Landscapes of the Ghost Dance: A Cartography of Numic Ritual

Recent historical and ethnographic research indicates that the study of ritual behavior could be greatly enhanced by combining parameters of place and landscape use with interpretation of material culture. This strategy is especially useful for identifying the archaeological record of ritual among societies that incorporated topographic features and natural resources into their liturgical order. In this article we apply a behavioral framework to the study of Numic ritual technologies. By intergrating ethnographic and historic data on the geography, practice, and material culture of the nineteenth-century Nevada Ghost Dance, we demonstrate how this framework helps to determine the configuration of a ritual place and its position relative to other ritual and nonritual places.     

Economic development,marine protected areas and gendered access to fishing resources in a Polynesian lagoon

This study examines the potential socio-spatial impacts of a new series of marine protected areas (MPAs) on fishers in Moorea, French Polynesia. The establishment of the MPAs is contextualized within recent and historical processes of economic development and theories of women in development and gender, culture and development. Seventy adults from three neighborhoods in Moorea were interviewed. Analysis of the data provides new information about the characteristics of fishing in Moorea. Unlike most fishing cultures and communities throughout the Pacific Islands, men and women in Moorea have similar, as opposed to segregated, spatial patterns of fishing activities and fishing methods. The study also points out the potential negative impacts of the MPAs on both men and women, particularly younger and lower-income fishers.     

Potters and pigments: preliminary technological assessment of pigment recipes of American majolica by synchrotron radiation micro-X-ray diffraction (Sr-μXRD)

This paper assesses the impact of European ceramics on preexisting American potting technologies. Specifically we investigate the technological features of pigments used for production of colonial American majolica. In order to achieve this goal, majolica sherds from Puebla (4), and Oaxaca (2), both in Mexico, from Antigua (Guatemala) (2), from Panama (1), and from Mission San Luis (Florida) (5) were analyzed by synchrotron micro-X-ray diffraction (μ-XRD). Eleven out of these fourteen samples were also analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The combination of micro-chemical and micro-structural techniques provides a cross sectional profile of the constituent minerals present ultimately providing information about the nature and distribution of the pigments used in their decorations, their dissolution in the glassy matrix, and the formation of crystalline compounds. Our results reveal significant differences among productions.     

Testing recipes: an experimental approach to paint production processes in Levantine rock art (Spain)

Over more than a century, several proposals have been made on the composition and technical features of the pictorial recipes used by Levantine prehistoric painters. In this paper all these proposals are surveyed and tested through systematic experiments to determine the technical affordance of pigments and binders in different pictorial recipes. Experimental results were then used as independent analytical parameters employed as diagnostic criteria to systematically study an archaeological sample of nine sites located in the Maestrazgo region (Spain) and their surroundings. Results reveal that out of 112 experimental recipes, only 16 afforded the production of paintings technically similar to Levantine rock art.     

Enrique Díaz Retg and El Diluvio: reportage from the Italian frontline (1916)

In the year 1916 Enrique Díaz Retg, a staff journalist working for the Spanish newspaper El Diluvio, extremely popular among Barcelona’s working class readers, was assigned to report from the Italian front. Following an invitation from the Italian Foreign Office, he was granted permission to visit war zones under the control of the Italian army. During this journey, which began on 5 September and concluded in Rome on the 22nd, he traveled with two other famous Spanish reporters, Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Eduardo Gómez de Baquero. Comparing the articles produced by the three journalists allows us to perceive the main distinctive features of Enrique Díaz Retg’s work. From an ideological point of view, his articles reveal a bias in favor of the Latin race and in them he calls for Mediterranean nations to unite, openly inviting the Spanish authorities to enter into war against the barbaric German enemy. In doing so, he contributed to widening the social gap that in the years to come would increasingly alienate the working class from the institution of monarchy and the Catalan elites.     

Ancestral memories and early medieval landscapes: the case of Sierra de Ávila (Spain)

This paper focuses on early medieval funerary practices from a landscape perspective in central Iberia. Rock‐dug graves constitute the most conspicuous remains in this region, but their informative potential has not yet been realized. The preliminary outcomes of an ongoing research project are presented here. This aims to contextualize such funerary cases by examining a mid‐altitude mountain study‐area. Through the use of intensive archaeological surveying and geographic information systems, the paper characterizes two basic funerary types: isolated graves and rural disordered cemeteries, which responded to two social strategies led by local households. By recalling ancestorship, they constituted effective mnemonic resources, contributing to claiming rights and forging identities among these dispersed and predominantly small‐scale herding communities.     

New Excavations at Border Cave,KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

New excavations at Border Cave use high-resolution techniques, including FT-IR, for sediment samples and thin sections of micromorphology blocks from stratigraphy. These show that sediments have different moisture regimes, both spatially and chronologically. The site preserves desiccated grass bedding in multiple layers and they, along with seeds, rhizomes, and charcoal, provide a profile of palaeo-vegetation through time. A bushveld vegetation community is implied before 100,000 years ago. The density of lithics varies considerably through time, with high frequencies occurring before 100,000 years ago where a putative MSA 1/Pietersburg Industry was recovered. The highest percentage frequencies of blades and blade fragments were found here. In Members 1 BS and 1 WA, called Early Later Stone Age by Beaumont, we recovered large flakes from multifacial cores. Local rhyolite was the most common rock used for making stone tools, but siliceous minerals were popular in the upper members.     

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.     

‘Recíbanlos con cautela y consideración’: las pugnas por el poder entre el personal de la Compañía de Jesús en la Nueva España durante el generalato de Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615)

Los obstáculos impuestos a los americanos para entrar a la Compañía de Jesús fueron una constante en la Nueva España durante el generalato de Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615). Si bien aquellos pueden ser considerados como la prolongación de un debate que había comenzado con la llegada de los primeros franciscanos en 1524, y como parte de tensiones que existían a nivel global sobre la viabilidad de aceptar no europeos en las órdenes religiosas, esta cuestión evolucionó conforme a los nuevos estándares de la Iglesia postridentina, y a los cambios sociales y políticos del virreinato. Las tensiones provocadas por diversos grupos sociales emergentes al reclamar sus propios espacios dentro de la sociedad novohispana, ocasionaron que la discusión en torno a la creación de un clero indígena se subsumiera en una serie de pugnas entre diferentes facciones de la Compañía de Jesús, bajo la sombra de los poderes de la Corona española y Roma. Así, en una época en donde la Compañía de Jesús se debatía sus prioridades apostólicas con la disyuntiva colegios/misiones, el caso de la Provincia de México nos muestra cómo este problema estuvo inmerso en una lucha de bandos por los puestos de poder.