Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (350 Records)
This paper reviews the most recent finds from the multi-year excavation at Aimsfield Walled Garden, the largest walled garden in Scotland (debated), in East Lothian, Scotland. It includes an examination of the surrounding landscape and how this was altered to provide a unique view and projection of power and wealth. The recent excavations of the vinery-pinery are presented to show an example of how pineapples were grown in Scotland in the 1700s and into the 1800s. The connection this site has to...
Archaeology of repression and resistance during Francoist dictatorship (2017)
Structural and physical violence are common instruments used by dictatorial regimes in order to impose their hegemony and to gain legitimacy within local communities. At the same time, repression usually entails resistance from individuals and societies, which may be active or passive, physic or ideological. Both repression and resistance are materialized in landscapes and objects which can be analysed through Archaeology, telling stories not visible by other means. In this paper, we will...
The Archaeology of the People’s Century? (2013)
The 20th century has widely been portrayed in the British media as the people’s century. This paper will examine the part played by archaeologists in the formation of this idea which, in my opinion, not only fails to reflect many of the stresses within British society, but also underplays the value of significant areas of British heritage. The result is that large sections of the recent past are seen as something that is ‘best not talked about’ to the public (Faull, pers comm, 2011) and the...
Archaeology, Memory and Community: Widening Engagement with Historical Archaeology (2013)
Telford was created as a 'new town' in the 1960s in a former industrial area, partly to regenerate what was perceived to be a derelict landscape. The new town initially had a divisive effect on long-established local communities. This paper describes an ongoing project which seeks to heal some of these divisions by working with local communities and other stakeholders to explore some of the area's neglected archaeology and heritage. The project has evolved from a 'top down' approach to a more...
Artefacts of transformation: the material culture of Black Loyalists in late eighteenth century Atlantic Canada. (2013)
In 1784, approximately 3,000 Black people who had joined the British during the American Revolutionary War were evacuated from New York to Nova Scotia, alongside several thousand other Loyalist refugees. This poster explores the transformative powers of three items of material culture in the creation and maintenance of a Black Loyalist identity in what is now Atlantic Canada: the book in which their names were recorded prior to their evacuation from New York; the uniform coat worn by one of the...
At Home in the City: reflections on theoretical and methodological approaches to contemporary homeless heritage (2016)
The Homeless Heritage project (2009-2013) was a collaborative public archaeology project that sought to document contemporary homelessness from the perspective of homeless people in two British cities, Bristol and York. This paper draws on case studies from the Homeless Heritage project and expands upon a paper given at SHA 2013 (Leicester) when fieldwork was in its concluding phase. Three years on, this paper reflects upon the theoretical and methodological challenges that were present and...
Baudrillard in Castroville, Texas: Traces of Contemporary America in the Biry/Tschirhart Families’ Home (2017)
In his 1986 travel memoir Amérique, Jean Baudrillard defined America as a constant flow of things: cars and highways, screens and electricity, rivers and geological silence. Everything flows as if the continental vastness of the U.S. could be reduced to a smooth surface that flattens historical time. The result is a landscape defined by regular surfaces that are symmetrical to the predictability of social practices. In this paper, I argue that America’s flow of things has a genealogy, and that...
Becoming the ‘other’?: Exploring mimetic practice in the Ulster Plantation (2013)
Mimesis involves the interpretation and imitation of behaviour. Crucially, it is a strategy employed not only by the ‘colonised other’, but also by those in authority engaging with and endeavouring to understand the behaviour of those over whom they wielded power. Far from settling an unpopulated colonial wilderness, those few planters who made their way to Ulster in the early seventeenth century were thrust into a populated Gaelic world where their survival depended upon a process of...
Becoming Urban – Emerging Urban Food Culture in Early Modern Tornio, Northern Finland (2013)
This paper focuses on emerging urban food culture in Tornio, a small town in Northern Finland, between AD 1621 and 1800. Tornio was founded in 1621 in Northern Finland, which at that time was a part of the Swedish kingdom. The population of the new urban centre was a mixture of local peasants and merchants from other towns of Sweden. Tornio was a dynamic boom town where people of different origins came together, forming a new urban community and a new urban food culture. Zooarchaeological...
Below sea-level. Combining Palaeolithic and Underwater Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. (2013)
The area of the eastern Mediterranean is a focal point for the study of the earliest acts of globalisation. Palaeolithic archaeology provides the tools for the analysis and interpretation of the material record of the early hominins who passed through and occupied this part of the world. However, since the early pleistocene, the constant environmental fluctuations between glacials and interglacials have caused major alterations in the ice sheets resulting in sea-level fluctuations. Consequently,...
The Best Kept Secrets in Archaeology: The numbers no one knows, but everyone talks about. (2015)
How many professional archaeologists are there? How much do they make? How many women are archaeologists? Where do they work? It has been 20 years since the data to answer these questions was gathered through a survey and published in the report The American Archaeologist: A Profile by Melinda A. Zeder. However, there has yet to be a follow up project. Our only profile of professional archaeologists is arguably out of date, signficantly. This paper uses a variety of different data sources to...
Between City and Country: New 'Urban' Landscapes of the Industrial Period (2013)
Industrialisation in England is often associated with urbanisation. Yet outside the major conurbations, many industrial settlements retained an essentially rural character. Although they contained ‘urban’ elements such as streets, rows of housing, churches and pubs, these settlements nestled within a predominantly rural landscape, and their inhabitants sustained semi-rural lifestyles – growing food, keeping animals and actively hunting and fishing. Using excavated examples from the East...
Between consumption and extermination: archaeologies of modern imperialism (2013)
In this introduction to the session, an outline of the existing and possible archaeologies of imperialism will be sketched. Emphasis will be put on the potential of archaeology to construct alternative narratives on Western colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It will be argued that this kind of archaeology has to take into account violence (both physical and symbolic), but also forms of hybridization, war as well as trade and exchange, open and subtle resistance, and hegemonic...
Between the dream and the conquest: settlement and daily life of the Portuguese in North Africa (15th-16th centuries) (2013)
The Portuguese presence in North Africa was materialized through the occupation of cities and fortresses along the coast, especially during the 15th and the first half of the 16th century. Traditional historiography has stressed the limited contact these strongholds held with their surrounding territory, underlining their highly military nature. In this paper we wish to re-evaluate this theory, mainly through the archaeological work we've been developing since...
Beyond material culture: virtual ship reconstruction (2013)
In the case of virtual ship reconstruction, the boundaries between fiction and science are hard to define. In attempting a ship reconstruction, the freedom provided by computer-assisted endeavors often clashes with the limitations of the historical archaeology data. Drawing on the expertise derived from several case studies, some ground rules are proposed in the hope of locating the border between these two approaches that will keep proposed reconstructions in the realm of science.
Beyond the Bar: The Consumption of Alcohol in Productive Spaces (2018)
The study of alcohol consumption has, in recent years, occupied much thought within modern academia. As a material culture, its ability to shed light on many social and economic themes has made alcohol consumption a vital part of human history. Places of consumption such as taverns have offered tantalising allusions to such themes as rebellion, subversion and freedom. However, alcohol consumption was not limited to those specialised spaces alone and was often consumed within the work and...
The bigger the cow the better she is’: new archaeological perspectives on livestock ‘improvement’ in late medieval and early modern England (2013)
In recent years, zooarchaeologists have become increasingly interested in exploring the timing and nature of ‘improvements’ in animal husbandry in later medieval and early modern England. These studies have identified that size and shape changes occurred from the 14th to the 17th centuries. However, the picture is complex: outlying sites experience later developments than central localities and there is considerable variation in the timing of size changes for different species at different...
The bio-sedimentation as monitor element of underwater archaeological sites of Cascais Sea (Portugal). The case of Patrão Lopes military ship. (2016)
The archaeological interpretations of the role that environment plays in the nature of the anthropogenic occupations on the coast, are currentely a thorough line of analysis on the Underwater Archaeological Chart of the Municipality of Cascais (ProCASC ).The main focus of our research have been divided into two categories that have direct impact on archaeological sites: a concern about the change in the coastal environment driven by man or nature, and, processes of adaptation and management of...
Boys and Their Toys: Masculine spaces in eighteenth-century York (2013)
This paper highlights the potential of material culture to challenge and nuance historical accounts of large-scale cultural transformations in the Georgian period, such as urban improvement and domestic privacy. It explores how the detailed analysis of houses and the changes made to their fabric, form and function, sheds light on their changing uses and meanings over time. When combined with the study of diaries, maps, newspapers, wills, illustrations and early photographs, it can be used to...
Bristol Houses: the Order of Merchant Capitalism in England's Second City (2013)
A survey of housing in medieval and early modern Bristol provides insights into how the urban elite overtly or less obviously reinforced social inequality and hierarchy. Some of these elements of urban culture relate to those identified elsewhere, notably in the writings of Glassie, Deetz and Leone with reference to the vernacular architecture and social structure of 18th-century North America, the use of classical architecture, falling gardens and baroque street plans. Other elements...
Bruno's blueprint (2013)
ANT-archaeology (another hyphen I know!) is all about how we build our worlds. In a relational world where does fieldwork start? Where does it stop? And what part do we play as authors? This paper takes Bruno Latour's Reassembling the social as a blueprint for fieldwork (except the last chapter, which was a bit of a cop-out) and translates it into materially grounded archaeological methodology. The result is a whistle stop tour of the 1879 Cape Telegraph Cable taking in Chilean mining, Swedish...
Building Colonialism: Nineteenth-Century Colonial Tanzania and its Urban Representation (2013)
Tanzania’s coastal harbour towns underwent phenomenally rapid transformation from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. This was the result of British and German colonialism and the development of a new capitalist system of economic and social control. This new western design served to re-define the earlier systems of capitalist exchange within the formally Omani dominated Swahili Coast. The various systems of appropriation and reorganisation are represented in the urban landscape and resulted in...
The Building of the City of Orthez (2018)
The goal of the expose is to illustrate the evolution of this particular urban area, using archeological sources such as preventive excavations, one-time digs, prospections, and architecture specialists as well as historical records. The idea is to measure as accurately as possible the impact of important historical events, particularly during the two eras that have influenced the history of Orthez the most: when it was the capital city of the principality of Béarn, then during the period where...
Building relevant capacity in implementing Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage programs (2013)
The CIE-Centre for International Heritage Activities has been very active in implementing Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage (MUCH) capacity building programs in a number of countries in southern Africa, Asia and the Pacific. While the UNESCO 2001 Convention and the Nautical Archaeology Society training programs are used as frameworks in the principles and practices for the programs, they are implemented in a manner and over a time that is considered relevant to each country. This comes...
Buzz-word or paradigm shift? Some comments on "Medieval Archaeology", "Post-medieval Archaeology" and the rise of "Historical Archaeology" (a German perspective) (2013)
In recent years "Historical Archaeology" has undergone a cometlike rise. Traditional pre- and protohistoric archaeology has had a hard time in accepting the conceptual design of "Historical Archaeology". Also, other disciplines (like art history or medieval history) have had issues with a concept that blurred established chronologies and disciplines. What does "Historical Archaeology" mean in Germany? A container without contents, a cross-cultural approach, or a...