'Waiting for the Master's Dams to Crack': Hydro-dependency, Water Autonomy and World-literature

This article examines 'hydro-dependency' in the neo-liberal era, exploring the cultural patterning and representations corresponding to the socio-ecological relations organising the extraction, production and consumption of water, both as commodity and as energy in the neo-liberal regime of the capitalist world-ecology. I investigate how specific infrastructures of riparian water management and hydropower – the pipeline and the dam – are mediated in world-literary hydropoetry and hydrofiction and the ways in which they are depicted as producing path-dependence and asymmetric distribution, often through tropes that evoke pathologised social addiction or exhaustion. However, I also demonstrate how texts reconceive water in terms of interdependence and hydrosocial interrelation, thus countering the hegemonic discourses through which flowing water is transformed into exchangeable, quantifiable commodities or forms of energy. As such, I argue that these water-insurgent texts turn on a dialectical tension between hydrodependency and autonomy that mediates the contradictions facing the appropriation strategies of the neo-liberal hydrological regime.

Twisted Handaxes in Middle Pleistocene Britain and their Implications for Regional-scale Cultural Variation and the Deep History of Acheulean Hominin Groups

A better understood chronological framework for the Middle Pleistocene of Britain has enabled archaeologists to detect a number of temporally-restricted assemblage-types, based not on ‘culture historical’ schemes of typological progression but on independent dating methods and secure stratigraphic frameworks, especially river-terrace sequences. This includes a consistent pattern in the timing of Clactonian and Levalloisian industries, as well as a number of handaxe assemblage types that belong to different interglacial cycles. In other words, Derek Roe’s hunch that the apparent lack of coherent ‘cultural’ patterning was due to an inaccurate and inadequate chronological framework was correct. Some variation in handaxe shape is culturally significant. Here we focus on twisted ovate handaxes, which we have previously argued to belong predominantly to MIS 11. Recent discoveries have enabled us to refine our correlations. Twisted ovate assemblages are found in different regions of Britain in different substages of MIS 11 (East Anglia in MIS 11c and south of the Thames in MIS 11a), the Thames, and the MIS 11b cold interval separating the two occurrences. These patterns have the potential to reveal much about hominin settlement patterns, behaviour, and social networks during the Middle Pleistocene.

Lost in Translation: Settlement Organization in Postpalatial Crete—A View from the East

This contribution will consider problems and issues related to understanding architecture and urbanism in postpalatial Crete in its larger Mediterranean context, with reference particularly to Philistia but also to Cyprus and mainland Greece (Fig. 13.1). Comparisons with Philistia and Cyprus are relevant because many scholars have argued for a migration to these regions in the form of large scale colonization, and they have attempted to identify Aegean influences and even direct architectural transfers in these regions (as outlined in sections 13.2 and 13.4). This paper takes a more moderate or minimalist position: that any migration to these regions from the Aegean was limited and entangled, taking the form of what Knapp (2008: 266–8, 289, 292, 356; see also Hitchcock and Maeir 2013) has termed a ‘hybridization process’. However, a comparative approach among the Mediterranean regions has value regardless of where one positions oneself on the issue of migration, cross-cultural influence, and/or interconnections (see now Knapp and Manning 2016). The value lies in cross-cultural patterning that may be identified based on common postpalatial changes in social organization, structures, and practices; levels of technology; climate; and geography. It is the search for such patterning that typifies the approach to studying culture in cultural anthropology (e.g. Haviland et al. 2011). The benefit in identifying architectural patterns and differences across IIIC pottery-producing cultures can help to identify both common social practices and regional differences. Furthermore, we will argue that understanding architecture on multiple scales (urbanism, curation, design, and technique) in this era should emphasize IIIC commonalities, rather than past studies that have privileged and over-emphasized continuities with the palatial Bronze Age. While such continuities are interesting and worth drawing attention to, emphasizing them minimizes the significance of the breakdown and diminishing of official architectural styles. In addition, given that the data base for architecture is much smaller than for ceramic studies, a comparative approach can bring new insights gained by using different methods—as in Driessen’s study of complementarity in the different use of similar spaces by males and females as indicated by different types of artefact patterning in each space (see chapter 5).