Caddoan Area archaeology since 1990

This paper summarizes recent archaeological research efforts, and changing perspectives, about the native history of the Caddo peoples who lived in the Caddoan Archaeological Area, which centers on the Great Bend of the Red River in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Of particular focus are the origins and early developments of the Caddoan tradition, regional diversity, subsistence changes and agricultural intensification, sociopolitical dynamics, and Caddoan-European interaction.     

Settlement and social change in central Europe, 3500–1500 BC

The chronology of the period is briefly considered in the light of the dendrochronological results which have appeared in recent years. Patterns of settlement history in different parts of the area are then examined, and it is suggested that in some of them the late fourth millennium was a period of population decline which was not reversed until the Early Bronze Age, 1000 years later. Detailed information about specific local occupation patterns is provided by recent work on the circum-Alpine lake villages. Changes in cultural patterns during the period, especially the appearance of the Corded Ware, are discussed and explanations of them reviewed. It is argued that changing patterns of gender relations were a major feature of the period, linked to processes which eventually led to the development of small-scale chiefdoms. The development of copper and bronze metallurgy and its connection to these processes are discussed.     

TEXTS ON THE MOVE: TEXTUALITY AND HISTORICITY REVISITED

The last time texts were brought onto the general theoretical and methodological agenda of the human and social sciences, they were reintroduced into history in terms of an indefinite set of indefinitely complex contexts, which gave every text a specific date and location in a network of other texts and events. A couple of decades later, however, a more prominent feature of texts seems to be that they are permanently on the move: they circulate, have effects on other things, change and transform realities, and are at the same time themselves translated and modified. In the literature exploring the textuality of history, these dimensions have been under‐theorized and often ignored. To meet this challenge, we need to develop concepts and approaches that enable us to place the mobility of texts as well as their mobilizing force at the center of our current historical concerns. In this article we will explore what the consequences of this move could be, and what resources are already at hand in different scholarly traditions. Exploring the entanglements between actor‐network theory (ANT in the version of Bruno Latour), on the one hand, and literary criticism, linguistics, and book history, on the other, enables us to focus on how texts move and how they move others. We will proceed in this essay by identifying three decisive moments in twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century textual scholarship, often conceptualized as “turns,” which are linked to the works of three path‐breaking authors and which at the same time represent three different stages or forms of textuality: the linguistic turn (Saussure), the turn to writing (Derrida), and the turn to print (Eisenstein). Our discussions of these three moments and forms of textuality aim at uncovering how they also represent seminal moments in Bruno Latour's development of the theoretical and methodological complex now referred to as ANT.     

Vico and the disgregation of historia salutis

This study aims to analyse the problem of Vico’s religiosity, still a subject for debate, in the European tradition of universal historiography. Vico’s historical reconstruction has traditionally been considered as orthodox and apologetic. The Neapolitan philosopher, in his major work, New Science, tried to defend not only the historical veracity and authority of biblical narratives as the only source to reconstruct the initial phases of history, but also the temporal and spatial frame of historia salutis, confuting the thesis of a greater antiquity of pagan nations. Nonetheless, it is difficult to conclude that Vico’s historical reconstruction followed the same route of the apologists of his time. Vico demolished not the temporal and spatial sphere, but the unitary frame of historia salutis. In Vico’s setting, all nations formed their civilizations in an autochthonous way and developed them autonomously with diverse timetables. Vico introduced the concept of the plurality of history. In this way, the Neapolitan philosopher contributed to the process of secularization of universal history in a completely different way from his contemporaries.     

The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, 1954–1970

This article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s.     

Gendered spheres: theorizing space in the English printing house

The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public work taking place in a private setting. This private space emphasised the traditional hierarchies of political and legal order: Women’s work that took place within the printing house thus fell into the traditional role of household labours. This erasure of labour is one that foregrounds the erasure of women’s writing from history; women who worked in essence as publishers, as printers and booksellers, are very clearly present in the historical records but invisible in our narratives of book history. How did this erasure happen, and why is their presence, and work, overlooked? If we consider the language of space in theory and reread Moxon’s Mechanickal Exercises closely, we see the ways in which the ideas of space itself can be implicitly gendered, and how this might shape our idea of the printing house.     

Gabrielle Lévy and the Roussy-Lévy syndrome

In 1934, Gabrielle Lévy died at the age of 48. She became well known for an article she published on a hereditary polyneuropathy in cooperation with Gustav Roussy, resulting in the eponym Roussy-Lévy syndrome. Not much is known about this extraordinary neurologist/neuropathologist. Her family declared that she died from the disease she was studying. She was a pupil of Pierre Marie, with whom she worked at the Salpêtrière in Paris and wrote on war neurology. In cooperation with Marie, she published a number of articles on postencephalitic syndromes, which also became the subject of her 1922 thesis. Three years later, she became associate physician at the Paul-Brousse Hospital in Paris, where the study of brain tumors became one of the subjects of her scientific work. Remarkably, Lévy was first author in a few of her many articles, although Roussy confirmed that she often initiated the study and even wrote the main part. In this article her career is considered in the context of the struggle of women physicians to improve their position during the early-twentieth century. She probably died from a brain tumor or a postencephalitic syndrome.     

The wealthier inhabitants of Croydon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

This article examines the wealthier inhabitants of Croydon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on differences in wealth, ownership of property and social relationships. Using wills and subsidy lists, four broad categories of people were identified: gentlemen, yeomen, tradesmen and craftsmen and widows. There was no simple gradation of wealth between these groups; although gentlemen were generally among the richest subsidy payers, yeomen and tradesmen could also figure. In terms of social relationships and the ownership of property, there were differences. Gentlemen tended to marry within their own social group, appoint other gentlemen as overseers in their wills and were more likely to own land outside Croydon. The social relationships of yeomen and tradesmen/craftsmen were more focused on the town itself, as were their land purchases. Two groups of individuals can therefore be seen, not one homogenous entity as some scholars have argued.     

Recollecting bones: the remains of German-Australian colonial entanglements

This article critically engages with the different politics of memory involved in debates over the restitution of Indigenous Australian ancestral remains stolen by colonial actors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought to Berlin in the name of science. The debates crystallise how deeply divided German scientific discourses still are over the question of whether the historical and moral obligations of colonial injustice should be accepted or whether researchers should continue to profess scientific ‘disinterest’. The debates also reveal an almost unanimous disavowal of Indigenous Australian knowledges and mnemonic conceptions across all camps. The bitter ironies of this disavowal become evident when Indigenous Australian quests for the remains of their ancestral dead lost in the limbo of German scientific collections are juxtaposed with white Australian (fictional) quests for the remains of Ludwig Leichhardt, lost in the Australian interior.     

La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.