Mapping a Future: Archaeology,Feminism, and Scientific Practice

Drawing on work in science studies, I argue for the importance of fieldwork and research practices when considering the relative significance of feminism within archaeology. Fieldwork, often presented as the unifying hallmark of all of anthropology, has a different resonance in archaeology at the level of material practice and specific techniques. In order to understand the relationship between archaeology and feminism we need to investigate methods, methodology, and interpretations of the material record simultaneously. Examining one practice, that of map making, I suggest venues amenable to feminist insights.     

Competitiveness through integration in the European Union Strategy for the Alpine Region: a ‘balanced development’ approach

In the last 10 years, the European Union has devoted specific attention and resources to the establishment of macro-regional strategies, with the objective of joining together transnational areas to favour the effective and organized management of common challenges. In most macro-regions, however, the identification of strategies to increase competitiveness is a rather difficult task, given the extreme internal diversity in economic activities. Focusing on the youngest macro-regional strategy – EUSALP – this paper highlights the specific combinations of territorial growth assets that allow to overcome the inefficient use of local abundant strategic resources, in line with a ‘balanced development’ approach. The results, obtained on the basis of a database gathered at NUTS3 level, are useful to provide policy suggestions to support the competitiveness of EUSALP through synergies and complementarities, according to a cooperation networks perspective.     

Substance,sign, and trace: performative analogies and technologies of enfleshment in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala

In Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, Marilyn Strathern (2005, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) shows how, through analogies, Euro-American knowledge practices turn offspring into property, information into knowledge, and relations into relations. This article takes this Strathernian insight as a point of departure for a consideration of the analytical possibilities – and the instances of incommensurability – of a juxtaposition of transnational adoption and migration. Drawing on ethnographic research in Guatemala, the article argues that kinning in this context relates not only to the construction of new forms of relatedness, but also, crucially, to the suspension and severing of relations, and to politically charged claims for the reactivation of connections and enfleshment. Against figurations of kinning as commodified and inequitable relations of ownership and exchange, struggles for ‘searches’ and ‘reunions’ in contemporary Guatemala bring into view a range of subjectivities and relations ‘under erasure,’ within the horizon of the Guatemalan conflict (1960–1996). Analogizing transnational adoption and migration is a cultural and analytical practice that performatively reveals and occludes. The article proposes a historically and idiomatically grounded reorientation of the analogic flow sideways, in the directions of the archive, as substance, sign, and trace.     

Towards Situated Analyses of Uneven Peri-Urbanisation: An (Urban) Political Ecology Perspective

In this article we develop a novel analytical framework for situated studies of uneven peri-urbanisation that resist further dividing Marxist and Situated (Urban) Political Ecology. We conceptualise uneven peri-urbanisation as a process in which access to the resources mobilised for peri-urban developments, such as water or land, is rendered uneven. In a three-step approach we suggest, first, describing how peri-urbanisation unfolds in the case being studied and distinguish it from other processes, such as suburbanisation. Second, we propose analysing the transformations of nature on which the peri-urbanisation process is based; and third, examining the uneven power relations infusing inequalities into these transformations and consequently into the peri-urbanisation process described. To allow for a situated analysis this approach regards the study of practices as crucial, but they have to be embedded in wider socio-economic, political, and historical processes, since both contribute to transformations of nature and thus shape uneven peri-urbanisation.     

Protocol for lapis lazuli provenance determination: evidence for an Afghan origin of the stones used for ancient carved artefacts kept at the Egyptian Museum of Florence (Italy)

Despite that the Badakhshan Province (Afghanistan) remains the most plausible hypothesis for the lapis lazuli used in antiquity, alternatives proposed in literature are worth to study to confirm or disprove their historical reliability. In this work, a protocol for determining the provenance of lapis lazuli rocks used for carved artefacts is described. Markers for the univocal attribution of the raw material to a source were identified analysing 45 rocks of known provenance (among which 15 georeferenced) from 4 quarry districts. To the best of our knowledge, this reference database is the widest in provenance studies on lapis lazuli. All the markers are recognisable by means of Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) techniques, in particular micro-proton-induced x-ray emission (PIXE) and micro-ionoluminescence (IL). These techniques are non-invasive and applicable in air, allowing to analyse artworks and rocks of practically any shape and dimension without sample preparation.The protocol was applied to determine the provenance of raw material used for carved lapis lazuli artefacts kept at the Egyptian Museum of Florence, the second most important Egyptian museum in Italy, second only to the museum of Turin. The collection in Florence has a great historical value and includes several lapis lazuli pendants, scarabs, small statuettes and amulets ascribable mainly to the first millennium BC. Following the protocol, 11 of these artefacts were analysed by means of IBA techniques. Results ascribe the raw material to the Afghan quarry district.     

Quantitative micromorphological analyses of cut marks produced by ancient and modern handaxes

In this study, we analyse the three-dimensional micromorphology of cut marks on fossil mammal remains from a ∼0.5 million year old Acheulean butchery site at Boxgrove (West Sussex, southern England), and make comparisons with cut marks inflicted during the experimental butchery of a roe deer (Capreolus caproelus) using a replica handaxe. Morphological attributes of the cut marks were measured using an Alicona imaging microscope, a novel optical technique that generates three-dimensional virtual reconstructions of surface features. The study shows that high-resolution measurements of cut marks can shed light on aspects of butchery techniques, tool use and the behavioural repertoire of Lower Palaeolithic hominins. Differences between the experimental cut marks and those on the Boxgrove large mammal bones suggest variation in the angle of the cuts and greater forces used in the butchery of the larger (rhinoceros-sized) carcasses at Boxgrove. Tool-edge characteristics may account for some of these differences, but the greater robusticity of the Boxgrove hominins (attributed to Homo heidelbergensis) may be a factor in the greater forces indicated by some of the cut marks on the Boxgrove specimens.     

Dialectical movements with the Toba people in the Argentine Chaco

Since 1998, I have undertaken fieldwork with the Indigenous peoples of the Argentine Chaco, focusing initially on their dances and embodied practices. After this ethnographic research, I began to think more deeply about the relationships between fieldwork and reflexivity and the possibilities of redefining analytical categories in the global South. The purpose of this article is to revisit my emphasis on a ‘dialectical approach to embodiment’ as a starting point for analysing cultural transformation in Latin America. I argue that this methodological approach has been closely linked to the interweaving of conflicting embodied experiences and peripheral geopolitical locations. In this regard I analyse how the contradictory experiences identified in my fieldwork with the Toba people, and also in my intersubjective and geopolitical positions as a Latin American academic woman, led me to a critical re-examination of dialectics. Further, I describe how this methodological approach, while well received among Latin American scholars has to some degree been resisted by (North) American and British scholars, and I explore the geopolitical implications of these disparate academic positions. Through these critical movements, I hope to contribute to rethinking dialectics in postcolonial contexts, adding some embodied voices from the Latin American South.     

Multi-technique investigation of historical Chinese dyestuffs used in Ningxia carpets

In this article, an extensive work is presented concerning the characterization with both chromatographic (high-performance liquid chromatography) and spectroscopic (surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and visible reflectance spectroscopy) techniques of historical Chinese dyestuffs in several carpets, mostly coming from the Ningxia region in Northern China and dating to the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries. Notably, the color of the background of these fine artifacts has been an object of debate since, while being depicted as bright red in the ancient iconography, nowadays it appears as orange/yellow. Therefore, in addition to the identification of all the colorants used in the carpets, the present study investigated the reasons of this apparent inconsistency, pointing out an explanation based on the joined use of the yellow dye obtained from the pagoda tree and a “fugitive” dye obtained from brazilwood.