Showing papers in "Journal of Social Archaeology in 2010"

Indigenous traces in colonial spaces Archaeologies of ambiguity, origin, and practice

Abstract: This article reconsiders how archaeologists find Indigenous people, particularly Native Americans, in past colonial communities. Significant progress has been made in studying indigenous living are...

World Heritage and mosaic universalism: A view from Palestine

Abstract: This article analyses UNESCO’s project of worldwide cultural heritage preservation. It does so through a double lens, an ethnographic and a textual one. I first look at the ways in which World Heritage works in Palestine/Israel. Second, I analyse the discourse of World Heritage, arguing that recent World Heritage reforms, stimulated by critiques of the Eurocentrism of its approaches, adopt the language of liberal multiculturalism. Building on critical accounts of this political discourse, I show how multicultural heritage policies not only risk affirming and solidifying cultural differences, but also the asymmetries between them. Furthermore, I argue that, paradoxically, World Heritage reinforces nation-states, and particularly state apparatuses’ reach and control over heritage sites and processes, often at the expense of the grassroots. By analysing a series of workshops in Jerusalem and Ramallah, I detail the ways in which highly innovative local Palestinian practices of heritage conservation tend to be...

From spectator to critic and participant: A new role for archaeology in ritual studies

Abstract: In order to understand ritual in the past, archaeology has long relied on theories developed in other disciplines. While these theories, which often rely on written or oral information, have added many important dimensions to our interpretation of the archaeological record, they have often proven difficult to successfully articulate with the archaeological sources. Moreover, archaeology has tended to remain on the receiving end of the formulation of social theory, and has only rarely participated in the theoretical development and critique. In this article we argue that we see a central role for archaeology to contribute to the development of ritual theory. Through two case studies from Scandinavian prehistory we illustrate how the application of a practice-based ritual theory allows us to more firmly connect the theoretical framework to our archaeological sources. This connection not only leads us toward a synchronization of materials, methods and theories, but it also allows us to engage in the broader interdisciplinary theoretical discussion about ritual. The specific challenges posed by the archaeological sources and the archaeological process of interpretation point to new questions relating to the application of theoretical frameworks, and may even suggest some solutions. (Less)

Power by design Architecture and politics in precolonial Dahomey

Abstract: This article examines the role of royal architectural design in strategies to promote political order in the Kingdom of Dahomey, a major West African state which emerged in the era of the transAtla...

Seeing like an oil company’s CHM programme: Exxon and archaeology on the Chad Export Project

Abstract: James Ferguson’s 2005 article ‘Seeing Like an Oil Company’ powerfully described the development of resource-extraction enclaves in African states, and the complex landscape of globally integrated a...

Materialized cosmology among ancient Maya commoners

Abstract: Classic Maya inscriptions and iconography reveal more than just royal customs since their origins lie in traditional Maya practices. They provide a key to unlocking how commoners created their own domestic universe. To explore how commoners mapped their cosmology and recorded their history, I discuss domestic ceramic clusters based on color, placement, and association with other artifacts at the minor center of Saturday Creek, Belize. Results show that cached items served to contextualize their place in the cosmos. Commoners may not have had the written word, but they had the means to record their own history, one with which they interacted daily — under their feet, within walls, and under their roof.

Intersecting magisteria: Bridging archaeological science and traditional knowledge

Abstract: Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that science and religion are fundamentally ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ — two spheres of understanding that should peacefully coexist without intersecting. However...

Social memory and trauma in northwestern Tanzania Organic, spontaneous community collaboration

Abstract: This essay assesses current oral social memory near the best documented ancient sacred site in Africa, the ‘Olduvai Gorge of the Iron Age’ (as locals now call it), located just west of Lake Victoria. Marked by Kaiija tree, this site is known for its antiquity and the rich panoply of myth and history attached to it. However, the deaths of older care-takers and tradition-keepers caused by HIV/AIDS and the destruction of once sacred shrines have permanently changed how history is now kept and remembered. A spontaneous initiative taken by local residents - a kind of therapeutic healing through heritage - is revitalizing the shrines and leading to a community re-examination of oral traditions to establish how the loss of these powerful mnemonics and older keepers of history has affected historical knowledge.

Marketing conquest and the vanishing Indian: An Indigenous response to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse

Abstract: In recent years, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1996) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2005) have come to represent the widely read and discussed secular narratives of human social and cultural evolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Disguised as an attack on racial determinism, Guns suggests that colonization and conquest were largely ‘accidents’ of history and that modern collapses can be avoided by careful study of Indigenous environmental mismanagement. Much of Diamond’s data is drawn from archaeological literature largely written in isolation from Native American descendent communities. The universalizing discourses advanced by processual studies can provide powerful counter-arguments to these claims when rearticulated with more recent Native American historical narratives. This essay responds to Diamond’s works, questions their veracity and assumptions and suggests that narratives such as Diamond’s are the most po...

Death and the family Developing generational chronologies

Abstract: Who buried the dead? Cemeteries contain the graves of people from local communities but the individual dead were buried by only a few members of that community, those that survived them. This article seeks to use detailed chronological information to analyse funerary data and proposes a system for establishing a generation-based dating scheme. Such a scheme advances studies of archaeological cemeteries by the discussion of life-time rather than end-of-life chronologies. This will enhance studies of social relationships, memory and the transmission of specific social identities by moving towards a more experiential archaeology. Specifically, I use a detailed study of three Anglo-Saxon cemeteries to investigate notions of social time. This article uses generational information in conjunction with other mortuary differentiations such as spatial location, age, life course, gender and grave-good wealth to show that Anglo-Saxon social status was determined by who was alive at any one time, and that the status o...

Making a huaca Memory and praxis in prehispanic far northern Peru

Abstract: Recent studies exploring social memory have led to a growing literature on the ‘archaeology of memory’ that examines the ways material culture is deployed to make cultural statements about the past...

Power by Design

Abstract: This article examines the role of royal architectural design in strategies to promote political order in the Kingdom of Dahomey, a major West African state which emerged in the era of the transAtlantic slave trade. Historical and ethnographic sources are marshaled to identify an underlying normative architectural tradition in Dahomean palace construction, a tradition defined by distinct zones devoted to public ritual and semi-public political negotiations. Analysis of the ground plans of six royal palace complexes from the precolonial city of Cana is then deployed to trace the evolution of the latter zone over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of spatial patterns reveals an overall rise in the spatial complexity of, as well as a radical expansion in the control of movement through, royal palace complexes over time. This pattern, I argue, was part of broader material attempts to promulgate a sense of social and political order in a period defined b...

Charred churches or iron harvests? Counter-monumentality and the commemoration of the London Blitz

Abstract: The bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe between August 1940 and May 1941 is a pervasive theme in popular memories and cultural representations of the Second World War, but it has been memorialized in a peculiarly restrained and disjointed manner. This article examines this phenomenon of memory fragmentation with reference to a specific site, St James’s Church Piccadilly. In contrast to these and other inscribed scraps of official memory I propose a re-examination of London’s ‘Iron Harvest’: the continual recovery of unexploded German bombs. By reconsidering James Young’s concept of the ‘counter-monument’ and the performativity of commemorative processes, I argue that these discoveries can be regarded as acts of commemoration. As the Second World War slips out of living memory we need more diverse and imaginative forms of remembrance to represent both the fragmented traces of modern wars and the absences they create.

Comparing the material lives of Asian transmigrants through the lens of alcohol consumption

Abstract: Historians commonly use the twin concepts of transnationalism and diaspora in exploring the lives of overseas Asian migrants, but such analyses are only just emerging among archaeologists. These concepts forefront processes of culture change and identity formation that consider simultaneously socio-economic and cultural influences from home and host countries. They also present an interpretive framework and common axes along which scholars can compare distinct groups of migrants. This study compares patterns of material consumption among Chinese and Japanese migrants at a salmon cannery in British Columbia through the lens of social drinking. Results indicate both groups consumed a range of western-style alcoholic beverages, influenced by local working-class life combined with processes of modernization occurring in the homeland. Nevertheless, both also consumed indigenous Asian beverages, which played a key role in maintaining distinct ethnic identities.

Taupita A 3000-year-old shell game in the Lapita cultural complex of Tonga

Abstract: Recent excavations at the archaeological site of Nukuleka on Tongatapu in the Tongan Archipelago have yielded the largest Lapita collection of perforated Ark (Anadara) shells known to date. In this...

Identity formation in a border area The cemeteries of Baoxing, western Sichuan (third century BCE - second century CE)

Abstract: Funerary sites in south-western China, dated from the third century BCE to the second century CE, display distinct combinations of local and non-local elements. The existence of mixed patterns has usually been interpreted within a cultural-historical framework or with reference to ethnic groups recorded in ancient historical records. This article focuses on three cemeteries in Baoxing (Sichuan province), located along the western frontier of a newly established prefecture under the Qin and Han imperial administration, and interprets the acquisition, combination and reinterpretation of non-local elements in grave goods and burial structure in relation to ongoing processes of identity formation. These were taking place in a phase of intense contact in the period immediately preceding the formation of the first Chinese empire in the third century BCE, and during a period of arguably decreasing control by the Han administration in the second—third century CE.