Tales of the Unexpected: Exploring Car Boot Sales as Marginal Spaces of Contemporary Consumption

Marginal and/or resistant consumption practices have been neglected in current geographical debates on consumption and retailing. This has resulted in partial and skewed theorizations of exchange within contemporary consumption. Consumption spaces such as car boot sales represent sites in which the conventions of the marketplace are suspended or abandoned, and replaced by forms of sourcing, commodity circulation, transaction codes, pricing mechanisms and value quite different from those which typify more conventional retail malls and department stores. Drawing on the anthropological literature on traditional and peasant markets, we argue that exchange within the car boot sale is socially, culturally and geographically embedded and we emphasize the intrinsic importance of fun and sociality to such activities. Marginal spaces such as the car boot sale offer both some important clues into the potential for rethinking marketplace dynamics, notably with respect to our understandings of value, and some intriguing possibilities for consumer politics.     

Geochemical indicators of preservation status and site deterioration at Star Carr

This paper presents the results of a project aimed at investigating the deterioration of organic remains at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr. Analyses of pH, Electrical Conductivity and Redox Potential are reported from borehole transects across the unexcavated part of the site. A comparison of field and laboratory measurements is made, leading to the characterisation of different preservation zones and identification of ‘vulnerable’ sediments at the site. These data are augmented by geochemical analyses of contemporary borehole sequences and adjacent historic monoliths. Analysis of surface water and groundwater has also been undertaken to assist in the interpretation of the site hydrology and geochemistry. The relationship between ‘natural’ geology and preservation potential, and the evidence for a ‘halo’ preservation effect in virgin sediments adjacent to previous archaeology trenches is investigated.     

Understanding Abandonments in the North American Southwest

The North American Southwest is renowned for its rich archaeological record. Thousands of prehistoric houses and ceremonial centers remain partially standing or form mounds that mark prehistoric villages that were once actively occupied and remain important to the descendants. The visibility of archaeological remains has sparked interest in questions of abandonment among archaeologists and the lay public. We explore reasons for this interest, how it is manifest in archaeological research, and how perception of that research influences popular views of the past and of native people. Our focus is on explanations for the causes of site and regional abandonment as well as on explications of the processes by which abandonments occur. Essential to our perspective is the view that abandonment is a process that involves decisions to move, which may be promoted by dire circumstances, but which are most often settlement strategies. The process of moving requires economic, social, and political decisions about the places from which people move and to which they move.     

Whose Economy for Whose Culture? Moving Beyond Oppositional Talk in European Debate about Economy and Culture

This paper provides an overview of the economy-culture debate as currently rehearsed within European urban and regional change circles, explores some of the key theoretical inadequacies of this debate and outlines and illustrates one possible way of moving debate forward. The paper begins by identifying the different ways in which economy and culture, and economy-culture articulations, are thought about within this debate and by arguing that what purports to be a debate about articulation collapses in practice into the respective privileging of either culture or economy. Subsequently, after a critique of the "economy-culture as differential logics" argument, we forward what we consider to be the minimal conditions for conjoining economy and culture theoretically. These entail according economy and culture equivalent conceptual standing, centring meaning and seeing meaning and practice as conceptually inseparable. We then illustrate this approach at the level of particularities, using a range of examples that span commodities, "productive" practices and processes of consumption and exchange.     

Changes in regional organization and mobility in the Zuni region of the American Southwest during the Pueblo III and IV periods: insights from INAA studies

The transition from the late Pueblo III (AD 1200–1275) to Pueblo IV (AD 1275–1400) period marks one of the most dramatic eras of demographic and social upheaval in the American Southwest. At this time, much of the northern Southwest was depopulated as thousands of ancestral Pueblo people moved to new homelands. In the Zuni region, this transition included a residential shift from dispersed, largely household-scale settlements to massive, multi-storied pueblos housing hundreds of people and a simultaneous contraction of regional settlement to a central core along the Zuni River and its major tributaries. This article presents a synthesis of our recent independent efforts to utilize instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) to investigate changes in social interaction in the Zuni region before and after this transition. We suggest that in addition to significant local and regional settlement shifts, the Pueblo III–IV transition in the Zuni region was accompanied by a major reorganization of pottery distribution networks as clear social boundaries began to emerge between village clusters. More generally, our combined study also highlights the iterative nature of INAA data analysis, the benefits of large sample sizes, and the utility of a diachronic interpretative approach.