An iconographic exploration of the “rattlesnake” gorgets of eastern Tennessee

ABSTRACT

Compared to other gorget styles and themes made during the Mississippian period, the so-called rattlesnake gorgets of eastern Tennessee have been found in fairly large numbers. Stylistically, Muller assigned these gorgets to the temporally related Lick Creek and Citico styles, while Crawford’s recent work has argued for substyles within. While their style has been studied extensively, the idea that these gorgets depict rattlesnakes generally has been accepted without further consideration. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic iconographic study of rattlesnake gorgets. Ultimately, we conclude that the image’s original referent is not just a snake but instead is intended to be a model of the cosmos at night.     

Technological,Functional and Contextual Aspects of the K2 and Mapungubwe Worked Bone Industries

Mapungubwe (AD 1220–1290) is generally regarded as the first urban centre in southern Africa, functioning as the seat of power for an extensive but short-lived polity. More than 80 years of excavations here, and at its nearby predecessor K2 (c. AD 1000–1220), resulted in a substantial assemblage of material remains from elite and commoner contexts. This assemblage includes a large collection of worked bone objects, such as needles, awls, tubes and objects of personal adornment. Of particular interest are the bone arrowheads and link-shafts, of which a significant number of specimens were found complete and intact. Such quantities of well-preserved worked bone objects are unique in the archaeological record of the region. The worked bone assemblages from these two sites provide a rare opportunity to study multiple components of the production process as well as the use context of bone objects. In this paper, we characterise the K2 and Mapungubwe worked bone industries through various morphological, technological, use-trace and contextual approaches and discuss the significance of these aspects in terms of raw material selection and manufacture and archaeological use context. In particular, this study shows the complexity of these worked bone industries over time.     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

Confessional disputes in the republic of letters: Susan Du Verger and Margaret Cavendish

The starting point of this article is an understudied piece of critical exegesis from 1657 titled Humble Reflections Upon Some Passages of the Right Honorable the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastles Olio. An obscure Englishwoman named Susan Du Verger composed this 164-page tract to refute a three-page essay on “A Monastical life” by the prolific poet, playwright, and philosopher, Margaret Cavendish. While there is now a substantial body of work on nuns and convents, this research largely overlooks how early modern women engaged with these topics in a scholarly manner. Along with elucidating the gamut of relevant patristic and ecclesiastical histories that were available in the English and French vernaculars, Humble Reflections provides a prompt for investigating Cavendish’s ideas on ecclesiastical order, ceremonies, and toleration. I propose that Cavendish refused to grace Du Verger with a direct response because her polemic disregarded the unofficial codes of conduct — friendship, transnational community, and inter-confessional co-existence — that were supposed to maintain peace within the Republic of Letters. In conclusion, this essay displays that Cavendish was actually a great admirer of monasticism, though not so much for its role in the spread of Christianity as for its place in the development of natural philosophy.     

Fixing value: history,ethnography, and material ontologies of deservingness in a Philadelphia repair shop

This article draws on labor history and science and technology studies to propose a method, and to provide an example, of historical analysis that is responsive to the conceptual categories that arise out of ethnographic accounts of individuals’ lived experiences. Using an ‘ontological tool-box’, this article follows various enactments of consumer appliances and, along with them, ideas of what it is to be a productive worker in a small appliance repair shop and across the practices of certain institutions of disciplinary power. Through an ethnographic and ontological analysis of repair in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, this article reveals that, rather than being inevitable or essential, all the categories used to organize our world, whether referent to identities or objects, are both constituted by and constitutive of a complex set of social relations and ideological priorities, which even historians are implicated in reproducing.     

Milky Quartz Bipolar Reduction and Lithic Miniaturization: Experimental Results and Archaeological Implications

We present experimental data examining the energetics and identification of axial bipolar reduction in contexts of lithic miniaturization on milky quartz. These experiments answer two specific questions. First, does bipolar reduction provide any benefits over freehand reduction? Second, can axial bipolar reduction be distinguished from freehand reduction? Our data show that bipolar reduction requires significantly less time to reduce a percentage unit of core mass and to produce a millimeter of cutting edge on milky quartz than freehand reduction. Milky quartz bipolar reduction surpasses even the cutting edge production efficiency of obsidian pressure blades. We outline a series of quantitative criteria for identifying bipolar cores and flakes. Our results show that bipolar cores and flakes can be distinguished from those produced using freehand reduction by quantifying platform crushing, distal flake rebound scars, bulb shearing, as well as axial, bipolar, and splintered flake terminations. Our results challenge the widely held perceptions about the wastefulness of bipolar reduction and provide clear guidelines for identifying this reduction strategy in archaeological milky quartz assemblages.     

Down Little Lon: An Introduction to the Casselden Place Archaeological Excavations, Melbourne

In 2002 Melbourne’s Casselden Place excavation provided a window into the urban past opened by an innovative relationship between the development industry, heritage consultancy and La Trobe University. The project demonstrated that with the support of consent authorities and the co-operation of the development industry, collaborations between the academic world and heritage consultants could be highly successful. The Casselden Place Project made a significant contribution to the ‘slum debate’ in Australia and delivered an enhanced understanding of the cultural, social and scientific significance of an inner-city block, and shed new light on a notorious chapter in the city’s history.