COMPOSITIONAL CHARACTERIZATION OF FRENCH LIMESTONE: A NEW TOOL FOR ART HISTORIANS*

Limestone from quarries known to medieval craftsmen and from the monuments they built and embellished, as well as from carvings now in museum collections, has been characterized by neutron activation analysis. Specimens from 38 quarries in the Lutetian and Jurassic limestone formations of France and from sculptures in American and French museums have been tested, and the results have been compiled in a data base to which art historians may refer when attempting to determine provenance for sculptures. Multivariate statistical analysis of concentration data shows stone from a particular quarry in the Paris basin to be compositionally homogeneous and distinguishable from other quarries in the same formation. The same approach to data related to quarries near the Burgundian abbey of Cluny finds general agreement between classifications based on compositional and on petrographic data, but the number of samples available for analysis at the time of writing was insufficient to achieve the finer distinctions reported for the Paris basin.     

MAPPING THEM 'OUT': EURO-CANADIAN CARTOGRAPHY AND THE APPROPRIATION OF THE NUXALK AND TS'ILHQOT'IN FIRST NATIONS' TERRITORIES, 1793–1916

As social constructions of reality, maps embody the values, truth-claims and power-structures of the cultures that make them. Using a variety of interpretive methodologies, geographers and cartographers have developed the thesis that, through selective 're-presentation', maps 'work' at a discursive, symbolic level. In focusing on the artifact itself, however, they have tended to forget that maps are made by someone. Indeed, as part of a wider institutional network, organized and reified by people in pursuit of certain goals, maps serve to create and sustain territories. In a colonial context, moreover, maps arrest and de-legitimize the territorialization of some cultural groups even as they enfranchise and legitimize that of others. Maps are, in this view, ideological weapons. In this paper I use a materialist hermeneutic to investigate the way in which maps helped to actualize the territorial dispossession of the original inhabitants of what is now British Columbia. Beginning with the charts of George Vancouver and Alexander MacKenzie, and ending with the Indian Reserve maps of the 1916 Royal Commission, I illustrate this thesis by tracing the cartographic encirclement of the Nuxalk and Ts'ilhqot'in First Nations. As an essential adjunct in the Euro-Canadian colonization of the region, the analysis has implications for our understanding of the social, political, and juridical function of maps within contemporary land claims discourse.     

NEUTRON ACTIVATION ANALYSIS OF AD 1660–1930 EUROPEAN COPPER-COLOURED BLUE GLASS TRADE BEADS FROM ONTARIO,CANADA

Blue glass trade beads from well-dated late seventeenth- to early twentieth-century sites and collections have been analysed non-destructively by instrumental neutron activation analysis. The beads display enough variations in their elemental contents to allow us to characterize the different chemistries. The implication of these results is that similar chemical analyses of blue beads from undated archaeological sites may be used to help date the sites, since each bead chemistry has a specific earliest period.     

CHEMICAL ANALYSIS OF COPPER ALLOY TRADE METAL FROM A POST-CONTACT HURON SITE IN ONTARIO,CANADA

Fifty-three copper-based metal fragments, recovered from the Robitaille site in southcentral Ontario, were analysed by neutron activation to establish their chemical make-up and to sort them by their trace elemental chemistries. Three different European copper samples, one brassy copper and 48 brass samples with five different chemistries were found. As few as eight trading actions may account for all of the recovered European metal fragments.     

THE POSSIBLE FRACTIONATION OF LEAD ISOTOPES IN ANCIENT METALLURGICAL PROCESSES

The possibility of lead isotope fractionation in ancient lead production is examined. Kinetic theory relating to isotopic fractionation in non-equilibrium evaporation is considered and the feasibility of the alteration of lead isotope abundance ratios in ore roasting and smelting is assessed. Previous experimental work is shown to have been inconclusive and conclusions are drawn on the need for further research to quantify the possible extent of fractionation in practice.     

RADIOCARBON DATES FOR BEESWAX FIGURES IN THE PREHISTORIC ROCK ART OF NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon ages have been taken for a test suite of small samples of material removed from some of the ‘beeswax’art figures found in rock shelters in northern Australia. The results indicate that we can reliably date this unique form of rock art with no noticeable damage. We had not expected to find figures of any great antiquity, and so we were surprised to find that the ages obtained spanned the time period from the recent past to about 4000 BP.