Race and the Pitfalls of Emotional Democracy: Primary Schools and the Critique of Black Pete in the Netherlands

A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete, has met with growing contestation in the past decade over its caricatural representation of people of African descent. Attacks on this national “happy object” elicited a host of majority responses that converged in professing non‐racism. As the celebration is primarily thought of as a children's festival, schools across the Netherlands had to decide whether to maintain, alter or suppress the Black Pete character. This article considers the spatial politics of race that informed school decisions about the festival. We show geographical variation in the distribution between change and non‐change. However, we find that both strategies were justified in the name of respect for “black feelings”, even as majority calls for mutual tolerance between proponents and opponents of Black Pete normatively portrayed multicultural society as conflict free and ultimately strove to disarm anti‐racist critique by framing it as anti‐democratic.     

Copper quality and provenance in Middle Bronze Age I Byblos and Tell Arqa (Lebanon)

Forty-four Middle Bronze Age I weapons discovered at the sites of Byblos and Tell Arqa in Lebanon were investigated in order to study their copper quality and provenance. The evaluation of copper qualities is based on quantifying permanent inclusions such as copper sulfide and lead globules. The provenance of copper was studied using lead isotope analyses. For further discrimination between copper groups and sources elemental analyses by PIXE were performed on some of the weapons investigated. The results revealed two copper groups that could be qualified as “dirty” copper and “clean” copper. The former was used in most of the weapon types whereas the latter was reserved for items made of high-tin bronzes (>11 wt%) which underwent heavy hammering during the manufacturing process. Even though several potential copper sources were identified, the data point to Iran and Oman as the most probable areas of origin for the metal used in these weapons. These results contribute to the study of inter-regional exchange networks in the ancient Near East.     

OSL and TL dating of the Middle Stone Age sequence at Diepkloof Rock Shelter (South Africa): a clarification

Diepkloof Rock Shelter offers an exceptional opportunity to study the onset and evolution of both Still Bay (SB) and Howiesons Poort (HP) techno-complexes. However, previous age estimates based on luminescence dating of burnt quartzites (Tribolo et al., 2009) and of sediments (Jacobs et al., 2008) were not in agreement. Here, we present new luminescence ages for 17 rock samples (equivalent dose estimated with a SAR-ITL protocol instead of classical MAAD-TL) as well as for 5 sediment samples (equivalent dose estimated with SAR-single grain OSL protocol) and an update of the 22 previous age estimates for burnt lithics (modified calibration and beta dose estimates). While a good agreement between the rock and sediment ages is obtained, these estimates are still significantly older than those reported by Jacobs et al. (2008). After our own analyses of the sediment from Diepkloof, it is suspected that these authors did not correctly chose the parameters for the equivalent dose determination, leading to an underestimate of the equivalent doses, and thus of the ages.