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.     

North Indian Notes and Queries,Vol. V

Life and Work of the People of England. A Pictorial Record from Contemporary Sources. By Dorothy Hartley and Margaret M. Elliot. Vols. ii (The Fourteenth Century) and v (The Seventeenth Century). B. T. Batsford, Ltd. 9?" x 6½". Pp. 38, 38. Pl. 49, 49. 4s. 6d. ea. bds., 5s. 6d. cloth.     

Stratigraphy and geochronology of La Playa archaeological site,Sonora, Mexico

La Playa archaeological site in northern Sonora, Mexico contains a long record of human activity that includes the Paleoindian period (terminal Pleistocene) and much of the Holocene. The size and complexity of La Playa has discouraged a systematic characterization of its stratigraphy and geochronology, a deficiency we redress in the study. We distinguished seven stratigraphic units ranging in age from >44,570 to 400 cal yr B.P. using ¹⁴C dates from charcoal and terrestrial gastropods found mostly in archaeological features. All of the buried (in situ) cultural remains are contained in Units B (4690–1580 cal yr B.P.) and C (1010–400 cal yr B.P.) and represent overbank deposition from the nearby Rio Boquillas. Occupation at the site peaks in Units B₄ and B₅, corresponding to the Cienega phase (2800–1800 cal yr B.P.) of the Early Agricultural period. This period coincides with the growth of early agricultural villages in the region and is marked at La Playa by thousands of archaeological features including roasting pits, human burials, and extensive canal irrigation systems. The presence of semi-aquatic and aquatic snails demonstrates that water was present year round in the canal systems constructed during this period. Stable and radiometric isotopic evidence suggests that early agriculturalists diverted ground water over several kilometers from the nearby Rio Boquillas. The extensive Cienega phase occupation ended after about 1700 cal yr B.P. with deep erosion of the site, an event also visible in alluvial records in southern Arizona that marked the end of the Early Agricultural period and significant changes in settlement organization in the region.     

Imagining Palestinian Archaeologies: A Sampler

As three of the articles in this collection demonstrate, one central axis of the Zionist archaeological project is the absolute necessity of diminishing, and ultimately erasing, the importance and existence of aspects of “the archaeological record” that pertain to non-Jewish presences in Palestine, particularly and especially Islamic civilizations and the long-term presence of an indigenous non-Jewish Palestinian population. In this introduction, I focus, however, upon Zionist archaeology’s rearticulation of Jewish identity in nationalist form, an operation that has entailed the elaboration of a consistently simplified, unidimensional, or narrowly channeled interpretive version of Jewish history and Jewish identity in Palestine over time. Through several pointed queries, I suggest alternative interpretations of one element of the Zionist archaeological narrative that in turn could lead to other ways of thinking about the long-term presence of Jewish people in Palestine.     

Starch granules,dental calculus and new perspectives on ancient diet

Recent work in various parts of the world has suggested the possibility of ancient starch granules surviving and adhering to archaeological artefacts. Often this information is used to infer aspects of diet. One additional source for recovery of archaeological starch granules is dental calculus. The presence of plant food debris in dental calculus is well known but has not been not widely investigated using archaeological material. The extraction of starch granules from dental calculus represents a direct link to the consumption of starchy food by humans or animals. Using dental calculus also sidesteps many other questions still inherent in using starch granules to reconstruct aspects of ancient diet, such as the effects of diagenesis on their morphology; as the starches are trapped inside a concreted matrix they are less likely to alter over time. We used amylase digestion by a starch-specific enzyme to confirm the material as starch.     

Hope’s Work

This article, given as the Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture on 28 August 2019, argues that hope can be found through training an attentiveness to the social world in troubled times. Hope then is an empirical question and a matter of documenting hopeful possibilities that often otherwise remain unremarked upon. In this sense “worldly hope” draws possibilities that are manifested in the social world and stands in contrast to cruel forms of optimism or an unrealistic faith in future progress. An argument for such an approach to hope and trouble is developed through two examples drawn from contemporary London life, namely, the silent walks at Grenfell Tower in West London and a community arts project in Bellingham, South East London.