Zulu Heritage between Institutionalized Commemoration and Tourist Attraction

This article engages critically with an aspect of the flourishing post-apartheid heritage sector in South Africa, shaped by the confluence of conservation objectives, political agendas, and tourism development strategies. It focuses on a number of memorials and new heritage sites in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) that officially commemorate and celebrate Zulu cultural heritage. Rural KZN is home to a complex, rapidly transforming society caught between a global trend toward Westernization and official policies or community forces that promote indigenous Africanist values. This is also a society characterized by the coexistence, or more often fusion, of Christian beliefs on the one hand and traditionalist ancestral beliefs and associated ritual practices on the other.

This article investigates how such cross-cultural influences affecting rural populations in KZN are reflected in the symbolic realm of monuments and memorials honoring the dead. The article first focuses on the recent trend toward the upgrading of burial sites of important clan leaders or members of the Zulu royal house; it then considers the new Spirit of eMakhosini monument, which is meant to draw attention to the eMakhosini Valley as the “Cradle of the Zulu nation” where many early kings lie buried. This monument initiative will be discussed critically in the context of the emergent cultural heritage tourism industry. Lastly, a few new battlefield memorials commemorating the previously unrepresented Zulu victims of the respective battles will be considered, pointing out how the designing artists attempt to fuse a Western, Eurocentric concept with local imagery and Afrocentric references. On the whole, the commemorative objects discussed in this article represent a shift towards modernity and commodification and reflect the values of a hybrid, transforming society.     

How I learned to love the bomb: excavating pueblo politics,love, and salvaged technologies after conflict

This article analyses the human technology of affect in excavation work in contemporary Spain. While the government continues to avoid addressing crimes committed during the Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship, many Spaniards have taken it upon themselves to address the past. The setting is in Abánades, a right‐wing pueblo destroyed in battle that rebuilt itself through the collecting and selling of battlefield scrap metal. Whereas some archaeologists and heritage managers view the pueblo's obsession with bombs and bullets as strange, I show how the pueblo's deep affection (cariño) for war materials challenges singular narratives of understanding the past. By examining the discovery and care of these materials through sensorial tools – what I call salvage technologies – we can probe the affective mechanics involved in how knowledge of the past is intimately produced and actively challenged in Spain today.     

Imagining race and nation in multiculturalist America

Post-1965 demographic changes in the United States [US] have brought blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans into direct conflict, raising the question of how and whether law and public policy should attempt to adjudicate conflicts among racialized minority groups. I argue in this article that for the past few decades, national political leaders in the US have promoted an official multiculturalist discourse that actually discourages Americans from naming and addressing these intergroup tensions. This discourse superficially reimagines race and nation – by moving from a biracial, black-white focus to a formal acknowledgment of multiracial difference – while refusing to acknowledge the complex interminority inequalities and antagonisms generated by this new diversity. How might we refocus national attention on the serious interminority conflicts and racial justice struggles unfolding around us? I consider resurrecting the traditional notion of racial hierarchy as a counter-narrative to official multiculturalist discourse before arguing instead for one which involves a more complex notion of “racial positionality”.     

SHAPING THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE: CONTENDING CIVIL SOCIETIES ON THE US–MEXICO BORDER

This article explores the cultural politics of memory and the reconfiguration of commemorative landscapes as one of the principal arenas within which the interiority and exteriority of place and identity are being re-narrated, contested, and re-enacted by actors and institutions representing a wide range of scalar stances. We treat place and identity as mutually constituted, dynamically interactive discursive and practical categories of becoming, and identify borderlands as multiscalar sites of imminence, where the interiority and exteriority of place and identity are re-narrated and re-enacted. Using a multiscalar network approach, we focus on the actors engaged in the cultural politics of memory in the southern Russian-Estonian borderlands. We conclude that borderlands are central multiscalar nodes where power, place and identity intersect, where the interior and exterior not only of Setomaa and Seto-ness, but also of Estonia and Estonian-ness, Russia and Russian-ness, and Europe and European-ness are reconfigured.     

Microevolution of African American dental morphology

The African American (AA) gene pool is primarily the result of gene flow between two biologically disparate groups: West Africans (WA) and Americans of western European descent (EA). This research utilizes characteristics of dental morphology to trace genetic relationships among WA, western Europeans (EU), AA, and European Americans. Dental morphological traits are useful for this purpose because they are heritable, do not remodel during life (although they can be lost to wear or pathology), and can be compared equally among samples from past and present populations. The results of this research provide new information about human microevolution through time and space in a biocultural setting. The mean measure of divergence is used to analyze dental morphological data from 1,265 individuals in 25 samples grouped by ancestry and time. Three hypotheses associated with admixture in AA are tested. When compared with known history, results from dental morphological data are equivocal in documenting admixture in AA. Dental morphological traits do appear to reflect admixture in AA. However, changes in trait frequencies do not closely correspond with important cultural events and trends such as the institutionalized racism of the Civil War and Jim Crow era. Results are mixed concerning whether AA with greater admixture were more likely to take part in the Great Migration to southern urban centers and to the North.     

'As Earth's testimonies tell': wilderness conservation in a changing world

Too often, wilderness conservation ignores a temporal perspective greater than the past 50 years, yet a long‐term perspective (centuries to millennia) reveals the dynamic nature of many ecosystems. Analysis of fossil pollen, charcoal and stable isotopes, combined with historical analyses and archaeology can reveal how ongoing interactions between climatic change, human activities and other disturbances have shaped today's landscapes over thousands of years. This interdisciplinary approach can inform wilderness conservation and also contribute to interpreting current trends and predicting how ecosystems might respond to future climate change. In this paper, we review literature that reveals how increasing collaboration among palaeoecologists, archaeologists, historians, anthropologists and ecologists is improving understanding of ecological complexity. Drawing on case studies from forested and non‐forested ecosystems in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australia, we discuss how this integrated approach can inform wilderness conservation and ecosystem management.     

Palaeoecology and long-term human impact in plant biology

Human impact is a collective concept that requires a holistic approach. Human needs eventually caused the development of cultural landscapes that are at the base of the current landscapes. The papers included in this special issue are evidence that cooperation between different disciplines helps to understand the trend of environmental transformation from past to future. Palaeoecology studies ecosystems of the past and needs archaeology to deepen sociocultural intervention in environmental patterns. In a similar way, ecologists have to include the complexity of societies and economies into landscape ecology by adding principles of human ecology into sustainability science. A brief history of previous actions encouraging the integration of palynology, archaeobotany, archaeology, botany and ecology is reported. The application of integrated studies comes to a new point, the research on the Long-Term Human Impact.     

When the past matters: memory politics and ethnic relations in Poland

This article identifies the conditions under which the interplay of past and present enables or constrains political action in the Polish public sphere. Using data from the Polish quality broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza, I account for the puzzles in the Jewish, German and Ukrainian minorities' memory work. The study reveals that history empowers ethnic groups differently, in the function of the certification by external allies, diverse salience of the arguments raised and the state's distinct memory projects. Namely, the high resonance of the Jews' claims that seize on the Holocaust narrative and official acknowledgement of their past allow the group to escape the limits of their narrow organizational capacities. In contrast, the state's rejection of the Germans' and Ukrainians' interpretations of the past has the effect of channelling minority claims towards the fight for acknowledgement.     

The past of others: Korean memorials in New York’s suburbia

Since the first decade of this century, public monuments to the memory of “comfort women” – women and girls forced into sexual service from the 1930s through 1945, by the Japanese Imperial Army – have been established in the United States by the Korean diaspora. This paper analyses recent memorials in the suburbs of New York that have experienced rapid immigration from Korea since the 1990s. The memorials met local resistance due to perceptions of unrelatedness to the American land. Such immigrant initiatives, however, have been supported by municipal governance. The project of inscribing a passage from East Asian history in the American context may be considered symptomatic of wider cognitive and social shifts in immigrant adaptation. Assimilation through the inclusion of immigrant heritage, along with an increasing sense of entitlement in being both “ethnic” and “American”, have been integral to this contest regarding collective memory.     

Archaeology, anthropology and subsistence

Wherever and whenever one may wish to place the roots of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, the subsistence-based categories of savage hunters and civilized farmers still lie at the heart of the division of much contemporary intellectual labour. The sources of these categories can be traced back into the seventeenth century, although they were first systematically related to (pre)history and cultural difference in the mid-eighteenth century. The subsequent relations between these categories and the changing disciplines of ethnology, ethnography, and archaeology have not remained constant over time or space. However, the underlying assumption that subsistence practices are meaningful and useful societal categories has persisted for the past 250 years. The relationship between such concepts, the closely associated idea of social evolution, and anthropology and archaeology, in particular from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, is examined. It is suggested that finding ways of writing across such categories is a necessary step for the future of both disciplines.     

Pasteur, Koch and American bacteriology

This study traces American awareness of the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch from the 1860s to the 1890s. In the years before the Civil War, American interest in germ theories had appeared at times of epidemics and persisted to a limited extent among physician-microscopists. Discussions of Pasteur's work occurred primarily in the context of spontaneous generation and antisepsis. Few Americans imitated his work on immunology or studied with Pasteur, but his work on immunity influenced their faith in the potential of bacteriology as a solution to problems of infectious disease. Koch's discoveries of the bacterial agents of tuberculosis and cholera stimulated American medical and public health interest in bacteriology in a more practical way. Americans learned Koch's methods by taking his courses and imported them directly into their own laboratories. A context of enthusiasm for science, educational reform, and problems of infectious disease associated with urbanization and changes in agriculture aided the growth of bacteriology in the American context.     

Preservation: A Developing Focus of American Archaeology

Social, historic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological values increasingly are considered in federal decision making affecting land use and modification . In situ preservation of significant archaeological properties is now often attainable through sensitive project planning. When destruction is unavoidable, funds are more often available for sound programs of data recovery than was the case in the past. The laws and policies which govern historic preservation challenge archaeologists to engage in regional planning, participate in agency decision making, emphasize conservation over excavation, develop explicit statements of research potential, and perform in a businesslike and professional manner. Particularism on the part of archaeologists, and procedural fossilization on the part of agencies, may hamper the development of balanced programs for preservation and scientific research . [Historic preservation, cultural resource management, public archaeology, archaeological law]     

Ecological approach to the genesis of calcium oxalate patinas on stone monuments

Summary The genesis of calcium oxalate patinas on stone monuments gives rise to controversial opinions. One of the proposed hypotheses links this phenomenon to the past presence of lichens on the exposed surfaces of monuments. However, the growth of a biological species cannot occur if environmental conditions are not compatible with its autoecology. Analysis of variations of the environmental factors that can act as «limiting factors» shows that in most monuments, the various exposures are not always compatible with biological growth. The environmental factor that seems to be the most limiting is the amount of surface water that is frequently below the range of tolerance of even the most xerophylous species. In the case of Trajan's column in Rome, the distribution of oxalate layers shows an opposite trend with respect to what we would expect for lichen colonization. Presently other kinds of biological colonization cannot be excluded.     

Monuments outlive history: Confederate monuments,the legacy of slavery,and black-white inequality

ABSTRACT

The conceptual linkages among Confederate monuments, slavery, and race suggest that Confederate monuments are relevant for explaining contemporary black–white inequality, yet we have little evidence on these relationships. I aim to further develop these possible connections. My analysis relies on a unique data set of Confederate monuments located in public spaces in the US South. I find that counties with Confederate monuments – specifically monuments inscribed with rhetoric glorifying either the soldiers as “heroes” or the cause as “pure” – have higher than expected levels of black–white poverty inequality. However, this relationship is stronger where the legacy of slavery is weaker, namely in counties with smaller historical concentrations of slaves. Confederate monuments are intertwined with a complex history, one that may continue to be reflected in the contemporary landscape of black–white inequality. The presented results are only suggestive, but they provide guidance for important avenues of future research.     

Seeing the Past: Visual Media in Archaeology

As digital media become increasingly affordable and accessible, visual representation in archaeology is expanding across several dimensions. In this essay, I examine some emerging forms of visual media in archaeology, including online documentaries, maps and photographs, hypermedia, experimental films, and peripatetic video. Visual media offer powerful opportunities for engagement with the public. In addition, archaeologists are finding new ways to use the visual in interpretation, analysis, and critique. Experimental visual works often are self-consciously reflexive, questioning and exposing the ways archaeological knowledge is constructed, represented, and disseminated.     

Prehistory, Identity, and Archaeological Representation in Nordic Museums

In this article, I examine the variable representation of Saami (Lapp) prehistory in several Nordic museums. The analysis is situated at the intersection of (1) the examination of the ideology of archaeological practice, (2) the discourse about creation of indigenous identity, and (3) the visual culture of museum exhibitions. I describe and analyze displays about archaeology and prehistory from seven museums in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The presentation of Saami prehistory differs significantly between majority community museums and those run by Saami communities. These presentations reflect ideologies implicated in building indigenous, nationalist, and pannational identities as well as in establishing legitimacy of Saami claims to land and heritage. Representations of the past are inevitably political because they are about linking people, place, and legitimacy. Ambiguities in these uses of prehistory are discussed, as is the globalizing role of the European Union.     

Biological diversity and cultural heritage

In this paper some examples of the development of communities of microorganisms and plants on historic buildings and monuments are shown. When the building stones differ from the surrounding natural substrata, an increase in the biological diversity of the area is produced. In some cases, monuments can come to constitute a true refuge for a few species when the natural habitat is threatened. It is suggested that biological diversity, when it does not represent a threat for the cultural heritage, should be considered worthy of preservation.     

Primate archaeology 3.0

The new field of primate archaeology investigates the technological behavior and material record of nonhuman primates, providing valuable comparative data on our understanding of human technological evolution. Yet, paralleling hominin archaeology, the field is largely biased toward the analysis of lithic artifacts. While valuable comparative data have been gained through an examination of extant nonhuman primate tool use and its archaeological record, focusing on this one single aspect provides limited insights. It is therefore necessary to explore to what extent other non-technological activities, such as non-tool aided feeding, traveling, social behaviors or ritual displays, leave traces that could be detected in the archaeological record. Here we propose four new areas of investigation which we believe have been largely overlooked by primate archaeology and that are crucial to uncovering the full archaeological potential of the primate behavioral repertoire, including that of our own: (1) Plant technology; (2) Archaeology beyond technology; (3) Landscape archaeology; and (4) Primate cultural heritage. We discuss each theme in the context of the latest developments and challenges, as well as propose future directions. Developing a more “inclusive” primate archaeology will not only benefit the study of primate evolution in its own right but will aid conservation efforts by increasing our understanding of changes in primate-environment interactions over time.     

The "Old West" in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country

ABSTRACT  In this article, I examine the role of the "Indian Country" heritage metaphor in U.S. military activities in the Middle East from a critical anthropological perspective. Research has revealed the proliferation of such discourse among soldiers, military strategists, reporters, and World Wide Web users to refer to hostile, unsecured, and dangerous territory in Iraq and Afghanistan. The salience of this symbol in 21st-century U.S. armed conflicts attests to its staying power in national narratives of colonialism at home and abroad. Summoning the "Indian wars" of the 19th century in the U.S. West as malleable symbolic parallels to the current war in Iraq serves to offer combat lessons in guerilla warfare while reinscribing epic stories of U.S. military imperialism and renarrating uncritically the struggles and conflicts of Native Americans, past and present, through the lens of contemporary perspectives on terrorism.