The Use of Mineralogy to Identify Sources of Soapstone Artefacts: an Example from Soapstone Ridge,Georgia (USA)

The late Archaic Soapstone Ridge quarries, near Atlanta, Georgia, are the largest sources of archaeological soapstone in the south‐eastern USA. Ten soapstone artefacts from the coastal plain, over 200 km south of Soapstone Ridge (SSR), were used in an attempt to relate their mineralogy to that of the Soapstone Ridge quarries and to investigate the utility of mineralogy in the sourcing of soapstone. There is an overall similarity in the abundance of the major soapstone minerals, talc, chlorite and amphiboles in the artefacts and the SSR soapstone. Differences in the variety of amphibole (tremolite/actinolite, magnesiohornblende and magnesiocumingtonite/anthophyllite) and FeTi oxides (magnetite and ilmenite) eliminate SSR as a source for some of the artefacts. The compositions of chlorite (Cr), magnesiohornblende (Si, Al) and Fe oxides (Cr, Mn) in other artefacts are not consistent with a Soapstone Ridge source. The talc compositions are identical in the artefacts and the SSR soapstone. The mineral assemblage and compositions of two artefacts are consistent with a Soapstone Ridge source. Despite an overall similarity in the modal mineralogy of the artefacts and Soapstone Ridge quarries, there is enough diversity to distinguish between artefacts from Soapstone Ridge or some other source. Mineralogy is a useful tool for the evaluation of soapstone sources.     

TWO CULTURES OF THE POSTHUMAN FUTURE

The posthuman has been looming large on the human horizon lately. Yet there is no shared understanding of what a posthuman future could possibly mean, and the tension between a technological‐scientific prospect of posthumanity and the critical posthumanist scholarship of the humanities is growing palpable. Whereas the former harbors a novel sense of historicity signaled by the expectation of an evental change to bring about the technological posthuman as a previously nonexistent and other‐than‐human central subject, the latter theorizes a postanthropocentric subjectivity of beings still human. In doing so, it extends the already familiar emancipatory concerns of the human world over the nonhuman, with special attention paid to the ecological other. Despite the occasional claims of critical posthumanism to bring humanities and technological‐scientific approaches to a shared platform, the prospect of technological beings of unparalleled power and the ecotopia of species equality do not fit together very well. In this article I argue that, in their present shape, technological posthumanity and critical posthumanism represent hardly reconcilable social imaginaries and two cultures of the posthuman future. My intervention is a plea for developing a more profound and mutual understanding of both. Instead of advocating particular agendas that nevertheless claim validity for the entirety of planetary life and the entire scholarly enterprise of knowledge‐production, we could invest more in efforts to come to grips with both social imaginaries and venture jointly into the creation of the conceptual tools of a new knowledge economy of understanding the rapidly changing world and our own (post)human prospects.     

Athanasian Paganisation of Arius: Unprecedented Application of the Deification Theme

Athanasian contribution to the development of the deification theme and its subsequent influence on Christian spirituality remains significant. Athanasius certainly applied deification in his fight with Arianism. A generally acknowledged application of deification in Athanasius in an anti‐Arian context also finds additional support in a seemingly unexpected place—Athanasian criticism of pagan divinization, mostly concentrated in Against the Pagans. Relying on a traditional Christian apologetic approach for criticism of pagan divinization, Athanasius contextualizes the theology of Arius as the paganization of Christianity as well as proposes necessary prerequisites for Christian understanding of deification. This is an unprecedented application of deification in Christian theology where one Christian author portrays the teaching of another Christian author as pagan divinization.     

Women's and Men's Work: The Production and Marketing of Fresh Food and Export Crops in Papua New Guinea

Fresh food markets have been a fixture of the social and economic landscape of urban and rural PNG since colonial times. They were often the first points of engagement with the market economy, especially for women, who as small‐scale producers, sold surplus produce from their food gardens located on communally‐owned land. Although local food markets have remained an important livelihood for women, the later adoption and expansion of perennial export cash crops like coffee and cocoa overshadowed food production for local markets as men dominated export crop production on land alienated from communal ownership for decades or permanently. New forms of social relations of production and more exclusive forms of land tenure emerged to accommodate export crop production that were very different from those governing the production and marketing of fresh food. Market values and a trend towards individualisation of production with less capacity to mobilise labour through reciprocal labour exchange networks have characterised export crop production. With the income benefits captured largely by men, women began redirecting their labour to fresh food production where they were able to exercise more control of production and income while still mobilising labour through indigenous labour exchange arrangements. Attempts by men to appropriate the income of women and sons’ labour in export cropping were greater during flush periods when income levels were high, and they were less likely to attempt to appropriate this income in low crop periods when incomes were lower. However, with the recent emergence of female entrepreneurers earning relatively large sums of money in large‐scale, profit‐driven vegetable production, the moral frameworks governing food production are coming to resemble those governing export crops, and making labour more difficult to mobilise. Despite women being key players in these changes, we argue there is an emerging risk that men will attempt to assert control over this income or move into vegetable production themselves and possibly marginalise women in the process.     

Changes in the body,glaze and enamel compositions of early Meissen porcelain, 1723–c.1740

The evolution of early Meissen body, glaze and colorant compositions is examined using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) measurements on three artefacts that can be accurately dated to the period 1723–c.1740. The results are interpreted based on recipes recorded in the earliest documents of the Meissen archives. The pure Aue kaolinite contains low levels of Ti and can be distinguished from secondary clays, for example, clay from Colditz. The excess Ti in the glaze versus the body reported earlier and confirmed by the present authors is explained by the exclusive use of Colditz clay for the glaze, as described in the recipes before 1730, providing a terminus ante quem for Meissen porcelain exhibiting this particular asymmetry. After 1730, the presence of elevated Ti in the body could serve as a marker for the experimental admixture of clays to Aue kaolinite to alter its properties. Based on the detection of As, Ba and Bi, it is suggested that smalt from Erzgebirge was the colorant for blue enamels until at least 1725.     

Narratives of Genetic Selfhood**

This essay considers the mid-twentieth century adoption of genetic explanations for three biological phenomena: nutritional adaptation, antibiotic resistance, and antibody production. This occurred at the same time as the hardening of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis in evolutionary theory. I argue that these concurrent changes reflect an ascendant narrative of genetic selfhood, which prioritized random hereditary variation and selection through competition, and marginalized physiological or environmental adaptation. This narrative was further reinforced by the Central Dogma of molecular biology and fit well with liberal political thought, with its focus on the autonomous individual. However, bringing biological findings into line with this narrative required modifying the notion of the gene to account for various kinds of non-Mendelian inheritance. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's reflections on narrative and experiment are valuable in thinking about the friction between the postwar ideal of genetic selfhood and actual observations of how organisms adapt in response to the environment.     

Feeding the Community: Women’s Participation in Communal Celebrations,Western Sicily (Eighth–Sixth Centuries BC)

In the study of the Sicilian Iron Age, most of the works devoted to their main communal ritual spaces—the so-called “acropolis”—have stuck mainly to describe both their architectures and those artifacts registered in them. However, in the realization of this practice, those objects traditionally considered as imported or exceptional have been emphasized. The return of this selective practice is that other artifacts could not be considered as extraordinary, but being also present in these spaces and, therefore, with a certain role in these celebrations, they have long been dismissed and undervalued. This is the case of all those objects that are directly related to the domestic sphere and, particularly, with those activities usually associated with the women’s world, such as cooking pots or loom weights. The invisibility of these objects relative to the domestic sphere and, above all, to the feminine sphere has led to validate and perpetuate a biased glaze over these ceremonies where only male elite actors could participate. In response to these androcentric and classist discourses, the main aim of this paper is to recover the agency of certain women in the development of these communal celebrations and to show their importance in the construction and representation of a sense of community that was created constantly through these ceremonies through the study of these long-forgotten household objects.     

Introduction to “Binary Binds”: Deconstructing Sex and Gender Dichotomies in Archaeological Practice

Gender archaeology has made significant strides toward deconstructing the hegemony of binary categorizations. Challenging dichotomies such as man/woman, sex/gender, and biology/culture, approaches informed by poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theories have moved beyond essentialist and universalist identity constructs to more nuanced configurations. Despite the theoretical emphasis on context, multiplicity, and fluidity, binary starting points continue to streamline the spectrum of variability that is recognized, often reproducing normative assumptions in the evidence. The contributors to this special issue confront how sex, gender, and sexuality categories condition analytical visibility, aiming to develop approaches that respond to the complexity of theory in archaeological practice. The papers push the ontological and epistemological boundaries of bodies, personhood, and archaeological possibility, challenging a priori assumptions that contain how sex, gender, and sexuality categories are constituted and related to each other. Foregrounding intersectional approaches that engage with ambiguity, variability, and difference, this special issue seeks to “de-contain” categories, assumptions, and practices from “binding” our analytical gaze toward only certain kinds of persons and knowledges, in interpretations of the past and practices in the present.