Archaeology of ethnicity

A Felső-Tisza vidék hegyvidéki folyóvölgyeiben a Kr. u. 2–4. században az általában vandálokkal azonosított, lengyelországi eredetű Przeworsk-kultúra hordozói telepedtek meg. Településeiken a helyben készített, kézzel formált finom és durva edények mellett már a Kr. u. 2. század második felétől elterjedt a gyorskorongolt kerámia használata. A specializálódott fazekastelepeken és a faluszéli műhelyekben előállított, gyorskorongolt edények egy részét a daciai, elsősorban a porolissumi római provinciális fazekasság hatására bepecsételt díszítéssel látták el. Az ismert műhelyek alapján Beregsurány- vagy Blažice-típusúnak nevezett barbaricumi termékek lelőhelyei a szakirodalomban gyakran „Bereg-kultúra” elnevezéssel szerepelnek. Jelen tanulmányban tíz, nagyrészt közöletlen magyarországi Przeworsk település bepecsételt díszű edénytöredékei kerülnek elemzésre. Az eredmények alapján a terület – a bepecsételt edények szempontjából – a daciai limes előterével, Zilah térségével és a Hernád szlovákiai szakaszával szorosabb kapcsolatban állhatott, mint a Szatmári és a Beregi-sík kerámiaművességével.
The mountain river valleys in the Upper Tisza region were settled by communities of the Przeworsk culture in the 2nd–4th centuries AD, a population generally identified with the Vandals arriving from Poland. Aside from the locally made hand-thrown fine and coarse wares, the pottery from their settlements also includes types made on a fast wheel from the later 2nd century onward. A part of the wheel-turned vessels produced on specialised potters’ settlements and in rural workshops was decorated with stamped designs inspired by the Roman provincial pottery of Porolissum. The sites yielding pottery labelled Beregsurány or Blažice type after their known workshop sites in the Barbaricum are often lumped together as representing the “Bereg culture”. Described and discussed here are the stamped pottery fragments from ten, largely unpublished settlements of the Przeworsk culture in Hungary. The principal conclusion offered by this material is that the region had much closer contacts with the Zilah area and the Slovakian section of the River Hernád in the foreland of the Dacian limes – at least regarding stamped pottery – than with the pottery wares produced on the Szatmár and Bereg Plains.

Although commonly accepted by Teotihuacan experts that the Zapotec, Veracruz and Maya people resided at Teotihuacan, the subject of ethnicity and ethnic enclaves has received little attention aside from DNA studies. The subject of ethnicity, however, is an important area of inquiry to identify ethnic boundaries and ethnic interaction. This paper seeks to evaluate ethnic boundaries of the Zapotec and Merchants’ Barrio, foreign enclaves located in the city of Teotihuacan, Mexico. By evaluating ethnicity through the study of craft production, one can begin to offer a glimpse of ethnicity at Teotihuacan, allowing one to determine whether the Zapotec, Veracruz and Maya people residing in Teotihuacan were accepted by the city’s populace or were seen as outsiders. By addressing the production of ceramics and figurines at the Zapotec and Merchants’ Barrio through the assessment of either foreign or local production taking place within foreign boundaries (and determining if the foreign production was distributed throughout the city or within the compound only), we can begin to understand how foreigners recognized themselves within the city and determining what ethnic identity they identified. As a topic that allows humans to identify themselves within a given group, ethnic boundaries seek to recognize in which group an individual identifies himself or herself, a subject that distinguishes groups of people as belonging, propagating an inherent human condition.

RESUMO O estudo da materialidade pode revelar aspectos sociais e econômicos relacionados à arqueologia da etnicidade quando situado em seu contexto histórico. Nesse sentido, escolhas tecnológicas, decorações plásticas aplicadas à cerâmica utilitária, vasilhames do tipo "monkey jars" e a interpretação das demais categorias materiais evidenciam um contexto relacionado ao fluxo de materiais na região de Santarém (Pará) durante os séculos XVIII e XIX. Tais fluxos demonstraram, além dos indígenas, a presença de africanos escravizados na Amazônia Colonial. O objetivo deste trabalho é abordar o contexto da Diáspora Africana com dados sobre zonas de captura, taxas de embarque e reembarque e elementos da cultura material capazes de revelar a agência dessas pessoas sujeitas à diferença colonial.

SUMMARY: Chapter 11, in Renfrew & Bahn's textbook (Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice), covers the bioarchaeology of people, including what evidence remains, how do we identify gender, life expectancy, age at death, height, weight, facial features, relationships, abilities (e.g., walking), hand usage (left versus right), speech development, behavior, disease, deformity, death, medical knowledge, nutrition, population studies, diversity within populations, evolution, and other aspects.  In my view, this is one of the best college textbooks available, and is invaluable for students, archaeologists, and the public in general, to obtain a top notch overview of approaching and interpreting the archaeological record. UPDATED Nov. 25, 2019: Some re-formatting, minor edits, and some new slides.

The Alan kingdom was the most powerful polity in the medieval North Caucasus, sitting astride the western end of the Silk Roads. However, due to the relative lack of written records from the region, a number of very basic facts about it are still disputed. This paper proposes a new interpretation of one such issue- whether it comprised a single kingdom, or two.

■ This article considers the relationship between identity politics and archaeological interpretations of ethnicity in postwar Japan. Although race and ethnicity were important concepts in early Japanese archaeology, from the 1930s a new interpretive paradigm based on archaeological cultures began to dominate the discipline. After the end of the Second World War, Japanese archaeologists became increasingly concerned with sociopolitical issues relating to democracy and peace, but the continued absence of explicit discussion of prehistoric ethnicity has tended to reinforce the primordialist view of ethnic identity that became common in postwar Japanese society. This article discusses the use of ethnicity in Japanese archaeology, citing examples from Hokkaido, Okinawa, and the Jômon-Yayoi transition. It is argued that the lack of emphasis afforded to ethnicity in postwar archaeology in Japan reflects interest in other sociopolitical issues rather than theoretical naivety with respect to identity politics.

Most Iron I sites in the northwestern Negev were identified as Philistine based on the references to Philistines in this region in the book of Genesis, proximity to Gaza, and the occurrence of Philistine pottery. Triggered by emerging discrepancies between the finds at these sites and the presumed Philistine attributes (e.g., the rarity of pork), this article aims to reevaluate the finds in the periphery of Philistia, mainly in the northwestern Negev, but also in the Shephelah and the Yarkon basin. A systematic examination of the data reveals a clear pattern in which the population of peripheral sites gradually adopted certain Philistine attributes (Philistine pottery and cooking jugs, which were avoided during the first phase of Philistine settlement), but continued to avoid others (Aegean-type hearths and significant amounts of pork). A thorough examination of the data suggests that most of the inhabitants in the periphery of Philistia were the descendants of the local Canaanite population of the Late Bronze Age, who were in the process of renegotiating their identity with the emerging ethnicities of the Philistines in the urban centers of the southern coastal plain and the Israelites farther west. While not forming a unified group, and probably being dominated by Philistia, the settlers in Philistia’s periphery did not adopt a Philistine identity, maintained clear boundaries with the Philistines, and should therefore not be treated as Philistines.

Two pits (L1016 and L1055) from the early New Kingdom cemetery in areas H/I and H/III at ʿEzbet Helmi, Tell el-Dabʿa (ancient Avaris), have long been identified as remains of execration rituals in which Nubians were killed. In this paper I will argue that nothing in these two pits suggests execration of Nubians. The racial attribution of the individuals found in these pits can be questioned on both a theoretical and methodological basis. The Nubian pottery and supposedly Nubian arrowheads often associated with these “execration” pits do not come from either the burials in the cemetery nor from the pits. These finds are later than the cemetery and the “execration” pits in H/I and H/III. In the case of Nubians and “execration” pits from Tell el-Dabʿa we are dealing with a case of mistaken identity, an erroneous interpretation based on culture-historical and racial anthropological assumptions—a hidden theory.

In the visual arts of ancient Greece and Rome, we are confronted with a great variety of contexts in which (elements of) African physiognomies can occur. In some cases, ethnic markers can serve as direct reference to a figure’s descent (e.g. the Egyptian king Busiris or the companions of Ethiopian king Memnon in Athenian vase-painting). More often, however, ‘ethnical markers’ are not primarily intended to indicate a figure’s origin but are used for status distinction (e.g. domestic slaves displaying African physiognomies) or as a comic element (e.g. parodies or grotesques). In these instances, ethnical features are often combined with other ‘deviant’ markers (e.g. short stature or old age) and thus have to be interpreted as a strategy to denote the figure as ‘the Other’ rather than ‘the African’.
The mythical tribe of the pygmies is a special case insofar as it is, at least to some accounts, located in Africa but at the same time represents a somewhat idiosyncratic topos that exceeds ethnical attributions: Whether as dwarf-like creatures fighting against the cranes on Athenian pottery or as uncontrolled midgets satisfying their sexual needs on the walls of Pompeian houses, they clearly belong to the realm of parody rather than ‘objective ethnology’.
The paper presents a short survey on the physiognomic features associated with African descent and their dominant contexts in Graeco-Roman art. The second part takes a closer look at the iconography of pygmies and tries to identify the particular functions and meanings of their physiognomic as well as habitual markers. The closing remarks are dedicated to the question if and how these images might have shaped the perception of Africa and its inhabitants in the Graeco-Roman world.

The so called four-brooch dress (Vierfibeltracht) – widely considered by the Hungarian research as the typical female dress in the 6th-century Pannonia – consists of two brooches located on the upper body, and two other ones generally found in the area of the pelvis or between the femurs or the knees. Although the name of the type of this dress clearly emphasizes the brooches, it consists of two parts: first the upper body clothing was fastened in a way and the the second is a girdle-hanger that is usually, but not necessarily decorated with brooches. With the analysis of the cemeteries from South-Transdanubia, I would like to present that the two aforementioned elements of the 6th century female dress are independent from each other, and that the ver-sions decorated with brooches are just their common, archaeologically well represented variants. So the four-brooch dress is the combined occurrence of these common variants of two dress elements. There is a difference between the connection networks of small and bow brooches based on 33 sites from modern-day Moravia, Lower Austria, Western Hungary and Slovenia. It can be presumed that there were different – spatial or tem-poral – structures behind their distribution.