‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar,and elsewhere about him’: Slaves' Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans

Drawing on slave testimony from criminal trials, this article suggests that slaves in French Colonial Louisiana articulated a nuanced relationship to material goods premised less on a static vision of West African culture, than on variable notions of gender and ethnicity. Here, articles of dress could be used by slaves to distinguish among themselves, as revealed in the 1766 investigation against one runaway marginalised in spite of his self‐conscious sartorial identification as a slave and as an ‘African’. This paper thus offers an example of slaves engineering social control within black spaces by manipulating the legal apparatus of the white hegemony. Sartorial performances of ethnicity and masculinity were key to this process.     

Rewriting the end of the Early Bronze Age in the United Arab Emirates through the anthropological and artefactual evaluation of two collective Umm an-Nar graves at Hili (eastern region of Abu Dhabi)

The Hili archaeological complex in Al Ain (U.A.E.) is important for its wealth of third-millennium BC Umm an-Nar burial and settlement sites. Two of the most significant burial sites are Tomb N at Hili and Tomb A Hili North. The latter is a classic circular Umm an-Nar monumental grave, while Hili N is a pit-grave, one of only two Umm an-Nar period pit-graves discovered so far in the U.A.E. Both of these tombs contained the remains of hundreds of individuals, in the case of Tomb A Hili North, more than 300, while around 600 people had been deposited in Hili N. Both population groups have been the subject of anthropological and artefactual analyses and a comparison of the findings help to shed light on the chronology of the end of the Umm an-Nar period.     

Trials,Blunders and Profits: The Changing Contexts of Currencies in Sierra Leone

The work presented here is in the form of a case study that connects currencies with merchants in Sierra Leone from the early fragmentary British presence in 1787 to wide-scale colonisation late in the century. Through accounts from archival research, it traces particularly early examples of monetary instabilities prior to formal colonial rule as well as the first attempts made by the British to regulate indigenous currency systems and standardise them into a homogeneous currency system. Through a monetary perspective, the article shows that colonial authorities did not succeed in having full control over the currencies nor did local ways of using them determine their circulation but merchants, who were responsible for shipping specie to the region, also had a degree of control over the circulation of currencies. As such, the article provides very interesting—and complex—cases that emerged from the interfaces in situ among indigenous populations, merchant companies, international traders, settler communities and British colonial officials.     

Atoms in wonderland

This paper examines the representation of atomic science in Britain in museums, exhibitions, and print in the period 1945–1960. Due to postwar shortages, authors and publicists initially relied more on the written text than on visual representation. Underlying much writing was the idea of the “intelligent layman,” which formed a shorthand way of conceptualizing the non‐specialist reading public, and accounts for much of the approach and tone of writing. The paper then examines the constraints of presenting atomic science in the Science Museum, London, and the 1951 Festival of Britain, as well as a range of publications for the wider market. These include the official publications of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the enthusiastic output of the Institute of Atomic Information for the Layman, as well as works such as George Gamow's Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland. The use of images from Alice in Wonderland is examined as recurring motif for presenting an optimistic view of the benign potential of atomic science.