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We have turned to things, it is argued in different contexts by social and cultural scholars. The previously neglected stuff of life is back and now deserves to be embraced and included in our histories and democracies. This paper discusses our efforts to include these others and seeks to reflect on how some of our gestures of inclusion may not be as humble and tolerant as we like to argue. With reference to an ongoing archaeological research of a recently abandoned herring station in Iceland's northwest the paper discusses how the archaeological remembering of this site, and its inclusion in historical narration, can in fact easily result in the active forgetting of things, their fragmented and discontinuous memory and their utter silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine the role of the built environment as a tool of nineteenth-century British colonial expression within the Red Sea island town of Suakin, Sudan. Within Suakin and its environs, four major European focal points were examined through the use of archaeological survey and excavation. These were; (1) waterfront development (2) centers of colonial management, (3) terrestrial and maritime communication and (4) defense. The central argument of the paper is that economic and social control was maintained through the creation of new urban morphologies and European domination of existing urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly knowledge of the historical settlements in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area in northern South Africa is fundamentally entangled with narratives told to N. J. Van Warmelo by two women, Sekgobogobo and Mphengwa. The account based on these stories narrated elements of Sekgobogobo's life history, and pointed to the at times lethal effects of internal political processes combining with regional instability and an approaching colonial frontier. This paper establishes a recursive relationship between this narrative and archaeological excavations to deepen the understanding of the sociopolitical dynamics in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of archaeological site formation processes, although routinely undertaken for prehistoric sites, is only carried out in historical archaeology in a limited way. Understanding the processes which formed the archaeological record of a site is an important first step towards developing justifiable inferences about past behavior and past societies regardless of the age of the site. This paper identifies and examines the cultural and non-cultural processes that formed the archaeological record at the Commissariat Store, Brisbane. The history of the site, from its construction in 1829 as part of the Moreton Bay penal settlement to the present, is examined and the expected impacts and processes on the archaeological record are identified. Archaeological evidence from the salvage excavation of the site undertaken in 1978 and 1979 is analyzed to identify the cultural and non-cultural site formation processes. This study identifies the presence of cultural formation processes including discard, loss, abandonment and re-use from an examination of the historical and archaeological evidence. Non-cultural formation processes at work in the site include faunalturbation, floralturbation, flooding, and aquaturbation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zooarchaeological works in the city lack of a specific theoretical and methodological framework to understand its faunal assemblages. The different analyses were done in most cases following procedures that had been developed for hunter-gatherer contexts. In this paper, we evaluate some questions related to this issue, encompassed in the acquisition mode and the characteristics of the archaeological record. Finally, an example from two sites in La Boca, Buenos Aires city, Argentina is given in order to understand some of these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a substantial literature on the use of oral history in archaeology, but there has been little consideration of the kinds of oral history and memory produced by the practice of archaeology. Through the personal narratives of a range of people involved in excavation during the 1960s in Britain, this paper explores understandings of what has been described as an archaeological 'sub-culture'. It examines the ideas and interests that motivated peoples' engagement in the 'digging circuit' at this time, and looks at how these were implicated in the archaeology that was produced. We argue that such accounts do not simply expose the 'subjective' context in which archaeological knowledge of these sites emerged but constitute an explicit and vital challenge to established accounts of archaeology in Britain at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Alderley Sandhills Project (ASP) was designed to archaeologically explore the transformative roles of industrialization and de-industrialization on the working communities of rural England. Collection of oral histories was an intrinsic element of fieldwork, with project participants including elderly former residents and neighbors of the excavated cottages. Their narratives provided a crucial source for understanding social meanings of the archaeological objects and places within this study site, particularly over the inter-war decades of the early twentieth century. Drawing from elements of this multi-year project, this paper will explore the dynamic maintenance of community life through the composition of social memories, and the materiality of social belonging, to illuminate the inner world of the Hagg Cottages of Alderley Edge, Cheshire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ringforts, the most numerous archaeological monument in the Irish landscape, have a dual character as places of early medieval habitation and as supernatural points of access to a fairy Otherworld. In my paper, I examine how these understandings interacted with, challenged and reinforced each other in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how oral perceptions had a significant if generally unacknowledged role in determining supposedly scientific archaeological perceptions of these monuments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the processes of settlement and abandonment of the medieval countryside as revealed by archaeological surveys undertaken in southern Greece. The Nemea region, the focus of an intensive archaeological survey, serves as a case study. Early archaeological surveys approached this time period primarily from a historical point of view. Political history provided the textual frame while the archaeological data were expected to “fill in” the gaps of the historical record. In contrast, in the last twenty-five years the second generation of surveys has taken an active interest in the archaeological documentation of the medieval countryside. The settlement trends observed in Nemea are viewed as manifestations of a variety of political, social, and economic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the socio-spatial characteristics of two missions dating from different periods in Torres Strait, northeastern Australia. It builds upon previous archaeological research which correlates settlement-subsistence systems with the seascape cosmologies of marine specialists. Against the backdrop of profound changes in colonial governance and religious commitment (from mission to church) from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries, we map the changing structure of two Torres Strait missions, and reflect upon these changes relative to lived sea-space. We use this approach in the belief that “local” histories provide meaningful context to broader colonial narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two contrasting Australian case studies in the archaeology of Indigenous-European interaction: one mission-like in its intent, the Aboriginal Settlement for Tasmanian Aborigines at Wybalenna on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait (1833–47), the other the Lutheran mission at Lake Killalpaninna (1867–1928) investigated by the Central Australia Archaeology Project (CAAP). Each of the two case studies adopted different strategies of investigation. Wybalenna was a small excavation while Killalpaninna was an extensive surface survey. Both studies reveal diversity in the range of responses to a missionizing program, providing evidence of agency in the formation of the archaeological record. They demonstrate the value of the material evidence and the significance of archaeology in contributing to a more sensitive understanding of the interaction process by providing an alternative to textual sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mombasa’s strategic position on the Swahili Coast and fine harbours were key factors in its emergence as a prosperous city state during the early second millennium AD. These same attributes drew the attention of rival powers in the struggle to control the lucrative Indian Ocean trade network, particularly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing from a rich legacy of cartographic and documentary sources created in the course of Mombasa’s turbulent history, this paper presents the results of a coastal archaeological survey undertaken in 2001 as part of a wider collaborative maritime project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]