Assessing the Scale and Pace of Large Shell-Bearing Site Occupation in the Prince Rupert Harbour Area,British Columbia

Methodological advancements in geoarchaeology and spatial and chronological modeling are opening new avenues to interpreting large coastal shell-bearing sites. We document the developmental histories of two such sites around Prince Rupert Harbour, Canada, using systematic percussion coring, intensive radiocarbon dating, and 3D surface mapping with Total Station and LiDAR. We also re-analyze a third site (Boardwalk/GbTo-31) excavated and radiocarbon dated in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 2000s using archival field notes, site maps, and stratigraphic profiles georectified using LiDAR. We map the natural landform beneath the sites and document the degree to which people physically modified landforms through the deposition of massive shell accumulations. We model site development through time and space and use accumulation rates and OxCal modeling to test for intentional deposition events. All three sites demonstrate complex and heterogeneous occupation histories. At each we identify instances of very rapid deposition that effectively terraced and extended parts of the natural landform to create places for constructing houses, though these episodes take place within longer histories of slower quotidian deposition. The anthropogenic modifications to the coastline in this area are the result of these mixed processes associated with long histories of occupation.     

Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication

Harvesting different species as foods or raw materials calls for differing skills depending on the species being harvested and the circumstances under which they are being taken. In some situations and for some species, the tactics used are mainly behavioral—that is, people adjust, or adapt, their own actions to fit the behavior and circumstances of the species they are taking. Under other circumstances and for other species, the skills and tactics used may call for greater environmental preparation or manipulation. Therefore, instead of trying to distinguish people today and in the past as either foragers or farmers, it makes sense to define human subsistence behavior as an interactive matrix of species and harvesting tactics, that is, as a provisions spreadsheet.     

The Multifunctional Transition in Australia's Tropical Savannas: the Emergence of Consumption,Protection and Indigenous Values

As elsewhere in affluent, western nations, the direction, complexity and pace of rural change in Australia can be conceptualised as a multifunctional transition in which a variable mix of consumption and protection values has emerged, contesting the former dominance of production values, and leading to greater complexity and heterogeneity in rural occupance at all scales. This transition has been explored in accessible, high-amenity landscapes driven by enhanced consumption values. Less attention has been directed to remote, marginal lands where a flimsy mode of productivist occupance can, in part, be displaced by alternative modes with the transitions being facilitated by low transfer costs. Such is the case in Australia's northern tropical savannas where an extensive mode of pastoral occupance is selectively displaced by alternative consumption, protection and Indigenous values. This transition towards multifunctional occupance is most readily documented by mapping changes in land tenure and ownership over the last three decades. Tenure changes have been accompanied by new regimes of property rights and land ownership, including: native titles derived from common law; non-transferable, common-property Aboriginal freehold tenures; transfers of pastoral leases to Indigenous and conservation interests; expansion of conservation lands under public tenures; and revisions of the rights and duties of pastoral lessees. Future occupance scenarios remain unclear, given the sensitivity of this frontier zone to national and global driving forces.     

Modern roads as UNESCO World Heritage sites: framework and proposals

There has been noticeable development in the protection of linear infrastructure by UNESCO, whether on its cultural, technological or historical merits. However, with the exception of other means of transport incorporated within the field of industrial archaeology or recognised by the CIIC under the category of cultural routes, little or no consideration has been given to roads built from the mid-eighteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century. In view of this situation, this paper has the following aims. Firstly, to define the concept of ‘modern road’ and provide a brief analysis of the historical development and current situation of the same. Secondly, to assess the main contributions made to date regarding the heritage dimension of modern roads. Thirdly, to reconstruct the process of defining linear cultural landscapes, historic transportation corridors, cultural routes and heritage canals, railways and roads, in accordance with the considerations raised by ICOMOS and UNESCO. Finally, to contribute to the debate on the definition, characterisation and assessment of modern roads as world heritage assets, both intrinsically and in relation to established heritage categories.     

Neoliberalism and the Aestheticization of New Middle‐Class Landscapes

Abstract: If according to Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 1990:28), the aesthetic is from the start “a contradictory, double‐edged concept”, how are seemingly innocent acts of viewing and consuming aesthetically pleasing landscapes implicated in the neoliberal politics of urban restructuring? Using contemporary Shanghai as a case study, this paper critically examines the role of the aesthetic in the politics of exclusion and urban segregation in post‐Socialist Shanghai where the restructuring and commodification of erstwhile public welfare housing have led to the rapid development of private “middle‐class” gated enclaves. A central objective of this paper is to excavate the underlying cultural politics of neoliberalism and demonstrate how the aestheticization of urban spaces in Shanghai has become increasingly intertwined with and accentuated by neoliberal ideologies and exclusionary practices in the city. Imbricated in the pristine neighborhoods of Shanghai's gated communities are the fault lines of social division and class distinction that are rapidly transforming urban China.     

Storm Tide Recurrence Intervals – A Statistical Approach Using Beach Ridge Plains in Northern Australia

The marine inundation generated by Tropical Cyclone Yasi, north Queensland, February 2011, flooded at least 130 beachfront homes and many commercial businesses, becoming the most substantial marine inundation impact in Australia's modern history. As a consequence, guidelines for building in storm tide impact areas have been developed and discussions are beginning on whether Australia needs a national standard for buildings impacted by these events. Central to this will be determining which areas of coastal land need to be subjected to the standard, and this will likely be based upon the magnitude of a particular return interval event. The veracity of the current method for determining these return intervals is difficult to determine as there has been no objective way to assess the accuracy of this approach. One such method is developed here – applying extreme value theory statistics to millennial scale sedimentary records of tropical cyclone marine inundations. The approach is applied to a 5000‐year‐long beach ridge record of tropical cyclone inundations near Tully Heads and the results suggest that the inundation generated by Tropical Cyclone Yasi here had a return interval of approximately 1000 years. This is a substantially lower figure than the approximately 5000‐year return interval suggested by the currently accepted approach. Irrespective of which method is more accurate, the marine inundation generated by Yasi was a very rare event and one that may become more common under a future altered climate.     

Interpreting World War II Intelligence Data for Cultural Heritage Studies

Abstract

Archaeological and cultural resource management analyses of sites of conflict of the recent past regularly draw on archival intelligence sources, in particular on aerial imagery. Like any other data source, they have their limitations. Using a case study, the World War II battlefield of Kiska in the Aleutians, this paper outlines the processes that generated these intelligence resources, as well as the factors that influenced their survival to the present day. Understanding these processes is necessary when using such sources to understand the development of cultural landscapes as well as specific sites.     

Environmental Justice Storytelling: Angels and Isotopes at Yucca Mountain,Nevada

Abstract: This paper discusses the productive role of storytelling in community struggles for environmental justice. The individual and collective task of environmental justice storytelling highlights where the politics of pollution intersect with geographical imaginations. Storytelling takes on a productive role in transforming localized and individual emotions and experiences of environmental injustice into public knowledge that is performed in the world. This paper draws on a case study of nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. I focus on how storytelling enacts scenarios of environmental witnessing and transformation that hold together a plurality of presences, absences, action and imagination, past histories and hope for the future.     

Reimagining the City of Fire and Iron: A landscape archaeology of the Angkor-Period Industrial Complex of Preah Khan of Kompong Svay,Cambodia (ca. 9th to 13th centuries A.D.)

In the archaeological literature regional centers often receive far less attention than capital regions and the medieval Khmer Empire (ca. 9th to 15th centuries a.d.) is a classic case in point. At its height, the Khmer Empire stretched across much of mainland Southeast Asia, and it remains the most extensive dominion in the history of the region. To date, however, relatively little archaeological work has been completed outside of the capital of Angkor, and we have a limited understanding of the broader dynamics of the Empire. In this paper we begin to address this lacuna at the remote monumental complex of Preah Khan of Kompong Svay, the largest of all the Angkor-period regional centers. We describe the use of remote sensing and ground survey methods to produce the first comprehensive archaeological map of the site. The map data are used to evaluate conventional interpretations of the site as a major industrial complex, urban center and military outpost. The findings have implications for our understanding of early urbanism, industrial production and imperial expansion in the region.     

The rise of cultural landscapes

The new interest in cultural landscapes is forcing a reappraisal of concepts of countryside heritage. First the traditional split between cultural and natural values is challenged. Second, modern landscape studies emphasise the subjectivity of landscape assessment, and this is subverting the former tendency to aspire to objectivity in evaluation. The acceptance of ‘associative’ value in landscape is an indicator of this. Modern landscape studies also emphasise the interrelationships between processes and aspects of value, and this is encouraging specialists to communicate across disciplinary frontiers. The desire by ecologists in the mid‐1980s to have cultural landscapes inscribed on the World Heritage list caused a re‐assessment of the World Heritage Criteria, and an initiative by ICOMOS brought this process to a conclusion in 1992. However the reappraisal of concepts of countryside value imply that there are many other philosophical and practical matters still to be resolved.