Sovereignty,mobility, and political cartographies in Late Bronze Age southern Caucasia

This article draws on archaeological data from Late Bronze Age (LBA, ca. 1550–1150 BC) fortress, shrine, cemetery, and residential sites in Armenia to challenge long-held assumptions about the potential for mobile-pastoral groups to develop and sustain complex polities. The past two decades of research by Project ArAGATS (the Armenian–American collaboration for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies) has demonstrated that LBA sovereignty emerged not through the sociopolitical coalescence of settled farming villages, but through the actions of hierarchically organized, mobile pastoralists. Post-processual archaeology helped focus discussions of ancient political life on the contingent nature of authority and the processes through which competing factions and stakeholders achieve political association. However, centuries of interpretive marginalization of nomadic peoples combined with deterministic notions regarding subsistence and settlement practices of mobile pastoralists have, until recently, hindered a broader anthropological consideration of the potential pathways to sovereignty available to more mobile societies. Drawing on a range of datasets from LBA fortresses, shrines, cemeteries, and ephemeral residential complexes, our study examines the essential factors contributing to the emergence and maintenance of complex polities among mobile pastoralists in the southern Caucasus, societies that were intimately associated—politically, economically, and ritually—with hill-top fortresses. This study of political association in LBA Armenia sheds light on the internal politics of nomadic communities and offers a unique opportunity to bring the South Caucasus into the comparitive study of ancient complex polities.     

Pre‐Columbian Tuberculosis in Northwest Argentina: Skeletal Evidence from Rincón Chico 21 Cemetery

Systematic excavation of collective burial sites makes possible the recovery of skeletal series which may show bony evidence of infectious pathological conditions. This paper presents the first evidence of the existence of tuberculosis in prehistoric populations of NW Argentina with a subsistence economy based on agriculture and pastoralism. The study was carried out on individuals from Rincón Chico 21 cemetery, a burial site located in the Santa María Valley, Catamarca, used between the Late Ceramic Period and the onset of the Inca empire expansion (AD 1000–1400). Six individuals out of the 70 so far excavated showed destructive lesions in the vertebral bodies and periosteal reactions in other bones. The morphology and distribution of bone lesions led us to rule out several diseases from a broad spectrum of possible diseases that could have affected the skeletal system. Thus, the lesions were interpreted as caused by mycobacterial infections (Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex). Considering previous studies on the dynamics of biocultural interactions which take into account information related from contextual associations and chronology, we can conclude that a tuberculosis‐like disease was present in prehistoric populations from NW Argentina. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Languages of Hegemony on the Eighteenth-Century Kazakh Steppe

ABSTRACT

Were the Kazakhs part of the Russian Empire after Khan Abulkhayir's 1731 oath? For many decades, Russian scholarship insisted that they were, although the work of Virginia Martin, Noda Jin and others has recently suggested other interpretations. My article shows that neither Kazakhs nor Russian officials thought of their relationship as a form of annexation. Instead, the Kazakhs used the arrival of the Qing Empire in Central Eurasia in the 1750s to triangulate between their two more powerful neighbors, maintaining a constant distance from Russian power. For Russian officials, this kind of relationship proved to be advantageous, ultimately because Kazakh mediation enabled Russian trade with Xinjiang. The final incorporation of the Kazakhs starting in 1822 had more to do with the withdrawal of Qing power from the steppe than the expansion of Russian authority.     

清代生员的进学年龄

生员进学年龄的大小与科举制度运作、朝廷文教政策、传统教育风习及当地社会文化区域概貌等密切关联。目前学界对清代生员的进学年龄虽有估算,认为平均年龄在24岁,但存在取样偏少,局限特定时段、单一地域等问题。以近年出版的"北京图书馆藏珍本年谱丛刊"所收清人年谱为依据,统计分析其中277位有确切记载的来自全国各地的士子考取生员时的年龄,得到平均为19.72(虚)岁的结果。生员进学年龄比之前估算的要低得多,提示清代科举人口的数量应重新计算,也为今人对旧时中国教育普及程度的重新认识提供了重要旁证。