Journal of Social Archaeology

This essay highlights the relationships between the realm of the symbolic world expressed in the funerary sphere and the realm of the maintenance activities of quotidian life, focusing on the Argaric culture of Southeast Iberia (c. 2250—1450 cal BC). The article begins by summarizing engendered mortuary archaeology in relation to maintenance activities and by briefly reviewing the funerary record of the Argaric societies. We then expand on the Argar culture, presenting in more depth two different types of archaeological evidence: grave goods deposited in tombs and paleoanthropological analyses conducted on Argaric skeletons. In the first case, we evaluate the relationship of grave goods to material culture integrated in practices related to the management of everyday domestic life, discussing the socio-symbolical significance that the exclusive association between awls and women may have had. In the second case, we report on those skeletal studies that allow us to infer information about sex differentiated tasks. To conclude, we bring these two different bodies of evidence into a focused dialogue in order to reach a better understanding about the relationship between the social perception and construction of Argaric women's identity and the practices that they may have carried out on a quotidian basis.

The following article addresses the question of how desired pasts function in cultural diplomatic relations, why they constitute a largely unacknowledged barrier in achieving cultural understanding and why they persist in both scholarly literature and in the popular imagination. Four desired pasts are considered in this context as represented by the institutions that sustain them. The Israeli desired past is represented primarily by the Israeli Government and, secondarily, by Jewish organizations in the United States. The Conservative Christian desired past is supported primarily by Christian fundamentalist organizations and, in part, by the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Biblical Archaeology Society. The Palestinian desired past is promoted by Palestinian rights organizations but, to some extent, is supported by Palestinian archaeologists and intellectuals. Finally, the `diplomatic' desired past is represented by appointed officials of the US Department of State. The analysis includes an examination of relevant materials issued by the organizations supporting each of these desired pasts including speeches, interviews, publications and websites.

This article discusses ship symbolism in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age, 1700—500 BC. It is argued that the ship symbol in south Scandinavia can be primarily related to a mythology guarded by individuals, while the ship symbol in the areas to the north had a more public character, being part of rituals involving many people. The argument is strengthened by a discussion of differences in the rock-carving practice in southern and northern Bohuslän and of ship settings in three different regions. It is argued that the identified differences in the use of the ship symbol are the result of different social strategies, namely a network strategy dominating in the south and a corporate strategy dominating in the areas to the north. By focusing on actions and local contexts, a view of the Bronze Age emerges that differs from recent studies, which instead have underlined the similarities between Scandinavia and central and south Europe in the Bronze Age.

Archaeologists have recently begun to address the ways in which past peoples revived, referenced, utilized, and amended their own, more distant pasts for diverse social and political ends. Social memory refers to shared ideas about the past. Monumental architecture entails the discursive construction of memory. Memory can be grounded in direct connections to immediate ancestors, or it can involve tenuous links to remote antiquity. In the terrain between, ideas about the past are both replicated and distorted. The concepts of citation and translation help clarify these processes. In the Southwest USA, architects in diverse temporal and social contexts invoked the memory of the prominent ritual center Chaco Canyon. At the twelfth-century site of Aztec, builders cited Chacoan architecture to legitimate ritual and political organization. In the thirteenth century in the Four Corners region, builders translated Chacoan ideas into McElmo-style towers to stabilize and transform a world in chaos.

This article emerges from collaboration with visual artist Janet Hodgson on excavations around Stonehenge. Experiencing Hodgson at work led me to re-examine how archaeologists think about visuality, particularly in criticism of the male gaze. Ideas of the gaze have significantly influenced the directions taken in studies of landscape and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) over the last 15 years. In this article I expand on and develop theoretical debate surrounding the gaze, using Hodgson's practice to illustrate my argument. I argue for a renewed critique of the politics of vision and cartographic method that assimilates recent theoretical developments. I review accounts of the gaze, and discuss recent theories of knowledge as applied to mapping and GIS. I suggest that new theories have the potential to move the gaze critique towards further exploration of the contextual complexities of visualities. I use Hodgson's artistic projects at Stonehenge to illustrate this complexity.