Combining Indigenous and Maritime Archaeological Approaches: Experiences and Insights from the ‘(Re)locating Narrunga Project’, Yorke Peninsula, South Australia

This paper details the unique pairing of Indigenous and maritime archaeological approaches in the ‘(Re)locating Narrunga Project’. Narrunga was a ketch built by the Narungga Aboriginal community at Point Pearce Mission (Yorke Peninsula, South Australia) at the turn of the twentieth century and later sunk in the 1940s. It is argued that convergences between the scholarly interests of Indigenous and maritime archaeological approaches have been slow to develop and that maritime archaeology as a sub-discipline has not capitalized on the insights that can be gained from collaborative approaches between communities and practitioners. Similarly, Indigenous communities in Australia have had few opportunities to work with researchers to record their maritime heritage. As is evident in the Narrunga story told in this research, non-Indigenous records have been complicit in underplaying the maritime achievements and skills of Narungga people and collaborative research can work towards decolonizing this past.     

The Pahlavi National Library Project: Education and Modernization in Late Pahlavi Iran

This paper examines the Pahlavi National Library, the planning for which began in 1972 and expired in 1978 on the eve of the Islamic Revolution. The Pahlavi National Library was to rank in size and eminence with the great libraries of the world, yet this extraordinary project has hitherto received little to no scholarly attention. Using documents primarily from the archives of the shah’s cultural counsellor at the imperial court, Shojā?eddin Shafā, this paper looks in detail at a number of initiatives spearheaded by Shafā from the early 1960s, which essentially laid the groundwork for the Pahlavi National Library, in order to understand how the shah’s regime used culture and scholarship to further its political goals. The paper proceeds to investigate the Pahlavi National Library, analyzing it in the context of the shah’s domestic and foreign policy objectives.     

Ceramic diversity,random copying,and tests for selectivity in ceramic production

This paper examines the evidence for selective reproduction of ceramic types based on their evolving frequency distribution, and on correlations of the abundance of types with underlying functional characteristics. How can we tell if a variant has been preferentially selected or discriminated against, and become more or less frequent than would be expected under pure drift (i.e. random copying, with the compounding over time of proportionate sampling error)? We examined a database of Hittite ceramic bowl types from two successive Phases of occupation of the Upper City of Bo?azköy–Hattusa, capital of the Hittite empire and the largest Bronze Age settlement in Turkey. We applied two tests used in genetics to assess departures from neutrality, to assess selectivity in rates of reproduction of ceramic bowl types (the Ewens-Watterson and Slatkin's Exact tests). We also examined the effects of ceramic fabric and vessel dimensions on changes in vessel abundance between the two Phases, using regression analysis. We found that while the frequency distribution of rim sherds did not in itself enable us to reject the null hypothesis of random copying, closer examination of the characteristics of these types enabled us to recognize latent dimensions of functional variability (including ware type and bowl diameter) that had demonstrably been the subject of selective decision-making by the potters. The present case study suggests that we should be wary of applying the neutral model from genetics uncritically in archaeology, because it is much harder to prove that the cultural traits whose frequencies are being modelled are genuinely functionally equivalent (as that model requires).