Creating an Imperial Frontier: Archaeology of the Formation of Rome’s Danube Borderland

For investigating the formation of frontier zones, study of changes in small communities that constituted the majority of earlier populations provides a different perspective from a focus on major centers. A network model applied to settlement and cemetery sites on Romes Danube River frontier in Bavaria, Germany, shows that many communities, through participation in regional and long-distance circulation systems, played significant roles in creating the dynamic and culturally heterogeneous character of that landscape. This approach offers a model applicable to analysis of the formation and functioning of frontier regions in all cultural contexts.     

New World States and Empires: Economic and Social Organization

We take a critical perspective in discussing recent publications on the archaeological study of the ancient state-level societies of Latin America. For some topics, such as intensive agriculture and exchange, data are far ahead of theory, whereas for others (e.g., gender and ethnicity), theory has outstripped data. Craft production, a topic that has achieved a good balance of data and theory, is one of the success stories of recent Latin American archaeology. After a discussion of sources of data, we review these and other topics (e.g., consumption patterns, household studies, social organization) in terms of both data and theory. In a second review article, we cover the topics of politics, religion, urbanism, and the processes of change.     

Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency

This paper aims to describe Bruno Latour's contributions to the theory and methodology of agency in the Philosophy of Science and to apply them to the study of agency in archaeology. These contributions include an understanding of how artifacts or representations of the world emerge, what the best conditions to study them under are and how to understand the process of change they undergo. A case study using the Hopewell burial mounds of the Lower Illinois Valley will serve to demonstrate the application of this methodology.     

What is a Burin? Typology,Technology, and Interregional Comparison

Classification of artifacts has long marked a significant edge between theory and practice in archaeology. While considering classification to be a necessary methodological device, most practitioners also recognize that it carries with it built-in assumptions. This essay approaches the issue by way of a specific stone tool type from Old World sites: the burin. By asking “what is a burin?” the study shows the need to reconsider typologies to reflect changes in research questions and progress in dating methods, especially when working with museum collections and secondary data between regions and across national traditions, and the need to study whole collections from the perspective of technological choices.     

When the Revolution Reached the Countryside: Use and Destruction of Imported Wares in Alta Gracia,Córdoba, 1810

During the 1970s, excavations were conducted in Alta Gracia, Córdoba, Argentina, in a compound that once was a seventeenth and eighteenth-century Jesuit Convent and is presently a museum. During the excavation, an amazing amount of historic material never studied before was discovered inside a sealed privy. After studying the material, we were able to identify the objects as once belonging to Santiago de Liniers, a man who successfully resisted and expelled British invaders from Buenos Aires. As a result, he was appointed Viceroy, though eventually he was shot in 1810 for confronting the Independence movement. Our hypothesis is that these objects were thrown into the privy as a gesture of contempt associated with his capture and execution.     

Newlyweds,Young Families,and Spinsters: A Consideration of Developmental Cycle in Historical Archaeologies of Gender

The social relations of class, gender, and ethnicity affected individuals and families in the nineteenth century and shaped (as well as were shaped by) uses of the material world. Changes in demographic composition of the household, successions in land ownership, and other events that altered the developmental course of the family unit, however, were also significant. Variations in the material and spatial expressions of gender ideologies, for example, were more than simply deviations from middle-class cultural norms. They represented the active negotiation of dominant ideologies and the construction of alternate meaningful gender relations and forms of domesticity.     

On the Particularism of English Landscape Archaeology

The aim of this paper is to explore the question: why is the archaeology of English historic landscapes apparently so provincial? Inevitably the response must be that matters are more complex. In this paper, I examine the work of W. G. Hoskins, the “father of English landscape history,” and draw attention to: the complex way in which landscape is embedded in nationalism; the relations between locale, province, and nation; and the way wider tensions, in particular of colonialism are embedded within Hoskins's own discourse. In conclusion, I examine ways in which this problematic continues to structure enquiry into the English landscape today and to inhibit a genuinely international and comparative approach to historic landscapes.     

The Archaeology of the Gaucho <Emphasis Type="Italic">“Vago y Mal</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">Entretenido”</Emphasis>

The purpose of this article is to explain and discuss the essential operational characteristics of the technology of power (sensu Foucault) perpetrated on the internal frontiers with the Indians in nineteenth-century Argentina. The conquest and colonization of the Pampas took shape in the establishment of military camp structures placed to create a defensive cordon, known as “the Indian frontier line.” These constructions were fortlets defended by gaucho cavalry squadrons (know as Blandengues during the Spanish period, and then Guardias Nacionales after Argentinean Independence). This process is known in Argentinean historiography as “the conquest of the desert.” This particular technology of power existed in this historical context and operated at every social level, impacting strongly on the lower classes that inhabited the incorrectly named “desert.” Its implementation in the military field enabled the existence of an array of micro-powers that surrounded the gaucho, called vago y malentretenido—“a vagrant and lingerer”—and their women's lives. The army as institution was the locus of various forms of coercion and old forms of punishment (such as the stakes, whipping, and public executions) most of which affected peasants, nonresidents, itinerant workers, and the rural youth. This schema was adopted in different areas: in the enrolment and discipline of the gaucho soldiers, in life in the fortlet-prisons, and in the ritualism of power. The alternative chosen by soldiers to evade this technology of power and the fortlet-panopticons was escape through desertion. The utility of those observations is demonstrated, because an important part of the area of research of historical archaeology that has developed with the greatest impetus in Argentina has taken fortlets as its subject of study.     

Peck-Marked Vessels from the San José Market Street Chinatown: A Study of Distribution and Significance

Ceramic bowls and plates with Chinese characters pecked into their surfaces are documented on almost every nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinatown site in California. Typically, these vessels are said to bear marks of ownership, and further analysis has been uncommon. Given the socio-political atmosphere surrounding Chinese immigration and labor during this time period, as well as the cultural relevance of this marking practice, it is the author's belief that this explanation is incomplete. Through analysis of archaeological materials from the Market Street Chinatown in San José, California, this paper explores the possibility that Chinese immigrants were using and hybridizing the familiar Chinese cultural practice of marking vessels to aid in creating an environment within the Chinatown that was both more comfortable and more livable.