Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (350 Records)
While Albania boasts over 400 kilometers of coastline, very little research has been done to learn about the significance of this dynamic coast. Until recently, it has been difficult for outside research to be done in Albania, but that is rapidly changing thanks to government agencies supporting research in many different fields targeted specifically along the coast and in the offshore regions. Because of this renewed energy in bringing attention to the coast, this project has sought to aid in...
Material Culture and Identity in Early Modern Ireland: Archaeological Investigations in Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim (2015)
The early demise of Carrickfergus in the 18th- century has ensured the remarkable preservation of the town's post-medieval archaeology, a relatively unique phenomenon in urban archaeological investigations in Northern Ireland. Established as an Anglo-Norman caput in the 12th-century, by the 17th-century Carrickfergus was serving as the cultural, commercial, and civic hub of Ulster; a trans-Atlantic port, home to the Lord Deputy of Ireland and a diverse population of competing political...
Material Culture from an early 16th century Portuguese Indiaman wreck site (Oman) (2018)
In early 1502 Vasco da Gama left Lisbon commanding an India Armada. During the voyage, the group of ships stopped in different locations along the West and East African coasts, such as Mozambique, finally sailing to India where they stayed until early 1503. Before departing back to Portugal, some of these ships remained on the Indian Ocean to disrupt maritime trade between India and the Red Sea. Two of those vessels, the Esmeralda and the São Pedro, wrecked off the coast of Oman in 1503. The...
Material Narratives of Repression (2018)
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the establishment of a new social and dictatorial order led by General Francisco Franco were heavily marked by and imposed through tactics of repression. My fieldwork at different points of Spain revolves around the materiality of repression and the interaction between this particular materiality and the local communities. In spite of the fact that this particular materiality appears to be dominated by absence and silence, in this paper I want to explore in...
Materiality of Odors: Experiencing Church Burials and the Urban Environment in an Early Modern Northern Swedish Town (2018)
In this paper, we focus on early modern scents in the town of Oulu (Ostrobothnia, Finland) and the social and cultural significance of odors in societies. Written documentation reveals two basic sources of foul odors: urban ponds of waste and the smell of death produced by church burials. The world of smells had a more central and far more complex meaning in the past than today. In the process of urbanization during the 18th century, a more systematic and clean environment began to be more...
Medieval Mummies: the next interdisciplinary frontier for paleopathology and the case of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (742 - 814) (2017)
Since its humble and pioneering beginnings, mummy research, as a branch of paleopathology, has grown remarkably. The implementation of state-of-the-art radiological techniques, as well as molecular and chemical methodologies, has advanced our knowledge of how mummification was performed in ancient Egypt, at the same time allowing us to get a clearer idea of the history and morphology of diseases in primeval times, thus shedding light on the evolution of pathogens and biological responses to...
The memorialisation of ‘excluded’ groups in Washington D.C (2013)
Growing multiculturalism in many cities has resulted in rising concerns over the shared historical narratives of their inhabitants; particularly in relation to past conflicts. Increasingly groups have spoken out against perceived exclusion from dominant conflict narratives. This paper seeks to understand the ways in which groups exert their claim on past conflicts through the urban environment, specifically through processes of war memorialisation. Examples in Washington D.C. comprise both new...
Memorials of the old churchyard in Tyrnävä (2018)
The old parish of Tyrnävä in coastal Northern Ostrobothnia, Finland, was in use from the 1640s until the 1890s. Two churches have been located on the site and the latest was burned down in arson in 1865. Several old grave memorials, mostly dating to the 19th century, are still present on the site. In 2017, a geophysical survey was performed on the site with ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer in an attempt to precisely locate the forgotten site of the burned church. During these studies,...
Memories of the Yeoman: the Moralized materiality of farming in the memory of rural New England (2016)
This paper focuses on the role of materiality and spatiality in the making of rural New England--a "historic place" with powerful resonances to the cultural identity of the United States. Rural New England was the site of 19th century historic preservation movements that sought to reclaim important objects and landscapes from material and social disintegration. Farming was integral to this construction, and the figure of the Yeoman was a frequently deployed categorical subjectivity, whose...
Memory, Forgetting and the War in Pictures (2016)
Pictures are one resource illuminating memory and forgetting of Finnish World War Two heritage. Pictures taken by Finnish Army photographers document wartime rituals, landscapes, and methods of warfare of German, Finnish and Soviet armies. In our paper we will examine how these wartime material practices and rituals were used to create, maintain and destroy identities and memory. Our discussion will focus on how the Finnish pictures were used to shape memory during and after the war.
Men do Art and Women do Craft, but Both can do Archaeology: Gender and Civilian Internment on the Isle of Man (2015)
The British interned both men and women on the Isle of Man during World War 2. The men were housed in camps in Douglas, Ramsay and Peel, and the women (and later, married couples) were in a large camp comprising both Port Erin and Port St Mary. Each camp developed its own sub-culture, but gender stereotypes amongst both staff and internees created different expectations. Famous artists produced important, innovative works in the men's camps, where newspapers were also regularly published., but...
The Merchant Weights of the Warwick (2013)
The merchant weights of the Warwick offer a unique insight into the nature of the voyage which brought the ship to Bermuda. Three lead pan weights were discovered at the site and, although the assemblage is small, it represents an important mercantile collection. The lead weights bear the ciphers of English trade guilds, marks, and regal stamps. The smallest weight was stamped with three emblems: the sword of St. Paul, which was the mark of London; an ‘I’ surmounted by the crown which...
Migrations, Dissonance and Unsettled History: The Case of the Kenya Luo (2013)
A common feature of many of the indigenous oral traditions documented by the first generation of historians of pre-colonial Africa is the emphasis they place on the migration of different distinctly bounded ethnic groups, or ‘tribes’, from an idealised homeland. Most archaeological approaches to the use of oral and linguistic data such as these, have simply tried to use oral traditions of migration as literal guides to the likely location of settlements associated with different phases of an...
Mill Communities and Social Networks in the Early-Modern Finland (2018)
In the 17th and 18th centuries several proto-industrial mills were established in the present day Finland, at that time under rule of Swedish kingdom. Around the mills grew up close-knit communities, consisting of mill workers and their families, which were controlled and ruled by the mill owners. This poster discusses two divergent Finnish early industrial communities, Pikisaari pitch mill community in the town of Oulu and Östermyra ironworks community in southern Ostrobothnia. We will compare...
Minding the Gaps: Exploring the intersection of political economies, colonial ideologies, and cultural practices in early modern Ireland. (2016)
Examinations of the imposition of colonial ideologies actualised through the mechanism of plantation, or enforced settlement, in Ireland often highlight plantation as a stark process that was founded upon, and thus fully accommodated to, a fully-fledged version of mercantile capitalism. Yet on the ground, engagements between peoples reveal that ideologies were incompletely applied, plantation plans seldom realised, and new economic formulations incompletely rendered. On close examination,...
Modern Ruins in the Age of Sustainability (2013)
Preservation is an essential part of heritage management; sites and monuments are protected in order to be kept intact for the future. Accordingly site managers encounter difficulties dealing with sites whose foremost qualities are the processes of change and decay that they are undergoing. It would seem that cultural heritage should be forever or not at all. The belief in this kind of ‘eternal’ perspective is in no way new, but the present preoccupation with sustainability has reinforced it and...
Modern Ruins: Revealing the Other Face of Things (2013)
Modern ruins hold an ambiguous position in both academic and public discourse. By blurring established cultural categories of past and present, purity and dirt, waste and heritage, they become matter out of place and out of time. In this paper I draw attention to another source for this ambiguity, at the same time disturbing and attracting, and which is argued constitutes a crucial aspect of their ruin value: the manifestation of things in their released otherness.
Modernity in a Waste Bin; On Waste, Conspicuous Consumption and Agrarian Practices in the Swedish Early Modern Towns of Jönköping, Kalmar and Tornio. (2013)
Waste in a town may be understood both as a problem to solve, and as a valuable resource. In some Early Modern Swedish towns, waste bins and pits were common, varying in size and localization in different plots (some hidden, some in full view), but in other towns bins and pits were totally absent and waste was dispersed around the plot, with concentrations in specific locations. In some places, waste was probably removed from plots to use as fertilizer on nearby fields and gardens. These...
More or less improved? Contrasting rural settlement in Ireland and Highland Scotland (2018)
This paper compares the experiences of non-elite communities in Ireland and Highland Scotland, c.1700-1850. Culturally and environmentally, Ireland and (Highland) Scotland are seen to share a number of traits. Irish and Scottish Gaelic are very closed related and were spoken almost universally in rural areas up to the 19th century. Furthermore, much of the west of Ireland is characterised by expanses of peaty upland, which resembles the Highland landscape. Their settlement histories begin to...
Mourning for children in northern Finland – Funerary attire in the 17th–18th century contexts (2016)
This paper examines commemorating children in premodern northern Finland. The hypothesis is that high child mortality (forty percent died before the age of four) affected the ways in which children were commemorated and how childhood was perceived. The primary question is, how mourning is visible in the coffin textiles and accessories? These materials have been unearthed both in town and rural cemeteries, while some of the clothes are dressed on mummified deceased below church floors. The...
The Multi-faceted Approach to African American Archaeology under Larry McKee’s Mentorship at The Hermitage (2018)
The historical archaeology internship program under Larry McKee’s leadership from 1988 to 1999 exhibited several key components which characterized it as one of the preeminent models in the Southeast. First, McKee grounded his vision of developing the program securely in the people themselves, the enslaved African Americans, whose lives and work made The Hermitage possible. An awareness and sensitivity to understanding and recovering their past contributions infused the structure of the program,...
Mundane material culture and political identity in Long Kesh / Maze prison (2013)
Studies of the material culture of political imprisonment during the Northern Irish Troubles have hitherto concentrated on prisoner self-expression – especially through the creation of contraband and handicrafts - or the presencing of prison protests in external communities through wall murals. Of less aesthetic value, but highly significant as a both a signifier of compliance / dissent and criminal / political status, are the relationships between prisoners and prison-issue artefacts. From...
My Father's Things (2013)
In the morning of April 5 2009 my father died; he was almost 86 years old. He lived alone, was in good health, and died suddenly. The confrontation with his silenced house was perhaps the worst moment of all. It was here, amidst his material realm, that I could see for myself that he was gone. At the same time, I realized that I had lost more than my father. My father’s home was changed into a material construction. The human component – my dad – was the coherent force that had kept this...
'The Naked Carcase': The Long, Slow Death of Sheriff Hutton Castle 1590-1890 (2013)
In 1534, the visiting John Leland saw at Sheriff Hutton castle, North Yorkshire, "no house in the North so like a princely lodgings". Yet scarcely ninety years later, the surveyor John Norden viewed only a "naked carcase", and today, four shattered towers remain from the original structure. Instead of considering the creation of an elite landscape and the heyday of a great late medieval residence, this paper will outline the transformation of one and the destruction of the other...
Nautical Archaeology from your couch: The NAS E'Learning Programme (2013)
The Nautical Archaeology Society's first course was held in 1986. Since then over 10,000 people have attended an NAS Training event in over 20 countries. This attendance involved actually meeting an NAS Tutor and discovering what nautical archaeology was all about. In 2013 UK NAS trainees will be able to learn what nautical archaeology is all about from the comfort of their couch. The NAS E'Learning Programme will offer interactive online lessons to replace the face to face lesssons of the...