Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Archaeometric analysis of ceramic production in Tiwanaku state (c.500–1000 ce): An exploratory study

The chemical and mineralogical characterization of seven ceramic fragments produced within Tiwanaku state (c.500–1000 ce ) is reported. The instrumental techniques used included X‐ray elemental and mineralogical chemical analysis, Raman spectroscopy, and scanning and light microscopy. The results indicate there are several clay types, although they show similarities, such as the use of a plant‐based temper. The red colour of the decoration is hematite, and manganese oxides such as jacobsite are present in the black. The white colour is a mixture of gypsum and clay, and the orange is a mixture of hematite and clay. The use of colours, the quality of the clays and the temperatures reached during pottery firing point to expertise in ceramic production and to complex decision‐making processes. The multi‐elemental archaeometric approach documented here could become an important tool to shed a light on ancient ceramic technology and the internal variance of Tiwanaku pottery.     

From commodity to money: The rise of silver coinage around the Ancient Mediterranean (sixth–first centuries bce)

The reasons why the Western Mediterranean, especially Carthage and Rome, resisted monetization relative to the Eastern Mediterranean are still unclear. We address this question by combining lead (Pb) and silver (Ag) isotope abundances in silver coinage from the Aegean, Magna Graecia, Carthage and Roman Republic. The clear relationships observed between ¹⁰⁹Ag/¹⁰⁷Ag and ²⁰⁸Pb/²⁰⁶Pb reflect the mixing of silver ores or silver objects with Pb metal used for cupellation. The combined analysis of Ag and Pb isotopes reveals important information about the technology of smelting. The Greek world extracted Ag and Pb from associated ores, whereas, on the Iberian Peninsula, Carthaginians and Republican‐era Romans applied Phoenician cupellation techniques and added exotic Pb to Pb‐poor Ag ores. Massive Ag recupellation is observed in Rome during the Second Punic War. After defeating the Carthaginians and the Macedonians in the late second century bce , the Romans brought together the efficient, millennium‐old techniques of silver extraction of the Phoenicians, who considered this metal a simple commodity, with the monetization of the economy introduced by the Greeks.     

Geochemical evidence for the manufacture,logistics and supply‐chain management of Emperor Qin Shihuang's Terracotta Army,China

Non‐invasive materials characterisation of reconstructed statues of Emperor Qin Shihuang's Terracotta Army has revealed distinct micro‐geochemical patterning within the clay paste used in their manufacture. The significance of this is explored in terms of the production sequence, logistics and supply‐chain management involved in the construction of this enormous funerary assemblage. Of particular interest is a compositional distinction between figures marked with the names ‘Gong’ (宫) and ‘Xianyang’ (咸阳). These seem to represent the products of two workshops involved in the supply of ceramic objects for this ambitious, large‐scale building project undertaken by the Qin Empire during the third century bce .     

The Santa María pottery of El Bolsón valley (Catamarca,Argentina): Compositional characterization and implications on the elaboration processes,ca. 1000–1600 ce

The results obtained from the multi-analytic compositional characterization of ceramic pastes and paints of the Santa María style, from the El Bolsón valley (Belén Department, Catamarca Province, Argentina), are presented here. This pottery style had a wide regional distribution in Northwestern Argentina between ca. 1000 and1600 ce and is characterized by its complex iconography painted in black, cream and red. The analyses show that the containers correspond to the technical tradition of using grog temper and suggest that its manufacture involved a double firing process. This reveals a new practice for the time.     

Identifying pre-Hispanic water storages in agricultural areas of south-central Andes through diatom evidence

In the Andes, there are several pre-Hispanic irrigation networks with structures destined for water storage. However, it has not been widely discussed in archaeological research. This is probably due to their being difficult to identify. The aim of this study is to explore the use of diatom assemblage analysis as a methodological tool suitable to help in the identification and characterization of these ancient hydraulic structures. We analyzed two archaeological structures interpreted as water reservoirs from north-western Argentina (EH1 in Antofagasta de la Sierra and U-88R1 in Yocavil) and compared them to current reservoirs. The diatom species composition and the changes in the dominant ecological groups in the studied structures highlight different periods of hydraulic behavior. EH1 contained and stored water, but there were periods of time in which there was a lack of use or abandonment of the structure. However, the U88-R1 structure does not have diatom evidence of containing standing water for a prolonged time but presence of wet soils. Thus, the structure could have been used for other water management strategies. The results show that diatom analysis is a methodological tool with a high potential to study ancestral hydrotechnologies.