‘Handle with care’: literature,archaeology, slavery

This article examines the relationship between literary and bioarchaeological approaches to slavery, and investigates how the methods and priorities of each discipline might inform each other in understanding what it was like to be enslaved. Both bioarchaeologists and creative writers have attempted to access the inner lives of enslaved people, yet there has been little interaction between them. This paper offers an account of a research project which brought together a literary scholar, two archaeological scientists and seven creative writers to explore how writing might not only communicate a history understood through archaeological evidence, but could itself inform approaches to that evidence. We discuss two key themes which emerged from the project: Conversation and Caring. These themes were crucial to the interdisciplinary process, as it was only through attention to our relationships with each other that we could begin to reassess the nature of material in each of our disciplines.     

Crossing the Threshold: Negotiating Space in the Vernacular Houses of the Isle of Lewis

This paper explores the construction of boundaries and thresholds as a means to examine the ways in which space is delineated and used within the house. Focusing on examples of vernacular housing from the Isle of Lewis, the most northerly of the Western Isles, the types of boundaries and thresholds that existed within the house are examined, alongside their role in establishing, reinforcing and manipulating social relationships among the inhabitants, both human and animal. As the houses in Lewis developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD, boundaries and thresholds lost or gained significance as they were moved, adapted, added and abandoned. Such developments reflected not only changing social conventions, but also the changing relationship between Lewis tenants and their cattle.     

Recording and Analysis of Ship Graffiti in St Thomas’ Church and Blackfriars Barn Undercroft in Winchelsea,East Sussex,UK

Two assemblages of ship graffiti were recorded using Reflectance Transformation Imaging in the ancient port town of Winchelsea. The engravings show characteristics common to most medieval ship graffiti in England, while displaying different levels of detail, which encouraged a nuanced interpretation. It is suggested that the ship graffiti demonstrate a multifaceted relationship with the sea. The St Thomas’ church graffiti could have been a means of spiritual protection and a devotional practice that cuts across different communities of practice and social groups. The seascape in Blackfriars Barn undercroft can be interpreted as an occasion of informal remembrance of the mustering of a large naval fleet before setting out.     

Multiple osteochondromas in the archaeological record: a global review

Multiple osteochondromas is an inherited autosomal dominant condition of enchondral bone growth. The paper undertakes the first synthesis study of the 16 known cases of the condition that have been identified in the international palaeopathological record. It also includes information derived from two newly discovered cases of the disease in two adult male individuals recovered from the Medieval cemetery at Ballyhanna, Co. Donegal, Ireland. The formation of multiple osteochondromas is the best known characteristic of the disease but it also involves the development of a suite of orthopaedic deformities. These deformities, which include disproportionate short stature, inequality of bone length, forearm deformities, tibiofibular diastasis, coxa valga of the hip and valgus deformity of the knee and ankle, are discussed in relation to the archaeological cases. Numerous synonyms for the disease have been used within the various publications produced by palaeopathologists, and this can generate confusion among readers. As such, the paper recommends that in future palaeopathologists should follow the guidance of the World Health Organization and use the term multiple osteochondromas when discussing the disease.     

Running with the land: legal-historical imagination and the spaces of modernity

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, rural upstate New York was the site of a series of sometimes violent tenant uprisings known as the «Anti-rent Wars». The objective of tenants was to dismantle massive landholdings, some of which, such as the Manor of Rensselaerwyck, dated from the 1620s. Though tenant opposition took many forms, one crucial component was litigation and the practice of legal argument. This paper uses ideas of the production of space associated with Henri Lefebvre in presenting a reinterpretation of these events. After giving a brief account of the genealogy of Rensselaerwyck as a legal space, the historical arguments expressed in and made possible by legal discourse in a series of legal cases are analysed. One of the central issues in these cases was whether Rensselaerwyck represented an illegitimate survival of feudal spatiality in New York or whether the legal foundation of social space here could be assimilated to more modern legal forms. Legal argument in these cases is a social practice by which partisans attempt to produce (or reproduce) social space through the strategic interpretation of lines of continuity (or discontinuity) of the legal meaning of space encoded in rival conceptions of property.