Bahamian Ship Graffiti

In the Age of Sail the Bahamas was on major routes between the Americas and Europe. Bahamians developed a way of life using their location to advantage. Ship graffiti are the first archaeological evidence of Bahamian shipping activity. The graffiti are unique in the region, being incised into a variety of stone surfaces, and probably other surfaces which have not survived. Images depict locally-built vessels such as sloops and schooners as well as larger, ocean-going ships. Graffiti locations are predominantly associated with people of African heritage and lower socio-economic status. Details suggest artists were familiar with ship construction and rigging.
© 2006 The Author     

Inter‐Indigenous development aid: markets,corporations, and biases

The Canadian government and the Meadow Lake Tribal Council sponsored a forest extraction corporation in eastern Nicaragua that restructured 16 Miskitu and Mayangna villages and transformed local human‐environment interactions. The Central American aid project demonstrated paternalistic and interventionist tendencies and exposed biases in inter‐Indigenous aid that rendered it inseparable from conventional aid. This case encourages reflection on social and ecological impacts from the marketing of collective resources, the creation of Indigenous development corporations, and the decision‐making criteria and processes driving foreign aid. The case study demonstrates how foreign aid programs targeting Indigenous Peoples may actually thwart the self‐determination that they set out to encourage. Aid agencies and business partners, who had limited knowledge of local cultures and institutions, created externally defined rules that instigated resource conflicts and undermined the authority of customary leaders without resolving poverty or uneven development.     

Italianità and internationalism: Production,design and mediation at Alessi, 1976-96

This article considers the Italian household product design company Alessi as quintessentially Italian and international. The interplay of mass-production and craft techniques at Alessi, an extended design process and the presentation of the family in company publicity exemplify the ambiguities identified within Italian design. The extent to which Alessi typifies Italian post-war design is questioned with reference to the company's international design team and the marketing of its products to foreign consumers as manifestations of italianità. The findings are based on primary research in Milan and the Alessi factory, including a series of interviews with designers, retailers, curators and media workers, combined with secondary material centred upon design history.     

Family and familiars. The concentric household in late medieval penitentiary petitions

Few studies to date have examined the relational aspects of life within a non-nuclear medieval household. This article aims to show that the affective bonds that were prescribed for members of the nuclear family in the late middle ages were also prescribed for members of the larger household, though to a lesser degree. ‘Familiars’ were expected to develop bonds of loyalty that cut across distinctions of social estate. A series of petitions to the papal penitentiary from German-speaking areas during the fifteenth century shows that both elite and non-elite individuals exhibited such affective bonds of support in violent situations as well as in a wide variety of other circumstances. This indicates that the household formed a major building block of medieval society in relational as well as in logistical terms.     

Correcting temporal frequency distributions for taphonomic bias

In this paper, we expand upon a prior study [Surovell, T.A., Brantingham, P.J., 2007. A note on the use of temporal frequency distributions in studies of prehistoric demography. Journal of Archaeological Science 34, 1868–1877.] that explored the problem of taphonomic bias. Taphonomic bias refers to the tendency for younger things to be over-represented relative to older things in the archaeological record due to the operation of destructive processes like erosion and weathering. Using a database of radiocarbon dated volcanic deposits from Bryson, R.U., Bryson, R.A., Ruter, A. [2006. A calibrated radiocarbon database of late Quaternary volcanic eruptions. Earth Discussions 1, 123–124.], we develop an empirical model of taphonomic bias. In contrast to our prior study in which we modeled taphonomic bias as an exponential function wherein the likelihood of site loss remains constant through time, we argue that the probability of site destruction actually decreases with site age. We further demonstrate how this model can be used to correct temporal frequency distributions and extract demographic histories. We illustrate this approach using databases of radiocarbon dates from rockshelter and open-air sites in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA, and mammoths and humans in Siberia, Russia.