The Small Things of Life and Death: An Exploration of Value and Meaning in the Material Culture of Nazi Camps

Camelid pastoralism, agriculture, sedentism, surplus production, increasing cultural complexity, and interregional interaction during northern Chile's Late Formative period (AD 100–400) are seen in the flow of goods and people over expanses of desert. Consolidating evidence of material culture from these interactions with a bioarchaeological dimension allows us to provide details about individual lives and patterns in the Late Formative more generally. Here, we integrate a variety of skeletal, chemical, and archaeological data to explore the life and death of a small child (Calate-3N.7). By taking a multiscalar approach, we present a narrative that considers not only the varied materiality that accompanies this child but also what the child's life experience was and how this reflects and shapes our understanding of the Late Formative period in northern Chile. This evidence hints at the profound mobility of their youth. The complex mortuary context reflects numerous interactions and long-distance relationships. Ultimately, the evidence speaks to deep social relations between two coastal groups, the Atacameños and Tarapaqueños. Considering this suite of data, we can see a child whose life was spent moving through desert routes and perhaps also glimpse the construction of intercultural identity in the Formative period.

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Protection in Life and Death: Pendant Crosses from the Cemetery of Apollo Klarios at Sagalassos, Turkey

European Journal of Archaeology ◽

10.1017/eaa.2017.55 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 280-298

Author(s):

Sam Cleymans ◽

Peter Talloen

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Contextual Information ◽

Popular Religion ◽

Byzantine Empire ◽

Western Turkey ◽

Radiocarbon Dates ◽

Life And Death ◽

Funerary Rites ◽

And Function ◽

Shed Light

This article presents the different types of pendant crosses found in the burials of a Middle Byzantine graveyard at the Pisidian settlement of Sagalassos in south-western Turkey. The aim is to study both the chronology and function of these pectoral crosses. A variety of sources are used, ranging from stratigraphy and radiocarbon dates to contextual information and skeletal data. The crosses could be broadly dated to between the eleventh and thirteenth century AD, thus providing an indication of the lifespan of the cemetery. Moreover, the typological evolution, which was corroborated by parallels from other sites in the Byzantine Empire, allowed us to establish a horizontal stratigraphy for the graveyard. The pectoral crosses discussed here shed light on the funerary practices in this part of the Byzantine world. These generally proved to belong to very young children. They constitute a category of material culture that not only provides insights into the lives of the Byzantine population, especially in early childhood, but are also the material manifestation of the intersection between popular religion, magic, and funerary rites.

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Death in the Diaspora

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474473781.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Comparative Analysis ◽

Material Culture ◽

First Century ◽

Life And Death ◽

The Social ◽

The World ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Irish Migrants

As the British expanded their empire from near colonies such as Ireland to those in remote corners of the world, such as Barbados, Ceylon and Australia, they left a trail of physical remains in every parish where settlement occurred. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, gravestones and elaborate epitaphs documented identity and attachment to both colony and metropole. This collection by leading migration historians and archaeologists seeks to explore what this evidence tells the twenty-first century reader about the attachment remote British and Irish migrants had to ‘home’ in life and death. As well as making public statements about imperial allegiance, the bereaved carved in stone the reunification of disparate families in death. Such mourning left an important seam of material culture that has hitherto received scant comparative analysis by scholars. Focusing on nodal areas of British and Irish trade around the world, each chapter reveals the social, religious, political and personal milieu of remote migrants in all continents where the British and Irish lived, worked and ultimately died.

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Within small things. Reflections on techno-social boundaries between prehistory and recent past during a Lebanese fieldwork

Dépasser la frontière - Frontière.s ◽

10.35562/frontieres.405 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 7-20

Author(s):

Johnny Samuele Baldi

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Bronze Age ◽

Food Storage ◽

Social Boundaries ◽

Late Prehistoric ◽

Recent Past ◽

Lebanese Civil War ◽

Recent Case Study ◽

Small Things ◽

The Village

The village of Qleiaat, in the Mount Lebanon, has recently been the centre of archaeological activities aimed at studying late prehistoric and Early Bronze Age vestiges. But from the very beginning this research has also tried to investigate with purely archaeological means the remains of the recent past of the village, especially the pithoi used in the 19th-20th centuries for food storage, and the ruins left by violent clashes that took place in Qleiaat at the end of the Lebanese civil war. Through a reflection on the possibility of reconstructing physical frontiers starting from the archaeology of fossil techniques, this paper applies to a recent case-study an approach used until now only for prehistoric material culture. The aim is to recognize the frontier between the militias having clashed in Qleiaat in 1988-1990 on the basis of the chaînes opératoires of the pithoi.

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The Material Culture of Nazi Camps: An Editorial

International Journal of Historical Archaeology ◽

10.1007/s10761-017-0444-z ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 423-429

Author(s):

Gilly Carr ◽

Marek E. Jasinski ◽

Claudia Theune

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Nazi Camps

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The Life and Death of the Old Polish Intelligentsia

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2493440 ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 1-27 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Aleksander Gella

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Material Culture ◽

The Other ◽

Value System ◽

Life And Death ◽

Political Events ◽

Current Perspective ◽

Polish Intelligentsia

Contemporary political events in Poland provoke many questions concerning the old Polish intelligentsia. Has it survived the historical storms of the last thirty years? How potent is the value system of this stratum today? Has its dominating influence on the other strata remained, or does Poland now have a new value system derived from the goals and morals of a different class? The Polish intelligentsia can be analyzed from several standpoints–from the historical or the current perspective, in the light of its national function or its own structure, or as revealed in its aspirations and values. It is the conviction of the author that the value system determines the structure of both the spiritual and the material culture in every social class and stratum.

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Coins and Cosmologies in Iron Age Western Britain

Cambridge Archaeological Journal ◽

10.1017/s0959774318000331 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 23-44 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Caroline Pudney

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Iron Age ◽

Life And Death

This paper offers a material culture-based approach to British Western Iron Age coins (i.e. those often attributed to the Dobunni). Through analysis of the materiality and imagery of these objects, the author explores the embodiment of later Iron Age cosmologies. In doing so, the cycles of day and night and of life and death are discussed. The ways in which these cosmologies could have been transposed onto the landscape through coin production and depositional contexts helps to demonstrate how Iron Age societies in Western Britain may have understood their world and confirmed their space within it.

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In Small Things Forgotten: The Georgian World View, Material Culture and the Consumer Revolution

Rural History ◽

10.1017/s0956793300000984 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 87-95 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Paul Courtney

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

Historical Archaeology ◽

New World ◽

World View ◽

Radical Change ◽

Future Research ◽

Starting Point ◽

History Of ◽

Small Things ◽

Medieval Archaeology

The publication of The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology, a festschrift in honour of James Deetz, makes a useful starting point for assessing the remarkable development of American historical archaeology over the last four decades. The discipline of ‘historical archaeology’ is the New World equivalent of British post-medieval archaeology. It is the study of the material culture of colonial and industrial America. Unlike its highly marginalised British counterpart, the discipline has seen an enormous growth in America over the last two decades, reflected in the creation of numerous posts both in universities and public-sector archaeology. This article seeks firstly to discuss some of the main contributions to the festchrift and areas of promise for future research. Secondly it will assess the relevance of some recent contributions on the history of consumption to Deetz's concept of the ‘Georgian world view’ and the notion of radical change in eighteenth-century material culture.

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