Le Grand Abri aux Puces,a Mousterian site from the Last Interglacial: paleogeography,paleoenvironment, and new excavation results

Le Grand Abri aux Puces (GAP), located on the right bank of the Ouvèze River of southern France, has been known to contain well-preserved stone tools and faunal remains, but our work in 2008 was the first professional, controlled excavation at the site and has exposed at least 1 archaeological layer with a very rich and diverse faunal assemblage (23 macrofaunal species, as many for the microfauna, 27 land snail species), abundant charcoals (fragments are large and preserve small twigs with their pith and bark still intact), and stone tools with immaculate surface preservation (retaining their original freshness and preserving microscopic use wear). The information issuing from paleontology, micropaleontology, malacology, and anthracology all place the principle GAP human occupation unambiguously in a temperate climatic phase. Different biometric and biochronological characters of the fauna converge to place the layers found thus far from before the last glacial, and most likely in MIS 5e (127–117 kya). The lithic elements, mainly composed of tools of superior quality, demonstrating particular technical investment, and made from widely distributed raw material sources, lead us to hypothesize brief passages of hunting groups in the cave focused around an anticipated activity. This hypothesis will be refined and tested during further excavations.     

A possible case of treponemal disease from England dating to the 11th–12th century AD

This short report describes a human skeleton from an archaeological site in England showing signs of treponemal disease. A radiocarbon determination indicates that it is firmly pre‐Columbian in date. The implications for recent debates concerning the origin of treponemal disease in Europe are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Representation as work in ‘America's most historic city’

This paper examines how the practices of heritage tourism reproduce identities in and of Fredericksburg, Virginia. In particular, we focus on the everyday practices of tourism workers who are essential in the representation and reproduction of this heritage space. In so doing, we want to move away from research in geography that theorizes representation and embodiment as distinct realms of experience and inquiry. Instead, we argue that representation is work and within this very material process, city workers weave memory with history as they guide visitors through ‘America’s Most Historic City'. Through an examination of three of Fredericksburg's tourism work environments we show how representations succeed in reproducing heritage tourism spaces precisely because representation is work.     

Establishing the Prehistoric Cultural Sequence for the Lopburi Region, Central Thailand

This study comprises the first archaeologically-defined chronological and cultural sequence for central Thailand. Based on collaborative research between the Thai–Italian Lopburi Regional Archaeological Project and the Thai–American Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project, the results of excavations at seven pre- and protohistoric sites that witnessed three millennia of local cultural development, from the early second millennium BC onward, are synthesized herein. This study fills a significant gap in Thailand’s prehistory, also identifying important cultural interactions ranging into southern China and Vietnam that led to the formation during the second millennium BC of a ‘Southeast Asian Interaction Sphere’. This interaction sphere, at the close of the second millennium BC, facilitated the transmission of the knowledge of copper-base metallurgy from southern China into Thailand, where it reached the communities of the Lopburi Region who took advantage of their ore-rich environment. At the end of the first millennium BC, strong South Asian contacts emerge in Southeast Asia. Among this study’s salient contributions is the characterization of these critical prehistoric antecedents, which culminated in a process of localization of exogenous elements, usually termed ‘Indianization’. The impact of this dynamic process was initially felt in central Thailand in the late first millennium BC, leading over time to the rise there, by the mid first millennium AD, of one of Southeast Asia’s first ‘state-like’ entities.     

Front contre Front

Sensations are elusive. As our conscience is unable to simultaneously sense and feel, we struggle to capture them fully as they take possession of us. Sensations are to be experienced immediately and silently as no words can faithfully express them in their intensity. This is the paradox facing writer Philippe Delerm, who ceaselessly searches for a way of translating the silent world of sensations which is at the centre of his work. This article seeks to examine the stylistic and thematic methods put in place by Delerm in order to address this issue. In particular, we will propose a critical reflection on the theme of the everyday, which permeates Delerm's works and explains the reasons that lie behind his enthusiasm for the ‘small pleasures of life’. We will see how the quotidian becomes the ideal language of translation for the elusive sensations he seeks to describe and we will examine how he transforms and plays with it to suit his writing needs. The everyday becomes an alibi for a writer whose aim is to express the inexpressible.     

Interstitial women: East African experiences

Kilbride, Philip Leroy and Janet Capriotti Kilbride. Changing Family Life in East Africa: Women and Children at Risk. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. xv + 271 pp. including references and index. $29.95 cloth.

White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. xiii + 285 pp. including notes, references, and index. $34.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.