Long-term developments in complex hunter-gatherer societies: Recent perspectives from the pacific coast of North America

The Pacific coast of North America is ideally suited to the study of long-term developments in complex hunter-gatherer societies. This paper synthesizes current research in California and the Northwest Coast on three related research problems. The first concerns the timing, spatial distribution, and economies of the earliest coastal peoples in the region. The second problem involves the growth and florescence of complex Pacific hunter-gatherer societies. What constitutes archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer complexity, when and where it occurs, and the interpretations proposed to account for it are reviewed. The final problem addresses how complex hunter-gatherer peoples responded to European exploration and colonization, and how these early encounters affected the Pacific coast societies recorded in early ethnohistoric accounts and later studied by ethnographers.     

颛顼“绝地天通”与凌家滩“龟卜”

颛顼"绝地天通"历来被视为原始宗教的重大改革,从文献学、民族学角度来解读具有丰富的内涵。根据考古材料论定龙山文化时期骨卜的普化暗合"绝地天通"所反映的巫觋功能的专门化。这就科学确定了"绝地天通"的年代学意义。而含山凌家滩玉龟和玉版"龟卜"的种种迹象,说明在接近颛顼时代之前",原始八卦"也已经基本定型。     

Late Holocene Changes in Shellfishing Behaviors From the Gulf of Carpentaria,Northern Australia

ABSTRACT

Dramatic changes in shellfishing behaviors occur across northern Australia during the late Holocene, marked most conspicuously by the cessation of large shell mound construction in some areas, and the reorganization of shellfishing behaviors towards more intensive production in the last 1,000 years. Excavations reveal rapid and widespread changes within coastal sites, an increasing diversification in overall subsistence resources, and patterns of increase in site establishment and use. Some of these changes have been argued to be associated with increasing climate variability and a trend towards increasing aridity during the late Holocene, thought to have transformed coastal ecosystems and mollusc availability. However, when these hypotheses are tested at the local level, more nuanced patterns of human-environment interaction emerge, which call into question interpretations based on broad-scale climate records. We suggest that disjunctions in the timing of the cessation of shell mound construction noted between the west and east Gulf of Carpentaria may be related, at least in part, to the timing and intensity of external cultural contacts with Macassan seafarers, associated with reorganization of mobility and production strategies, rather than as yet undemonstrated environmental changes impacting on shellfish availability.     

古代谶纬的机缘巧合及在钱币中之妙用

谶纬,是中国古代文化中的一种现象,有着悠久的历史。即:把自然界中发生的偶然事件而神秘化,并用诡秘的隐语、预言作为神的启示,将其视为预示社会安危的决定因素,以告人政事,或昭示国运的兴衰。亦是方士或巫师假借神明来说吉凶祸福的征兆。其中,表现在对钱币的运用上尤为突出,足见其产生的影响。     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

是“陶片放逐”还是“贝壳流放”?——“Ostracism”释义

"Ostracism"是公元前5世纪古代雅典一项重要的政治制度。但是这一制度的中文译名却不尽相同,有的称之为"陶片放逐",有的称之为"贝壳流放"。通过辨析"Ostracism"的物质载体"Ostrakon"的含义,无论是从语义方面还是从考古证据来说,"陶片放逐"的译法均比"贝壳流放"更加合理。中文译名之所以发生分歧,是因为客观资料的限制和苏联史学译作的影响。     

唐代星变的占卜意义对宰臣政治生涯的影响

由于传统的天命观念在唐代皇帝和宰辅大臣的思想意识中仍然起着作用,所以不论是“荧惑犯上相”还是日食的发生以及流星的出现,它们都具有预测宰辅大臣政治命运的特殊功能。于是,星变的发生就与唐代大臣的乞退行为形成了一定的因果关系;与两汉相比,唐代对于星变的认识有较大提高。但唐代社会中仍盛行着较为浓厚的星占风气。     

楚人卜筮概述

本以楚地出土的实物(卜骨、卜甲)与字(楚简)材料为基础,结合相关历史献与已有研究成果,对楚人的卜筮规则与相关程式进行了综合探讨。认为楚人的卜筮基本上与商周卜筮保持了较大的一致性,其损益变通处,则与周代更为接近。在卜筮规则与程式上,仍然因袭商周传统,并无多少创新。楚人的出土资料,更多的是在为周人典籍作印证与补充。     

First contribution of the excavation and chronostratigraphic study of the Ruways 1 Neolithic shell midden (Oman) in terms of Neolithisation,palaeoeconomy, social-environmental interactions and site formation processes

The NeoArabia project tries to understand how environmental, social, economic and technological factors work in concert to influence settlement and abandonment along a latitudinal transect of 1200 km from UAE to southern Oman. This region was affected by wide north–south variations in the Indo-Arabian monsoon, marine upwelling activity and eustatic variations in the Mid-Holocene. On the local settlement scale, this transect is based on fine stratigraphic excavations and permits the reconstruction of the site formation processes and site catchment analysis. A large number of studies have been conducted on the Ruways-1 site, focusing on a deep stratified sequence corresponding to three millennia of occupation. These studies include on-site climate-environmental signal analysis, local palaeogeography and environmental reconstruction, reservoir effect studies, typo-technological studies, palaeoeconomic strategies, anthropological studies, sclerochronological studies and, finally, site formation processes, the understanding of which makes it possible to explain the potential and limits of the archaeological excavation. The first results confirm the richness of these archaeological archives for documenting the socio-environmental dynamics, but also the richness of its complex sedimentary structure and the importance of conducting fine and multidisciplinary excavations to answer questions about the rhythms and functions of occupations and the causalities of socio-environmental changes.