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.     

Strontium isotope analysis in ancient glass from South Asia using portable laser ablation sampling

In order to carry out strontium (Sr) isotope analysis, glass artefacts from South Asia were sampled with portable laser ablation (pLA), a relatively novel sampling technique that leaves damage invisible to the naked eye. Subsequently, thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) was used to obtain Sr isotope ratios after sample dissolution and separation. In this study, the goal was twofold: to determine whether the measurements of Sr isotope ratios were impacted by using a portable laser as a sample tool; and to assess the pertinence of using Sr isotope ratios to provenance Indian glass. Despite a deterioration in the precision of the measurement of the Sr isotope ratios for artefacts sampled with pLA compared with the traditional sampling method, the Sr isotope ratios of certain Indian glass are so different that this does not affect their separation but a comparison of data sets obtained using standard methods and pLA might be challenging.     

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.     

Anticipating the Next Half‐Century of Geographical Analysis

Prompted by a series of panel sessions at a recent American Association of Geographers annual meeting entitled “A Globe‐Shaped Crystal Ball: The Next Fifty Years of Geographical Analysis,” participants were asked to speculate on the future of the journal, which of course has broader implications for spatial and geographic analytics. In what follows, I provide my thoughts on the journal as a reader, contributor, referee, and former editor of Geographical Analysis. The major points touched upon include the following. First, application to address substantive concerns will come to dominate the field. Second, the spatial data deluge will continue unabated, but will lead to important advances because of better detail and less abstraction of reality. Third, analytical methods will evolve specifically for big data. Fourth, the point‐and‐click revolution will result in ever more use of spatial analytics, but also will lend itself to greater and more widespread abuse of these methods. Fifth, addressing assumptions and theoretical foundations of long utilized approaches will revolutionize a new generation of spatial analytics. Sixth, geographic uncertainty and bias will be more than an afterthought, and methods will emerge to support meaningful analysis. Finally, spatial optimization will have increased prominence in fundamental analysis, particularly associated with establishing and evaluating significance.