A Palaeolithic fishhook made of ivory and the earliest fishhook tradition in Europe

Prehistoric fishhooks have previously been described in northern Europe as being common since the Mesolithic. Here we present a Final Palaeolithic ivory fishhook from the site Wustermark 22 (north-eastern Germany), the raw material of which is about 19,000 years old. Five further fishhooks were discovered in situ at the same site one of which has a calibrated radiocarbon age of about 12,300 years. The tool industries of flint artefacts and bone/antler tools are associated with descendants of the Federmesser-culture and the palynological context indicates a Younger Dryas environment. Wustermark 22 represents the largest collection of Palaeolithic fishhooks so far found at a single European site. A comparison with other sites in Europe, containing Palaeolithic fishhooks suggests that the appearance and development of fishhooks may be associated with a general change in resource availability during the Greenland Interstadial 1 (Bølling/Allerød warming), which is also connected with a change from late Upper Palaeolithic to Final Palaeolithic industries in Northern Central Europe. We conclude that Mesolithic fishhook tradition has its roots in the Final Palaeolithic.     

Kinship and mobility in 11th-century A.D. Gammertingen,Germany: an interdisciplinary approach

Excavation in and around a Medieval church in Gammertingen, Germany, revealed the skeletal remains of eight individuals dating to the 10th and 11th century AD. Archaeologists hypothesized that the individuals were the first members of a family later known as the Counts of Gammertingen, a medieval high nobility family. In an interdisciplinary approach, Strontium isotope and ancient DNA techniques were performed in order to test the hypothesis that the church was used as a family burial site and to investigate the provenance of family members. Seven of the eight individuals can be placed in a three-generation genealogy. The isotope analyses establish that the eighth individual had a different birthplace and possibly became a member of the Counts of Gammertingen through marriage. Further, genetic data revealed that distant relatives of the paternal lineage are still present in this area today. Thus, the combined results lead to a very detailed knowledge about a 1000-year old noble family.     

High‐Resolution 3D Marine Seismic Investigation of Hedeby Harbour,Germany

Offshore 3D‐seismic acquisition has been a standard for high‐precision structural imaging in the oil and gas industry for many years. Recently this technique has been adapted by only a few teams to the resolution required for archaeological marine investigation. In contrast to sonar techniques, the 3D‐seismic method produces images below the sea‐floor. We investigate the harbour of the Viking age proto‐town of Hedeby in Northern Germany with the SEAMAP‐3D system. SEAMAP‐3D allows for rapid acquisition and employs an automated data processing sequence. We observe a wealth of archaeologically relevant detail and compare our results with previous work.     

Unravelling Washington's Judgement Calls: The Cases of the Malaysian and Chilean Capital Controls

While the option of constraining cross-border financial flows to emerging markets (capital controls) has taken a backseat in the official policy debates about strengthening the global financial architecture, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has ceded that certain temporary measures to limit the inflow of hot money may be beneficial in achieving some breathing space for governments. In this sense, capital controls are only to be used as a means to reach the larger end, namely, the proper (neoliberal) management of financial liberalisation. Indeed, by sanctioning a particular type of capital control it is engaging in a political judgement call, which is based upon certain material interests, as opposed to mere economic logic. This becomes evident when we juxtapose two different types of capital controls: the Chilean unremunerated reserve requirement, which was endorsed by the Fund, and, conversely, the IMF's rejection of the Malaysian currency control. I suggest that the IMF's opposition to Malaysian controls stems from its perception that capital restraint on outflows threatens the imperative of free capital mobility, which benefits both the US and transnational financial capitals.     

Making and Mastering Violent Environments: Following the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Coastal Louisiana

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands have been disappearing at an alarming rate over the past several decades, with the greatest harm experienced by vulnerable populations (poor and racialised residents). It was not until 2005 that the state legislature responded with a much-lauded Master Plan tasked with integrating the construction of new flood control infrastructure with wetland restoration. Seeking to unsettle this initiative, we develop a historical-geographical materialist approach to follow the entanglements between infrastructural production and capital accumulation in Louisiana over the past several hundred years. In so doing, we present a two-fold argument: that the making and mastering infrastructural violence has always been part of the historical unfolding of the socio-spatial dynamics of capitalism; and that infrastructural development has played an integral role in this duality at every historical turn. The capitalist state, at both the federal and state levels, has played a vital role in producing and controlling this violence.     

Negotiating German colonial heritage in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel

Abstract

Conceptualising heritage as a contested process of past-based meaning production in the present, this paper analyses the ongoing dispute over street names in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel. In 1899, Berlin named two of its newly-built streets Togo Street and Cameroon Street. Togo and Cameroon had been proclaimed the first German colonies in 1884. By 1958, 22 Berlin streets had been named after African regions that had been colonised by the German Empire or after German colonial protagonists. In 2004, several NGOs called for the renaming of some of these streets, igniting a fierce dispute over the heritage status of the German colonial past. Drawing on guided interviews and document analyses, we analyse this debate on three levels, showing how the NGOs and their claims have been marginalised on each level. While the level of agency can be traced back to the different positioning of the actors in the political field, the levels of temporality and spatiality belong to the realm of ideas about the world and one’s place in it. By exploring the authoritative power of traditional notions of permanence, and of place and space, this paper seeks to bring temporality and spatiality into the focus of those studying heritage-making practices.     

HLO1‐south: An Early Neolithic site in Wadi al‐Hilo (Sharjah,UAE)

Site HLO1 (Sharjah, UAE), situated in a particularly favourable geographical position, has provided an extraordinary range of anthropogenic radiocarbon dates, spanning before 8000 to Zero BCE. The Neolithic is represented by finds from the eighth to the fifth millennium BCE. Apart from the dated fireplaces, however, there are almost no typical artefacts of this period. Small stone structures appear to have been early Neolithic graves. A middle Neolithic grave consisted of a large rounded stone heap which was reused as a grave during the Late Bronze Age. The site is interpreted as a campsite of nomadic herders, used throughout the Neolithic period. After a break in the fourth millennium BCE, the site became a Bronze Age smelting site which continued to be settled until the Late Iron Age.     

Cleaning up down South: Supermarkets,ethical trade and African horticulture

Supermarkets in Great Britain have joined the country's Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) in order to demonstrate their commitment to social welfare and environmental standards in their supply chains. They have been particularly concerned to enforce ethical as well as food safety standards in the African horticultural industry, which has historically depended on cheap labour to produce high-value vegetables. The supermarkets' 'ethical turn' appears to signal an important change from forms of commodity fetishism that obscured exploitative relations of food production in the South. This paper, however, argues that in an era of high food anxiety for both retailers and consumers, ethical standards are themselves fetishized. It also shows how the effort to impose such standards on Zambia's horticultural export industry resembles the colonial 'hygienic mission', and faces a similar contradiction.     

The pit: landscape scars as potential cultural tools

A huge and continuously growing pit is about to divide the Swedish mining town of Malmberget into two halves. What once was the town centre is now a 200 metres deep hole, and private homes and key buildings like the old school and the church have had to be demolished or moved. The pit is a human imposed ‘landscape scar’ epitomising the town’s lost golden age of mining, its present situation of decline and uncertain future prospects – despite a recent recovery in the mining industry. Although the pit is decisively present in the local community, it is not articulated as significant, especially not from a heritage perspective. Why is this so? In this article, we examine the pit as a potential cultural tool for heritage processes, and find that it is indeed used by individuals in this respect, but not in collective memorialisation. We conclude that landscape scars definitely can constitute critical cultural tools, although they may not always need to be labelled as belonging to an ‘authorized heritage discourse’. Instead, the potential of the landscape scar is to enhance the amount and recognition of shared memories in the local community.