In this article, the author explores basket divination, a technique found in Zambia and neighboring countries, as a form of material religion. Mores specifically, the author shows that in basket divination the idea of objectivity (objective knowledge) is directly associated with the materiality of the oracle used for divining. In the Luvale…[Read more]

This chapter on witchcraft in northwest Zambia shows that forms of asking and giving may be deployed to suspend suspicion about the motives of others, even as they possess the potential to kill. When a woman asks a witch for a gift of salt to flavor her food, the witch feigns generosity but forces that woman to join the coven in recompense. In…[Read more]

Instead of asking what evil is, let us see where evil takes us. Based on many conversations on the topic of witchcraft in northwest Zambia, Africa—conversations in which witchcraft is presented from the perspective of the bewitched—the concept of evil takes us to a ghastly realm of destruction and transfiguration where the discourse of mor…[Read more]

Samuzala lived through colonialism in Angola, the liberation war, the civil war that followed independence, forced displacement to Zambia, and a landmine accident resulting in amputation. At different points in his life, Samuzala was a trader, a migrant, a refugee, and an amputee. In engaging with Samuzala’s life story, a narrative of movement, w…[Read more]

Reification, fetishism, alienation, mastery, and control – these are some of the key concepts of modernity that have been battered and beaten by postmoderns and nonmoderns alike, with Bruno Latour, a nonmodern, discarding them most recently. Critical of this approach, which creates a rift between moderns and nonmoderns, the author engages in d…[Read more]

Sónia Silva is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Skidmore College. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, as well as museum work in Europe and the USA, Silva’s research deals with materiality, material religion, the notion of the fetish, ritual and religion, divination, witchcraft, violence, and museums. Silva is the author of Alon…[Read more]

Based on a case study, the paper analyses the possibilities of social media as a tool for science communication in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) usage in archaeology. Aside from discussing the characteristics of digital archaeology, the social networking sites (SNS) Twitter, Sketchfab, and ResearchGate are…[Read more]

Based on a case study, the paper analyses the possibilities of social media as a tool for science communication in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) usage in archaeology. Aside from discussing the characteristics of digital archaeology, the social networking sites (SNS) Twitter, Sketchfab, and ResearchGate are…[Read more]

There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand…[Read more]

For over a decade the Historic Land-Use Assessment Project, a partnership between Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, has undertaken the challenge of mapping the character of Scotland’s historic landscape. By 2015 the Project will have delivered 100% coverage and, for the first time, S…[Read more]

Previous work on inter-ethnic coexistence in Mauritius has portrayed secularism as the only possible site of the national, which is at the same time described as clearly separated from religious traditions. In contrast, focusing on understandings of secularism among Mauritian Muslims in the context of a politics of diasporic ‘ancestral c…[Read more]

In its strategy of postcolonial nation-building with a highly diverse population Mauritius has opted for a multicultural highlighting of the differences in ethnicity and religion among its population. Akin to a mosaic, the Mauritian state officially recognizes the existence of several “ancestral cultures” of its citizenry, above all those of Ind…[Read more]

Social network analysis as a distinct field of study had its genesis in the anthropological
revolt against structural-functionalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was born through
an awareness among a new generation of scholars that structural- functional models failed
to make adequate space for human agency. Attention to personal…[Read more]

The growth of the city of Rome was dependent on its ability to exploit successfully the human and natural resources of its hinterland. Although this hinterland eventually extended to incorporate the entire Mediterranean seaboard, the resources of the Tiber valley originally nourished the city and continued to do so despite the growth in imports…[Read more]

Agent-based modeling presents the opportunity to study phenomena such as the emergence of territories from the perspective of individuals. We present a tool for growing networks of socially-connected settlement structures from distribution map data, using an agent based model authored in the Netlogo programming language, version 3.1.2. The…[Read more]

For historians, agent-based modeling (ABM) methodologies allow us to formalise our thinking about how the past worked and explore those assumptions in a way previously limited to thought-experiments. In ABM, numerous autonomous, heterogeneous agents are allowed to interact in a digital environment according to rules of behaviour directly drawn…[Read more]

An appendix to my MA thesis, ‘Satisfied with a Knowledge of the Totals: Labouring to Build the Claudian Aqueducts’, Reading, 1998. In this appendix, I tried to match Ashby’s descriptions of the remains of the aqueducts with Van Deman’s descriptions. From these descriptions, I crafted a volumetric model of the quantities of materials used in the…[Read more]

Die Tierphilosophie ist eines der lebendigsten Felder der Gegenwartsphilosophie. In ihrem Mittelpunkt standen bislang Fragen nach dem Geist der Tiere, der Tier-Mensch-Unterschied oder Probleme der Tierethik. Die auf drei Bände angelegte »Philosophie der Tierforschung« wirft einen neuen Blick auf dieses Gebiet mit dem Ziel einer strukturierten Un…[Read more]

Die Tierphilosophie ist eines der lebendigsten Felder der Gegenwartsphilosophie. In ihrem Mittelpunkt standen bislang Fragen nach dem Geist der Tiere, der Tier-Mensch-Unterschied oder Probleme der Tierethik. Die auf drei Bände angelegte »Philosophie der Tierforschung« wirft einen neuen Blick auf dieses Gebiet mit dem Ziel einer strukturierten Un…[Read more]

The Neolithic period is well known for its stone and earth monuments. However, the cropmark record and a small number of excavations demonstrate that monuments, in a variety of different forms, were also built of timber. Although timber monuments have been photographed from the air since aerial survey began in Scotland and, as a result, the…[Read more]