A re-assessment of Basketmaker II cave 7: massacre site or cemetery context

Our ongoing investigation of early maize farming in the American Southwest has entailed stable isotope analysis and accelerator radiocarbon dating of Basketmaker II remains from sites in the Four Corners region. Here we report radiocarbon dates on a large mortuary assemblage excavated by Richard Wetherill in 1893 from a burial cave in southeastern Utah. It has long been thought that all individuals interred in Cave 7 were massacred in a single violent attack given embedded projectiles and evidence for blunt force trauma. However, accelerator radiocarbon dates on purified bone collagen (n = 96) do not lend strong support to this argument, even among the subset of individuals with clear evidence for violent injuries. Moreover, nearly 80% of Cave 7 burials examined in the study show no evidence of perimortem trauma and no adult females or subadults under the age of 12 appear to have suffered violent deaths. Rather than an anomalous single-event massacre, the Cave 7 radiocarbon dataset suggests that raiding and intra-group, male/male violence was episodic among Basketmaker groups in southeastern Utah. Population densities were relatively high and individuals interred in Cave 7 and elsewhere in the region were heavily dependent on maize agriculture, a prehistoric economic strategy typically characterized by high amplitude fluctuations in productivity. Variability in the array of grave goods accompanying Cave 7 male burials and elsewhere suggests competitive social differentiation likely heightened during periods of resource shortfall leading to intra-group conflict, raiding and perhaps ritualized acts of violence.     

Postneoliberalism and its Malcontents

Abstract: The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near‐term and longer‐run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neoliberalism as a form of social, political, and economic regulation. In many ways a creature of crisis, could neoliberalism now be falling to a crisis of its own making? Answering this question is impossible, we argue, without an adequate understanding of the nature of neoliberalization and its evolving sociospatial manifestations. These are more than definitional niceties. The prospects and potential of efforts to move genuinely beyond neoliberalism must also be considered in this light.     

Semi-parliamentary government in perspective: concepts,values, and designs

The article responds to four commentaries on the concept of semi-parliamentary government and its application to Australian bicameralism. It highlights four main points: (1) Our preferred typology is not more ‘normative’ than existing approaches, but applies the criterion of ‘direct election’ equally to executive and legislature; (2) While the evolution of semi-parliamentary government had contingent elements, it plausibly also reflects the ‘equilibrium’ nature of certain institutional configurations; (3) The idea that a pure parliamentary system with pure proportional representation has absolute normative priority over ‘instrumentalist’ concerns about cabinet stability, identifiability and responsibility is questionable; and (4) The reforms we discuss may be unlikely to occur in Australia, but deserve consideration by scholars and institutional reformers in other democratic systems.     

Qualifying Mediterranean connectivity: Byzantium and the Franks during the seventh century

In the last two decades, historians researching the seventh century ce have increasingly emphasized mobility, communications and connectivity across the Mediterranean world that supposedly included close contacts between the Franks and Byzantium. These studies, however, rely often on optimistic, maximum interpretations of the comparatively sparse source base, and have not always precisely distinguished between different forms of mobility and connectivity. This article argues that a closer examination of the actual cultural and political consequences of mobility and contact between Byzantium and Gaul is required, and that the possibility of discontinuity and disintegration should not be disregarded. In our reading of the sources, we deliberately adopt a sceptical, methodologically cautious minimal position: the textual sources can be interpreted as showing that, while individual, sporadic contacts across the Mediterranean continued to exist, there was no established, continuous practice of communications between Byzantium and Gaul.