Archaeological Survey of the Ex-USS <Emphasis Type="Italic">Independence</Emphasis> (CVL22)

In August 2016, a multidisciplinary team conducted the first archaeological survey of the deep-water (829 m) wreck of the ex-USS Independence (CVL22) using the remotely operated vehicles Argus and Hercules. The survey provided 34 h of direct observation with video and still camera documentation of the wreck, which the previous year had been initially identified with a limited three-dimensional sonar survey of the site. The 2016 assessment added considerably to an understanding of changes to Independence after its use as a target vessel for the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, as a radiological laboratory, training facility, and finally as a receptacle for “nuclear waste” prior to its scuttling off California in January 1951. The location and detailed examination of the wreck, along with additional archival research, offers a more nuanced definition of the carrier’s role within the context of the Cold War between the USSR, its adversaries and the race to establish nuclear supremacy, as well as site formation processes and ongoing biological colonization of the wreck site. As well, no evidence of residual radiological contamination was noted during the mission.     

USS <Emphasis Type="Italic">Independence’s</Emphasis> Aircraft

Submerged aircraft are a newly emerging area of study in underwater archaeology. In August 2016, a multidisciplinary team conducted the first archaeological survey of the deep water (829 m) wreck of the ex-USS Independence (CVL22), a WWII era light carrier scuttled off San Francisco after its use as an atomic bomb test target and subsequently as a floating radiological laboratory and training facility. Using the remotely operated vehicles Argus and Hercules, the expedition documented and studied Independence including assessment of a sonar target thought to be an aircraft resting inside the sunken carrier’s forward elevator pit. The survey confirmed the presence of a plane, but previous assumptions as to the type and identity of this aircraft, based on archival records, proved erroneous. As well, the remains of a second, and possibly a third, aircraft were also encountered during the 2016 survey. These artifacts, through their context, both as naval warplanes on an aircraft carrier, and as test articles for seaborne nuclear weapons development, more precisely fit within the parameters of maritime archaeology. They join other archaeological evidence at the Independence site that helps define its significance within the context of World War II and the Cold War.     

ENCOUNTERING INDIGENEITY: RE-IMAGINING AND DECOLONIZING GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT. In an era of postcolonialism and postcolonization, Indigenous struggles continue. Within 'settler societies' issues of dispossession—particularly of lands—remain largely unresolved. As part of the discipline of geography's active movement away from its colonizing project, this introduction to this special edition of Geografiska Annaler B seeks to (re)focus a disciplinary lens, and (re)open a dialogue—and potential research trajectory - about 'indigenous geographies'. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, new cultural geographies have begun a process of re-engagement with issues of indigeniety through careful, sensitive, inclusive, representative and emancipatory research projects.     

Bodily differences?: Gender, race, and class in Hans Sloane's Jamaican medical practice, 1687-1688

Despite the multitude of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British medical publications regarding empire and health, Hans Sloane's A Voyage To the Islands [of] Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707) was the first to incorporate significant numbers of female and African patients among its printed case histories. Comprising some sixty-four pages of the introduction, this unique set of records affords scholars the rare opportunity to examine how patients (of both sexes and races, various ages, and all social levels) residing in a "torrid zone" were diagnosed and treated by an English physician during the 1680s. Sloane had expected to encounter illnesses vastly different from those found in England when he arrived in Jamaica, but after practicing medicine in Jamaica for over a year, he concluded that there existed very little difference in the manifestation of illnesses in different climates. Although some ailments were sex-specific and culture-specific, for the most part Sloane transgressed categories of gender and race by diagnosing and treating all his patients according to the same medical ideology. And although it did not directly challenge accepted medical views, Sloane's Voyage revealed incongruities in dealing with such categories within the context of early imperial medicine.