Reaping the rewards: the potential of well designed methodology,a comment on Vardi et al. (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1716–1724) and Goodale et al. (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1192–1201)

The recent articles by Vardi et al., “Tracing sickle blade levels of wear and discard patterns: a new sickle gloss quantification method” (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1716–1724), and Goodale et al., “Sickle blade life-history and the transition to agriculture: an early Neolithic case study from Southwest Asia” (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1192–1201), are two papers that seek to address interesting archaeological questions through the development of new approaches to measuring the duration of stone tool use. Here comment is made on the fashion in which research design and analytic procedures contribute to limit the capabilities of each of the techniques presented. Whilst the authors support the investigation of novel techniques, in order for the results of any use-wear analysis to be accepted as reliable the methods employed must be demonstrably sound.     

Google Earth, GIS and stone-walled structures in southern Gauteng, South Africa

In South Africa, air photos were used in the 1960s and 1970s to plot distribution maps of pre-colonial stone-walled structures in order to study the peopling of this landscape. Different architectural styles of stone-walled structures were attributed to different cultures, who shared a mixed agricultural and pastoralist economic base and a cattle centered world-view. New technologies such as Google Earth satellite imagery as well as Geographic Information System software justify revisiting these structures as they facilitate more complex analyses of larger databases. The spatial analysis of remotely sensed settlement data from the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve near Johannesburg shows significant changes in settlement patterns from dispersed homesteads to nucleated towns during the last two or three centuries before colonial times. These changes echo similar patterns reported in the neighboring North West Province, where they have been interpreted as a sequence of evolution in social, political and economic complexity. In the Suikerbosrand reserve climate change, conflict and other factors may have helped bring about the observed changes in settlement patterns.     

Contested Cartographies: Empire and Sovereignty on a Map of Sistān,Iran (1883)

ABSTRACT

The papers of Malkam Khān (1833–1908), Iranian ambassador in London from 1872 to 1889, a staunch supporter of Iranian state modernization and a scholar, include an often-overlooked map of the Iran–Afghanistan border dating to 1883. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi compiled this exceptional piece of nineteenth-century Iranian cartography. The map is an illustration of how quickly the Qajar administration was able to emulate European cartographical discourses to protect its own interests in the context of the so-called ‘Great Game’, that is, the often confrontational Russo–British relations over the control of Central Asia and Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. In this article we show that Iranian officials had developed a much more substantial articulation between cartography and statecraft than is conveyed by the stereotypes in nineteenth-century Western literature, when the capacity of local players to use counter-mapping to their own advantage was often underestimated by European agents. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi’s map of Sistān exemplifies how the apparently all-powerful Western science that seemingly supported nineteenth-century imperial expansion was rarely left unchallenged locally. The genealogy and circulation of the map also reflects how overly simplistic the postulation of a polarization of ‘Western’ knowledge and ‘Eastern’ attempts at safeguarding local sovereignty can be.     

隋唐都城尺度设计方法新探

对隋唐都城设计尺度的还原分析表明,两京的尺度设计分别以数字"九"与"七"为基数控制宫、宫城与皇城、郭城、市、苑囿的东西广度,并以9:10与1:1为基准比例,确定全城的尺度结构与规模。两京的设计与布局方法与萌生于北魏洛阳,并影响到了同时期东亚其他都城的布局设计,同时也对唐以后中国历代王朝都城设计产生重要影响。     

文化冲突与跨国迁移群体的适应策略——以南非中国新移民群体为例

论文运用田野调查的方法,选择南非的中国新移民作为研究对象,介绍了20世纪90年代以来南非中国新移民群体的概况,阐释了中国新移民在南非遭遇的文化冲突以及他们的适应策略。研究发现,中国新移民在基本价值、家庭观念、消费观念等方面与南非人有明显的冲突,新移民群体对＂南非文化＂持一种＂保持距离＂的态度。具体体现在居住区域、社会交往和通婚等方面。同时,同质性强的中国新移民身处介于同质与异质之间的社会空间,对南非文化仍有明显的隔阂。     

防疫还是排华？——1911年俄国远东地区大规模驱逐华侨事件研究

论文介绍了1911年俄国远东地区当局以＂防疫需要＂为名大规模驱逐华侨和限制中国人入境等排华事件的主要过程,分析了这一事件背后更深层的原因。认为当时华侨在俄远东地区的广泛存在,引发了俄国国内一部分政治势力在政治、国防方面的担忧和恐慌,便以＂防疫＂为名,以＂排华＂为实制造了这一标志着自19世纪60年代以来俄国境内排华活动达到高潮的事件。在此次事件中,中国政府努力对难民进行了安置,并进行外交交涉,但成效不彰。     

THE FRONTIER REMIX

In The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts, Premesh Lalu claims to offer a critique of apartheid's colonial past. Emblematic of this colonial past is the 1835 killing and mutilation of the Xhosa king Hintsa. Lalu uses this violent event to argue against the evidence provided by the colonial archives. He argues that the killing of Hintsa was not an empirical fact but a product of the colonial imagination. The review argues that although the critique of apartheid's colonial past is timely, the book is not about Hintsa and does not therefore offer an alternative narrative of the death of the Xhosa king.     

From Compounded to Fragmented Labour: Mineworkers and the Demise of Compounds in South Africa

Abstract: At the core of colonial and apartheid social engineering was a spatial strategy based on institutions and infrastructure linking together rural homesteads and villages, and mining centers and towns. In the case of the mining industry, single‐sex compounds were set up as the foundation of the infrastructure of control over black labor. In this paper we examine how various forms of control operated. We locate our contribution within the labor geography literature. We argue that it was not only state institutions and major corporations that shaped landscapes of control. In this regard we highlight the centrality of workers’ agency, specifically the way in which the National Union of Mineworkers captured the compounds and subverted the logic of employer control. However, the union's successes as well as the advent of democracy have resulted in profound changes, thus presenting the union with new challenges.     

Timing the Neolithic transition: the application of fluoride dating at Tell Halula,Syria

The study of Near Eastern Neolithic villages provides a unique means of tracing subsistence strategy, population growth, health, and emerging social inequality associated with agricultural origins. However, disentangling these patterns requires a detailed comprehension of the chronological placement of individual households in the site. In this paper, we present a test to determine the reliability and applicability of the fluoride dating method (a relative dating method) on human dentition of 40 samples from 28 Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (or PPNB) burials from the site of Tell Halula, in Syria. This method, applied here for the first time on a Neolithic Near East case study, is an alternative when other dating methods, like radiocarbon dates, do not provide the required temporal resolution to address particular research problems. Nonetheless, the results obtained in the fluoride analysis show how both the age at death of individuals, and the integrity of the burial plug enormously affect the amount of fluoride absorbed by teeth, so that only a small subset of the full dataset was suitable for fluoride dating. Although the distribution of fluoride values of dentine from the small sample of burials from suitable contexts matches the expected chronology, and corroborates the hypothesis that the occupation at Halula extends from the Middle to the Late PPNB, our analysis illustrates the need for a better understanding of the different sources of error in fluoride dating to improve the method itself, and to obtain more reliable fluoride chronologies.     

Nature and significance of the Howiesons Poort to post-Howiesons Poort transition at Klein Kliphuis rockshelter,South Africa

This paper considers the transition from Howiesons Poort to post-Howiesons Poort technologies at the rock shelter site of Klein Kliphuis, South Africa. The transition at this site is shown to be gradual, with incremental changes in material selection and in the size and shapes of flakes and cores. Implements which appear to blend characteristics of those distinctive of the earlier and later industries appear briefly at the mid-point of the transition. The results suggest that there is unlikely to have been an occupational hiatus between the Howiesons Poort and post-Howiesons Poort. Explanations for the Howiesons Poort phrased in terms of population expansion and contraction are also difficult to support. Technological changes at this time may relate to environmental variation, though the limited nature of terrestrial archives documenting changes in resource productivity necessitate that any such suggestion be made with caution.