Barbara Bender

Gatherer‐hunter to farmer: A social perspective

Abstract The theoretical approach to agricultural origins in the last decade has concentrated on techno‐environmental and demographic causality. This paper attempts to show that both are dependent upon the social structure, and that this is where the enquiry should begin. The social properties of a tribal system are examined; first, in an anthropological framework using ethnographic illustrations, and then in an archaeological framework using prehistoric data. The ability of such systems to generate increasing demands on production, which under certain conditions may be resolved by a commitment to agriculture, is stressed.

Leskernick : Stone worlds ; Alternative narratives; Nested landscapes

The first season of an on-going project focused on Leskernick Hill, north-west Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, entailed a preliminary settlement survey and limited excavation of a stone row terminal. Leskernick comprises a western and a southern settlement situated on the lower, stony slopes of the hill and including 51 circular stone houses constructed using a variety of building techniques. Walled fields associated with these houses vary in size from 0.25–1 ha and appear to have accreted in a curvilinear fashion from a number of centres. Five smal burial mounds and a cist are associated with the southern settlement, all but one lying around the periphery of the field system. The western settlement includes ‘cairn-like’ piles of stones within and between some houses and some hut circles may have been converted into cairns. The settlements may have been built sequentially but the layout of each adheres to a coherent design suggesting a common broad phase of use. The southern settlement overlooks a stone-free plain containing a ceremonial complex. The paper presents a narrative account of the work and considers not only the form, function, and chronology of the sites at Leskernick but also seeks to explore the relationships between people and the landscape they inhabit; the prehistoric symbolic continuum from house to field to stone row etc, and to investigate the relationship between archaeology as a discourse on the past and archaeology as practice in the present. It considers how the daily process of excavation generates alternative site histories which are subsequently abandoned, forgotten, perpetuated or transformed.

Prehistoric Developments in the American Midcontinent and in Brittany, Northwest France

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses prehistoric developments in the American Midcontinent and in Brittany, Northwest France. In European prehistory, the boundary between hot and cold societies—those with history and those, supposedly, without, those that change and those that do not—is usually set between the Paleolithic–Mesolithic and the Neolithic, between gatherer–hunter and farmer (Renfrew 1974). The chapter discusses gatherer–hunter societies of the late Mesolithic-late Archaic, then the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic and from Archaic to Woodland when the Breton but not the American societies took to farming, and the social developments in the Neolithic and Woodland Adena–Hopewell. The overall aim is to advance the understanding of general processes of change and technological intensification in tribal societies.

Book Review: Material culture in the social world:

fians in order secretly to practice thuggee, and then a chapter on the significance of disguise in Kipling’s Kim. Next comes a considerable jump to the role of Vivekananda’s Irish disciple, Margaret Noble, transformed into a new kind of Hindu woman with her rebirth as Sister Nevedita. This offers the prompt for the introduction of the subject of the following chapter, Sarojini Naidu, the anglicized poet and Indian nationalist. Although the book claims to consider postcolonial identities, only the case of the film actress Nargis deals with postIndependence Indian culture, and Nargis’s career effectively ended a mere ten years after British rule. Nargis, a morally marginal Muslim woman, most famously portrayed the eternal Hindu mother in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India. Her own person life as mistress, wife and mother of Hindu men, and her ambiguous conversion to Hinduism, act as a metaphor for the problematic status of Muslims in an increasingly Hindu India. I regret that Roy grants the past 40 years such scant attention, and would have gladly traded Burton and Kim for the new, diasporically oriented Bollywood movies and the Indian novel with its eye on the Booker Prize, both serving up a view of India from the inside looking out, looking back in. There is a world of difference between the opportunism of the flesh-and-blood Burton in the temporary disguise to facilitate his exploration and the strategy of the imagined Irish boy, Kim, standing for the anguished liminality of the Indian-born British of the ‘other ranks’. There is only the most tenuous of connections between Margaret Noble, who at the height of British imperialism becomes Indian in name, religion, loyalty, diet and dress, and Sarojini Naidu, who steadfastly remains Indian but utilizes what seems serviceable in English language and culture. Roy puts her central emphasis on the constancy of mimesis as a thing in itself and interprets its different use as a function of changing insecurities in colonial and postcolonial identity; where I disagree with her is in the underlying assumption that there are secure identities to be appropriated. The frequently used phrase ‘mimic man/woman’ devalues complex relationships by implying an imagined authenticity elsewhere. One searches in vain for the self-conscious element which would have brought this study to life. Roy writes as if from outside and above, but her name indicates that she is either Indian or of Indian descent and her affiliation that she teaches English at the University of California. She must surely live the Indian traffic of her research.

Thatcherism and Anthropological Research Funding

Given the current state of the world, it may seem at best somewhat parochial for a journal like Critique to devote space to the funding problems of anthropological research, let alone the particular case of Britain. Times may be hard in the UK, but they are certainly worse for many of our friends overseas. Worse, at least, from a financial point of view: simultaneously with its withdrawal of resources from state sector education, Thatcherism has also undertaken a campaign of denigration of those who work in public education which seems to signal the existence of deeper objectives than those of legitimising fiscal economies. Even from a purely British point of view, the fate of anthropological research as such might seem of only marginal significance in the overall context of Thatcherite educational policies. Present policy implies that