describes the use of dendrochronological methods to establish a construction date for the Huxford House and attempts to confirm or dispel accounts that the house contains recycled timbers from the historic fort.     

Surveying Coastal Archaeological Sites Damaged by Hurricane Sandy in Rhode Island,USA

Supported by the U.S. National Park Service's Historic Preservation Fund program, the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission administered surveys of coastal archaeological sites damaged by 2012's Hurricane Sandy in Rhode Island, USA. This project documented the transformative effects of Hurricane Sandy on coastal archaeological sites, evaluated the eligibility of many of those sites for listing in the National Register of Historic Places, and provided new insights into ancient Native American coastal occupation. Notable project limitations include incomplete property access, bureaucratic delays, and a Tribal collaboration that fell short. Because preserving most of these erosion-prone sites through shoreline stabilization is unlikely, management efforts will consider preemptive archaeological salvage excavations. This case study may prove useful to archaeologists worldwide who are managing coastal sites threatened by rising sea levels and storms of increasing intensity and frequency.     

Skeleton decay of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Cervus elaphus hispanicus</Emphasis> carcasses in Mediterranean ecosystems: biostratinomy at Sierra Norte of Seville natural park (SW Spain)

Taphonomic studies of faunal assemblages from archaeological and palaeontological sites need biostratinomy research to endorse their results. Many papers have studied the relationship between the differential conservation of anatomical parts and the animal responsible for the deposits. In this paper, we present the biostratinomy results from 18 Cervus elaphus hispanicus carcasses (Hilzheimer 1909) in a Mediterranean ecosystem (the Sierra Norte Mountains in Seville Natural Park). We also describe the skeleton decay related to scavenger community, where Sus scrofa (Linnaeus, 1758) is maybe the most important bone scavenger in our study area. These results of this research were compared to those obtained from a similar study carried out in Doñana National Park (Huelva) and confirmed that post-mortem tendencies are similar in both ecosystems.