Heritage spectacles: the case of Amphipolis excavations during the Greek economic crisis

This article explores the ways in which the archaeological excavations at Amphipolis, Northern Greece, were transformed into a ‘heritage spectacle’ during the summer of 2014. The article argues that the spectacularisation of Amphipolis excavations constituted a powerful, political medium for dis-orientating the wider Greek public from issues related to the severe economic crisis of the country. Although the practice of heritage spectacularisation is not new, the media spectacle of Amphipolis introduced an advanced mechanism for spectacularizing archaeological research and the past. The article deconstructs this mechanism through a thematic content analysis of about 100 newspaper articles published in the Greek press, filtered through the lenses of spectacle theory. As it is demonstrated, the spectacularisation process of Amphipolis excavations is embodied by emotive dramatisation, banal cultural symbols, escapism and power imbalances. The article concludes with an interpretive framework for heritage spectacles while highlighting ethical and practical implications regarding the role of archaeologists and heritage practitioners towards political ‘abuse’ of heritage in times of socio-economic and political crises.     

Three-dimensional cranial shape analyses and gene flow in North Africa during the Middle to Late Holocene

Archaeological evidence shows that populations used to transverse the Sahara Desert throughout the Holocene despite the extreme temperatures and the rough physical terrain. The current paper examines whether the desert inhibited extended gene flow among populations by means of cranial morphology as captured by geometric morphometrics. The examined populations include the Garamantes, a group centered in Southwest Libya and largely controlling trans-Saharan trade, and various Egyptian, Tunisian and Sudanese groups dating to the Middle and Late Holocene. The results showed that most inter-population comparisons were statistically significant and therefore all populations appear more or less distant to each other. The Mahalanobis biodistance measure identified four clusters. The first consists of the Garamantes alone, the second includes the populations from Kerma and Gizeh, the third includes the Badari and Naqada, while the fourth consists of the samples from Algeria, Carthago, Soleb and Alexandria. Moreover, the distance of the Garamantes to their neighbors was significantly high and the population appeared to be an outlier. This is attributed to the location of the Garamantes at the core of the desert, indicating that, despite the archaeological evidence, the Sahara Desert posed important limitations to gene flow between the Garamantes and other North African populations.     

The Indian State in a Liberalizing Landscape

There has been much discussion recently on the ‘great Indian land grab’, that is, the acquisition of productive land by the government, and the handing over of this land to large‐scale industry. What do these ongoing land transfers tell us about the nature of the state? This article builds a picture of the state in a liberalizing landscape based on empirical evidence. It outlines the role of the state in Kutch during a transfer of 30 km² of forest and coastal land to a cement manufacturing and exporting operation ‘Karkhana Ltd.’ (pseudonym). Karkhana's experience does not evince a state in withdrawal. Nor do we witness a regulatory state that watches a changing economy from the legal and coercive sidelines. Instead, the case study is able to reinforce heterodox perspectives that place the state at the centre of India's new economy as a close ally of big capital. Taking these views forward, the author suggests that the state's role in this alliance is that of a normative legitimator of liberalization, a buffer in the contentious politics of land, and an institutional promoter of and manoeuvrer through the new land regime. A multifaceted state is indispensable to India's liberalizing landscape.     

Opacifiers in Late Bronze Age glasses: the use of ToF-SIMS to identify raw ingredients and production techniques

Time of Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) is applied to the study of four samples of opaque glass of Late Bronze Age date. The technique is uniquely capable of identifying compositional heterogeneity at a sub-micron resolution within the crystalline opacifiers dispersed through homogeneous glass matrices. It is shown that this provides crucial information on the possible raw ingredients of the opacifying inclusions used, and has the potential for highlighting regional variations in the production technology involved in creating different colours of opaque glass.     

North American–Asian aquatic bird dispersal in the Miocene: evidence from a new species of diving duck (Anseriformes: Anatidae) from North America (Nevada) with affinities to Mongolian taxa

Stidham, T.A. & Zelenkov, N.V., September 2016. North American–Asian aquatic bird dispersal in the Miocene: evidence from a new species of diving duck (Anseriformes: Anatidae) from North America (Nevada) with affinities to Mongolian taxa. Alcheringa 41, XXX–XXX. ISSN 0311-5518.

Prehistoric intercontinental dispersals are often used to explain the modern geographic distributions of various organisms, including birds. The extant Holarctic avifauna formed largely in the Neogene, and thus dispersals of various taxa during the Miocene likely have had a strong long-lasting effect upon the geographical pattern of the extant avian communities. However, the uneven fossil record of Neogene birds prevents accurate reconstruction of the biogeographic history of many bird clades, and the present evidence on dispersal of birds in the Neogene among continents is very limited. Past dispersals are most likely to be documented by taxa that are well represented in the fossil record, including diving ducks. Although these birds have a rather substantial fossil record in Europe and Asia, they remain very poorly known from the Neogene of North America. Here we document a new species of Miocene diving duck represented by a proximal humerus and a distal tibiotarsus from the Esmeralda Formation in Nevada (USA) and describe it as a new species of the primitive diving duck genus Protomelanitta Zelenkov (Protomelanitta bakeri sp. nov.), previously known only from the middle Miocene of Mongolia. Both species (from Mongolia and Nevada) are from the ca 11–12 Ma age range during the warm (though cooling) middle Miocene after the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum and Middle Miocene Climate Transition. Given their proposed close relationship, it appears that Protomelanitta dispersed between Asia and North America, and this instance is the first clear indication of an aquatic bird dispersal between North America and Eurasia in the middle Miocene. This palaeobiogeographical event predates the famous immigration of Hipparion horses to the Old World and the late Miocene dispersals between continental Eurasian and North American faunas in general, but likely reflects one prolonged faunal interchange related to global climatic conditions and its effects.

Thomas A. Stidham* [presbyornis@gmail.com], Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100044, China; Nikita V. Zelenkov [nzelen@paleo.ru], Cabinet of Paleornithology, Borissiak Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Profsoyuznaya 123, Moscow 117997, Russia.     

Αge‐associated Variation and Sexual Dimorphism in Adult Cranial Morphology: Implications in Anthropological Studies

The current paper explores the impact of age and sex on adult cranial shape and size variation in the documented collections from St Bride's and Spitalfields. The scope is to assess the extent to which it is valid to pool age and sex groups in inter‐population comparisons that use cranial data. For this purpose, age and sex differences in cranial shape and size were explored using multivariate analysis of variance, Discriminant analysis and Mann–Whitney tests. The results suggest a clear change in cranial shape with increasing age; however, this change is not statistically significant. Therefore, it is justifiable to pool different age groups in bioarchaeological analyses. Increasing age also has a minimal impact on cranial size among females, whereas among males, its impact is small but statistically significant. Finally, cranial shape and size are significantly different between males and females, irrespective of their age. This dimorphism can be used for the assessment of sex, although attention should be given to over‐classification problems when using discriminant analysis. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Unfixed State of Unfixed Land

Land is unfixed. Qualitative research in India shows humans physically reconfiguring, legally redefining, politically relabelling and discursively re-imagining land in growth- and investment-led policies. The state is a key actor in the material and conceptual unfixing of land, and its re-fixing to emerging developmental imaginations. But land is not just a territorial container for the implementation of policy. Rather, it routinely stretches the boundaries of state authority. In the fieldwork on which this article is based, unfixed, multi-dimensional land emerges as contested access, social and political territory making, possession that goes beyond the legality of property, and more. As unfixed land extends beyond the boundaries and authority of the state, the state too is stretched in projects of land's unfixing and re-fixing. This state is revealed as porous, and with a criss-crossing of social relationships that draw out its institutional bounds into a world of moonlighting officials, revolving doors, and shadowy actors and transactions over unfixed land. The result of this co-productive interaction is the unfixed state of unfixed land.     

Estimation of the Original Number of Individuals Using Multiple Skeletal Elements

The current report presents simple equations for the estimation of the original number of individuals that have been preserved in a sample of commingled remains and compares the estimates obtained by them to those obtained from the application of the joint hypergeometric estimator, elaborate computer simulations and documented collections. The equations that perform better under different preservation scenarios are the ones that take into consideration that the various bone types have different post mortem survival probabilities. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence,the Special Relationship,and the Vietnam War’

This article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.