Opening a New Frontier in the Study of Neolithic Settlement Patterns of Eastern Thessaly, Greece

The Innovative Geophysical Approaches for the Study of Early Agricultural Villages of Neolithic Thessaly (ARISTEIA-IGEAN) Project made an extensive use of geospatial technologies in the study of the natural environment and social dynamics of Neolithic settlements within the coastal region of eastern Thessaly, Greece. The goal of the project was to offer a broad and non-destructive remote sensing coverage of a number of Neolithic settlements to study habitation practices that were developed in various ecological niches and to document site-specific cultural and environmental characteristics. The methods and techniques used in the IGEAN project included satellite remote sensing, Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), ground-based geophysical surveys exploring new generation prospection instrumentation, and soil analyses. The manifold research agenda proved to be effective for the detailed mapping of soils in which archaeological residues of past occupation reside. The full open-access geospatial data is served online at http://igean.ims.forth.gr/. The IGEAN project exposed a large degree of variation in the occupation of the landscape and the usage of space in both small and large settlements. The study was able to capture an integrated image of the habitation settings and highlight the large degree of divergence in the intra-site settlement patterns of these agrarian societies. The synthesis of the results opens up further research questions regarding early agricultural villages of Neolithic Thessaly.

Ontogeny

Unlike any other animal we have a history. We live in historical time thanks to culture and culture is largely technological in nature, whether the technologies we identify are languages, cities or machines. History as the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus told us, is the story of constant change. In the case of war, our behavior has witnessed three major historical transitions: from the primate stage of evolution to one that was recognizably human; from the hunter – gather stage of existence to the emergence of agrarian societies; and finally the transition from the agricultural to the industrial era. And if war is universal – if it transcends both time and culture – different societies have different ways of thinking about war and conducting it. Indian, Chinese and European ways of thinking were all different from each other and were different again from the Meso– American. Uniformity has finally arrived with the digital era.

Children in the New Testament World

At the turn of the 20th century, Clarence Herbert Woolston penned the words to the now famous children’s song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (published in Gospel Message 1-2-3 Combined, edited by J. Lincoln Hall, Adam Geibel, and C. Austin Miles [Philadelphia: Hall-Mack Company, 1915], p. 355). Woolston’s song is reflective both of the American Sunday School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and the growing trend in popular biblical studies to read Jesus as a friend of children. However, a few early monographs not excepting, children did not receive sustained attention in New Testament scholarship until the 21st century. This is distinct from studies and application of the metaphorical use of “children” and “child” as rhetorical or metaphorical images in New Testament texts, especially the Epistles, which is considered in a separate entry (“Child Metaphors in the New Testament,” forthcoming). With the advent of the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies and child theology in the 1980s and 1990s, the stage was set to study more closely both Jesus’s relationship with children as portrayed in the New Testament texts and the child characters, Jesus included, therein. In terms of sheer demographics, children are estimated to have made up roughly two-thirds of ancient agrarian societies, such as the 1st-century Mediterranean. As such, when the feminist principle of reclaiming characters from the “shadows” of the text is employed, the imprint of children can be seen across the New Testament. This widespread presence of children in 1st-century Judea and Galilee has also been confirmed by social science and archaeological investigations. Moreover, such investigations have revealed that the character and nature of childhood, or more properly, childhoods in these contexts, was radically different than many of the 21st-century assumptions. Most notably, the assumptions that the Jesus movement was solely positive for children, or that such positivity was unique, have been called into question. To this end, the study of children in the New Testament seeks to bring to light both the presence and lives of child characters in these texts and the children among their original audiences while avoiding anachronistic and supercessionist assumptions. What has resulted is a more nuanced reading both of the experience and character of childhoods in the 1st-century world and, as a result, of the New Testament texts.

Crooked limbs

This chapter describes thalidomide embryopathy as a paradigm of exogenous malformation. Previously, 1 in 1000 newborns had a limb anomaly, dreaded by agrarian societies that valued their offspring according to their bodily fitness. During the Middle Ages, malformations were attributed to cohabitation with animals or maternal imagination. Thalidomide, produced by the German company Chemie Grünenthal, was a popular sleeping pill marketed in Germany from 1957, in Britain from 1958, and in many other countries. With a 9-month delay and until 1962, over 10,000 severely malformed infants were born worldwide, the most frequent defects being limb reductions, ear and eye anomalies, and heart malformations. The drug’s toxicity was species specific and acted from 24 to 33 days after fertilization, when many women did not yet know they were pregnant. The epidemic was the greatest disaster in the history of pharmacology, and revealed severe shortcomings in German drug legislation. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, drug laws were tightened and patient safety has improved. The price was that in European countries, it became difficult to develop new drugs for infants.

The Linear Pottery culture face vessel from the site Biskupice 18, southern Poland

This paper presents the stylistic analysis of a unique face vessel fragment, found at a recently excavated settlement of the Linear Pottery culture near Biskupice, located in the Carpathian foothill region in southern Poland. The evaluation is based on a multivariate analysis of the stylistic features of 130 human face vessels from 91 Central European Neolithic sites of the Linear Pottery culture and the Alföld Linear Pottery culture, and is conducted with the help of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). The main objective of the research is to find the closest analogies of the Biskupice by tracking similarities between the manner of execution of the combination of facial elements and accompanying motifs appearing on the Biskupice vessel and on other depictions of the human face. This investigation also aims to make inferences about the chrono-cultural connections of the first agrarian societies in the area of the Carpathian foothills with other regions of the Linear Pottery world.

Hydroclimate Variability Influenced Social Interaction in the Prehistoric American Southwest

When droughts and floods struck ancient agrarian societies, complex networks of exchange and interaction channeled resources into affected settlements and migrant flows away from them. Did these networks evolve in part to connect populations living in differing climate regimes? Here, I examine this relationship with a long-term archaeological case study in the pre-Hispanic North American Southwest, analyzing 4.3 million artifacts from a 250-year period at nearly 500 archaeological sites. I use these artifacts to estimate how the flow of social information changed over time, and to measure how the intensity of social interaction between sites varied as a function of distance and several regional drought patterns. Social interaction decayed with distance, but ties between sites in differing oceanic and continental climate regimes were often stronger than expected by distance alone. Accounting for these different regional drivers of local climate variability will be crucial for understanding the social impacts of droughts and floods in the past and present.

The Structure of Religion, Ethnicity, and Insurgent Mobilization

ABSTRACT This article problematizes the social structure of ethnic groups to account for variation in insurgent mobilization within and across ethnic groups. Relying on network-based approaches to social structure, it argues that insurgent mobilization is constrained by the structural connectivity of the ethnic group, a measure of the extent to which subethnic communities—neighborhoods, villages, clans, and tribes—are socially connected internally and with each other. In agrarian societies, structural connectivity is traced to religion. On the basis of unique data on rebel recruitment from the Mizo insurgency in India and microlevel variations in changes associated with the spread of Christianity among Mizos, the author demonstrates that enhanced structural connectivity resulting from a network of highly centralized churches and institutions under the Welsh Presbyterian Mission significantly bolstered insurgent recruitment. Semistructured interviews of Mizo insurgents and ethnographic evidence from the neighboring Meitei and Naga ethnic insurgencies further support the argument and the casual mechanism.

Territoriality and Violent Conflicts in Tivland

Although ethno-territorial struggles affect the manner in which political authority is constituted and legitimised throughout the world, their impact on the trajectories of power and the state in Africa have not received the attention deserved in the literature on political development and state building. In majoritarian agrarian societies, land tenure, just like the granting of usufruct rights to water, shapes economic and political dynamics. Conflicts over land and struggles over access to the key resources of agricultural production – fertile soils, green vegetation and water – are widespread throughout Africa and are likely to intensify in the light of ongoing climate change-induced production constraints. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data on the farmer-herder conflicts between Fulani pastoralists and Tiv agriculturalists in Tivland, north-central Nigeria, over land and water resources, this study establishes how the struggles over agricultural resources, governance and political power have shaped the violent transformations in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria.