Things, Places, & the Archaeology of Eurasia
Is there anything he can’t do?
August 10, 2011: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin holding two ceramic vessels that he discovered while diving near an archeological excavation of an ancient Greek port on the Taman Peninsula. (AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin)
Open Context is a new effort to provide web access to digital archives of sites from around the world. As the number of sites included grows this could become a great research tool and venue for publishing original datasets. The geographic and temporal extent of sites already included in the database is impressive.
5,900-year-old women’s skirt discovered in Armenian caveSeptember 13, 2011 | 11:39 YEREVAN. – Excavations at Areni 1 Cave in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor region unearthed a more-than-5,900-year-old women’s straw-woven skirt, Armenian Archaeology and Ethnography Institute Director Pavel Avetisyan told Armenian News-News.am. Avetisyan informed that this artifact was discovered in 2010 and, even though they had informed about this precious item at the time, interest toward it grew further only recently. “The women’s clothing dates back to 39th century BC. So far we have discovered the skirt’s parts, which were superbly preserved. It is an amazing material with rhythmic color hues, and other remnants of the straw-woven material were also discovered. Such thing is recorded in Armenia for the first time,” Avetisyan noted. According to Archaeology and Ethnography Institute’s director, the artifact is currently under their care, but it will soon be sent to the restorer who, until the arrival of French specialists, will work on its restoration. Pavel Avetisyan added that, after the final conservation process, the skirt will be exhibited at the History Museum of Armenia.Areni 1 is the same cave where the world’s oldest leather shoe more than 5,500 years old, wine-press, as well as flaggy items and part of a mummified goat’s body were discovered.
via 5,900-year-old women’s skirt discovered in Armenian cave | Armenia News – NEWS.am.
Cambridge Scholars Press has just published a new book on the Archaeology of Politics edited by Peter Johansen and Andrew Bauer. The volume is an important new statement in the newly emerging archaeology of the political that will be a recurring theme of many of the issues I’ll be interested in sharing here: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. As my first post to Assemblages, here is an excerpt from my concluding chapter in Johansen and Bauer’s volume.
On December 17, 2010, a policewoman in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, 300km south of Tunis, confiscated an unlicensed produce cart from twenty-six year old Mohamed Bouazizi, the sole income earner in a large extended family. Humiliated by the brutality of the police and the imperious disregard of local officials, Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the headquarters of the provincial government. This act of spontaneous self-immolation sparked riots across Tunisia that ultimately cascaded into popular uprisings across northeast Africa and the Middle East. By spring 2011, governments had fallen in Tunisia and Egypt, crackdowns against mass demonstrations preoccupied authorities in Iran, Yemen, and Bahrain, and Libya had collapsed into a violent civil war.
It is hard to imagine a more quotidian beginning to regional revolution than a confrontation over a produce cart that spiraled into a popular movement to renegotiate the terms of political association. Yet the 2011 uprisings did just that, following on a series of mass movements that have convulsed the early years of the new millennium (e.g., Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004, Lebanon 2005, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Iran 2009), struggles—some successful, some not—that sought to redefine the limits of sovereignty and fundamentally re-order relations of authorization and subjection. Yet the episode that sparked Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution neatly encapsulates the central theoretical contention of the present volume, revealing how the political is located in a broad array of practices that are mediated by dense, and often surprising, material assemblages.
Is this thing on?