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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]

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]