ON THE ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH FOR LIFE: THE CREATION OF THE POST‐RACIAL ERA

This article takes the Nietzschean dictum that history must “serve life” as a point of departure for an analysis of the American institution of Black History Month. Many continue to place great faith in the power of historical education to solve problems of race in America. Against this common‐sense view, this article argues that the excessive historicization of the problem of racism is at least as oppressive as forgetting. The black history propagated during this month has mostly been a celebration that it is history and thus a thing of the past. The article makes the claim that it is precisely a surfeit of black history that has encouraged the view that racism is vanishing in the river of time. The constant demand to view American racism through a historical frame has led to the perception that racism is a problem that must be historically transcended rather than solved. In other words, it is through the widespread dissemination of black history during Black History Month and elsewhere that the historical category of the post‐racial era has been constituted. The postracial era is not, as is so often claimed, a denial of historical context. On the contrary, it is an assertion that the horrors of racist discrimination were once real but are now over and done with.     

A hoard of Nilotic nacreous shells from Egypt to Jericho (Early Bronze II, 3000–2800 BCE): Their finding,content and historical archaeological implications

ABSTRACT

The Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho, is amongst the earliest “cities” that rose in the Southern Levant between the end of 4th and the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE. The site is being excavated, studied and rehabilitated for tourism by Sapienza University of Rome and the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities since 1997. In 2017, during the 13th season of excavation, an unexpected discovery occurred: five Chambardia rubens shells have been found piled up in a dwelling unit dating back to the Early Bronze Age IB-II. The discovery is a tangible evidence of trade and cultural interconnections between the Southern Levant and Egypt, as these shells belong to a species that is only been found to live in the Nile. Moreover, chemical analysis, and thorough Scanning Electron Microscopy examination revealed that the shells contained Manganese Dioxide, an inorganic compound used as make-up ingredient in ancient Egypt, and available in the ores of the Sinai. These findings strongly support the existence of a link between the urban rise in EB IB-II through international trade of luxury goods, and are suggestive of the emergence at Jericho of a ruling elite that was influenced by Egypt.     

The spatialities of intersectional thinking: fashioning feminist geographic futures

In this article, we highlight the inherent spatialities of intersectionality and its pivotal importance for feminist geographic thought. Intersectionality was, at its inception, already a deeply spatial theoretical concept, process and epistemology, particularly when read through careful and serious engagement with Black Feminist Thought and the writings of radical women of color. We do so here, revisiting Cooper, Crenshaw, Collins and other key scholars to demonstrate that the interlocking violence of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism have always constituted a spatial formation. Drawing on feminist geographic thought from the 1990s onwards, we highlight the influence of intersectional thinking on our discipline particularly concerning how racial, gendered and classed power operates in place and through space. These pieces have inspired and driven our work, and we extend them here, recognizing newer scholarship that extends and enriches feminist geography through a postcolonial intersectionality. We close by arguing that intersectional thinking is indispensable to feminist geography. Working in solidarity, across and through the interrogation of difference, with agreement and discord, we encourage a deeper feminist geographic engagement with intersectional thinkers, contributing to more critical (and hopeful) futures for our scholarship.     

From the Sands of the Ogaden to Black Hawk Down: The End of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa

From the Ogaden War to the Black Hawk Down incident, the Horn of Africa was a theatre of events with far-reaching international consequences. This paper argues that the distinctive process leading to the end of the bipolar conflict in the Horn is crucial to understanding the role of this region both during and after the Cold War. Through an extensive analysis of the period 1985–1991, this article explains why only a few years after the ‘burial’ of SALT II in the sands of the Ogaden, the superpowers withdrew from the region which had been the symbol of the failure of détente. Similarly, an analysis of the end of the Cold War is paramount to understanding why, after the break-up of the USSR, the Horn of Africa hosted one of the most tragic episodes of post-Cold War US foreign policy.     

Pre‐Black Futures

Abstract: In this essay I look at the contemporary production of surplus life in liberal democracies, and how it manifests a new type of sovereign spatial power. This power operates through the capacity to exile individuals and populations who are defined—in advance—as risk failures. I investigate further the ways that these pre‐known risk failures are determined through historical and geographical processes of racial formation, arguing that certain kinds of bodies have become vessels for concepts of risk formed in anticipation of an inevitable future. This “inevitable future” involves the formation of populations, which I term Pre‐Black, who are projected as outside of the enabling web of pastoral power. Moreover, as a consequence of this pre‐failure, individuals and populations can be forcefully and, more importantly, “justifiably” removed from commonly held spaces and resources in a contemporary liberal form of sovereign dispossession.     

Charcoal reflectance measurements: implications for structural characterization and assessment of diagenetic alteration

Charcoal is a valuable source of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental proxy data. However growing evidence suggests that production conditions can strongly influence post-depositional alteration of charcoal. Consequently, both reconstruction of production temperature and understanding of the potential for diagenetic alteration are of great interest. Here, we use mean random reflectance (Ro_mean) in conjunction with other chemical characterization methods to address these questions. Ro_mean was obtained for a suite of modern analogue charcoal, produced under controlled conditions, and for a series of natural charcoal samples, obtained from archaeological and palaeoenvironmental deposits. Ro_mean proves to be a robust measure to assess formation temperature for samples produced at 400 °C and above, even after exposure to highly oxidizing conditions. Ro_mean is also useful for samples formed between 300 °C and 400 °C. However, if an assemblage of charcoals has been exposed to oxidizing conditions, lower temperature charcoals may be preferentially lost. It is apparent that charcoal produced at lower temperatures is more highly susceptible to chemical oxidation, and that there is a continuum in charcoal degradation potential, dependant upon fuel material and production conditions.     

Black limestones used in antiquity: the petrographic,isotopic and EPR database for provenance determination

We compiled a database of some of the most important black limestone quarries used in Roman times to be able to determine the provenance of ancient artifacts. For this purpose, we adopted a multimethod approach using the techniques commonly applied to study the provenance of white marbles: petrographic observations, carbon and oxygen isotope composition, electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra characteristics. Few black limestones were quarried and traded in ancient times; indeed, the importance of most of these quarries was restricted to the areas in which they were located. In this work, we selected a limited number of quarries that produced material believed to have been exported and used throughout the Mediterranean area; most of the quarries selected are found in northern Tunisia, i.e. the Roman proconsular Africa: Djebel Oust, Djebel Azeiz, Ain al Ksir and (presumably) Thala. The “Nero Chiota” limestone quarried on the Aegean island of Chios (Greece) was also included in the database.     

内蒙古巴林左旗辽代祖陵陵园黑龙门址和四号建筑基址

祖陵是辽代开国皇帝耶律阿保机的陵寝之地,始建于天显二年(公元927年),毁于金兵侵占辽祖陵陵园的天庆十年(1120年)。祖陵位于内蒙古     

SEM–EDS ANALYSIS AS A RAPID TOOL FOR DISTINGUISHING CAMPANIAN A WARE AND SICILIAN IMITATIONS

The aim of this work is to examine whether it is possible to find chemical markers that allow a distinction to be made between the imported black glossed ‘Campanian A’ and the Sicilian imitation (end of fourth to first century bc ) of these productions by carrying out quantitative chemical microanalysis of the slip using the SEM–EDS technique. The efficiency of the proposed analytical method has been tested on a set of ceramic samples corresponding to Sicilian black gloss imitations whose ceramic body has already been characterized petrographically by thin‐section microscopy and chemically by XRF. The analytical data point to Na₂O as a suitable chemical marker to distinguish between original ‘Campanian A’ imported from the Gulf of Naples area and Sicilian imitations of the same forms of Hellenistic pottery. In order to verify the above result, the enrichment factors (EFs) between the raw clays, the corresponding ceramic body and black gloss slip were calculated. Some differences in the patterns of EFs between original ‘Campanian A’ and Sicilian imitations were recognized and explained. Therefore, the obtained results can help to accomplish a first distinction between imported and local material on a firm analytical basis, working on a statistically significant number of individuals.