Conversion,Autobiography and Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)

This article juxtaposes two of Richard Baxter’s autobiographical accounts written 5 years apart but along very different lines. In the final chapter of A Holy Commonwealth (1659), Baxter confidently asserted the rightness of Parliament’s cause in the civil wars; for Baxter, it is a strikingly optimistic, triumphalist and providentialist account. In the Reliquiae Baxterianae, which he began to write in 1664, he explicitly distanced himself from any such claims about the wars and he wrote in a more chastened fashion. The former account, and the kind of autobiography it intimates, brings Baxter’s purposes in writing the Reliquiae more clearly into focus. The article advances on recent scholarship by Kathleen Lynch while investigating the nature of autobiography. The iterations of Baxter’s autobiography demonstrate that such accounts are first a story that the author tells himself or herself. If events negate that story, it is never told.     

Tracing Medieval and Renaissance Alabaster Works of Art Back to Quarries: A Multi‐Isotope (Sr,S, O) Approach

Multi‐isotope fingerprinting (sulphur, oxygen and strontium isotopes) has been tested to study the provenances of medieval and Renaissance French and Swedish alabaster works of art. Isotope signatures of historical English, French and Spanish alabaster source quarries or areas are revealed to be highly specific, with a strong intra‐group homogeneity and strong inter‐group contrasts, especially for Sr and S isotopes. The chosen combination of isotope tracers is a good basis for forensic work on alabaster provenance, allowing verification of hypotheses about historical trade routes as well as identification of fakes and their origin. The applied analytical techniques of continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometry (CF–IRMS) and thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) only require micro‐samples in the low‐milligram range, thus minimizing the impact on the works of art.     

What constitutes a ‘trip’? Examining child journey attributes using GPS and self-report

Active travel is associated with improved health and development outcomes in children. Accurate detection of children's travel behaviors and routes, however, is problematic. Travel diaries are often used to collect information on children's travel behaviors, yet no evidence for the accuracy of this methodology exists. This study investigated the validity of children's self-reported trips (origin, destination) compared with an objective criterion (global positioning systems units; GPS). Children (n = 10, 9–11 y) wore the GPS units for seven consecutive days between March and June 2011 and completed travel diaries daily with researcher assistance. Affinity group interviews were conducted in December 2011 with 30 children from two schools to garner perspectives on trip definition, neighborhood perceptions, and to illuminate GPS and travel diary findings. GPS journeys were manually compared with travel diary journeys for destination sequencing, start times, and travel mode. Accuracy in trip sequencing was compared by day type, and journey type using percentage differences and the chi-square (χ²) statistic. Of the 380 trips captured, 54.5% of journey sequences were fully or partially matched, 22.4% were GPS only trips and 23.2% travel diary only. Greater accuracy (full/partial match) was observed for weekdays than for weekend days and for the journey to or from school than for other journeys. Travel mode agreement existed for 99% of matched trips. Although children's travel diaries may confer contextual journey information, they may not provide completely accurate information on journey sequencing. Thematic analysis of affinity group data revealed that reasons for this are multifaceted, including differing concepts of what constitutes a ‘trip’. A combined approach of GPS and travel diary is recommended to gather a comprehensive understanding of children's journey characteristics.     

Introduction: Feminist Theories and Archaeology

This journal issue developed out of a desire to increase the use of feminist theory in archaeology, leading me to ask Laurajane Smith of York University to co-organize a symposium on the topic for the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin in July 2008. The impacts of major feminist theories on constructions of the past and archaeological thinking are discussed, emphasizing how they implicitly or explicitly influenced other articles in this journal issue.     

Tending and drive hunting: A density-mediated attrition model can explain age profiles of white-tailed deer at Iroquoian village sites

In a 1993 paper, Noble and Crerar suggested, based on the age and sex distribution of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) longbones from four Attawandaron Iroquoian sites around the western end of Lake Ontario, that the contact-period Attawandaron were managing local deer populations, in response to the aboriginal trade in hides. Having observed similar patterns of differential preservation of elements and epiphyseal fusion at nearby Iroquoian sites that are not ascribed to the Attawandaron, and which pre-date the hypothesised trading period, we argue that these patterns may instead relate to bone density and/or vulnerability to taphonomic effects of late-fusing epiphyses. We further support our argument through age profiles based on dental eruption and wear.     

The Paradox of the Earned Income Tax Credit: Appreciating Benefits but not Their Source

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is widely recognized as the United States’ most effective contemporary policy for reducing poverty, and scholars have found that it elevates recipients’ sense of social inclusion. This raises the question of how it influences recipients’ civic engagement, namely their attitudes about government and political participation. We draw on policy feedback scholarship to consider expectations. Then we use a unique dataset to compare recipients of the EITC, Aid to Families With Dependent Children/Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and nonrecipients of either policy in order to identify how policy features are related to political attitudes and behaviors. We find that despite the benefits they receive, EITC recipients experience low external political efficacy, but are more likely to be politically active than their peers.     

Kaparlgoo Blue: On the Adoption of Laundry Blue Pigment into the Visual Culture of Western Arnhem Land,Australia

International Journal of Historical Archaeology - It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it...     

Feminist Theorizing of Patriarchal Colonialism,Power Dynamics,and Social Agency Materialized in Colonial Institutions

In the twenty-first century historical archaeologists have increasingly drawn on post-colonial theory to analyze the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, Australasia, and Africa. However, few have employed feminist theories to gain insights into the patriarchal power dynamics that were fundamental to institutionalized colonial ideologies and practices. This paper provides feminist theorizing of new concepts and a heterarchical model of multiple interacting powers that increase understanding of complex gender and sexual power dynamics between colonizers and colonized.     

Remembering the Sea: Personal and Communal Recollections of Maritime Life in Jizan and the Farasan Islands,Saudi Arabia

People create narratives of their maritime past through the remembering and forgetting of seafaring experiences, and through the retention and disposal of maritime artefacts that function mnemonically to evoke or suppress those experiences. The sustenance and reproduction of the resulting narratives depends further on effective media of intergenerational transmission; otherwise, they are lost. Rapid socio-economic transformation across Saudi Arabia in the age of oil has disrupted longstanding seafaring economies in the Red Sea archipelago of the Farasan Islands, and the nearby mainland port of Jizan. Vestiges of wooden boatbuilding activity are few; long-distance dhow trade with South Asia, the Arabian-Persian Gulf and East Africa has ceased; and a once substantial pearling and nacre (mother of pearl) collection industry has dwindled to a tiny group of hobbyists: no youth dive today. This widespread withdrawal from seafaring activity among many people in these formerly maritime-oriented communities has diminished the salience of such activity in cultural memory, and has set in motion narrative creation processes, through which memories are filtered and selected, and objects preserved, discarded, or lost. This paper is a product of the encounter of the authors with keepers of maritime memories and objects in the Farasan Islands and Jizan. An older generation of men recall memories of their experiences as boat builders, captains, seafarers, pearl divers and fishermen. Their recounted memories are inscribed, and Arabic seafaring terms recorded. The extent of the retention of maritime material cultural items as memorials is also assessed, and the rôle of individual, communal and state actors in that retention is considered. Through this reflection, it becomes clear that the extra-biological memory and archive of the region’s maritime past is sparse; that intergenerational transmission is failing; that the participation of state agencies in maritime heritage creation is highly limited; and that, as a result, memories current among the older generation have limited prospect of survival. These memories, recorded and interpreted here, identify the Farasan Islands as a former centre of the pearling industry in the Red Sea, and identify them and Jizan as open to far-reaching maritime-mediated cultural influences in an era before the imposition of the attributes of the modern nation-state.