Agricultural change in Copper Age Croatia (ca. 4500–2500 cal B.C)?

The Copper Age in the Carpathian Basin is marked by a distinct change in settlement patterns, material culture, social traditions and subsistence practices; however, few studies address the nature of crop cultivation in the region. This paper examines new archaeobotanical data from 13 Copper Age (ca. 4500–2500 cal BC) sites located in continental Croatia, in order to assess the extent to which crop agriculture may have changed and contributed to overall subsistence economies in the Copper Age. From the archaeobotanical results, a dominance in einkorn and emmer is seen followed by barley. Less frequently millet, naked wheat and spelt/new glume wheat are also recovered, but due to their limited numbers, it is less clear whether they were grown as crops or represent weeds. Pulses (e.g. lentil, pea and grass pea), fruit remains (e.g. cornelian cherry and chinese lantern) and wild plant and weed species are also recovered, although more commonly from the late Copper Age sites. The archaeobotanical results show a clear reduction in the quantity and range of plant species recovered during the early/middle Copper Age; however, this is likely the result of taphonomic bias rather than a reduction in crop cultivation. The results therefore highlight problems of recovery bias in the region, which makes comparisons between sites as well as the reconstruction of crop husbandry regimes difficult. Overall, the results from continental Croatia suggest that the type of crops cultivated continued relatively unchanged from the late Neolithic, although it is clear that more research is desperately needed to explore the relationship between crop agriculture and the changing socio-economic environment of the Copper Age in the region.     

The Archaeological Survey Project in Fatschenbrunn,Municipality of Oberaurach,Germany: A Case Study for the Reconstruction of Past Farming Regimes in the Late Medieval and Post-Medieval Era

This paper presents the preliminary results of a survey project which is being carried out in the small village of Fatschenbrunn, in Lower Franconia, Germany. The project combines archaeological, historical geographical, botanical, geological and pedological data to reconstruct the farming regimes and land use in the late medieval and post-medieval era. Although the project is still on-going, the collected data allows the formulation of hypotheses on the formation of fertile agricultural soils through long-term human intervention in the past.     

No need to hear your voice,when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself…’ Discourses on Knowledge and Power in the !Khuiseb Delta on the Namib Coast, 1780–2016 CE

Indigenous pastoralists at Walvis Bay on the Namib Desert coast were drawn into global commerce at the end of the eighteenth century. A hundred years later, they were impoverished and peripheral to colonial settlement, but their resilience and traditional reliance on the endemic !nara melon gave them a unique cultural identity and a way into the informal domestic market. Subaltern and subservient in the past, the Topnaar today are creating a niche in the modern Namibian economy. I present a background historical archaeology and some of the challenges facing the Topnaar through the subjective voices of a number of historical and current stakeholders. There may be parallels between the story of the Topnaar in the Namib and the archaeology of indigenous communities in Australia, the Americas and elsewhere in the world.     

Functionality and Morphology: Identifying <Emphasis Type="Italic">Si</Emphasis> Agricultural Tools from Among Hemudu Scapular Implements in Eastern China

Most Chinese archaeologists assume that the scapular implements used in the Hemudu culture in eastern China (7000–5000 BP) were the si agricultural implements (tools for breaking ground and turning soils over to assist in seeding) recorded in ancient Chinese literatures and, accordingly, assume the Hemudu culture was a farming society. However, ethnographic and historical literatures worldwide have suggested inconclusive functions for similar implements. We conducted a range of experiments under realistic conditions, including hide and plant processing and earth-working, followed by use-wear analysis, to identify the functions of the Hemudu scapular implements. The results suggest that no more than half of the implements were employed as si and that their penetrability and durability were rather limited. These findings help explain why Hemudu should not be labeled as a farming society. Through experimentation and use-wear analysis, we produced relatively large datasets that make a significant contribution to the identification of soil-derived wear patterns on bone tools. We also included quantitative measurements of soil properties to ensure similarities in use contexts between our experimental and archaeological analogies in order to reach reliable functional identifications. Our approaches and results, therefore, provided a solid base for re-evaluating previous research as well as building a standardized database of scientific value for future evaluation and adjustment, even if that future research is done in isolation and in different soil contexts.     

Extra! Extra! Read All About It: Newspaper Archives as Archaeological Site Survey

Relative to other historic documents, newspapers have received little attention from researchers as a source of archaeological data. Now that many historic newspapers have been digitized and placed online, this traditionally underutilized resource has the potential to yield new information about archaeological sites, especially those in heavily developed urban areas where sites are inaccessible or have been destroyed. In this article, a methodology is proposed by which archived newspapers might be searched for data about archaeological sites. A case study using newspapers from Allen County, Indiana and its principal city, Fort Wayne, demonstrates the utility of the methodology by producing evidence about many previously unrecorded archaeological sites.     

Towards an Archaeology of Disentanglement

The impact of connectivity in past societies has long been a focus of archaeological studies. Well-established approaches have been developed over the years to understand emergent connections and entanglement between distant communities, including world system, culture contact, post-colonial theories and network analyses. Our understanding of connectivity remains partial, however, because researchers have focussed on the establishment and consequences of contact and largely ignored the dynamics that often led to its interruption. Yet these processes of ‘disentanglement’ are just as complex and far-reaching as their converse and need to be understood in their own right. This paper shows that a thorough analysis of disentanglement processes can contribute to our understanding of the very nature of the interrupted contacts, as well as shed light on the social dynamics that engender long-term changes in contact patterns. The concept of disentanglement is discussed in the light of current theories of connectivity and explored through regional case studies in Late Bronze Age Italy (Salento) and Greece (Achaea).     

Mississippian Plazas,Performances, and Portable Histories

Although plazas have a lengthy and variable history in southeastern North America, by the Mississippian period (ca. 1000–1500 CE), they had assumed some degree of conformity: they were square to rectangular in shape, anchored the approximate center of a settlement, often had additional inclusions such as public buildings or earthen monuments, and were the arenas of secular and religious public activities. We suggest that the importance of these architectural features to Mississippian life ways can be attributed to two characteristics that are widely shared with other cultures that also employed plazas as a form of axis mundi. First, their construction represents an event that arrests temporality and draws attention to their pivotal role in synchronizing ritual life. Second, their relatively open architecture confers them a relational flexibility that allows for the linkage of a wide variety of spaces, things, and beings. A quantitative and qualitative study of 35 Mississippian plazas demonstrates discrepancies from a linear relationship between plaza size and site size that may be related to variation in the kinds of performances that were conducted in these public places at different types of settlements. Despite this variation, the ubiquity of plazas suggests that they were pivotal to the founding of Mississippian places, and may have been important for reestablishing a sense of cosmological order for migrating communities.     

No Compensation Needed: On Archaeology and the Archaeological

The archaeological is regularly perceived in negative terms as lacking and deficient. It is fragmented, static, and crude, a residue of past living societies. Accordingly, much of archaeologists’ efforts are directed toward the amendment of these flaws. The present paper, however, argues that these so-called deficiencies are in fact constitutive absences. Whatever the archaeological lacks, it lacks by definition. It thus follows that working to render the archaeological “complete” is in fact an effort to undo it, to convert it into something else. For the sake of discovering the past, archaeological practice is a sustained effort to rid itself of the very phenomenon that defines it, consequently setting in motion self-perpetuating circularity predicated on deficiency and compensation. The reason for this, it is suggested, is the otherness of the archaeological, being at one and the same time a cultural phenomenon and a fossil record, a social construct and a geological deposit. This condition is so baffling that it is approached by transforming it into something familiar. The paper argues that understanding the archaeological should be archaeology’s first priority. Insofar as it is also the study of the past, this should be predicated on the understanding of the archaeological present.     

Regional Demographic Dynamics in the Neolithic Transition in Iberia: Results from Summed Calibrated Date Analysis

This paper assesses long-term trends in human activity across the Iberian Peninsula associated with the spread of agriculture. In order to improve our understanding of regional trajectories within the two-way and multiple-velocity model proposed by Isern et al. (Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 21:447–460, 2014), we consider summed calibrated radiocarbon dates of a large audited dataset from across Iberia. To assess the role of different analytical units, two alternative peninsular divisions at different spatial resolutions were used: one, with three generalized study areas, and the second, with eight biogeographic regions. This comparison of spatio-temporal variability provides a more in-depth inter-regional reading of the Neolithic transition in Iberia than more generalized approaches. The southwest, Mediterranean coasts and interior portions of Iberia all showed significant demographic expansion with the onset of the Neolithic, as observed across Western Europe. By contrast, northern Iberia featured a close adherence to a null model of exponential growth and a longer continuation of hunter-gatherer strategies.     

Matter,Places, and Persons in Cahokian Depositional Acts

Artifact caching, soil layering, and other intentional depositional practices—archaeologically defined “ritual deposits” of the past—are especially prevalent during the Mississippian period. Employing a perspective of relational ontology, however, we interrogate the validity of a past partitioned into religious, political, and daily spheres. Rather, this perspective emphasizes the multi-experiential and multi-dimensional aspects of social life. Meaning, intentional depositional acts can no longer be usefully described as simply “sacred” or “ritual” practices. Rather, these deposits should be explored as experiences tied to multiple layers of social life, investigating the relationships constructed through such deposits between humans, nonhuman agents, and the landscape.