Counter-Witchcraft and the Fetish

West 86th · 2025-03-01

Anthropologists have long demonstrated how witchcraft and magic are engaged with the modern, in some cases suggesting that witchcraft’s various manifestations are constitutive of modernity in its different forms. This scholarship pushes back against the inherited teleology of Protestant Enlightenment discourse, which in turn positioned itself against West African fetish practices, which were thought to evoke Europe’s more superstitious past. Similarly, we can ask how English witchcraft accusations of the sixteenth to seventeenth century were also caught up with modernity. This paper takes up the problem of counter-witchcraft in the form of English “witch bottles” to explore their relation to the fetish and to modernity.

Monsoonal habitats for the people: a pilot geoarchaeological and urban-planning study of land use and water management histories in the highlands of Madagascar

Archaeology International · 2025-01-20

This article addresses one of the most significant research questions in the archaeology of Madagascar: when and how rice farming began to spread in the highlands. It also explores if it is possible to use this archaeological knowledge in urban codesign. Here we present preliminary geoarchaeological results and interview data from our two pilot field trips around several key archaeological sites along the Ikopa and Sisaony rivers in the Imerina region, near the capital city of Antananarivo. These first-hand data on land use and water management histories provide fresh insights to understand highly localised erosion events and other ecological consequences of farming, as well as the non-linear evolution of hillslope–valley environments and landscapes in the studied region. Our results suggest that while some erosion might have begun as early as 2000 bp, most erosion events occurred from 500 bp onwards, coinciding with clear evidence of severe soil slaking and increased presence of rice phytoliths. The impact of intensified land use practices on local environments varies significantly between different locations and sites, revealing that the relationship between local ecosystems and human activities was more complicated than generally assumed. In terms of present-day landscape impact, our pilot study also uncovered the ambiguities and discrepancies in policy-making, appreciation and implementation among different stakeholders, rendering communities unaware of the real causes of environmental degradation and vulnerable to future environmental crises. These findings highlight the great potential of integrating archaeological knowledge of ecological and land use histories with the diverse needs of stakeholders for sustainable development and better preparation for future climaterelated challenges.

Affective Politics and the Qualities of Things: Materials and Metonymy in the Archaeology of Highland Madagascar

Cambridge Archaeological Journal · 2025-11-21 · 1 citations

Abstract How might the affective work of politics be accessed through the fragments of material culture that we recover as archaeologists? This paper considers how political identities can be formed and shaped affectively through engagement with the qualities of craft objects and the connected world of experience that they index. Taking up a case study from nineteenth-century highland Madagascar, I explore how political affects are caught up with the making and using of everyday things and how the transposed qualities of objects and the metonymic connections they evoke offer a means to tie changes in material culture to shifts in political affects over time.

‘Contextual archaeology’ revisited:

Oxbow Books · 2021 · 3 citations

• Archaeology
• History
• Geography

“The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist”: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter

American Antiquity · 2021 · 134 citations

• Sociology
• Archaeology
• History

This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.

DIGGING WITH THE PEN:

2020-05-01

Unknowability and Indeterminacy: Neanderthal Histories

Deleted Journal · 2020 · 1 citations

• History
• Genealogy
• Geography

Unknowability and Indeterminacy:Neanderthal Histories Zoë Crossland (bio) INTRODUCTION Preparing for this article, I ran a search for "Neanderthal" with Google Images, which conjures up a remarkably consistent constellation of pictures. Absent is the characteristic portrayal of Neanderthals familiar from twentieth-century media presentations, invariably slumped forward, hairy, and brutish in physiognomy and attitude. Instead, image after image shows Neanderthals reimagined as stocky ("robust" in the parlance of physical anthropology), poorly dressed, and weatherworn, but always visibly human. These are people who lived hard lives, expressed in the wrinkles and creases of their faces and the windblown, unkempt condition of their hair. They are also mostly men; the very few images of Neanderthal women or children come from recreations of specific individuals, usually the Neanderthal woman and child found at Gibraltar (Finlayson 2019). This collection of pictures captures the range of possibilities that are imagined and actualized in contemporary reconstructions of Neanderthals. The images are constrained by current scientific knowledge but also go beyond what is known. They act as a convenient point of entry for thinking about the question of unknowability. All knowledge of such deep prehistory has to be inferred from material traces—there are no documents, oral histories, or living testimony to bolster these claims about the past. And Neanderthals offer a particularly [End Page 75] good subject to think about the question of unknowability, given that they were unknown before the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, knowledge of Neanderthal history has shifted dramatically, most recently due to the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and innovations in other analytical techniques. We're in a moment when not only what is known but also what is possible to know about Neanderthals changes from year to year. The archaeology of Neanderthals therefore opens itself up to a kind of thought experiment, offering a means to think about unknowability and indeterminacy via the deep past, its continuing traces in the present, and the constantly reconfigured fields of possibility engendered around these traces. When we think about unknowability in archaeology, we tend to focus on the relationship between our tangible archaeological evidence and the past that it points to. But there is also another dimension to the unknown, which is more future-oriented. These traces and the past they summon are understood in an unfolding present and an emergent future. How is that unfolding field of possibility involved in the way in which the past is known and unknown? How are future unknowns conceptualized as possibilities and when do they come into view as topics of study? Related to this is the question of what we do with evidence for possibilities that cannot be put to the test, neither validated nor disproved. How do these possibilities shape the scope of archaeological inquiry? These are questions that are wider and deeper than that of the Neanderthal unknown. Examining the workings of such archaeological evidence also informs us about the nature of experience more generally. How do we come to know the previously unknowable, and how is this knowledge constrained by how we imagine and experience the possible? When Neanderthals were identified in the second half of the nineteenth century, something novel was discovered; a species previously unknown and unknowable came into view. The name comes from the first partial skeleton to be recognized as a prehistoric species of human. Found in 1856, dug out of Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley (Neander Thal in the German of the time), the bones were [End Page 76] identified and saved by schoolteacher and natural history enthusiast, Johann Carl Fuhlrott. He was able to recognize that the bones were not of a cave bear, as had at first been thought, but were rather more human in character. The local newspaper quickly published a report on the find. The following year, Fuhlrott published his findings with Hermann Schaaffhausen, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, arguing that the discovery offered evidence of an archaic species of human (Drell 2000). The bones of the Neanderthal specimen revealed the potential for a previously unknown world. Who would have thought that another human species had once walked around Europe? At that moment, this past world existed as...

10. Digging with the Pen: Writing Archaeology

2020-05-01

Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG)

2020-01-01 · 1 citations

Digging with the Pen

2020-01-01