BLACKSMITHING TECHNOLOGY IN IRON AGE WESSEX

Summary. The sophistication of Iron Age blacksmithing technology in Wessex was determined by the metallurgical examination of 503 iron artefacts using Optical Metallography, Electron Microprobe Analysis and Vickers Hardness Testing. Iron artefacts from the different regions and site types of Southern Britain were examined to determine both the capabilities of Iron Age blacksmiths to alter the properties of iron artefacts through cold-working, carburization, heat-treatment and alloy selection, and the distribution of these possible techniques. The reasons for the selection of the areas, the sites, and the actual artefacts chosen for examination are discussed.     

‘We have so many challenges’: Small-scale mining,Covid-19 and constant interruptions in West Africa

Currently, the impacts of Covid-19 are receiving significant global attention. This also applies to the extractive industries, where this global crisis is directing the gaze of policymakers, donors and academics alike. Covid-19 is seen as having far-reaching and disruptive consequences, especially in the case of artisanal and small-scale mining. While the authors consider this attention important, their work on artisanal and small-scale mining in Ghana – and West Africa more broadly – reveals that for many miners, Covid-19 is ‘just’ another interruption to their lives and lifeworlds which are chronically affected by interruptions of different scales, magnitudes and temporalities. As anthropologists have shown, foregrounding this structural condition – which is emblematic for the lives of many people, especially in the Global South – is key to questioning, understanding and contextualizing the current moment of ‘global’ crisis and must be an element of any policy and research emerging from it.     

PATTERN WITHOUT A PLAN: RETHINKING THE BRONZE AGE COAXIAL FIELD SYSTEMS ON DARTMOOR, SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND

Summary.   The coaxial field systems on Dartmoor are widely interpreted as the result of a relatively rapid period of planned land division during the middle centuries of the second millennium BC. This article seeks to challenge this notion of a 'planned landscape'. Using examples from southern (Shaugh Moor) and north-eastern (Kestor and Shovel Down) Dartmoor, it is demonstrated that the boundaries materialized existing structures in the landscape which had emerged through patterns of dwelling and long histories of tenure. In seeking to present a new narrative for the enclosure of the Dartmoor landscape, it is argued that tenure was articulated at a local level through the relationship between occupancy and ancestral ties to the land, and that land division was only possible because the forms of tenure and perceptions of landscape were already in place. The coaxial pattern emerged in a reflexive tradition of boundary construction rather than as part of a transformative plan or a conscious strategy to reorganize and enclose the moor.