Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph: Imagining North Australia as an Indian Ocean Colony before 1914

In the late nineteenth century, the officers of the Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company provided north Australia with a cable connection to London via Java, Singapore, and India. The telegraph project prompted a new era of colonisation in tropical north Australia and the officers of the company sought to ensure that the north would be shaped according to their notions of Indian Ocean colonial culture. They insisted on employing Asian domestic servants in opposition to White Australian nationalists who advocated restrictions on Asian migration. Like the pearling industry, which was permitted ongoing access to Asian labour, the telegraph company drew on the support of liberal parliamentarians, and leveraged their privileged position as providers of imperial telecommunications to develop an elite colonial counter-culture in north Australia.     

Are universities ready for interculturality? The case of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ (Ecuador)

This article focuses on the creation of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ in 2003, and its evolution up until its final suspension from the university system in Ecuador. I reflect on the difficulty of implementing educational approaches based on locally situated cultural identities that involve epistemologies different from those which are hegemonic in academic spheres on the global level. From the point of view of the indigenous movement, the current situation is solely the result of the ignorance and arrogance of the state, which ‘has led to a backlash against the gains made by indigenous people that has even led to a decline in terms of indigenous rights’, calling the current government a government of ‘a new colonization’ (Salvador). However, interviews conducted in the years after the closure of Amawtay Wasi bring to light certain discourses and opposition that go beyond the obvious intellectual and political reluctance of the current government to maintain the Amawtay Wasi Intercultural University.     

Revisiting the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic Transition in the Extreme NW of Africa: The Latest Results of the Chronological Sequence of the Cave of Kaf Taht el-Ghar (Tétouan,Morocco)

African Archaeological Review - This study focuses on the chronostratigraphic sequence of the Cave of Kaf Taht el-Ghar (Dar Ben Karrich, Tétouan, Morocco) excavated in 2012 in the framework of...     

Flint and Quartzite: Distinguishing Raw Material Through Bone Cut Marks

Since the 1980s, several experimental analyses have been able to differentiate some lithic tool types and some of their raw materials according to the morphology of cut marks imprinted by such tools when used for butchering activities. Thus, metal tool use has been differentiated in contexts with an abundance of lithic tools, or even the use of hand axes has been documented in carcass processing, in contrast with simple unretouched or retouched flakes. As important as this information is, there are still other important aspects to be analysed. Can cut marks produced with different lithic raw material types be differentiated? Can cut marks made with different types of the same raw material type be characterized and differentiated? The objective of this study is to evaluate if cut marks resulting from the use of different flints and different quartzites are distinguishable from each other. In the present work, an experimental analysis of hundreds of cut marks produced by five types of flint and five varieties of quartzite was carried out. Microphotogrammetry and geometric–morphometric techniques were applied to analyse these cut marks. The results show that flint cut marks and quartzite cut marks can be characterized at the assemblage level. Different types of flint produced cut marks that were not significantly different from each other. Cut marks made with Olduvai Gorge quartzite were significantly different from those produced with a set comprising several other types of quartzites. Crystal size, which is larger in Olduvai Gorge quartzites (0.5 mm) than Spanish quartzites (177–250 μm), is discussed as being the main reason for these statistically significant differences. This documented intra‐sample and inter‐sample variance does not hinder the resolution of the approach to differentiate between these two generic raw material types and opens the door for the application of this method in archaeological contexts.     

Industrial districts and migrant enclaves: a model of interaction

So far, the relationship between Industrial Districts (IDs; clusters of interconnected local industries) and migrant enclaves (areas with a high concentration of international migrants from a single nationality) has been studied mostly by focusing on the emergence of ‘ethnic enclave economies’ within the district and/or by highlighting racist conflicts that achieved notoriety in the media. In this study, we contend that there is a more general and complex interaction between the two phenomena. This interaction is mediated by the local context, national regulations, and the organization of the international market, among other factors. By focusing on the case of the ceramic ID of Castelló de la Plana (Spain), we show how this ID with a high rate of job formality, combined with other job opportunities and a unique ‘institutional completeness’, set up the conditions for a non-conflictive Romanian migrant enclave that reached 14% of the town’s total population in 2012. Finally, and also considering another case study of ID and migrant enclave (Prato, and its Chinese enclave), we suggest a model of interaction that should be interpreted taking into account the general dynamics of the international organization of value and the requirements of flexibility and reduction of costs that frame IDs.     

Paul Broca’s search for Basque skulls: The full story

Paul Broca surmised that the short and broad—brachycephalic—skulls of the earliest European settlers had become longer and narrower—dolichocephalic—in modern populations due to the blending of different races. Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius had two brachycephalic skulls said to be from contemporary Basque individuals, a claim suited to test Broca’s hypothesis. Broca worked with fellow anatomist and surgeon Pedro González Velasco, the founding father of Spanish anthropology, to gather a large number of Basque skulls. In its time, this was the most fascinating collection owned by the Anthropological Society of Paris. This article explains how Broca and Velasco were able to gather such a sizeable array of specimens, which they had collected at a location known at first by the code name of “Z.” Although Broca finally concluded that the origin of the Retzius skulls could not be determined, his research was to spark anthropologists’ interest in the language and origins of the Basque people.     

Urban Development and Cultural Policy “White Elephants”: Barcelona and Valencia

The importance of culture in defining new models of local development has been increasingly emphasized. However, less attention has been paid to the influence of local development models on local cultural policy. This article will focus on analysing two cities that have used culture as a central element in their economic and urban development. In both cases, they have followed different strategies but the two have finally finished generating two “white elephants”: the Universal Forum of Cultures in the case of Barcelona and the City of Arts and Sciences in the case of Valencia. From a comparison of the two cases, the paper analyses the causes of this urban phenomenon, which combines cultural legitimation, wasteful investments, financial and social unsustainability and, last but not least, corruption. These four characteristics of cultural white elephants express the depletion of a neoliberal city model based on real estate speculation and tourism, which de facto relegates culture – in spite of discourses about social cohesion and sustainability – as an instrument of urban branding and elite socio-economic domination.     

Stable isotope analysis on human remains from the final Early Holocene in the southern Puna of Argentina: The case of Peñas de las Trampas 1.1

In this work are presented the results of isotopic analyses made on bone remains of human individuals (n?=?6) from the southern Puna of Argentina dated to the final Early Holocene (ca. 8230–8000 BP). They were found in structures located in Peñas de las Trampas 1.1, a rockshelter at 3582 m.a.s.l. in Antofagasta de la Sierra, in the southern Argentinian Puna. They contain multiple secondary burials. Bone fragments were recovered from at least six individuals, three in each structure. Stable isotopes of Carbon (δ¹³C) and Nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) analysis were aimed at defining aspects related to the palaeodiet of the six individuals within the palaeo-economic subsistence spectrum typical of hunter–gatherers. It is worth noting that these human remains are among the earliest from North-Western Argentina, where funeral practices are related with the transportation of certain anatomical parts. The palaeodietary inference considers, on the one hand, the extreme aridity of this geographical area and its impact on the isotopic ecology. And, on the other, it takes into account the fact that four of the six individuals under study were breastfed infants. The results are in agreement with the expected values of the period, which has been characterized as the beginning of the arid Altithermal.     

In the Nature of the Non‐City: Expanded Infrastructural Networks and the Political Ecology of Planetary Urbanisation

This paper proposes extending Urban Political Ecology's (UPE) ideas about the urbanisation of nature in order to include the geographical imprints of expanding, global metabolic flows of matter, energy and capital. It does so through the analysis of Huasco, a small agricultural village in northern Chile that has been overburdened with massive energy undertakings aimed at powering the operations of mines that supply raw materials to international markets. Like the sewage and technological networks that feed the life of cities, the paper argues that Huasco—as a metabolic vehicle of planetary urbanisation—has also been hidden from view, and thus the fetishisation of urban infrastructural networks initially theorised by UPE, has been ratcheted‐up to the global level by the mediating powers of neoliberalising capitalism. Just as the socio‐material arrangements that facilitate the smooth functioning of the modern city and household are riddled with glitches and exclusions, the paper suggests that globally up‐scaled infrastructures reveal even larger contradictions that put into jeopardy the very premises upon which the ongoing commodification of nature is grounded.