Our Privilege and Co-responsibility in the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History established an ethical program for the protection and research of the country’s underwater cultural heritage (UCH). Its Vice-Directorate of Underwater Archaeology trains archaeology and conservation students, participates in national and international initiatives regarding UCH, and develops multidisciplinary projects in maritime and continental waters. During negotiation of the UNESCO Convention, the Latin American and Caribbean Group united in a strong voice and contributed to its adoption in 2001; in 2006, Mexico ratified the Convention. This article highlights Mexico’s adoption of the 2001 UNESCO Convention as a case study, to stimulate all countries to ratify the convention and to cooperate in protecting the world’s UCH.     

Snapshots of History and the Nature of the Archaeological Image

By its very definition, archaeology is situated at the intersection of the material and the temporal worlds. Photography is similarly positioned, and yet it can be manipulated to produce constructed contexts according a photographer’s agenda. In order to explore how the abilities and limitations of archaeology and photography are entwined I examine the representational power of the photograph and the phenomenon of Japanese tourist photography. I then discuss the construction of archaeological photographs, both in practice and in the prescribed theory contained archaeological methods textbooks, as well as how photographs are used to represent the embodied, physical performance of archaeology.     

Recording Transition in Post-Industrial England: A Future Perfect View of Oxford’s Motopolis

Deindustrialisation is rapidly recreating Britain's economic landscape. Heavy industry is being replaced by the built forms and landscapes needed by service industries. This paper introduces an archaeology of deindustrialisation as it occurs in the present. It examines the ways in which the Taylorist and Fordist auto-manufacturing landscapes that have defined their environments are being reshaped and commemorated.     

South Carolina Shipyards: Labour,Logistics, Lumber and Ladies

Southern shipyards, like Hobcaw and Mars Bluff, were established at locations chosen primarily for convenient access to transportation networks, building materials, clientele and labour. The historical record reveals a home front role played by local plantation owners and slaves as shipyard labour. Women served as project fundraisers, shipyard dilettantes, shipwright’s wives and possibly slave mistresses with a paucity of material culture to confirm their presence in the archaeological record. Archaeological investigations on land and underwater yield evidence of artefacts associated with diet, shipbuilding, warfare and ethnicity.     

Does size matter: the role and significance of cereal grains in the Indus civilization

Cereal grains play a pivotal role in the rise and character of the Indus civilization. Archaeologists have traditionally focused their attention on the large-grained crops of wheat and barley while often minimizing the importance of the smaller-grained millets. Both environmental and cultural variables influence crop selection in the past as well as today. This paper explores the role and significance of cereal grain size during the evolution of the Indus civilization.     

A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy

This paper presents an overview of the Middle–Upper Paleolithic transition in Italy in light of recent research on the Uluzzian technocomplex and on the paleoecological context of the transition. Drawing on the realization that human niche construction can be documented in the pre-agricultural archaeological record, niche construction theory is used as a conceptual framework to tie together facets of the behavioral, biological, and ecological dimensions of the transition interval into formal models of their interaction over time and in diverse contexts. Ultimately, this effort shows how foragers of the transitional interval in the Italian peninsula were active agents in shaping their evolutionary history, with consequences of some adaptive systems being felt only much later and directing the forces responsible for the ultimate disappearance of the Mousterian and Uluzzian technocomplexes in favor of the proto-Aurignacian industry, the exact nature of which clearly appears to vary on a regional level.     

New data and new issues for the study of origin of rice agriculture in China

China was one of the major centers for the origin of agriculture in the world. The origins of agriculture in China, especially the origin of rice agriculture, made a significant contribution not only to the occurrence of Chinese civilization but also to the development of world history. Recently, the study on the origin of rice agriculture has attracted the attention of the academic community due to the dramatic development of archaeobotanical research in China. In recent years, the flotation technique has widely implemented in archaeological excavations in China. As the result, a tremendous amount of plant remains have been recovered from archaeological sites, including those much related to the study of early rice agriculture. The new data provide direct archaeological evidence for, and raise some new issues about, the origin of rice agriculture in China. For example, the rice remains from the Shangshan site, dated to ca. 10,000 cal. B.P., suggest the beginning of rice cultivation regardless of whether that rice was domesticated or not. The quantitative analysis of plant remains recovered by floatation from the Jiahu site, dated to ca. 8,000 cal. B.P., revealed that the subsistence of the Jiahu people mainly relied on fishing/hunting/gathering, while the products of rice cultivation and animal husbandry were only a supplement to their diet. The ongoing excavation, with floatation and water-sieving, at the Tianluoshan site, dated to 6,000 to 7,000 cal. B.P., suggests that rice farming, though important, was only part of a broader subsistence pattern of the Hemudu Culture, and rice domestication culminated after 6,500 B.P and the beginning of rice domestication remain unclear.