Dressed for Ritual,Dressed for Life. A Migration-Period Grave from Sande in Norway

A RICHLY FURNISHED GRAVE from the migration period in Norway is our starting point for a discussion of the impact of dress in life and death. The Sande farm is situated on the southern tip of Norway on the Lista peninsula, an area renowned for its many rich finds from the migration period.⁴⁴ Helliksen 2006 Helliksen, W 2006, ‘Rik kvinnegrav og naust fra folkevandringstid på Sande i Herad’, Listamuseet Årbok 2006, 7–9. [Google Scholar], 7; Lund 2008 Lund, W H 2008, ‘Grav, kult og hall i folkevandringstid og merovingertid på Sande i Farsund k, Vest-Agder’, Primitive Tider 10, 7–19. [Google Scholar], 8–10. A high-status grave from Sande in Vest-Agder was excavated in 2005 and was found to be lavishly equipped, not least in terms of jewellery items and dress fittings. Some remarkable textile remains were also preserved. The types of adornment and their position in the grave strongly suggest this was the burial of a woman, while the jewellery and textiles and their composition, style and appearance, all offer valuable information on the story of the individual and the dress code of the time. This article offers the first detailed exploration of this burial and its assemblage and an in-depth discussion of the surviving textile fragments and dress equipment as evidence of a form of dress and display that may have operated in life and death.     

The impact of mining activities on the environment reflected by pollen,charcoal and geochemical analyses

This article presents results of a multi-proxy study of a fen deposit in the former mining district of Falkenstein near Schwaz in the Tyrol, Austria. The aim of the study in the framework of the special research program HiMAT (The History of Mining Activities in the Tyrol and Adjacent Areas – Impact on Environment & Human Societies) was to disclose the ecological impact of mining in pollen and heavy metal diagrams and to create a model combining the changes in palaeoecological proxies with historical evidences for mining. The application of this palaeoecological–historical model to prehistoric times allowed us to reconstruct the impact of mining and metallurgic activities in the surroundings of the fen during the last millennia. The results of stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, LOI, pollen and micro-charcoal analyses as well as geochemical analyses of scandium, lead and lead isotopes validated by historical and archaeological data are hereby presented.     

Urban geoarchaeology and environmental history at the Lost City of the Pyramids,Giza: synthesis and review

Sediment accretion in ancient urban sites and tells records a combination of cultural and geomorphic processes. Urban geoarchaeology is focused on site accumulation, collapse, weathering and erosion, as constrained by architectural plans and structures. These may document settlement growth and decay, as well as environmental history, posing a multidisciplinary challenge of interactive and fluctuating processes.     

Reading versus Seeing? Winckelmann's Excerpting Practice and the Genealogy of Art History

From his arrival in Italy in 1755, Winckelmann's work is infused throughout by a fundamental antinomy: reading versus seeing. This antinomy possesses for him a decidedly epistemological significance: it allows him to present himself as the father of a discipline deserving of its name, i.e., the history of art. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), he claims to break with a long tradition of art discourse which had been primarily supported by ancient texts, basing his book instead on the direct observation of the artworks. The aim of this paper is to critically examine this antinomy. How does seeing relate to reading in his working method? What relationship does art history, in the empirical dimension Winckelmann wanted to give it, have to book knowledge? Winckelmann's excerpts collection provides valuable answers to these questions. Following an old scholarly tradition, Winckelmann used to write down passages of his readings, constituting a vast handwritten library of excerpts which never left him. The result of this intense excerpting practice consists in some 7,500 pages, which allow to better define the share of empirical observation and book-based knowledge in his approach to ancient art.     

Shifting social networks along the Nile: Middle Holocene ceramic assemblages from Sai Island, Sudan

During the middle Holocene, profound changes in environment, economy, and social relations laid the foundations for the emergence of Africa’s earliest polities: the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the Kerma state. Regional shifts in economy and society may be reflected in local changes in patterning of ceramic production and exchange. Analysis of two pottery assemblages from Sai Island, north Sudan, reveals dramatic shifts in the scale of cultural spheres and the nature of cross-cultural interaction between 5000 BC (Khartoum Variant) and 2600 BC (Pre-Kerma). Near-sedentary Khartoum Variant hunter–gatherers at site 8-B-10C participated in a longstanding cultural sphere that extended far into the Sahara, but were beginning to focus more tightly on resources by the Nile. By Pre-Kerma times, Sai occupants familiar with animal husbandry started to use southwest Asian plant domesticates; they began to experiment with large-scale storage facilities and engage in long-distance trade along the Nile, outside of their own cultural boundaries. Beyond a shift in axes for contact from east–west to north–south, these changes signal progressive geographic and temporal compression of cultural entities, amidst accelerating processes of economic innovation and social change that finally culminated in the polities of Egypt and Kerma.     

Millet cultivation history in the French Alps as evidenced by a sedimentary molecule

We report on the detection, in a sediment core drilled in Lake Le Bourget (French Alps), of a fossil molecule (miliacin) that was synthesized by broomcorn millet cultivated in the watershed, and then exported to the sediment. The variation in abundance of this molecule allows us reconstructing the history of millet cultivation around Lake Le Bourget. Our results support the introduction of millet around −1700 BC in the region. After an intensive cultivation during the Late Bronze Age, the failure of millet cropping during the Hallstatt period coincides with a phase of climatic deterioration. Millet cultivation recovers during the Roman and Mediaeval periods before falling most probably due to the introduction of more productive cereals. These pioneering results constitute the first continuous record of an agrarian activity covering the last 6000 years and emphasize the close relationships between local hydrology, land use and agro-pastoral activities around Lake Le Bourget.