Sourcing nonnative mammal remains from Dos Mosquises Island,Venezuela: new multiple isotope evidence

Archeological excavations of Amerindian sites on Dos Mosquises Island, Los Roques Archipelago, Venezuela, uncovered a wide range of evidence reflecting seasonal exploitation of local resources and multiple ritual depositions of large quantities of ceramic figurines, lithics, and faunal remains. Zooarchaeological analysis revealed the presence of modified and unmodified bones and teeth from numerous imported mammal species. Local geographic and environmental conditions preclude permanent establishment of terrestrial mammal populations and as such, there are no native mammalian taxa on the island itself or the surrounding oceanic archipelago. The presence of these faunal remains on Dos Mosquises can be attributed to the intentional movement of animal resources from the mainland to Los Roques by indigenous groups in the Late Ceramic Age (~AD 1200–1500). Despite attributions to a mainland source region, little else is known about the origins of these unique specimens. Here, we apply strontium (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr), oxygen (δ¹⁸O), and carbon (δ¹³C) isotope analyses of tooth enamel from various archeologically recovered taxa including deer, peccary, tapir, ocelot, margay, opossum, fox, and weasel to investigate their geographic origins via comparisons with macro-regional models of precipitation δ¹⁸O and bioavailable ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr. The ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr results are highly variable both for the overall assemblage and between specimens within the same taxa, indicating origins from different geochemical environments of mainland South America. The combined archeological and isotopic evidence are consistent with origins within the late pre-colonial Valencioid Sphere of Interaction which encompassed the Lake Valencia Basin, surrounding regions, and several offshore island groups including Los Roques archipelago.     

Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care

What would it mean to think about cities marked by past structures of violence and exclusion as wounded but also as environments that offer its residents care? My current book in progress, Wounded Cities, focuses on creative practices and politics in Bogotá, Cape Town, Berlin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke, cities in which settlement clearances have produced spaces so steeped in oppression that the geographies of displacement continue to structure urban social relations. Precisely in and through these ‘wounded cities’, residents, artists, educators, and activists reconsider the meanings of the ‘right to the city’ and to theorizing the city more broadly. Drawing upon ethnographic research and theories from postcolonial theory, social psychiatry, social ecology, feminist political theory, and art theory, I introduce my concepts of ‘wounded city’, ‘memory-work’, and a ‘place-based ethics of care’ to retheorize urban politics. Artists and residents in wounded cities encourage political forms of witnessing to respect those who have gone before, attend to past injustices that continue to haunt contemporary cities, and create experimental communities to imagine different urban futures. I argue that a deeper appreciation of the lived, place-based experiences of inhabitants of most cities would enable planners, policy makers, and urban theorists to consider more ethical and sustainable forms of urban change than those that continue to legitimate disciplinary forms of governmentality.     

The German question in Jakarta Indonesia in West Germany’s foreign policy, 1955–65

This article explores a hitherto unexamined chapter of German Cold War politics: West Germany’s relations with Indonesia between 1955 and 1965. Indonesia was a peculiar case, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, President Sukarno turned his country into a radical champion of ‘anti-imperialism’. This included actions directed against the Netherlands, Britain, Malaysia, and the United States. As part of a comprehensive strategy to isolate East Germany in the ‘Third World’, West German diplomacy nevertheless tried to maintain solid relations with Sukarno’s increasingly unpredictable Indonesia, even if that meant undermining the position of Western allies.     

Why a resale royalty was rejected in Australia

In 2004 the Australian Opposition party introduced to Parliament a private member’s bill proposing the amendment of Australian copyright law to include an artist’s resale royalty. In response to the bill the Government released the Proposed Resale Royalty Arrangement Discussion Paper, which successfully provided a tangible foundation for discussions and stimulated the first strong academic debate regarding a resale royalty within Australia. Despite overwhelming support from respondents, in May 2006 the Government announced it would not support the adoption of a resale royalty right and the Resale Royalty Bill 2004 failed to pass through Parliament. The rejection of a resale royalty by the Australian Government illustrates the ongoing difficulty of incorporating civil law notions of creative rights, and moral rights in particular, into common law – particularly as the Australian Government’s approach to policy making is increasingly underpinned by economic rationalism.     

Salt production in pre-Funan Vietnam: archaeomagnetic reorientation of briquetage fragments

Bronze to Iron Age briquetage found in the northern Mekong Delta has an appearance similar to analogous material from Europe and Asia; however, the orientation in which the briquetage was employed during the production of salt is still under debate. As a consequence of the heating and subsequent cooling of the briquetage during the evaporative recovery of salt, the magnetic mineral particles within the ceramic formed a stable thermoremanent magnetization in alignment with the Earth's magnetic field. It thus becomes possible to find the orientation in which the ceramics were last fired by aligning their recorded archaeomagnetic signal with estimates of the Earth's ancient field direction in Vietnam. The archaeomagnetic directions obtained from 22 samples taken from five different briquetage artefacts are somewhat scattered, but they reveal a consistent orientation and thus the mode in which the briquetage was employed can be reconstructed.     

Post‐totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia

Through a comparative analysis of Germany and Russia, this paper explores how participation in the memorialization process affects and reflects national identity formation in post‐totalitarian societies. These post‐totalitarian societies face the common problem of re‐presenting their national character as civic and democratic, in great part because their national identities were closely bound to oppressive regimes. Through a comparison of three memorial sites—Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial in Germany, and Lubianka Square and the Park of Arts in Russia—we argue that even where dramatic reductions in state power and the opening of civil society have occurred, a simple elite–public dichotomy cannot adequately capture the nature of participation in the process of memory re‐formation. Rather, mutual interactions among multiple publics and elites, differing in kind and intensity across contexts, combine to form a complex pastiche of public memory that both interprets a nation's past and suggests desirable models for its future. The domination of a ‘Western’ style of memorialization in former East Germany illustrates how even relatively open debates can lead to the exclusion of certain representations of the nation. Nonetheless, Germany has had comparatively vigorous public debates about memorializing its totalitarian periods. In contrast, Russian elite groups have typically circumvented or manipulated participation in the memorialization process, reflecting both a reluctance to deal with Russia's totalitarian past and a emerging national identity less civic and democratic than in Germany.