Slaves to Sailors: the archaeology of traditional Caribbean shore whaling c.1850–2000. A case study from Barbados and Bequia (St Vincent Grenadines)

The archaeology of the post‐Emancipation Caribbean remains relatively understudied. The collapse of the industrial‐scale sugar plantation systems of the islands in the early 19th century saw a radical re‐organization of socio‐economic life. A new corpus of consumers was created, eking out a living on the margins of island society, but never quite liberated. This period sees the emergence of an Afro‐Caribbean maritime culture focused upon shipbuilding, fishing, turtling and whaling, the latter a particular feature of the eastern Caribbean (Windward Islands). The archaeology of whaling communities, is relatively well understood from the perspective of North America, Australasia and Europe, but less so in the Caribbean. Using two case studies based upon recent excavation and survey work, this paper sheds light on a distinctive maritime cultural response in the post‐emancipation Eastern Caribbean world.     

Embodying brainstorms: the experiential geographies of living with epilepsy

This paper examines how living with epilepsy involves the complex interaction of knowledge of the unstable body, surrounding space and social relations. Through an engagement with written testimonies, it is argued that the spatial extent of everyday life varies with willingness to take socio-emotional and material risks in terms of when and where losses of bodily control (‘seizures’) might occur. I suggest that spaces and activities once taken-for-granted become potentially ‘unsafe’ and require renegotiation as trust in the limits of the body is disrupted. Findings confirm but also build upon previous work by geographers of chronic illness and impairment by engaging characterisations of the temporalities of fluctuating symptoms and of illness as manifesting either visibly or invisibly. Furthermore, it is argued that how people respond to the complete loss of bodily control differs in key ways to people coping with partially impaired control of the body. The paper concludes by asserting the potential for using written testimony as source data to highlight the voices of people whose spaces may otherwise remain silent.     

Crusade or cooperation? Savary de Brèves’s treatises on the Ottoman Empire

This article examines two treatises by François Savary de Brèves, French ambassador to Constantinople (1589-1605) and to the Holy See (1608-14), one promoting a crusade against the Ottoman Empire and the other championing the Franco-Ottoman alliance. By closely reading these ostensibly paradoxical texts, which were published in the same volume, I argue that de Brèves’s true intent was to advocate cooperation between France and the Ottoman Empire as a long-term foreign policy objective. This article draws attention to the significant roles played in the political, diplomatic and intellectual worlds of early-seventeenth-century France by Savary de Brèves, a largely forgotten figure. It highlights the ambivalent image of the Ottomans in early modern Europe and contributes to recent scholarship on the interactions between the Islamic East and Christian West.     

Touchstones: some aspects of their nomenclature,petrography and provenance

Touchstones are pieces of fine-grained black stone which are used for assaying gold by comparing the colour of streaks made on the surface by alloys of known composition with the colour of the streak from an object of unknown composition. The technique has been in use since at least the 6th century BC.The petrographic aspects of the identification of touchstones are reviewed and 42 historical touchstones or museum specimens of similar looking stone are described, most of them including the results of petrographic examination.The results show that touchstones usually consist of sedimentary rock types, of which the most frequently occurring ones are tuffs, cherts and siltstones.