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2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Bonnie L. Pitblado

Since the emergence of the niche in Folsom, New Mexico, in the late 1920s, peopling archaeology has sought to understand the earliest human occupants of the Western Hemisphere. Three generations of practitioners have made great strides in the techno-environmental arena. However, we have largely failed to tap into PaleoIndigenous intellectual, emotional, and social lives—the very domains that made Ice Age people as fully human as we are. As a result, our interpretations of those pioneering populations could often apply as readily to a colony of ants or a herd of wildebeest as they do to living, breathing, thinking, dreaming, loving, striving human ancestors. This article first explores the reasons for our failure to fully actualize First Peoples, identifying and implicating a feedback loop that includes practitioner homogeneity (we have always been and continue to be disproportionately white men of European descent); our predominantly positivist worldview; our language, training, and practice; and even the limited nature of the material record we study. This article also, however, highlights the ways that an important minority of peopling scholars have sought to access the humanity of PaleoIndigenous people. By more consistently mobilizing our own human capacity to creatively interrogate the deep past, we will produce scholarship that more consistently recognizes the capacity of the people who lived it and, just as importantly, respects those living today.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan S. Reeves ◽  
Tomos Proffitt ◽  
Lydia V. Luncz

AbstractThe ability to modify the environment through the transport of tools has been instrumental in shaping the evolutionary success of humans. Understanding the cause-and-effect relationships between hominin behavior and the environment ultimately requires understanding of how the archaeological record forms. Observations of living primates can shed light on these interactions by investigating how tool-use behaviors produce a material record within specific environmental contexts. However, this requires reconciling data derived from primate behavioral observations with the time-averaged nature of the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record. Here, we use an agent-based model to investigate how repeated short-distance transport events, characteristic for primate tool use, can result in significant landscape-scale patterning of material culture over time. Our results illustrate the conditions under which accumulated short-distance transport bouts can displace stone tools over long distances. We show that this widespread redistribution of tools can also increase access to tool require resources over time. As such, these results elucidate the niche construction processes associated with this pattern of tool transport. Finally, the structure of the subsequent material record largely depends on the interaction between tool transport and environmental conditions over time. Though these results have implications for inferring hominin tool transports from hominin archaeological assemblages. Furthermore, they highlight the difficulties with connecting specific behavioral processes with the patterning in the archaeological record.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-71
Author(s):  
Amara Solari ◽  
Linda K. Williams

In the first decades of the Franciscan evangelical campaign in Yucatán, Mexico (1540–90), Maya builders and artists directed the construction and pictorial decoration of hundreds of Christian edifices, ranging from small-scale chapels to larger churches and entire monastic complexes, offering a material record of the peninsula’s religious transformation. Strategic color selection and the deployment of Maya blue pigment in particular architectural, iconographic, and liturgical contexts enabled Indigenous catechumens to reconcile post-Tridentine conceptions of divinity with precontact sacred ideologies. By weaving diverse methodologies from the study of visual sources, textual documents, and material characterization techniques, we demonstrate how colonial Maya color theory actively engineered localized Catholicism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 23-56
Author(s):  
Ersin Hussein

The events leading up to and surrounding the annexation of Cyprus from Ptolemaic Egypt by Rome and the administration of the island have been studied at length. For the sake of brevity, this chapter summarizes key details in light of recent scholarly interpretations of the events that occurred throughout this period of transition in the island’s history (from Ptolemaic to Roman, then back to Ptolemaic rule, before securely returning to Roman rule once and for all in 30 BC). Literary evidence has been crucial for understanding the organization and character of Roman administration of the island from 58 to 22 BC. After 22 BC, literary references of the identities and activities of Roman officials posted to the island are sparse, and from here on it is the material record that is most instructive. This chapter examines familiar, previously overlooked, and new material, to analyse further the nature of local interactions with Rome’s representatives. The available evidence for the proconsuls of Roman Cyprus significantly outweighs information for other officials; therefore, this study deals only with their representation and does not address records of their subordinates. The following features of the epigraphic, numismatic, and literary sources will be examined: where monuments were set up, by whom and why; the use of epithets; and in general, the use of epigraphic conventions and language. This chapter presents a revised list of proconsuls before closing with discussion of local levels of administration—notably the koinon Kuprion


Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič

By combining the study of early modern everyday religion and the study of material culture, new light is shed on daily religious beliefs, practices, and identities. This chapter examines what the material record discloses about everyday religion in the light of new theoretical developments in material culture studies and studies of material religion in anthropology and sociology. It sets out how detailed, qualitative analysis of inventories and objects provides access to the inner devotional lives of Prague burghers. The analysis is embedded in a broader discourse of religion and material culture across the early modern world. It situates the study in a wider context by comparing and contrasting seventeenth-century Prague to milieus elsewhere in Europe.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth C. Robinson

The introduction situates the book within the broader discourse of work on the Roman conquest of Italy. It begins by discussing the theoretical underpinnings and methodological considerations of the work. After a historiographical discussion of “Romanization studies,” it mentions three models that will be drawn on in the work (those of Mattingly, Barrett, and Terrenato). It then discusses the importance of the spread of Hellenistic culture throughout Italy for studies of the Roman conquest. Next, it examines recent regional studies of the Roman conquest of Italy, particularly in central and southern Italy. It brings up three key questions that will be addressed in the work: How did Larinum’s participation in the broader Hellenistic koiné contribute to its integration into the Roman state? What forms of Roman influence spread to Larinum during the period in question and how did they arrive there? And, in what ways do the changes in Larinum’s material record reflect broader cultural developments both at the site and within its territory? It makes the case for Larinum’s being a prime candidate for this type of study by laying out the available evidence for the creation of a site biography before ending with an overview of the main argument of the book.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Yağmur Heffron

Abstract This article offers a historiographical examination of how 20th-century ideas of assimilation and cultural purity have shaped our understanding of Bronze Age Anatolia, focusing on the canonical narrative of Assyrian presence at the site of Kültepe-Kaneš. According to this narrative, Old Assyrian merchants who lived and conducted business at Kaneš from the early 20th to the late 18th century BC left no trace in the archaeological record except for cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, assimilating to local culture to such a degree that Kültepe’s archaeological record is entirely of Anatolian character. The accuracy of this view has met increasing circumspection in recent years. What remains to be articulated is why it remained unchallenged for so long, from its initial formulation in 1948 until the late 2000s, during which time it was widely repeated and reiterated. It is proposed here that the persistence and longevity of what is essentially a misconstrued notion of foreign (in)visibility in Kültepe’s material record can be explained by treating it as a ‘factoid’. The article first historicises the factoid’s formulation and subsequent development. This is followed by a critical evaluation of the evidentiary bases of the factoid to show how disciplinary tendencies to privilege certain categories of evidence over others have created artificial gaps in the data. Ultimately, the article seeks to highlight the epistemological implications of how one of the key sites of Bronze Age Anatolia came to represent a perceived rather than an observed case of indigenous cultural purity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 51-84
Author(s):  
Lisa Stead

The chapter examines two key roles from different stages of Vivien Leigh’s career that highlight her work as an active collaborator in adapting roles from stage and page to screen. It looks firstly at her work on A Streetcar Named Desire in the early 1950s, considering how she exercised authorial agency in assisting with the adaptation of the script from stage to screen. The chapter then examines how she navigated the interlocking issues of age and gender and their impact on star labor in the 1965 adaptation of Ship of Fools. I consider how materials such as script annotations, paper correspondence, and phone call transcripts speak more broadly to the archive’s potential to deconstruct the film performance by mapping out its prehistory, interrogating this as a process of personal and collaborative development. The chapter also considers the material record of projects documented in Vivien Leigh’s archive that did not come to fruition.


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