The persistence of caffeine in experimentally produced black drink residues

Black drink is a native North American caffeinated tea produced from the leaves of Ilex vomitoria. The beverage was an important part of prehistoric Southeastern culture, as it was the only native source of caffeine in North America. The leaves of I. vomitoria were, therefore, a potentially valuable trade resource during the period. As such, the ability to identify archaeological black drink residues is useful to Southeastern archaeologists. In order to determine the plausibility of detecting I. vomitoria in residues, black drink was repeatedly produced in experimental unglazed pottery. The resulting potsherds were buried in several environmental contexts, recovered, and underwent absorbed pottery residue analysis. After two months of burial in three different soil types, plus a control stored in the freezer, caffeine was well-preserved in all sherds, suggesting that caffeine is a potentially useful biomarker for the detection of black drink.     

瘟疫何以肆虐?——一项医疗环境史的研究

"瘟疫何以肆虐"的问题,既与环境史相关,亦与医疗社会史不可分,但并不能用其中任何一者涵盖之;由此,我们提出"医疗环境史"的概念,以黑死病为个案,围绕瘟疫本身进行环境分析。在14世纪英国的聚落环境中,传染源普遍存在,鼠、蚤、人紧密共存,便于瘟疫的传播;交通运输的便利,利于瘟疫的跨聚落和跨地区流传;落后的医疗防治水平不能阻止瘟疫的肆虐,甚至会因不合理的举措而适得其反。上述病发、流传和应对环境还存在地区性的差异,从而导致瘟疫肆虐程度之不同。     

Over two centuries: Black people in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi

ABSTRACT

This article charts the history of Black people in nineteenth-century Hawai?i, an Indigenous and non-White society that prohibited slavery. Far from the Black Atlantic, African-descended people in the Pacific found acceptance and refuge. Since the late 1700s, Black mariners and notable figures – including former slaves from the US as well as Cape Verdeans – arrived in a non-slave society which was in the process of adopting race. Largely unrecognized, they worked in concert with Native Hawaiians – as spouses, educators, attorneys, and advisors to the monarchs – to influence and resist the development of American racial ideologies. Combining Hawaiian language sources, missionary journals, and ship logs with the scant existing historiography, this article accounts for Black people in the Hawaiian Islands during its tumultuous shift from an independent nation to a US Territory – a period and people neglected in twentieth-century scholarship on the Black Pacific.     

De victorias o derrotas: El metro,de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

El metro (2007), the most recent novel by the Equatoguinean author Donato Ndongo, ends with the failure of the immigrant experience for its African protagonist. I argue that the blurring of gender difference and a relationship with the world based on male competition leads to this ending of the novel in a fundamental manner. This text reflects an identity conflict in an African male individual, Lambert Obama Ondo, who relates to white men in terms of victory or defeat. Both black and white women have a subsidiary role. In this scenario, there is no possibility of conquest for Lambert, since he comes from a poor country and cannot count on a corrupt government to confront neocolonial exploitation. Finally, as an illegal Black African immigrant in Spain who has to endure racism and social vulnerability, he will not have a chance for a sound victory over white men. He will end being a victim, but at least a heroic one.     

Reproducing the Plot: Making Life in the Shadow of Premature Death

A protracted process of policy development has been underway in Jamaica to curtail the widespread incidence of informal settlements. Against the logic of emerging policy, this article aims to reconnect present-time unauthorised use of space to ancestral refusals of plantation land monopoly. Through ethnographic research and a reconsideration of historical texts, the article situates insecure tenure in a long history of conflict over land and livelihood—conflict that produces a boundary around the authorised use of space. That boundary is porous and mobile, the outcome of a palimpsest of colonial violence and its negation. This argument interrogates the gap between “landless” and “ownershipless”, revealing both the role of incomplete dispossession in racialised social reproduction and the spatial practices through which Jamaicans “make life” even in the shadow of premature death.     

Black Belonging,White Belonging: Primitive Accumulation in South Africa's Private Nature Reserves

Evictions have been shown to be a mechanism of primitive accumulation in nature conservation. This paper adds an historical analysis to the discussion on primitive accumulation in conservation by exploring the seemingly innocuous mechanism of White belonging to land in South Africa's private nature reserves. Contemporary articulations of White belonging are replete with stories and images of White male “pioneers” from the colonial era who, upon arrival in “empty lands”, were able to create economies out of nothing. Such representations of history on private nature reserve websites and other promotional material invisibilise Black belonging and legitimise private conservation. By illuminating the inconsistencies in the empty lands narrative and the legacies of three championed conservation pioneers from the 19^th century, this paper argues that White belonging is a mechanism of primitive accumulation, while Black belonging continues to be expressed in various ways in contemporary South Africa.     

The Black Death

The purpose of the present research is to examine various theories concerning the origin of the Black Death, to record its routes of dissemination in the Nordic countries and across the British Isles, and to compare the pattern of that dissemination with trade routes carrying grain throughout northern Europe in the period up to and including 1350.     

‘We are the boys from the Black Country’! (Re)Imagining local,regional and spectator identities through fandom at Walsall Football Club

The Black Country, a region that is only loosely defined geographically, is an area located in the West Midlands of England, which its inhabitants claim holds a distinct geographical and cultural personality. However, despite the territory's perceived uniqueness, popular imaginations of England have often overlooked the Black Country's historical and socio-cultural individuality. Therefore, given those working in a number of disciplines have recognised local football spectator communities to be significant cultural arenas, through which localism is performed and remade, this article explores the role of fandom in imagining, preserving and/or contesting notions of ‘Black Countryness’. Utilising semi-structured interviews, netnography and participant observation, as key methodological techniques, this study explores how local-spectator communities at Walsall Football Club (one of three professional football teams based in the Black Country) continually (re)negotiate a collective sense of local and regional identity. By adopting a critical approach, guided by Hall's notion of ‘cultural identity’, this research, in line with other similar studies, highlights the significant role football fandom plays in imbuing particular locales with meaning. However, more importantly, by understanding football fandom is emergent from complex, productive and interconnected cultural processes, this article is also critical of local football spectator communities and their exclusionary, as well as inclusionary, practices and customs.     

Forging African American Minds: Black Pragmatism, “intelligent labor,” and a new look at industrial education, 1879–1900

This article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and intellectual achievement in the late nineteenth century. Conventional scholarly accounts of the politics of black knowledge and education – including the still very prevalent paradigm of industrial and classical education – have missed a fascinating transformation of thought among many African American leaders after 1879 who sought to reinvent black identity. At the root of this transformation were shifting ideas about the black worker and a new industrial economy. The leaders who represented the transformation embraced progressive, pragmatist, and very modern approaches to intellectual cultivation – approaches that were more in line with theories of manual training and object-learning than with classical education. In other words, the intellectual rationales for industrial education among black educators were as important as the economic and practical ones. Those rationales were articulated not just by more conservative black voices intent on fitting into a new industrial order, but also by black progressives and radicals who hoped to cultivate black “self-consciousness,” vigorous engagement with the “real world,” and intellectual independence from white norms.     

Dental pathology and diet at Apollonia,a Greek colony on the Black Sea

Dental pathology has the potential to provide insight into the composition of the diet and to reveal dietary differences based on age, sex and social status. Human skeletal remains from the Greek colonial site of Apollonia (5^th to 2^nd centuries BC) on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria were analysed for various forms of dental pathology in order to: assess the prevalence of dental disease in the population; compare the dental pathology data from Apollonia with dietary data derived from ancient literary texts and from previous stable isotopic analysis of the colonists' remains; explore variations in dental disease with respect to age and sex; and compare the prevalence of dental pathology in the Apollonians with that of other Greek populations. The composition of the diet, as indicated by the dental pathology data, is consistent with the stable isotopic evidence from Apollonia and with the ancient literary texts, both of which indicate the consumption of a relatively soft, high carbohydrate diet. The higher frequency of dental caries, abscesses, calculus, and antemortem tooth loss in older adults compared with younger ones reflects the age‐progressive nature of these conditions. The lack of significant sex differences in caries, abscesses, calculus and tooth loss corresponds with the stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic data derived from bone collagen, which indicate no significant sex differences in the consumption of dietary protein. In contrast, these findings conflict with the ancient literary texts, which refer to distinct dietary differences between males and females, and with the stable carbon isotopic values derived from bone carbonate, which indicate sex differences with respect to the overall diet. Despite the lack of marked sex differences in dental pathology, overall trends point to subtle dietary differences between males and females. A greater degree of tooth wear in males also hints at possible sex differences in the use of the teeth as tools. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.