This study looks at archival records and photographs from the pre-WWII Japanese occupation of the Micronesian island of Tinian to discuss the archaeological remnants of the Okinawan diaspora from the 1920s to 1940s in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) today.
Japanese diaspora archaeology originated in the late 1960s but reports and publications did not appear until the 1980s. Early studies often included Japanese artifacts or sites within larger surveys, but by the 1990s and 2000s were the focus of targeted research. Most research has been undertaken in western North American and the Pacific Islands. Pre-War farms and work camps and...
Historical archaeologists often view curated or heirloom pottery as a frustrating anomaly in the dating of historical-period sites or contexts. Fewer pause to consider why the artifacts were curated in the first place, or what their presence reveals about the people who maintained them. Drawing on a case study of curated micaceous pottery at a Hispanic diaspora site in east...
This paper presents the first archaeometrical data on colonial glazed wares (taches noires) imported in Haiti (Fort Liberté). The analysis evidenced the exclusive presence of Italian taches noires products, dated before 1820 and related to the colonial era. The presence of English wares next to colonial materials demonstrated continuity in the use of landscape after the...
The archaeology of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) has experienced an important development over the last two decades. Several field projects have studied aspects such as mass graves, forced labor camps, and battlefields. In this paper, we present a case study from the so-called “Northern Front” (Frente Norte). The impressive mountain of Monte Bernorio, situated at the foothills...
Archaeological deposits build up inside standing buildings both under and between floors and these have the potential to provide considerable information about human behavior in the past. Under and between floor spaces provide a unique depositional environment that allow the survival of rare and fragile organic materials that typically do not survive in other archaeological...
Smell is a language, communicative and interpretive. Firmly embedded in the physical, social, emotional, and semantic context, odor emanates as existential expression that is integral and idiosyncratic to human culture, behaviors, and practices. Advances in scientific techniques allows for odor to be used as primary source evidence. Focusing on a ground-breaking technique...
Unlike other social sciences, the archaeological discipline has been lacking a theoretical framework to discuss the mechanism of migration. Traditionally, patterns of population movements were denoted from material culture and interpreted within the context of ethnicity and the diffusion of ideas without considering underlying processes and incentives, despite active...
In this paper, I propose a method to improve the intercomparability of different artifact groups by narrowing the error caused by the differences in material densities. The products, especially of mixed materials, have not been previously analyzed as regards whether or not they have statistically significant differences in material densities or whether the densities affect...
This paper is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary presentation of stone walls in the Central European mountains from the perspective of landscape archaeology based on field surveys and analysis of cartographic and LiDAR data. The stone walls in the Izera Mountains of southwestern Poland are the largest ones in the region, as they represent a rare case of fully enclosed...
This paper aims to discuss subalterns in different social environments in Sweden. The potential of archaeological studies of landless subalterns in rural and urban areas are shown though a number of case studies. It is argued that archaeology can show the multivocality of the lives of the subalterns, in the same way as it shows how the subalterns organized their daily life. This...
The Kondui Palace is the world-famous archaeological site of the Mongolian Empire’s period. However, few people know that the ruins of the palace were used for the construction of the Orthodox Virgin church in the Kondui village in the early nineteenth century. This paper describes the construction of the church with regard to studies of the Mongolian palace.
This article proposes that early modern globalization took shape through the global circulation of gender ideologies, sexual politics, engendered technologies, and engendered knowledge. It does so by exploring the early years of Jesuit missions in Guam (Mariana Islands) and describes mission policies as engendered sexual policies that fostered the emergence of a new sex/gender...
When survivors from the Ravensbrück concentration camp arrived in Sweden in spring 1945, some of the objects they brought with them from the camp were collected and preserved. These are modest in appearance, but were – as oral testimonies show – invaluable in camp. The concentration camp context of obliteration stretches the limits of interpretation of material culture to its...
The theft of mundane items of material culture from the ground of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2015 by English schoolboys raises a number of questions about the value of similar items at this and other Nazi camps. This paper explores questions of value, interpretation, and the categorization of objects from such camps, before examining the case study of Lager Wick, a forced labor camp...
The prisoners of the former concentrations camps were supposed to be deprived of their socialization by brutal dehumanization. Among other things, the use of blue-and-white striped prison clothes was meant to reinforce a homogeneous and uniform prisoner society. However, studies from a sociological perspective have shown that prisoners’ societies were indeed diverse and...
This paper examines the premise that officially sponsored heritage bodies in England are intrinsically involved in the formation of national memories which fail to reflect the stresses within British society and ignore the value of areas of recent past. As a result, investigation of sections of British history is discouraged and the archeological potential of sites of conflict...
The papers in this issue come out of the Archaeology of Reform/Archaeology as Reform session at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Leicester, England. Focusing on many different institutions and programs, this volume was brought together to explore the idea of social reform as it manifests in different ways in different places. At its very basic level...