Middle power,status-seeking and role conceptions: the cases of Indonesia and South Korea

This article examines how role theory can enhance the middle-power literature in understanding the role preferences of middle powers. Rather than treating it as merely a function of material capability or good international citizenship, this article resituates middle power as a concept of international status that states aim to pursue through the enactment of role conceptions. Thus, it reinstates a conceptual distinction between ‘middle-power status’ and ‘middle-power roles’. The article suggests that the notion of role conceptions can analytically connect the status-seeking behaviour of middle powers with their foreign policy agenda. In so doing, it provides a more nuanced explanation of middle-power behaviour, which might differ between one middle power and another. Using Indonesia and South Korea as case studies of middle power, this article contends that foreign policymakers have strategically conceptualised and enacted several main roles that aim to capture historical experience, as well as ego and alter expectations, in order to pursue middle-power status. These role conceptions determine the foreign policy agenda of states in articulating their middle-power status.     

Marine shell dates and surface lithic assemblages on the west coast of South Africa

Archaeological surface finds are difficult to date. There are several useful methods, but each requires special circumstances and has one drawback or another. On the west coast of South Africa marine shell are abundant on surface sites but they are rarely dated because they are perceived to be in disturbed context and in questionable association with artefacts. This paper attempts to rectify this misconception and shows that, although far from perfect, a large suite of surface dates can shed as much light as excavated data. On the Vredenburg Peninsula they help refute the hypothesis that two economically and culturally distinct populations shared this pre-colonial landscape since 2000 BP.     

Google Earth, GIS and stone-walled structures in southern Gauteng, South Africa

In South Africa, air photos were used in the 1960s and 1970s to plot distribution maps of pre-colonial stone-walled structures in order to study the peopling of this landscape. Different architectural styles of stone-walled structures were attributed to different cultures, who shared a mixed agricultural and pastoralist economic base and a cattle centered world-view. New technologies such as Google Earth satellite imagery as well as Geographic Information System software justify revisiting these structures as they facilitate more complex analyses of larger databases. The spatial analysis of remotely sensed settlement data from the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve near Johannesburg shows significant changes in settlement patterns from dispersed homesteads to nucleated towns during the last two or three centuries before colonial times. These changes echo similar patterns reported in the neighboring North West Province, where they have been interpreted as a sequence of evolution in social, political and economic complexity. In the Suikerbosrand reserve climate change, conflict and other factors may have helped bring about the observed changes in settlement patterns.     

Ruwayda: an historic urban settlement in north Qatar

SUMMARY: Ruwayda was first identified as an archaeological site in the 1970s and was excavated between 2009 and 2014. Despite a paucity of documentary evidence, this large settlement, which extends over an area of more than 90 hectares, contains a number of features indicative of an urban settlement including two mosques, a series of warehouses, a large multi-period fort, large courtyard houses interspersed with smaller, less substantial structures and a number of cemeteries. In addition to these buildings, there is also evidence for associated field systems and a walled garden.     

Ceremonial objects or household items? Non‐destructive μ‐XRD2 and μ‐XRF studies on three Neolithic hematite axes from Qatar

Three small stone axes were collected by the joint Qatari‐German South Qatar Survey Project (SQSP) at two places close to the eastern and western coast of Qatar in autumn 2012. Associated with settlement remains, flint artefacts and pieces of ?Ubaid pottery, the implements have been dated to the fifth millennium BCE. Non‐destructive μ‐XRD² and μ‐XRF analyses could, for the first time, prove the use of hematite as the raw material for the manufacture of these tools in Arabia. The absence of major hematite sources in the region and the special characteristics of hematite — a unique metallic shine of polished pieces and the blood‐red colour that appears during the manufacturing process — suggest the highly symbolic character of these objects.