The Puppy in the Pit: Osteobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Dog at the Three Cranes Tavern, Massachusetts

Boston’s “Big Dig” construction project resulted in the excavation of multiple archaeological sites dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, including the Great House/Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown, Massachusetts (USA). An otherwise unremarkable pit below the tavern foundation contained bones originally identified as a cat skeleton, which has subsequently been reidentified as a dog. This paper discusses site context, osteological evidence for the dog’s reclassification, and the shifts in cultural meaning this may indicate. Employing an osteobiographical approach, it draws together points of connection between the modern skeletal assessment, a series of 1980s excavations, and the motivations of eighteenth-century tavern inhabitants.

L’igname et le fruit du nôôle. Plantes, animaux, personnes et collectifs dans le système socio-cosmique d’Arama (Kanaky Nouvelle-Calédonie)

The yearly first fruit ceremony for yams has been described in most societies of Kanaky New Caledonia. In the far north of the country, however, Arama society’s special feature is that a few weeks before the yam ceremony a small ceremony is held which revolves around the fruit of a tree, the nôôle. This ceremony concerns ad hoc collectives of people acting together. Classically in Kanaky New Caledonia, the yam ceremony concerns a localized social configuration, here the Great House and its ancestors. It is made up of four hamlets conceptualized as Houses organized by an order of precedence. This ceremony also concerns kinship groups (and relations with the Catholic Church). This article analyses both ceremonies in relation to their environments, to horticulture and to their sequential unfoldings. Its perspective is a dynamic, processual description of aspects of the Kanak world construed as a socio-cosmic space and system.

Reading between the Lines: The Social Value of Dogoszhi Style in the Chaco World

Archaeologists have pointed to certain architectural or decorative designs as representing “elite styles” that mark status distinctions. We look at one such style—Dogoszhi—that was applied to several pottery wares across the Chaco World of the northern Southwest. Using a large database of ceramics, we test whether this style comprised an elite style or whether it signaled participation in a broader Chaco social network. We compare the distribution of Dogoszhi style to measures of settlement importance, including site size and network centrality, and we investigate whether this style occurs differentially at Chacoan great houses as opposed to small houses, or by subregion. We also compare its spatial distribution to an earlier style, called Black Mesa style, similarly applied to a number of different wares. Our results indicate that both styles were consistently distributed within Chaco communities (whether great houses or small houses) but variably distributed across subareas and most measures of settlement importance. We conclude that Dogoszhi style was used to mark membership in social networks that cross-cut great house communities, a pattern more typical of heterarchical rather than hierarchical social structures. Such variation questions the uniform category of “elites” and points to the ways that representational diversity may be used to interpret different regional histories and alliances.

Postcolonial reading of select poems of A.K.Ramanujan

The proposed paper will attempt at making a close scrutiny of A.K.Ramanujan’s poems ‘Snakes’, ‘A poem on particulars’, and ‘Small-scale reflections on a great house’, in the light of postcolonialism . Though many attempts have already been made at highlighting postcolonial and postmodern traits, in many Indian poems in English, they have not fore grounded the points of deviation, while applying these theories to Indian poems written in English. The present paper will take up the use of the English language and projection of macrocosmic self (nation) through the microcosmic self (family) for analysis and demonstrate how A.K.Ramanujan’s poems mentioned above can be seen as exemplifying them in clear-cut as well as concrete terms. Besides showing the scope for interpreting these three poems from this perspective, the proposed paper also argues that it is the interplay of binary opposites such as the colonizer and the colonized in terms of handling the form and individual self and the collective self in terms of the content that makes possible the postcolonial reading of these three poems.

Convergence of Evidence Supports a Chuska Mountains Origin for the Plaza Tree of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon

The iconic Plaza Tree of Pueblo Bonito is widely believed to have been a majestic pine standing in the west courtyard of the monumental great house during the peak of the Chaco Phenomenon (AD 850–1140). The ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) log was discovered in 1924, and since then, it has been included in “birth” and “life” narratives of Pueblo Bonito, although these ideas have not been rigorously tested. We evaluate three potential growth origins of the tree (JPB-99): Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, or a distant mountain range. Based on converging lines of evidence—documentary records, strontium isotopes (87Sr/86Sr), and tree-ring provenance testing—we present a new origin for the Plaza Tree. It did not grow in Pueblo Bonito or even nearby in Chaco Canyon. Rather, JPB-99 originated from the Chuska Mountains, over 50 km west of Chaco Canyon. The tree was likely carried to Pueblo Bonito sometime between AD 1100 and 1130, although why it was left in the west courtyard, what it meant, and how it might have been used remain mysteries. The origin of the Plaza Tree of Pueblo Bonito underscores deep cultural and material ties between the Chaco Canyon great houses and the Chuska landscape.

Not Much Ado about Mollusks

This chapter discusses the ways mollusks were differentially integrated into plantation foodways practices at Betty’s Hope. The focus on mollusk data is significant because it is frequently overlooked in historical zooarchaeology and was the animal taxon that demonstrated the most dramatic difference in use along the race- and class-based divisions of those who lived and worked at Betty’s Hope. In this case, mollusks were least abundant in the Great House, while the faunal assemblage associated with enslaved African contexts were almost entirely comprised of mollusk material.