Undocumented migrants entering the United States on foot through southern Arizona face extreme uncertainty and risk in their endeavor. The forces of decay and erasure experienced by migrants and the things they carry ensure the rapid disappearances of the traces—primary material evidence—of this already invisible and precarious social movement as it unfolds. Playing a large role in this erasure is U.S. border security policy, which routes migrants into remote spaces where their experiences are hidden and where they are likely to become lost, to become hurt, and die. The environment of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert rapidly decays both objects and human bodies when people die en route, where migrant death is as high per capita as it has ever been. When discovered by land managers, investigators, or others, the things migrants leave behind and their bodies after death are actively removed from the landscape. Remarkable within this context of erasure are the semi-permanent and deliberately placed vernacular shrines, which mark migrants’ engagement with risk. The evocative nature of shrines inspires their preservation and curation by non-migrants who encounter them. As shrine sites directly engage with the risks migrants face, because of their sacred aura, and because they uniquely persevere in the harsh desert landscape, these sites serve as memento mori. Tethered in place, they become physical and emotional points of reference for navigating a landscape characterized by risk and uncertainty.
This article, which centers upon the Neo-Assyrian empire of the early first millennium BCE, presents agriculture as a field of political intervention and transformation in the creation of imperial subjectivities. As part of the expansion process into territories of Upper Mesopotamia, Neo-Assyrian rulers (ca. 900–600 BCE) relied on settled agriculture to produce and promote imperial subjects bound to the authorities for whom they tilled and toiled. However, archaeobotanical data from Tušhan, a provincial capital of the empire, reveals that people under Neo-Assyria’s control did not fully conform to the idealized agrarian lifeways construed by officials to uphold Assyrian power and dictate subject conduct. Evidence for semi-nomadic pastoralism at Tušhan exposes the slippage between ideal agrarian subject and actual agrarian practice in the Neo-Assyrian empire, wherein lies the contestation over politically oriented subjectivities and their instantiation through land-use.
Currently, a unilinear, nation-bounded approach is taken to the recording and interpretation of the material heritage of immigration in settler nations, largely ignoring the transnational social fields to which the immigrants who created the heritage places and buildings belonged. Focusing on Chinese migration to Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, I offer the ‘heritage corridor’ concept as better representing the transnationally ‘stretched’ or ‘distributed’ built environment emerging from the cross-border flows of people, objects, ideas and money to which migration typically gives rise. I argue that intensities of affect and emotion have acted to entangle migrants and their relatives remaining at home in this environment. Remittance payments from Chinese migrants in Australia are shown to have been instrumental in the building of houses, temples, schools, shops, roads and bridges in the emigrant villages of Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province, many of which are now regarded as heritage items.
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, and relation. This paper presents an ontology of the Sq’éwlets Virtual Museum of Canada Website Project, a project that has focused on creating a digital community biography of the Sq’éwlets First Nation (www.digitalsqewlets.ca). Based on several decades of community archaeology and the recent production of short video documentaries, the website presents a long-term perspective of what it means to be a Sq’éwlets person and community member today. We explore how this project came to focus on the nature of being Sq’éwlets; how community members conceived the nature, structure, and nomenclature of the website; and how this Sq’éwlets being-ness is translated for outside audiences. We suggest what lessons this approach has for anthropological conventions of naming and knowing as they relate to Indigenous histories, and consider how archaeological knowledge can be transformed into a digital platform within a community-based process.
There are estimated to be around 1200 depictions of painted and engraved chariots in Saharan rock art, a number which has doubled in recent years. However, because of the nature of the environmental conditions in the Sahara, the chariot is regarded as having played a minor technological and cultural role, and archaeologists have been criticised for attributing too much importance to these images. This enquiry focuses on the aesthetic component of these depictions, addressing the variation in chariot representations. In reviewing the significance of these depictions beyond their technological significance, the aim is to consider how they functioned socially, culturally and cognitively within a Saharan context.
Archaeologists have frequently employed formal style-based approaches to identify regional rock art styles as a means to learning about social organization, territoriality, boundaries and interaction/communication. However, less attention has been devoted to interrogating the relational and cultural understandings of the motifs and sites subsumed under these broad regional style labels. In this article we focus on the complex social and cultural relationships tied to rock art at a regional level from northern Australia’s Gulf country to explore the association between a regional rock art style – the ‘Gulf style’ – and local Indigenous understandings of rock art. We argue that images from the southwest Gulf country are more than part of a regional rock art style – they are a part of an important network of ontological and epistemological encounters, which extends far beyond the rock wall in which they are encountered and into the realm of kinship, ceremony and Indigenous philosophical systems.
This article argues that international conservation and heritage governance are now entering new and historically important phases. The economic and political shifts that characterize globalization today are providing a platform for non-Western modes of heritage governance to gain newfound legitimacy on the international stage. With the appropriation of cultural heritage for commercial and political purposes occurring at all levels within the emerging economies of Asia, South America, the Middle East, and Africa, heritage conservation aid now plays an important role in the cultural diplomacy and soft power strategies of numerous countries in these regions. Analyses of the globalization of heritage governance in the mid-late 20th century have focused primarily on intergovernmental bodies, such as UNESCO, at the expense of critically reading the role nation-states continue to play in international conservation and heritage governance policy. Using examples from Asia, this paper addresses this imbalance by re-centering the nation-state in an account that argues the rise of heritage diplomacy, coupled with today’s shifting global order and ongoing reduction in UNESCO’s capacity, hold important implications for heritage conservation over the coming decades.
Recently a fierce criticism has been aimed at social history and how it has been directed by various forms of grand narratives. Some microhistorians have lent this critique a voice from where a new theoretical framework, the singularization of history, has arisen. It rejects the notion that fragments of historical data can be put together into rational and coherent metanarratives but emphasizes the need for an inward focus on the material at hand and interpretations free from the idealized perspectives on the past. Consequently, it involves scrutinizing the details of each event and object of research, looking for meaning within them rather than in larger contexts. In this paper, we intend to pose the question of if or how the idea of the singularization of history may apply to archaeology. Furthermore, we want to reflect upon the possibilities of a ‘singularized archaeology' that regards the things at hand by honouring the nature of singularities, their relations and ontological constitution and how they reassemble into composite entities like practices, events or persons.
This paper discusses what it means to label heritage as being ‘at risk’ in post-disaster landscapes in the city of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Discussions question the relevance of a ‘heritage at risk’ framework, pointing out the issues associated with starting from this popular threat-based model of preservation in the aftermath of near or total destruction. By challenging the hegemony of a ‘heritage at risk’ rhetorical device that constructs heritage typologies, this debate focuses instead on the emergence and mastering of new heritage in post-tsunami Aceh, and the ways in which a shift in focus is able to document and preserve the emergence of unique heritage constructs and priorities. This paper promotes the study of heritage as a performance that transcends an emphasis on victimhood, toward framing a heritage construct that is productive and dynamic, a steward for post-disaster identities.
Natural resource extraction projects such as dams and mines entail alteration to or destruction of natural and cultural landscapes. Heritage mitigation efforts often propose compensating for or salvaging material heritage, largely because this can be inventoried and evaluated alongside economic and environmental resources. Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is often overlooked, despite the fact that tangibles, intangibles, and economic resources together constitute the impacted landscape. Writing from the perspective of western Lesotho’s Metolong Dam, we view landscape as an embodiment of intangible heritage to explore what ‘landscape loss’ consequent on dam-building entails. We contend that this process involves dissociating intangibles from their material correlates, and transforming landscape experiences by dissolving and re-constituting boundaries and ‘resources’ in line with developer perspectives. We suggest that considering interdisciplinary approaches to landscape theorisation and ICH achieves a more nuanced view of how landscape loss and ICH interrelate, and thus improves mitigatory practice.
For over 200 years, until the 1960s, a system of haciendas and debt peonage dominated the rural economy of the central Ecuadorian highland province of Chimborazo. Over the last 40 years, with land reform and growing indigenous political and economic power, the hacienda system has declined. The ruins of hacienda architectural complexes now dot the landscape of highland Ecuador, presenting challenges to ideas of heritage representation, management, and visions of the rural past. Through the presentation of three case studies of hacienda complexes outside the town of Colta, Ecuador, I propose that these properties usefully remain in legal limbo, providing community architectural spaces and spaces for the memories of great pain that surround the hacienda era in this region.
Cultural anthropologists and historians have successfully adopted a borderlands perspective to investigate interaction, power, and identity between emerging or expanding state societies. This article develops an archaeological approach to such interstitial landscapes. It conceptualizes borderlands as spaces where people engage the material world under very specific geopolitical circumstances and create very specific materialities and subjectivities in the process. Political, social, and ideological dynamics between state societies produce two kinds of cultural spaces: hybrid "third spaces" and "fractured landscapes." Although seemingly contradictory, these often emerge side by side in the same physical space. We illustrate this process by exploring the expansion of the Catholic Church and the Swedish kingdom to the Northern Ostrobothnian coast in northern Finland during the Middle Ages (ca. 1300–1600). During this era, church buildings and cemeteries became sites where locals, ecclesial officials, and state agents negotiated their relations through complex material and spatial practices.
The term ‘sexual metaphor’ consists of two elements: sexuality and metaphor. Both individually and together provide a perspective on material culture, and particularly on the current discussions on the relations between humans, things and materiality. Using such relatively common objects as cock taps, bollock daggers and redware pipkins as examples, the article examines sexual metaphors in material culture from the 15th to the 17th centuries. Sexual metaphors – such as touching a barrel tap, or thrusting a bollock dagger – did not have hidden meanings. Instead, as situations they express the entanglement of two domains of practice, connecting everyday objects and repetitive practices with conceptions of sexuality and, for example, humoral theories about the human body.
This article explores the past as a lived, inhabited reality through a series of examples of indigenous heritage practices in NW Argentina (NWA), a region that in recent decades has seen increasing indigenous demands for autonomy as well as for land and cultural rights. This article seeks to understand the locations where heritage struggles emerge, as well as the artefacts around which they emerge, as social, semantic, and physical spaces of ontological multiplicity. Understanding how such places and artefacts are constituted as lived-in-the-flesh realities today requires examination of the multiple present connections that make them possible, as well as inquiry into how the sedimentation of previous lived experiences contributes to present understandings. This article examines ancient places that become gravity points, fuelling both indigenous politics and an academic practice with its own aesthetic code. To varying degrees, the cases explored reflect our involvement – as archaeological researchers, professional advisors, and museum visitors – with re-emergent indigenous heritage practices in the region.