Early Cambodian gold and silver from Prohear: composition,trace elements and gilding

Rescue excavations in Prohear, southeast Cambodia, recently saved the last untouched graves of one of the richest prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia. Many Iron Age burials dating from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD contained gold and silver ornaments so far unknown from archaeological contexts together with indications for the presence of an immigrated elite. A first selection of 59 objects were analysed by LA-ICP-MS to obtain detailed information about the composition, as well as minor and trace elements. The majority of the ornaments consist of electrum and auriferous silver with low copper concentrations, and two main groups indicating different alluvial gold sources can be distinguished by different concentrations of Pt, Ir, Bi and different Pd/Pt ratios, one group being related to rich burials with non-local features. The SEM and EDX analyses of four objects revealed two different gilding techniques observed for the first time in Southeast Asian artefacts: foil-fusion gilding, related to special Ag–Au–(Cu)–Sn alloys containing up to 4% tin, and depletion gilding.     

Analysis of a protohistoric net from Shahi Tump,Baluchistan (Pakistan)

The fire that partly destroyed a 4th millennium BCE building at Shahi Tump in the Kech Valley of south-western Pakistan is responsible for the exceptional preservation by carbonisation of a net found on the burnt floor as a heap of entangled cords and knots. Macro- and microscopic observation has allowed a reconstruction of the techniques used to manufacture the net from a two-strand plied cord. The comparison of the phytoliths extracted from the archaeological net to those from a modern reference collection suggests the use of fibres that originate from the leaves of a local palm species: the desert palm or Nannorrhops ritchieana (Griff.) Aitch. Besides the technical and archaeobotanical aspects of the study, the paper discussed past and present uses of the desert palm in the arid regions of the Middle East as well as the possible utilisation (fishing, carrying etc.) of the protohistoric net.     

Despairing at ‘A World Made New’? South Africa Encounters the Post-war Human Rights Idea

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the efforts of the South African state to respond to the reconfigured world that emerged after 1945. Focussed on those years around the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), it argues that South African governments and officials were well attuned to the rising threat of human rights. Drawing on South African archives, it demonstrates that representatives of late United Party and early apartheid era governments were insightful observers of the mortal danger universal human rights posed to the racialised ideological architecture which governed essentially all of the country’s politics and society. Paradoxically, the most avowed opponents of the new crusade for universal human rights perceived its significance with equal or greater acuity than those more enthusiastic about the nascent rights order.