Survive and Thrive: Field Research in Authoritarian Southeast Asia

The literature on field research methods has focused almost exclusively on the strategies available to scholars working in democracies. By comparison, there has been scant guidance for those working in authoritarian regimes. This is despite the distinct set of challenges that arise where civil liberties and political rights are not consistently or well protected. The purpose of this article is to address this deficit. Drawing on the region of Southeast Asia as a natural laboratory for comparative analysis, it offers guidance on how to successfully conduct archival research, carry out interviews and undertake participant observation under authoritarianism. The resulting conclusions are applicable to the pursuit of primary research by scholars at all career levels and in other regions of the world.     

Heads or Tails? Modified Ceramic Gaming Pieces from Colonial California

Modified ceramic disks have been recovered from historic-era sites across the Americas. Small unperforated disks are commonly interpreted as gaming pieces and larger perforated disks are often classified as spindle whorls. Here, we examine these interpretations in light of collections from three colonial-era sites in central California: Mission San Antonio de Padua, Mission San José, and the Rancho San Andrés Castro Adobe. We argue that the small unperforated disks from our study sites were two-sided dice. These gaming pieces facilitated the social cohesion of Native people living in the large, multiethnic Indigenous communities that formed around Spanish colonial missions and later Mexican-era ranchos.     

Determining when rare (zoo-)archaeological phenomena are truly absent

Archaeologists are regularly faced with the dilemma of determining if the absence of a class of item is the result of that class never having been present in an area or if its absence is the result of sample deficiencies. This dilemma is especially apparent when a class of item is rare and has a patchy distribution. Comparison of samples that lack specimens of the class with samples that have specimens reveals criteria of an adequate sample. These criteria must be met by a sample in order to convincingly argue that the class of item was never present in the area from which the sample derives, and to provide guidelines for developing sampling designs aimed at discovering rare phenomena.     

Gender,Ethnicity, and Hybrid Forms of Community-Based Urban Activism in Vancouver, 1957–1978: The Strathcona story revisited

In the 1960s and early 1970s, residents of the neighbourhood of Strathcona in the city of Vancouver, Canada, successfully fought the grand designs of planners, engineers, politicians and developers to displace residents, demolish homes, clear lands, and rebuild the area. Against all odds, a relatively politically powerless group of residents and their supporters from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds formed a neighbourhood organization, the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) to mount a last-ditch struggle to defend their homes, ways of life, and right to place. This article re-examines existing explanations of these historic events. It identifies the unique activism of ethnic minority women, and introduces the concept of culturally hybrid forms of oppositional practice—the interaction of cultural practices of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural residents of Strathcona with mainstream Canadian political discourse and structures. The article stresses the critical importance of broadening and complicating existing analyses of multi-ethnic women's community-based urban activism as a way of rethinking feminist conceptualizations of movement activism around place and identity.     

CHARMed PyMca,Part II: An evaluation of interlaboratory reproducibility for ED‐XRF analysis of copper alloys

CHARMed PyMca is a protocol for researchers using energy‐dispersive X‐ray fluorescence spectroscopy (ED‐XRF) who wish to maximize interlaboratory reproducibility of quantitative results from copper alloys found in heritage materials. This paper reports the results of a study evaluating the interlaboratory reproducibility expected when following this protocol. Five institutions participated in this study, using nine tube‐based instruments of seven types. A set of 12 reference materials not used for calibration was analysed according to the protocol. The results show an improvement in reproducibility of between 65% and 83%, depending on the element, in comparison with a similar study carried out in 2010. The protocol allowed the consistent reporting of concentrations for 15 elements, in contrast to only eight elements that were reported in the 2010 study. Finally, the protocol was shown to generate accurate quantitative results with a well‐characterized precision. It is hoped the information presented here can help researchers studying heritage copper alloys to collaborate more effectively and with greater confidence in the reproducibility of their results. It should also aid researchers to make realistic and informed decisions about whether or not the degree of reproducibility that they may expect from ED‐XRF makes the protocol suitable for their specific purposes.