Emma Blake

Identity-Mapping in the Sardinian Bronze Age

The aim of this paper is to locate in the emergence and elaboration of Sardinias Nuragic society, a narrative of cultural identity formation. The Nuragic period is typically defined in terms of economic, social, and demographic characteristics, and a Nuragic identity is implicitly taken to be a passive byproduct of these material circumstances. Such an account overlooks the role of identity in enabling and characterizing human action. The disjointed and contradictory Nuragic period transition preceded the formation of a coherent cultural identity. This identity, it will be argued, underwent a retrospective rearticulation to establish a distinct boundary between the Nuragic society and its antecedents. The material record illustrates clearly that the history of the Nuragic identity is implicated in social development on Sardinia in the second millennium BC.

Spatiality past and present An interview with Edward Soja, Los Angeles,12 April 2001

The impact of spatial theory on archaeology has been profound in recent years. As one of the foremost spatial thinkers of our time, Edward Soja must take much of the credit for this new conceptualization of space that has swept across academia. His books Postmodern Geographies (1989), Thirdspace (1996), and Postmetropolis (2000) have been instrumental in changing the way many of us think about space. Professor Soja was interviewed by Emma Blake at the University of California-Los Angeles, where he is Professor of Urban Planning. Here he discusses the origins and implications of this insertion of space into social theory, the links between geography and archaeology, and his own ideas on the critical role of cityspace in human development. The interview concludes with a follow-up discussion, conducted via email in December, in which Professor Soja commented on the spatial repercussions of the September 11th events.

The Marsala Hinterland Survey: Preliminary Report

The Marsala Hinterland Survey is a diachronic archaeological project investigating a 112 km2 block of terrain adjacent to the coastal town of Marsala, in the Province of Trapani of northwest Sicily (Fig. 1). The project is carried out in collaboration with the Soprintendenza per i Beni Culturali ed Ambientali di Trapani.1 Western Sicily has a rich and complex past, changing hands between multiple foreign powers and experiencing repeated outside cultural influences. Despite this colorful history, the region is markedly understudied archaeologically, with only piecemeal urban excavations and one smallscale intensive survey.2 Our survey aims to reconstruct the region’s long-term settlement patterns and history of land use from its first inhabitants to today. A pilot season in 2007 served to clarify the geologic evolution of the land formations in our area, and in 2008 we began full scale data collection. This report summarizes our methodology, research agenda, and preliminary results.