The Application of Steroidal Biomarkers to Track the Abandonment of a Roman Wastewater Course at the Agora (Athens,Greece)*

A subterranean, stone‐built, sediment‐filled culvert discovered during excavations at the Agora (Athens, Greece) was dated to the Roman period on the basis of its characteristic construction and associated finds, including coins. The location of the culvert relative to other adjacent watercourses and an ancient river bed suggested that the structure was a sewer. This was confirmed through a multi‐molecular biomarker approach based on analysis of the bile acids associated with sediment filling the sewer, using gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). The acid fraction contained predominantly deoxycholic and lithocholic acids, while the neutral steroid fraction comprised a complex mixture of Δ⁵ sterol and 5β‐ and 5α‐stanols, dominated by coprostanol, suggesting the presence of faecal matter of predominantly human origin. The concentrations of neutral and acidic faecal biomarkers were observed to vary in tandem, with the highest concentrations being found in the sediment at the base of the fill in the culvert. A reduction in concentration occurred with decreasing depth of the fill, with concentrations in the uppermost samples being little different from control samples of sediment taken beyond the confines of the culvert. The enhanced concentration of bile acids relative to 5β‐stanols compared with fresh human faeces must reflect the enhanced diagenetic stability of the former, thereby making bile acids the possibly preferred biomarker for this type of study. The quantitative data obtained suggest that the culvert fell rapidly out of use, possibly coinciding with the Slavic incursion in AD 582–3.     

Production Networks and Consumer Choice in the Earliest Metal of Western Europe

The earliest metal objects and metal production practices appeared in Western Europe during the fourth and third millennia BC. The presence of earlier dates for copper, gold, silver, and lead, as well as arsenical copper and tin-bronze alloys in Central and Eastern Europe implies that there is no evidence for the independent invention of metallurgy in Western Europe. Instead, the acquisition of metal objects as exotica by communities appears to have led eventually to the movement of people possessing metallurgical expertise. However, the metals, production techniques and object forms used in each region reflect local standards seen in other materials. This implies a process of incorporation and innovation by the communities involved rather than a straightforward or inevitable adoption. The presence of metal may have created new networks of communication and exchange but, due to its small scale, there is no evidence for any metallurgical revolution.     

Assemblies,Coalitions, and Conflicts Over Free Speech: From “Trespass” to “Encroachment” in Urban Space at Hyde Park,London, 1861–1962

By drawing, among others, on the ideas of the Bakhtin Circle and Judith Butler, this paper explores spatial struggles over the right to free speech at Hyde Park, London, 1861–1962. From the 1860s to the early 20^th century, the state gradually constructed a “monologic” discourse about an ideal-typical “indecent” speaker who would “trespass” on Hyde Park through their “excitable speech” against a legally sanctioned right to give a “public address” in the park. This discourse gave the state some room to evict those it claimed to be transgressing “public address”. However, different “heteroglossic coalitions” of regulars ensured that Hyde Park remained not only a “political assembly” to discuss political issues, but also a “social assembly” to exercise free speech on a range of social topics. Indeed, by the 1950s, these coalitions used a nearby road scheme to successfully argue it was the state that was potentially trespassing, or “encroaching”, on free speech at Hyde Park.     

Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.