Anthropologists at war?

This guest editorial addresses issues to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An initial statement by one professional association prevaricates on the cause of the war by blaming NATO expansion. Here the story is told of why statements need to be unambiguous in their condemnation of Russia, which is not to say that this makes for ‘NATO anthropologists’ as some have claimed on social media.     

Iron Age Diet at Sisak,Croatia: Archaeobotanical Evidence of Foxtail Millet (Setaria Italica [L.] P. Beauv.)

Recent excavations at Sisak, Croatia, unearthed an Early Iron Age pot filled with archaeobotanical remains within the floor of a structure dating to between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. Burnt in situ the archaeobotanical remains provide unique evidence for diet and agriculture in a region where archaeobotanical evidence is rare. The preliminary results from this analysis are outlined here, with a focus on the discovery of foxtail millet (Setaria italica [L.] P. Beauv.) and its contribution to the diet of the Early Iron Age population at Sisak.     

Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post-racial self-image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings.     

Comparison of GIS‐Based Logic Scoring of Preference and Multicriteria Evaluation Methods: Urban Land Use Suitability

Multi‐criteria evaluation (MCE) methods are useful tools to evaluate the land suitability for various uses and assist in the effective management of available land. Many common GIS‐based MCE methods, such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP), ordered weighted averaging (OWA), and a combination of AHP and OWA methods (AHP–OWA) are not able to fully represent all the logic that constitute a wide range of human decision‐making reasoning. Consequently, improved GIS‐based MCE methods such as Logic Scoring of Preference (LSP) method are needed. The main objectives of this study are to: (1) implement the GIS‐based LSP method for land suitability evaluation and (2) compare qualitatively and quantitatively the suitability maps generated by LSP and three GIS‐based MCE methods. This study was implemented with data sets from Boulder County, Colorado, USA for the case study of the urban land suitability evaluation. The qualitative properties of MCE methods and the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) statistics were used as comparison metrics. The results indicate that soft computing methods and particularly LSP performed the best among GIS‐based MCE methods for the urban land use application.     

Analysis of Medieval and Post‐Medieval Glass Fragments from the Dubrovnik Region (Croatia)

Dubrovnik was an important trade city throughout the medieval and post‐medieval time period, maintaining its own glass production from the 14th to the 16th century. Unfortunately, Dubrovnik glass discoveries have not been well investigated up until now, except via archival data in large data analyses. In the following work, we will shed new light on the glass material found in this region, which has diverse origins, chronology, typology and style. Medieval and post‐medieval glass finds (10th/12th–18th centuries) discovered during archaeological excavations in Dubrovnik and the Dubrovnik region were analysed using particle‐induced X‐ray emission (PIXE) and particle‐induced gamma‐ray emission (PIGE), which revealed three main compositional groups: natron glass, plant‐ash glass and potash glass. This demonstrates the important commercial links present between Dubrovnik and other major glass‐making centres.     

Exploring the Concept of (Un)familiarity: (Un)familiarity in Border Practices and Identity-Formation at the Slovenian–Croatian Border on Istria

In border region studies, the concept of (un)familiarity is applied in empirical studies of consumer culture across borders, illustrating how feelings of unfamiliarity can have an off-putting influence on cross-border interaction (e.g. because of dislike of or lack of attraction to the other side) at the same time as it can be an incentive for people living at borders to cross them (e.g. to explore the exotic other side). The concepts explanatory scope has, thus, far responded to the normative claim that a borderless Europe encourages and increases mobility. However, in previous studies applying the concept of (un)familiarity, an explanatory problem remains concerning people's unarticulated and perhaps deeper reasons for mobility and lack thereof. This leaves a question mark as to why feelings of (un)familiarity occur in the first place as well as the actual degree to which they constitute barriers and provide incentives for mobility. The concern in this article is to deepen our understanding of the concept of (un)familiarity. It enriches the bandwidth of the unfamiliarity concept by relating it to a notion of socio-spatial identity-formation, which takes into consideration the psychological aspects involved when identities form. By doing so, the concepts explanatory scope is extended, making it possible to explain some of the complexity involved when feelings of (un)familiarity occur. It, thus, also answers the question why (un)familiarity cannot be translated into normative claims about cross border mobility.     

St Paraskeve in the Balkan Context

The cult of the great saints is usually much wider and involves more than their hagiographies alone. These, as a special literary genre, have to consider strict compositional principles and an even stricter church canon. Not even the apocryphal hagiographies, although they most often originate in oral tradition, can completely escape the influence of these norms, which come into play as soon as an oral legend starts gaining the form of a literary composition. The cult is rather freer and much less dependent on the Church. Once they become a part of popular religion, the officially recognised saints almost invariably enter a ready-made semantic field that acts as their natural surroundings. Here, by the working of many generations, they build up the multilayered, developed, often unexpected, but always logical connections with the tradition and the culture to which they belong. These fertile and inescapable interactions are reflected in elements of folklore, especially folk literature, from the major prose forms like folktales and epic poetry, to the so-called minor genres (nursery rhymes, incantations, proverbs, and so on). In association with other elements of material and spiritual traditional culture (such as rites, customs and beliefs), stories about the saints tended to spread everywhere, rendering their roots and influences difficult to elucidate.     

Socialist Intercessions: The Earliest Demands for a Separate Montenegrin Language (1967–1972)

The question of a separate Montenegrin language has been extensively debated in the last decades. Its roots, however, lie deeper, with the first demands for it appearing in the late 1960s. By analysing the contemporary sources, this paper seeks to establish how and by whom these demands were voiced, the argumentation of both sides of the debate and how were they received by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The debate was started by a group of Montenegrin intellectuals in a climate favourable to the “political periphery” of socialist Yugoslavia and the smaller nationalisms. The group, supported by some of the high executives of the Communist Party, claimed that the rights of the Montenegrin nation were being negated by the government's refusal to allow the local language to be codified to a literary standard. The discussion sheds light on the process of nation-building in socialist-era Montenegro, revealing its actors and dynamics.     

The goodness of fit and statistical significance of seriation solutions

This paper presents a method for determining the statistical significance and goodness of fit of seriation solutions based on correspondence analysis. The basic assumption is that seriation solutions corresponding to relative chronological sequences should have unimodal distributions of types across assemblages in a sequence. In order to evaluate significance of chronological signal in data, the observed number of modes of a seriation solution based on correspondence analysis is compared to a distribution of number of modes generated by randomization of the original data table. A quantitative measure of the goodness of fit is presented. The method is tested on two data sets: 1) archaeological data with a known chronological ordering 2) non-archaeological data without a chronological patterning. The method successfully detected a significant chronological signal in the former, and failed to detect it in the latter.