‘The Scum of France’: Australian Anxieties towards French Convicts in the Nineteenth Century

Between the 1860s and the early decades of the twentieth century, escaped and liberated French convicts from the penal colony in New Caledonia arrived on Australian shores, raising concerns about physical as well as moral contamination. This article combines Australian sources with French consular and ministerial archives to examine the impact this little-known episode of trans-imperial history had on the early Australian federal process. The arrival of the convicts and former convicts played on at least two levels. It highlighted the colonial authorities’ weak powers in asserting their territorial sovereignty and policies and pitted them against both Great Britain and the French. Further, the constant nudging of these unwelcome neighbours disrupted the ongoing disavowal of the colonies’ convict past.     

Her Mirror,His Sword: Unbinding Binary Gender and Sex Assumptions in Iron Age British Mortuary Traditions

At the site of Hillside Farm, Bryher, on the Isles of Scilly, a materially rich single Iron Age inhumation was discovered containing the unsexable fragmented remains of one adult with a number of high-quality metal grave goods including an iron sword with a bronze scabbard and a bronze mirror. Swords and mirrors have long been considered high-status, oppositionally gendered grave goods that crosscut regional divisions in the pre-Roman British Iron Age (c. 800 B.C.–A.D. 43). Their combined presence within the burial of a single individual represents a touchstone within the ongoing unraveling of a long-held, interconnected set of reified binary sex and gender assumptions that have permeated discussions of British Iron Age mortuary contexts. In better recognizing this web of “binary binds,” we can deconstruct the a priori, exclusionary, interconnected sex and gender assumptions that configure how we investigate the terms of engagement between materials and persons in these burial contexts. Crucial to this analysis is an approach to patterning that (1) does not begin with a search for sex and gender as evidence of male and female dichotomies, (2) sees the potentiality for any component of a mortuary assemblage to have multiple points of significance, and (3) embraces data ambiguity. Developing such critical approaches will ultimately contribute to the deployment of more inclusive forms of analysis that do not reify sex and gender as the primary organizing principles within mortuary contexts, aiding scholars in avoiding assumptions that bind sex and gender analyses into artificially binary paradigms.     

Ochre,Ground Stone,and Wrapping the Dead in the Late Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) Levant: Revealing the Funerary Practices at Shubayqa 1, Jordan

The appearance of rich and diverse funerary practices is one of the hallmarks of the Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian in the Levant. Numerous burials at a number of sites excavated mostly in the Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant have fed into the interpretation of the Natufian as a sedentary society of complex hunter-gatherers. Here, we report on the human remains recovered from Shubayqa 1, a well-dated early to late Natufian site in northeast Jordan. The majority of the minimum of 23 individuals that are represented are perinates and infants, which represents an atypical population profile. Ground stone artifacts and traces of colorants are associated with some of these individuals, providing a rare insight into funerary treatment of subadults in Natufian contexts. We interpret the Shubayqa 1 evidence in the light of current and ongoing debates concerning Natufian burial practices and the issue of social complexity.     

Memorial soliloquies in post-colonial Rhodes and the ghost of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism

This paper is based on a close reading of Greek and Rodesli (Rhodian Jewish) narratives focusing on the time when Rhodes was under Italian (1912–1943) and then German (1943–1945) rule, the last period when religiously diverse communities coexisted in the island. While Greek historiography seeks to vindicate the island’s final integration into the Greek national space, Rodesli memory is meant to preserve the heritage of a community destroyed by the Nazis. Notably, these corpuses make no references to one another. This phenomenon of soliloquy, the article argues, is illustrative of a competitive memory characteristic of recollections of the past in the eastern Mediterranean and challenges nostalgic invocations of a pre-national, “cosmopolitan” Mediterranean. Broadening the discussion to other post-Ottoman settings, the article draws attention to property redistribution in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing as a major factor in the separation of memory along communal lines. Noting the omnipresence of the figure of the “ghost” in the literature on the region, the paper finally explores the heuristic potential of hauntology to conceive histories of the region that would be inclusive and yet attentive to the differences in the nature, purpose and reciprocal indifference of the sources and of the asymmetrical relations of power in which they were produced.     

Ethnicity,Secessionist Conflict and the International Society: Towards Normative Paradigm Shift

Abstract. This article addresses the challenge of ethnicity and particularly of secessionist conflict by trying to outline an international normative framework more conducive to conflict settlement. The working hypothesis is that accommodation through dialogue, in spite of its risks, offers the only way forward in situations of politicised ethnicity. The existing international nonnative regime (with its ban on secession and no opening for autonomy) is insufficient for managing and resolving such conflicts, while its revolutionary antipode, ‘national’ self-determination, is a frightening prospect. Three alternatives are explored: partial recasting with emphasis on devolution; a secessionist option for some federations; and secessionist self- determination for tormented minorities within well-defined criteria. The advantages as well as the drawbacks of unilateral (secessionist) self-detennination are explored in detail.     

Agent-Based Simulation of Holocene Monsoon Precipitation Patterns and Hunter-Gatherer Population Dynamics in Semi-arid Environments

Based on archaeological evidence from Kutch-Saurashtra (N Gujarat, NW India), we use agent-based modelling (ABM) to explore the persistence of hunter-gatherer (HG) groups in semi-arid environments in the mid and late Holocene. Agents interact within a realistic semi-arid environment dominated by the monsoon. Precipitation trends are modelled from instrumental records (1871–2008) calibrated with existing models for the Asian monsoon in the Holocene (c. 12 ka–present). Experiments aim at exploring dependencies between population dynamics and climate-driven environmental change (in terms of resource availability) for precipitation patterns at the local, regional and continental scales. Resources are distributed across a simplified ground model. Average yearly precipitation (AYP, i.e. mean) and variance in yearly precipitation (VYP, i.e. standard deviation) are the main parameters affecting resource availability in the simulations. We assess the effects of environmental change on HG populations at different timescales: (1) patterns of seasonal (inter-annual) resource availability, (2) effects of changes in mean precipitation trends over the long (Pleistocene–Holocene) and the mid (Holocene, millennial) periods, and (3) effects of intra-annual precipitation variability, i.e. changes in standard deviation from mean precipitation trends over the short period (annual to decadal). Simulations show that (1) strong seasonality is coherent with the persistence of HG populations in India, independently of the geographical scale of the precipitation models, (2) changes in AYP over the mid period (Holocene) are not sufficient to explain the disappearance of HG populations in Kutch-Saurashtra (K-S) 4 ka and (3) precipitation variability (VYP) over the short period (annual to decadal) is the main parameter affecting population performance and overall ecosystem dynamics. To date, sufficiently refined palaeoclimatic records do not exist for the study area, but higher VYP values 4 ka do not exclude the possibility that other factors may have driven the disappearance of HG populations in Kutch-Saurashtra.     

Introduction to “Binary Binds”: Deconstructing Sex and Gender Dichotomies in Archaeological Practice

Gender archaeology has made significant strides toward deconstructing the hegemony of binary categorizations. Challenging dichotomies such as man/woman, sex/gender, and biology/culture, approaches informed by poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theories have moved beyond essentialist and universalist identity constructs to more nuanced configurations. Despite the theoretical emphasis on context, multiplicity, and fluidity, binary starting points continue to streamline the spectrum of variability that is recognized, often reproducing normative assumptions in the evidence. The contributors to this special issue confront how sex, gender, and sexuality categories condition analytical visibility, aiming to develop approaches that respond to the complexity of theory in archaeological practice. The papers push the ontological and epistemological boundaries of bodies, personhood, and archaeological possibility, challenging a priori assumptions that contain how sex, gender, and sexuality categories are constituted and related to each other. Foregrounding intersectional approaches that engage with ambiguity, variability, and difference, this special issue seeks to “de-contain” categories, assumptions, and practices from “binding” our analytical gaze toward only certain kinds of persons and knowledges, in interpretations of the past and practices in the present.