Visible Men and Elusive Women

Early gender archaeology formulated two statements: men are visible, women are invisible, and men work in hard materials, women work in soft materials. We discuss these dichotomies in connection with nineteenth-century folklore and an excavated eighteenth-century cottage at a summer-farm. We conclude that much of the gendered order-of-work tasks broke down in pragmatic day-to-day life, especially by women crossing the gender border. However, social chaos was held at bay by ritual acts and magic objects.     

The Challenges and Potentials of Archaeological Heritage in Africa—Cape Verdean Reflections

This paper considers three different ways that heritage can be considered fragile—as a reference to the conservation status of the physical heritage, as a concern for the meaning of the heritage, and in terms of threats to the knowledge potentials. It also briefly considers any special conditions that may characterise the threats to heritage in Africa and the consequential challenges to its heritage managers and politicians. On this basis, the experiences of working on one of the first systematic archaeological projects in Cape Verde are used to think about how these challenges are encountered within a specific place but from the viewpoint of foreigners and archaeologists.     

An example of the establishment of the Bronze Age cultural landscape in SW Scandinavia

In the Lake Hullsjön area, Västergötland, SW Sweden, the increase in the deposits of artifacts, the erection of monumental graves, and the intensification and expansion of cultivation and grazing, is discussed in terms of cultural landscape changes at the Neolithic/Bronze Age transition c. 2500–1500 B.C. The expansion included an intensified use of low‐lying clayey areas and caused an increase in soil erosion, as indicated by the sediment stratigraphy.     

New Presses for Old Grapes: I: Multiple Classification Analysis

Searching, gathering, organizing, and retrieving data are basic tasks for historians. As long as historians work by themselves, decisions concerning data format, data exchange, computer platform, and the like remain secondary. Teams of historians often use relational databases for centralized data storage. However, fundamental risks are implicit when one uses databases. Among technical considerations, the process of transformation between the source and the database is a deciding factor. For those who gather data, the effective use of such possibilities as data exchange, compatibility, and simplicity of survey and the reuse of the data in other contexts and platforms becomes increasingly important. In contrast, the user's needs include the possibility of data verification and use of the data for more than one question. Many relational databases have considerable shortcomings because the stored data lose the visual characteristics, the syntax, and the semantics of the original source. The EuroClimHist database environment is a part of the NCCR Climate project. It uses a data tool, written in Java for the gathering of documentary data, which generates extensible markup language (XML) files for data exchange.