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Item A deposit of Kilwa-type coins from Songo Mnara, Tanzania(Routledge, 2014) Perkins, John; Fleisher, Jeffrey; Wynne-Jones, StephanieA deposit of coins was recovered during excavations at Songo Mnara, Tanzania, containing over 300 copper Kilwa-type coins. This is the first deposit or hoard of these coins found in a well defined archaeological context and it therefore offers a unique glimpse into both the typology of these coins and their contemporary uses. The ramifications of the Songo Mnara deposit are discussed. In particular, the deposit is firmly attributable to the end of the fourteenth or very early fifteenth centuries, allowing for some chronological resolution. Coins of the late eleventh- to early twelfth-century sultan Ali ibn al-Hasan show that these types remained in circulation for several hundred years. In addition, the common coin type of Nasir ad-Dunya can now be attributed firmly to the fifteenth and possibly fourteenth centuries by this find. Finally, the paper discusses the burial of the coins in the foundations of a stonehouse and the fact that this likely represented the building of value into the house and an investment in place. Other finds, such as a carnelian necklace found with the coins, testify to the importance of this practice.Item A Future History of Water(Duke University Press, 2019) Ballestero, AndreaItem A taphonomic analysis of PTK (Bed I, Olduvai Gorge) and its bearing on the interpretation of the dietary and eco-spatial behaviors of early humans(Elsevier, 2023) Organista, Elia; Moclán, Abel; Aramendi, Julia; Cobo-Sánchez, Lucía; Egeland, Charles P.; Uribelarrea, David; Martín-Perea, David; Vegara-Riquelme, Marina; Hernández-Vivanco, Lucía; Gidna, Agness; Mabula, Audax; Baquedano, Enrique; Domínguez-Rodrigo, ManuelHere, we present a thorough taphonomic analysis of the 1.84 million-year-old site of Phillip Tobias Korongo (PTK), Bed I, Olduvai Gorge. PTK is one of the new archaeological sites documented on the FLK Zinj paleolandscape, in which FLK 22 level was deposited and covered by Tuff IC. Therefore, PTK is pene-contemporary with these sites: FLK Zinj, DS, AMK and AGS. The occurrence of these sites within a thin clay unit of ∼20 cm, occupying not only the same vertically discrete stratigraphic unit, but also the same paleosurface, with an exceptional preservation of the archaeological record in its primary depositional locus, constitutes a unique opportunity to explore early hominin behavioral diversity at the most limited geochronological scale possible. The Olduvai Bed I sites have been the core of behavioral modelling for the past half a century, and the newly discovered sites, excavated with 21st century technology, will increase significantly our understanding of early human adaptive patterns. Here, we present PTK as another assemblage where faunal resources were acquired by hominins prior to any carnivore, and where stone-tool assisted bulk defleshing was carried out. The abundance of juvenile individuals extends our understanding, as in Kanjera (Kenya), about the hunting skills of early Homo sensu lato. The increasing number of sites, where bulk defleshing of small and medium-sized carcasses took place is underscoring the importance of meat in the diets of some of the early hominins, and their patterned use of the space for food processing and consumption. The patterning emerging has a profound importance for the evolution of some of the features that have traditionally been used to identify the behavior of the genus Homo.Item Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico(Duke University Press, 2016) Howe, Cymene; Boyer, DominicThe conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done, the methods of transition can be deeply problematic.Item Aeolian politics(Taylor & Francis, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Boyer, DominicOur project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to consider the ventifactual arrangements of its political materiality. In a time when carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly assumed to have a clear, logical, and obvious salvational purpose: a path away from fossilized resources and toward sustainable sources of energy. Mexico has established some of the most far-reaching and comprehensive climate legislation in the world, including mandates for renewable energy production. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the Southern state of Oaxaca, now hosts the densest concentration of on-shore wind development anywhere on the planet. We find, however, that the ‘good’ of wind is differentially felt. The power of the wind is not singular, but rather as multiple as the world it inhabits. We thus develop an argument against a singular interpretation of ‘wind power’ and toward a surfacing of wind's manifold effects and ways of mattering. We call this domain: aeolian politics. In this article, we take several snapshots of aeolian politics to help articulate its multiplicity, showing how wind power becomes contoured by land and desire and by infrastructure and technological management. We also see aeolian political life entangled with cosmologies and subjectivities and implicated within the ethical domains of sustainable development.Item After war(Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2016) Wool, Zoë H.In the United States – as in other places in the ambit of biomedicine – the efforts exerted on and by injured soldiers’ bodies in the aftermath of war are generally understood under the familiar medical rubric of ‘rehabilitation’. This reflection troubles that term by moving away from the medical logic of rehabilitation and its telos of injury and healing, and the logics that see injured soldiers as promising bodies. Instead, the think piece explores a wider range of practices of attention to injured soldiers’ bodies that emerge ethnographically, and traces embodied forms of being made within unsteady temporalities of life, health, and death after war, forms that call the temporality of rehabilitation into question and highlight care’s collateral affects. I reflect on the phenomenon of heterotopic ossification – bone growth at the site of injury that is a sign of healing that is also itself a form of injury – to think through the confounding analytical, ethical, political, and corporeal implications of such a space.Item Anthony Morris Plantation(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2015) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of Anthony Morris Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Anthony Morris Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, census data, historical nonfiction books, letters, newspaper articles and advertisements, drawings, and lists of deed records.Item Anthropocene Unseen : A Lexicon(punctum books, 2020) Howe, Cymene; Pandian, AnandThe idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word. The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole. The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril.Item Anthropocenic Ecoauthority: The Winds of Oaxaca(George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research, 2014) Howe, CymeneThis article analyzes the development of wind parks across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) and, in turn, how a politics of resistance and local perceptions of environmental peril have challenged renewable energy transitions. In the fraught debates surrounding the massive Mareña Renovables wind park, dramatic distinctions have emerged between local perceptions of ecological conditions and forms of environmental knowledge calibrated to global climate remediation. These divergences indicate distinct ways of imagining and articulating “anthropocenic ecoauthority”—a series of experiential, scientific, and managerial truth-claims regarding ecological knowledge and future forecasting in an era of global anthropogenic change. Whether enunciated by resident communities, state officials, corporate representatives, or environmental experts, ecoauthority gains its particular traction by asserting ethical claims on behalf of, and in regards to, the anthropogenically altered future of the biosphere, human and nonhuman. The article concludes with a discussion of how biopolitical and ecoauthoritative positions coincide, suggesting that although the original sites of biopolitical intervention have been population and the human species, the energic, atmospheric, aquaspheric, and lithospheric shifts that have been dubbed the Anthropocene demand that we account for life in its local dimensions as well as on the scale of the greater planetary bios.Item Anthropologies of ethics: Where we've been, where we are, where we might go(University of Edinburgh, 2014) Faubion, James D.Comment on Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Item Anthropology and disability: an interview with Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg(Open Edition Journals, 2022) Fietz, Helena MouraItem Antropologia e deficiência: uma conversa com Rayna Rapp e Faye Ginsburg(Open Edition Journals, 2022) Fietz, Helena MouraItem Archer House(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2024) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of the Archer House (later known as the Herndon Beach Home), located in the 1830s town of Velasco, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, and informaton on social events related to this location and time period. The item contains maps, photographs and lists of deed records.Item The Austins; May Their Bones Burn In Hell!(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2024) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the 1834 duel between William T. Austin and John A. Wharton in which Wharton was wounded and Austin was unharmed, the author presents information derived from archival research that documents the various accounts of this event. The item contains photographs and newspaper articles.Item Banton Plantation(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2015) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of Banton Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, the current status of Banton Plantation, and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, census data, handbook entries, photographs, court records, and lists of deed records.Item Bates Plantation and Churchill's Ferry(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of Bates Plantation and Churchill's Ferry, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Bates Plantation and Churchill's Ferry and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, census data, and lists of deed records.Item Bell Grove Plantation(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2016) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of Bell Grove Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Bell Grove Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, classifieds, census data, tax and will records, and lists of deed records.Item Bell Plantation and Hinkle's Ferry(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2009) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of Bell Plantation and Hinkle's Ferry, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and machinery, the current status of Bell Plantation and Hinkle's Ferry and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, tax records, photographs, census data, and lists of deed records.Item Bingham Plantation(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2015) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of Bingham Plantation, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, shifting ownership over time, biographical and genealogical information on owners, measures of agricultural productivity and inventory, the current status of Bingham Plantation and information about enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, paintings, newspaper articles, diary entries, census data, letters, and lists of deed records.Item Brazoria Masonic Oak(Brazosport Archaeological Society, 2014) Smith, JamesIn this overview of the history of Brazoria Masonic Oak, the author presents information derived from archival research covering geographical location, biographical and genealogical information on associated people, disease outbreaks, shifting ownership over time, the current status of Brazoria Masonic Oak and information on enslaved people and other forms of captive labor. The item contains maps, photographs, Freemason meeting minutes, letters, and lists of deed records.