The Words that Archaeologists Choose: A Maltese Case Study in Artifact Terminology, Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

Writing is the means by which archaeological knowledge is produced, shared and negotiated, which is why, as part of a wider reflexive archaeology, writing within the discipline has come under scrutiny. When writing, archaeologists make choices about what words to use to express their ideas about the past (even if these choices are sometimes subconscious). This study examines such choices via the application of methods from two linguistic subdisciplines, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, to a case study of Maltese archaeological texts and terms for a specific yet problematic type of Maltese artifact (axe-amulets/pendants). Using these methods, we connect political and theoretical shifts to changes in English-language use and terminology across three periods of Maltese archaeological history, demonstrating how authors choose words that reflect the broader assumptions and understandings that inform their work. In sum, this paper contributes to an increasingly critically aware understanding of the history of colonial and postcolonial archaeology in Malta and other Mediterranean islands and encourages writers to have a heightened awareness of the taken-for-granted but fundamental part that language plays in their poetics and politics

Mobile elites at Frattesina: flows of people in a Late Bronze Age ‘port of trade’ in northern Italy

Following a mid twelfth-century BC demographic crisis, Frattesina, in northern Italy, arose as a prominent hub linking continental Europe and the Mediterranean, as evidenced by the remarkable variety of exotic materials and commodities discovered at the site. Debate persists, however, about the extent to which migrants influenced the foundation and development of Frattesina. The authors present the results of strontium isotope analyses, which suggest significant migration to the site, particularly of elites, mostly from within a 50km radius. Among these non-indigenous people, the authors identify a \u2018warrior-chief\u2019, whom they interpret as representing a new, more hierarchical society

How landscapes remember

This paper considers the possibility that as subject or agent, the landscape might have the potential to contain, store or transmit memories of their past, which are engaged experientially as uncanny. In a simple sense it asks why there are some landscapes – or landscape features – that are regarded as spiritually animated by different social groups, at different times. The paper focuses on the Neolithic temple site of Borġ-in-Nadur, in Southern Malta, which as well as having been a site of prehistoric ritual activity has more recently been the site of a significant devotion to the Virgin Mary, who graced the site with regular apparitions, and a focus for national and transnational Goddess pilgrimage. The paper suggests that sites such as Borġ-in-Nadur can be seen as palimpsest landscapes, in which memory is layered such that experiential engagements with them draw the past in to the present, and forwards into the future. The paper examines the intertwining of prehistoric, Catholic and Neo-pagan engagements with Borġ-in-Nadur, extending Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) to encompass the milieux de memoire, or memorial environments, which are themselves also context of, and for, the uncanny

Ten millennia of hepatitis B virus evolution

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene. After the European Neolithic transition, Mesolithic HBV strains were replaced by a lineage likely disseminated by early farmers that prevailed throughout western Eurasia for ~4000 years, declining around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The only remnant of this prehistoric HBV diversity is the rare genotype G, which appears to have reemerged during the HIV pandemic