Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea: Place,Personhood and Exchange

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.     

Recent discoveries at Ely Cathedral,Cambridgeshire: Aetheldreda’s Gate,the church of Holy Cross and the possible boundary of the Anglo-Saxon monastery

Recent fieldwork ahead of construction in Ely Cathedral precinct has identified two documented but ‘lost’ medieval buildings, in addition to a large boundary ditch and other deposits which potentially relate to the monastery founded by St Aetheldreda in the late seventh century. The excavations provide an opportunity to review the currently limited state of knowledge regarding the location and layout of the Anglo-Saxon monastery at Ely and to put forward some models to be tested through future fieldwork.     

A short note on starch and xylem of Ipomoea batatas (sweet potato) in archaeological deposits from northern New Zealand

This study examines preservation of microfossils identified as introduced Ipomoea batatas in soils from northern New Zealand. Starch grains and xylem cells showed highly variable preservation, from good to extremely poor. For starch grains, the latter included brown-staining, expansion and distortion of the grain and vacuole, loss of the Maltese cross, pitting, cracking, fragmentation and disintegration. Degraded xylem showed similar brown-staining, occasional cracking, cross-wise fragmentation, with wall pits becoming progressively less visible or showing distortion, expansion and coalescence.