CONSTRUCTING CARIBBEAN CHRONOLOGIES: COMPARATIVE RADIOCARBON DATING OF SHELL AND WOOD ARTEFACTS FROM PRE‐COLUMBIAN SITES IN CUBA

The lack of robust chronological frameworks for pre‐Columbian archaeology in the Caribbean limits the interpretive potential of ongoing studies of inter‐site and inter‐island interaction. This paper reviews the dating of 28 wood and shell artefacts from sites in northern Cuba in an attempt to date pre‐Columbian activity in the region and develop dating methodologies for the study of pre‐Columbian interaction in the Caribbean. This research compares dates from wood and shell artefacts from the waterlogged site of Los Buchillones in north‐central Cuba with dates from shell artefacts from sites on eight islands in the Sabana–Camaguey archipelago in the Bahama Channel. In addition to providing a chronological framework based on absolute dates for pre‐Columbian activity in northern Cuba, this paper also considers the methodological issues of using shell for dating pre‐Columbian activity in the Caribbean.     

Women in Mangaian Society: A Historical Portrait

This article investigates commonly held assumptions about the subordinate place of women in Mangaian society before the arrival of Christianity. In a review of the available evidence from Mangaia and elsewhere in Polynesia, this paper suggests that suitably selected and trained women in a society such as pre-contact Mangaia could fill certain important positions as priestly experts and tribal historians. Mangaian women were also fearless warriors and resolute in saving the lives of family members and other connections, suggesting that they held a respected place within the ancestral social order of Mangaia.     

The Influence of Ibn Sīnā on al‐Ghazzālī in Qur'anic Hermeneutics

Al‐Ghazzālī criticized Muslim philosophers in general and Ibn Sīnā in particular in a number of matters notwithstanding, he was deeply influenced by philosophy and Ibn Sīnā's views as to some issues. Of the contexts in which al‐Ghazzālī is under the clear influence of Ibn Sīnā are the interpretations of some Qur'ānīc chapters and verses which are related to the demonstration of the existence of God and the explanation of some divine attributes and names. In many of his works, al‐Ghazzālī reproduces Ibn Sīnā's interpretation of the verses in harmony with the ontological proof. One can observe Ibn Sīnā's influence on al‐Ghazzālī in relation with the hierarchy of beings, too. However, the context in which Ibn Sīnā's influence is most obvious is the interpretation of the 35^th verse of the Sūrah Nūr. Ibn Sīnā's interpretation of the terms occurring in this verse as symbols of the human faculties exercised a profound impact on the thought of al‐Ghazzālī, which manifests itself in his interpretation of the verse in Mishkāt al‐Anwār. Another of such contexts is the topic of human psychology and the interpretations of the verses related wherewith. Immensely influenced by the psychological views of Ibn Sīnā, al‐Ghazzālī adopted Ibn Sīnā's notion of the simultaneous creation of soul and body, interpreting some Qur'ānic verses in harmony with this notion. This article is intended to illustrate that al‐Ghazzālī, who is opposed to the blind imitation of any school of thought, did not make a wholesale denouncement of the views of philosophers; on the contrary, he made an extensive use of Ibn Sīnā's ideas in conformity with his general attitude of benefiting from all schools of thought.     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

Returned to Sender: Some Predicaments of Re‐indigenisation

ABSTRACT It is some 40 years since Australia officially re‐indigenised its Aborigines, at the same time giving rise to cultures of indigenism in the community at large. For those who lived in the closely settled areas, re‐indigenisation entails a new positioning vis‐à‐vis what can be recovered of traditional practices and places, but also vis‐a‐vis non‐indigenous people involved in indigenism. The paper recounts the response of one such indigenous group to the possibility of learning secrets that had long been known to white people, but not to them.     

First year on the faculty: the quality of their teaching

Abstract

This article considers the arguments being advanced in the USA for an expansion of academic programmes incorporating service‐learning, in which students undertake, as part of their studies, community service, and engage in academic activities designed to provide a context for reflection on their experience in doing so. Three arguments are usually advanced for this: the merits of experiential education, the value of service‐learning in education for citizenship, and its significance in promoting a sense of ‘community’. Some examples are given and the issues raised by these programmes are explored briefly. It is suggested that geography could profit from incorporating elements of service‐learning in order to enhance its treatment of moral and political issues.     

Editorial

Abstract

The Fiestas de Astures y Romanos (The Festival of Astures and Romans) is a thriving historical re-enactment performed in the town of Astorga, in north-west Spain. The objective of our research has been to explore the complex interactions between politics, the public, and heritage management, and to evaluate their impact upon archaeology as a discipline. We draw on a participant ethnography carried out during the 2011 event. The concept of ‘Celtic-Barbarian Assemblage’ enables us to understand how different usages of the pre-Roman past condition identity politics and heritage policies at the local level. Finally, we reflect upon our findings and suggest potential lines of action to tackle what we perceive to be the increasing gap between public and academic archaeology in Spain, whose long-term consequences can be detrimental for the discipline as a whole.     

Hydrogeochemical dynamics affecting steam‐heated pools at El Chichón Crater (Chiapas – Mexico)

El Chichón is an active volcano located in the north‐western Chiapas, southern Mexico. The crater hosts a lake, a spring, named Soap Pool, emerging from the underlying volcanic aquifer and several mud pools/hot springs on the internal flanks of the crater which strongly interact with the current fumarolic system (steam‐heated pools). Some of these pools, the crater lake and a cold spring emerging from the 1982 pumice deposits, have been sampled and analysed. Water–volcanic gas interactions determine the heating (43–99°C) and acidification (pH 2–4) of the springs, mainly by H₂S oxidation. Significantly, in the study area, a significant NH₃ partial pressure has been also detected. Such a geochemically aggressive environment enhances alteration of the rock in situ and strongly increases the mineralization of the waters (and therefore their electrical conductivity). Two different mineralization systems were detected for the crater waters: the soap pool‐lake (Na⁺/Cl^? = 0.4, Na/Mg>10) and the crater mud pools (Na⁺/Cl^? > 10, Na/Mg < 4). A deep boiling, Na⁺‐K⁺‐Cl^?‐rich water reservoir generally influences the Soap Pool‐lake, while the mud pool is mainly dominated by water‐gas–rock interactions. In the latter case, conductivity of sampled water is directly proportional to the presence of reactive gases in solution. Therefore, chemical evolution proceeds through neutralization due to both rock alteration and bacterial oxidation of ammonium to nitrate. The chemical compositions show that El Chichón aqueous fluids, within the crater, interact with gases fed by a geothermal reservoir, without clear additions of deep magmatic fluids. This new geochemical dataset, together with previously published data, can be used as a base line with which to follow‐up the activity of this deadly volcano.     

Hans Morgenthau and the Tragedy of the Nation-State

The cardinal role of tragedy in Morgenthau's theory of international politics has hardly gone unnoticed. Indeed there is now a considerable corpus of literature that established the importance of tragedy as a central concept around which Morgenthau's theory revolved. This paper builds upon this already developed framework and employs tragedy not as an analytical category but as a metaphor employed by Morgenthau to approach the nation-state. It is claimed that the idea of tragedy underpinned his notion of the nation-state inasmuch as it did his view of individual human beings. As such the notion of tragedy informed consistently Morgenthau's analyses of national tragedies that were like the self-defeating nationalism of Germany. It also informed his efforts to avert potential national tragedies from materialising as his attempts to influence US foreign policy demonstrated. It is finally claimed, that far from a descent into despair, Morgenthau's realism signified a conscious effort to go beyond the tragedy of the nation-state.