The Monumental Cemeteries of Northern Pictland

THE EMERGENCE OF FORMAL CEMETERIES is one of the most significant transformations in the landscapes of 1st millennium ad Scotland. In eastern and northern Scotland, in the lands of the Picts, square and circular burial monuments were constructed to commemorate a small proportion of the population — perhaps a newly emerging elite in the post-Roman centuries. This paper presents the results of a project that has consolidated and reviewed the evidence for monumental cemeteries of the northern Picts from Aberdeenshire to Inverness-shire, transcribing the aerial evidence of many sites for the first time. In addition, the landscape location of the cemeteries is assessed, along with their relation to Pictish symbol stones, fortified sites and settlement landscapes of the 1st millennium ad. Two particular elements of the burial architecture of northern Pictland are highlighted — barrow enlargement, and the linking of barrows through the sharing of barrow/cairn ditches. Both of these practices are suggested here to be implicated in the creation of genealogies of the living and the dead during an important transitional period in northern Europe when hereditary aristocracies became more prominent.     

Capacity Design of Coupled RC Walls

Capacity design aims to ensure controlled ductile response of structures when subjected to earthquakes. This article investigates the performance of existing capacity design equations for reinforced concrete coupled walls and then proposes a new simplified capacity design method based on state-of-the-art knowledge. The new method is verified through a case study in which a set of 15 coupled walls are subject to nonlinear time-history analyses. The article includes examination of the maximum shear force in individual walls in relation to the total maximum shear force in the coupled wall system, and subsequently provides recommendations for design.     

Embodied geographies of kangaroo meat

A growing body of work in social and cultural geography is concerned with examining food to explore ethical, civic and social concerns. I build on the critiques by engaging with the visceral. Drawing on the theoretical work of Elspeth Probyn, I argue that eating reveals the fundamental ambiguity of embodiment, allowing us to attend to visceralities of difference as understood within the context of power geometries that shape and reshape food politics. This analysis is promoted by the Australian Commonwealth Government's endorsement of suggestions by environmental scientists that households' meals should substitute kangaroo for farmed livestock to lower greenhouse gas emissions. I investigate appetites for kangaroo as discussed while plating-up, and sometimes digested, by white bodies in kitchens and dining rooms within thirty households in Wollongong, New South Wales. To explain where kangaroo is rendered inedible, or edible, I use the recognition that the visceral realm—narrated through the aromas, tastes and touch—offers insights to place, subjectivity, embodied skills and food politics.     

Open-Air “Adena” Paired-Post Ritual Features in the Middle Ohio Valley: A New Interpretation

Circular paired-post structures have been recognized as a quintessential trait of the “Adena” concept. Although once thought restricted to ritual contexts beneath burial mounds, work over the last 30 years has identified several open-air structures in contexts apart from burial mounds or ditches. Uncluttered by overlapping features, open-air examples present a unique opportunity to document the initial roles played by these features. Currently, no unequivocal evidence for mortuary processing has been found directly associated with open-air paired-post structures. This fact calls into question the prevailing belief that most of these features were used to process, or prepare, the dead. Instead, a more reasonable interpretation is that these structures were involved in rituals minimally related to, or entirely devoid of, mortuary activity.     

All at Sea. Rethinking fishers' identities in Australia

In fisheries a new ecological order is being created based upon conservation sciences. Bio-economic models of conservation sciences are being pursued globally in response to the crises generated by over-fishing. Drawing upon Haraway's concept of ‘cyborg politics’ we provide a material analysis of the gendered identities belonging to both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ orders. In this case study, empirical evidence is derived from observation and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with trawlers, deckhands and managers of the Australian South East Trawl Fishery. We show how conservation sciences, framed within the New Right's economic policies, have prioritised performances of masculinity centred on managerialism over those of manual labour.

En pesquerías un nuevo orden ecológico se crea sobre ciencias de conservación. Modelos bíoeconómicos de las ciencias de conservación se persiguen global en reacción a la crisis generado de sobrepescar. Empleándose el concepto de Haraway del ‘político del ciborg’ proveemos un análisis material de las identidades de género que corresponden a los ordenes ‘viejos’ y ‘nuevos’. En este estudio de caso, la evidencia empírica se derivan de observaciones y análisis cualitativa de entrevistas profundas llevado a cabo con jabegueros, marineros de cubierta, y gerentes de la Pesquería Red Barredera de Sudeste Australia. Ilustramos como las ciencias de conservación, enmarcado dentro de las políticas económicas de la nueva derecha, han priorizado los representaciones del papel de masculinidad que se concentran en gerencialisma además de los masculinidades de labor manual.     

On the Particularism of English Landscape Archaeology

The aim of this paper is to explore the question: why is the archaeology of English historic landscapes apparently so provincial? Inevitably the response must be that matters are more complex. In this paper, I examine the work of W. G. Hoskins, the “father of English landscape history,” and draw attention to: the complex way in which landscape is embedded in nationalism; the relations between locale, province, and nation; and the way wider tensions, in particular of colonialism are embedded within Hoskins's own discourse. In conclusion, I examine ways in which this problematic continues to structure enquiry into the English landscape today and to inhibit a genuinely international and comparative approach to historic landscapes.