NEXUS

Design theory analysis of biface technology at the Botanie Lake Dam site (EcRj 15), south-central British Columbia

Paul Ewonus — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:18 PDT

Editor’s note: This article appears as a reprint from Volume 18 due to printing errors. Nexus apologizes to the author for the delay in publishing the work in its entirety.

A design analysis is applied to six bifacial tools recovered from the Botanie Lake Dam site (EcRj 15) on the Plateau of southern British Columbia. While these artifacts, selected from the lithic assemblage of this late pre-contact period mat lodge campsite, show some internal variation, they share important characteristics indicative of their use by Plateau peoples. Acute edge angles and less durable raw material suggests that these bifacial tools were used to cut relatively soft contact materials such as herbaceous plants. Their lengthy use lives and multifunctionality make them effective solutions for the requirements of plant and animal processing during a mobile seasonal round. This application of design theory to a small sample of lithic artifacts from a seasonal camp site with an hypothesized focus on root resource harvesting and processing adds to the growing number of studies employing this approach to lithic analysis.

Book review: Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland. Marianne Sommer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, xii + 398 pp, list of archives consulted, 14 figures, 2 appendices.

Heather T. Battles — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:17 PDT

In Bones and Ochre, author Marianne Sommer, a historian of science, aims to address her discipline’s neglect of paleoanthropology and prehistoric archeology (11). Sommer situates her book among other recent works in the history of science, such as Keller (2000), Secord (2000), and Daston (2000; 2004), as well as those which contextualize the anthropological sciences, including Hammond (1980), Bowler (1986), and Delisle (2007). Drawing on both published and archival sources, Sommer takes on the large task of tracing the history of paleoanthropology through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as she follows the changing biography of the “Red Lady of Paviland.” She uses this ochre-stained fossil skeleton and its role (along with that of associated artifacts) as an “anthropological object,” at once a natural, material object and meaningful concept (6), to demonstrate the historically contingent nature of anthropological interpretation, as the Red Lady’s age, sex, ethnicity, and place in human history shift multiple times from discovery in 1823 to the present day.

The social, political, and economic causes of violence in Argentine soccer

Eugenio Paradiso — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:14 PDT

In recent years, the changing character of Argentine political culture has influenced the ways in which groups of soccer fans organize themselves around political and economic goals. Argentine soccer clubs have always had strong ties to local and national politics. In this article, I examine the relationships between Argentine political culture and corruption in soccer since 1976, the year in which the last military regime took power. During the dictatorship, acts of violence were unregulated. The so-called Grupos de Tarea (death squads) found themselves in a position of absolute power, meaning that they had the freedom to act independently without having to justify their actions in front of a centralized authority. Present-day barrabravas (Argentine hooligans) have copied the behaviour of the death squads. Contrary to what happens in other national contexts, the spread of violence in Argentine soccer is encouraged by social leaders through corrupt political and economic arrangements that benefit all parties involved. Being a barrabrava is a full time job based on the use of violence. By using a comparative approach, I emphasize the need to understand local specificities when examining soccer violence in different national contexts. The structure of Argentine soccer allows fans to penetrate the political sphere of soccer clubs. This, in turn, creates an environment where organized groups of fans develop strong ties to club officials. By contrast, soccer violence in Italy and Holland remains apolitical. Soccer hooliganism has no universal causes and no universal solutions.

It’s all about Cinderella – and the Prince?: Women’s NGOs in Bulgaria

Christine Kennedy — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:11 PDT

The fall of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 generated fundamental political and socio-economic transformations. The introduction of the free-market economy in the region led to the closure or privatization of state corporations and, consequently, to an increase of the unemployment rate, while reductions of state funding for social services resulted in the erosion of former securities. Simultaneously, Western and international agencies and organisations have transferred billions of US dollars of financial aid into the region. Among the receivers of Western funding were Eastern European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) aiming to support local women through the transformations and to advocate their rights. Several authors, however, have pointed out that many of them pursue what they and/or their Western donors think is best for women rather than focusing on what women themselves consider their needs and wishes. This paper critically reviews two Bulgarian women’s NGOs, including a discussion of their representations of women, the influence of Western donors, and the issue of who benefits from the NGOs’ work. I argue that both NGOs, although they claim to advocate equal opportunities for women and men, pursue a ‘women-only’ approach by ignoring gender relations – an issue that is also largely overlooked by the critics presented in this paper. I conclude that NGOs, if they want to assist and support local women, ought to implement a ‘women-and-men-together’ approach, consider what women themselves view as their needs, and challenge neoliberalism.

Discussion of screen size and resource depression: Using an examination of Faleloa, Tonga

Nadia Densmore — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:09 PDT

Resource depression has become prominent in the study of faunal material from the archaeological record in recent years. One of the chief concerns in these studies is the difference in amount of material between that has been collected, versus that which has been lost during the excavation process. This paper addresses some of the theoretical and methodological issues of resource depression as well as the use of screen size in zooarchaeological studies. The fish material collected from unit 16 of the site of Faleloa, Tonga is analysed through three different mesh sizes, to address the importance of the 1/8” and 1/16” screen sizes.

Bones, people and communities: Tensions between individual and corporate identities in secondary burial ritual

Ani Chénier — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:06 PDT

This review of archaeological and ethnographic literature on secondary burial practices explores how different theoretical understandings of the body inform interpretations of mortuary practice as a forum for negotiations of identity and community among the living. Tension between various scales of identity – personal and corporate – assumed by the deceased are shown to be key elements in many of these negotiations. The materiality of the body can allow participants to explore these tensions through physical manipulations that are part of ritual practice. However, ethnographic examples suggest that multiple interpretations can exist for similar practices, and that secondary burial practices are often mutable and fluid in meaning. While historically contingent, variations in practice can become a means of group identification or differentiation.

Health and morbidity in ancient Chilean populations: Preliminary perspectives using subadult data

Christine Elisabeth Boston — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:03 PDT

Bioarchaeological studies have suggested a general trend whereby the health of past populations degraded as they transitioned from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle. Ancient societies of northern Chile provide a unique perspective on this debate in that while the earliest societies relied on hunting and gathering they were at the same time sedentary. Furthermore, later agricultural Chilean societies had relatively balanced diets since they also relied on fishing. Thus, this study examined four skeletal markers of health on sixty-one subadults ranging from the Archaic (7000-1000 B.C.) to Late Horizon (A.D. 1476-1532) periods in order to prove the impact of subsistence strategies and social organization on individuals’ health. These health markers were cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis, trauma, dental pathological conditions, and infections. Despite the small sample size, this study gives a glimpse of childhood health conditions and morbidity patterns in northern Chile. The results showed no statistical differences of morbidity patterns between preagricultural and agricultural societies, a contradiction to previous assumptions about morbidity differences between preagricultural and agricultural societies.

Long bone bilateral asymmetry in the nineteenth-century Stirrup Court Cemetery collection from London, Ontario

Heather T. Battles — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:27:01 PDT

This study employs non-destructive methods to investigate patterns of long bone bilateral asymmetry in a skeletal sample from the nineteenth-century peri-urban Stirrup Court Cemetery collection from London, Ontario, Canada. The St. Thomas Cemetery skeletal sample from urban Belleville, Ontario provides additional data for comparison. While one objective of the study is to determine the etiologies of any asymmetries and to identify patterns in what measurements on which bones displayed the most asymmetry, another objective is to test the hypothesis that limbs indicating asymmetry due to pathology or trauma in one element would show bilateral asymmetries elsewhere in the same bone and limb, due to either atrophy alone or to additional compensatory hypertrophy. Overall, the Stirrup Court data shows a general pattern of crossed symmetry, and when compared with the Belleville data the pattern of high and low absolute asymmetries is consistent. The results reveal a lack of asymmetry in elements with obvious long-term damage, which may indicate that caution is required in making determinations about lived impairment/disability in such cases. The sexual dimorphism in asymmetry in both samples, with males displaying more asymmetry in humeral minimum shaft circumference in the Stirrup Court sample, likely reflects the division of labor and behavior patterns in these populations. Finally, this study suggests that the effects of osteoarthritis may mask non-age-related impairment/disability, and that the skeletal record of impairment/disability is likely affected by differential preservation, with consequences for the emerging field of the archeology of disability.

Race, Politics and History in a Survey of Contemporary Ethnographic Writing on Trinidad

Sacha Geer — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:14:52 PDT

Contemporary anthropological work in Trinidad is largely focused on theorizing the racial antagonisms between Indo and Afro Trinidadians. Since the time of independence, political leaders have called for unity and harmony amongst . Trinidadians, but individuals of all racial groups who utilize primordial understandings of race in everyday discourse to negotiate tensions and define themselves contest the shape and content of what it means to be Trinidadian. While a study of Trinidadian history shows that many of the stereotypes which operate in contemporary Trinidad have their roots in colonial discourses surrounding Afro and Indo Trinidadians, ethnographic work shows that these stereotypes have changed in response to various political and economic pressures, and that individuals utilize or ignore these stereotypes depending on context and goals. Further, Indo-Trinidadians have historically been semantically excluded from the lexicon which describes what it means to be Trinidadian by their exclusion from the term 'Creole,' and as such have faced considerable difficulty accessing reins of political power due to their exclusion from a sense of Trinidadian identity.

Imagining Nations: An Anthropological Perspective

Samah Sabra — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:14:50 PDT