Burning Villages Research Articles

Demographic reconstruction of the Halaf culture society on the territory of the Eastern Euphrates

The study of the problem of the population of the Halaf culture in the 6th millennium BC in the territory of the North-Eastern Syria is conducted for the first time in order to study the demographic situation of this region in the Late Neolithic. The statistical approach in paleodemographic reconstruction is the basis of the scientific procedure, because it’s source are the materials of the settlements. It also includes methods used in both Russian and foreign archeology. The basis was taken as the average population density, proposed by foreign anthropologists for the Neolithic in the Eastern Mediterranean, which was compared with the indicators of the southern part of Western Europe and Southwestern Iran. According to the calculations, 30-35 thousand people lived in the territory of northeast Syria during Halaf culture. These results were verified by the method of C. Reed and R. Braidwood, using the method of population density per settlement area by C. Renfrew as well as an indicator of natural annual population growth. This verification confirmed the obtained quantitative indicators of the Khalaf population in Eastern Euphrates. A variant of determining the population of the Halaf settlement of Sabi Abyad I by the residential buildings of the “Burnt Village”, which makes up 1/10 of the area of the monument, is proposed. This result can be an independent baseline for the reconstruction of the paleodemographic characteristics of the Late Neolithic culture of Mesopotamia. Conclusion based on the obtained paleodemographic data: Despite the high infant mortality, Khalaf society is characterised as developing. For comparison, this article presents the demographic indicators of the modern Syrian Arab Republic

“Burning Villages”: Leo Katz’s Novels on the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt and the Question of Antisemitism

This article explores the Jewish question in the context of the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt through the novels of the Austrian Jewish communist Leo Katz. Katz witnessed the uprising as a youth from his native village situated on the border between the Habsburg Empire, Romania, and Tsarist Russia. He wrote two novels about the revolt: one in 1940 and the other in 1946. The present study examines the violent clashes that unfolded at the border and how the writer approached the concept of antisemitism in the context of the revolt. Relying mainly on Katz’s personal papers, the article shows that Katz’s understanding of antisemitism was related to his communist beliefs. This changed following debates on antisemitism that he and other German-speaking communists had while in exile in Mexico, where Katz spent most of World War Il. Although Katz includes more details on antisemitism in his second novel, he does not address the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by the rural masses, which is an aspect otherwise well documented by the Austro-Hungarian border authorities. Katz’s novels are the most comprehensive Jewish narratives on the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt and represent a Jewish intellectual’s struggle to make sense of the rising antisemitism in that tri-border area at the turn of the twentieth century.

Criminal Acts of the Nazi Germany Occupation Regime in the Territory of the Vyazma District of the Smolensk Region in 1941-1943

When numerous myths are circulating around the Great Patriotic War on the whole and around the Vyazma Pocket in particular, there is the necessity to study the specific disclosures concerning the tragic period of the occupation of the Smolensk Region by Nazi Germany that can be proved with documents. This determines the topicality of this paper. In our research, we rely on the documents kept in the Central Archives of the Russian Defense Ministry, the Governmental Archives of the Smolensk Region, as well as on the witness memoires. The purpose of this research is to study the Nazi Germany war crimes committed by the occupation regime in the territory of the Vyazma District of the Smolensk Region in 1941-1943. The results of the research demonstrate that in 1941-1943 in the territory of the nowadays Vyazma District of the Smolensk Region, Nazis and their accessories committed the full range of war crimes as defined in the four Geneva Conventions (1949): murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; humiliating and degrading treatment; public arbitrary executions; cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners of war, including the wounded and sick. For civilian persons, the whole system of horrification and oppression was created to break down their resistance; the punitive actions were taken regularly. Special cruelty and cynicism were inherent to numerous cases of burning villages together with their residents, who in the war time were mainly the old, women, and children.

DEAD ZONE: Zone morte et autres textes

in your pot / but a broomstick and a pay cut[.]” Sometimes there is an admirable attempt at irony, but it usually descends into mere bathos: “Please, do not imagine a lame pony scuttling, wheeling against the ground, slated for retirement by Mr. HighVelocity Rifle.” The poet also takes a distinctly undergraduate approach to allusion, dropping in names from philosophy with no real import for the poem or embroidering his own lines with some of the most highlighted bits of the Norton Anthology. He really wants everyone to know he has read Hegel, and Adorno, and Yeats. He even includes an index to make sure we don’t miss how clever he has been. The admirable attempt to address history’s increasing freight of violence is belied by the poet’s tendency to reduce that violence to mere shock material: “a man / who watched his mother / being raped / placing his gun / on a child’s lips / and pulling the trigger.” This is an important subject for poems, but the sensationalism of the line-breaks reveals the poet’s immature motives for evoking it. This is not how Celan does it. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Lance Henson DEAD ZONE: Zone morte et autres textes Trans. Manuel Van Thienen & Sonia Protti. Lafarre, France. Les éditions de la Tortue. 2018. 119 pages. Born in 1944 in Washington, DC, poet and playwright Lance Henson grew up in Calumet, Oklahoma, with his traditional Tsis-tsis-tas (Southern Cheyenne) grandparents. Henson has long been both an internationally known and a prolific writer, authoring over thirty volumes, translated into twenty-five languages. A member of both the Native American Church (peyote religion) and the Cheyenne Hotamémâsêhao’o (Dog Soldier society ), Henson served as a Marine during Vietnam. Being both a peyote man and a warrior give him responsibilities, according to Cheyenne customs, to protect and to pray. In this new volume, his poems, his songs, use words with those aims. In doing so, he acts much like the water protectors at Standing Rock to whom he dedicates “the river sings.” DEAD ZONE: Zone morte et autres textes is mostly a bilingual volume in French and English; like his other works, however, it includes a good portion of the Tsis-tsis-tas language as well. The volume is divided into two sections: “songs of two worlds” and “the dead zone.” The book’s epigraph— in Henson’s handwriting, then in English, and finally in French—reads: “We are not human beings / on a spiritual journey / we are spiritual beings / on a human journey ,” a quote often attributed to French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The first words of a poem, however, are in Tsis-tsis-tas and center the volume at the point where we currently are in the human journey: “mapi / mapi / dosah / dosah,” which translates to “water, water, where, where.” Written, as the title says, “for the dine,” the poem refers to the water crisis the Diné (Navajo) people are experiencing because of contamination, shortages, and lack of access but also refers to the greatest immediate challenge for all humans in the Anthropocene era, continued supply of this life-giving resource. The juxtaposition here—of the French audience, the Cheyenne poet with French heritage, and the Diné to whom the poem is written— reminds us of our shared humanity and common fate. Henson calls America to a spiritual accounting for what has been done to the physical world and the spirits humaning within it. As Robert Berner noted (see WLT, Summer 1990, 418–21), Henson’s freeverse poetry is strictly minimalist, imagistic , and has very little, if any, punctuation or capitalization, but its intensely electrifying sparseness intimately connect the humans in the reading audience to the natural world of wind, wet leaves, winter , wolves, crows, tornadoes, rivers, and plains as the Guarani Indians to whom one poem is dedicated are connected to theirs. These poems guide us through a world of burning forests and “burning villages,” the genocide and environmental devastation brought by settler-colonialism and global corporatization, toward spiritual evolution . In DEAD ZONE, Henson is one of the “seers” from his poem of that title, who are “singing themselves from the misery...

Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic

Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic

Violence and Historical Authenticity: Rape (and Pillage) in Popular Viking Fiction

Add to and suddenly it has a certain air of knock-about fun. --David Mitchell (2009) The phrase rape and pillage has become almost synonymous with Vikings. In newspaper headlines, guidebooks, textbooks, romance novels, cartoons, and museum exhibits, rape and pillage acts as shorthand for any and all Viking crimes, whether real or purely fictional. Paradoxically, phrase has become enshrined in rhetoric of debunking, or at least problematizing, simplistic notion of bloodthirsty Vikings. A popular introductory textbook explains that dominating popular perception of people who flowed out of Scandinavia in Viking Age is image of blood-thirsty warrior bent on slaughter, and pillage (Forte, Oram, and Pedersen 2005, 299). More popular writing employs a similar rhetoric; in an article reviewing new British Museum Vikings exhibition, Simon Armitage (2014) writes for Guardian: [T]hose simply seeking raping and pillaging berserkers of legend may be surprised. The question of Viking brutality or its absence is one that has been debated for over fifty years, led in particular by work of Peter Sawyer (1962). But in all these debates over Viking brutality, what seems never to be critiqued is use of phrase rape and pillage to denote an often unspecified range of Viking war crimes. For image of Viking is one that is firmly ensconced in our modern imagination. On film, in romance novels, and in a range of modern media, hairy Viking warlords women inside wreckage of their burning villages. They carry off beautiful women with graphic and detailed threats of in captivity. Drunken, feasting Vikings grope and leer at buxom mead-hall wenches or scantily clad slave girls, and grizzled old Vikings reminisce about their glory days of raping and pillaging. It thus becomes clear that part of answer to how phrase rape and pillage came to be associated with Vikings must involve an exploration of how and violence against women has come to be so closely identified with Vikings and Viking raids. In what follows, I will attempt to chart evolution of trope of Viking rape, and how has come to be so closely associated with popular image of Viking. In process, I also provide some discussion of evolution of phrase rape and pillage and attempt to demonstrate how its polemical usage in early nineteenth century lent itself neatly to its later use in depictions of Viking and abduction. The figure of Viking often represents a very specific form of masculinity, one that encompasses notions of dominance, and other aggressive traits. Recent research has touched on role of imagined Viking in naturalizing patterns of dominance in present day, as in Anglo-American narratives of conquest and colonialism (Kolodny 2012), or in early twentieth-century Germanic ideologies of racial superiority (Irlenbusch-Reynard 2009). It is not surprising that they should also come to be associated with domination of women, and with extreme blurring of lines between consensual and that constitutes modern culture. (1) Vikings, with their giant battle-axes and muscular good looks, perfectly symbolize the aggressive-passive, dominant-submissive, me-Tarzan-you-Jane nature of relationship between sexes in our [rape] culture (Herman 1994, 45). With its close correlation to broader sex and violence, phrase rape and pillage has come to encapsulate this paradox and perfectly describe a violent, dominant form of male sexuality. The phrase is used in a remarkable range of texts and genres, from Danish guidebooks to modern romance novels. Not confined to descriptions of literal Vikings, phrase is used to evoke a particular brand of male sexuality even in present day. The hero of modern-day romance novel, Gena Showalter's Catch a Mate, for instance, is introduced in strongly medieval terms: From behind he was gorgeous. …

Raids made out by the Lushai Tribes in the Tea Gardens of Cachar during the Colonial Period: A Study on the Historical Perspective.

In this paper, an attempt has been made to discuss the impact of the large scale expansion of tea cultivation started by the European Entrepreneurs during the colonial period in Cachar, which affected the neighboring tribes, especially like the Kukis and Lushais, their social and economic conditions. This resulted in the constant raids of the neighboring tribes on the tea gardens of plains area of Cachar Valley. The nature of their raiding was burning villages, kidnapping and killing people. The name of the tea gardens of Cachar that the tribes were attacked, were – Rupcherra (1849), Adampore (1862), Chandraipur (1863), Loharbond (1868), Monierkhal (1869), Ainakhal (1871), Alexandrapur (1871), Katlicherra (1871), Dharmikhal (1871), Nagdirgram (1871), Jhallancherra (1871), Baruncherra (1892) and Baladan Tea Estate (1893). These raids executed by the Lushais ultimately led to the British Government to take severe measures with regards to them which ultimately brought the Lushai tribes under British regime on 27 January, 1898.

Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania (review)

Reviewed by: Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania Kirsteen Murray Helen Betha Gardner . 2006. Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania. Dunedin: Otago University Press, pp. 204, Pb, £18.98. Gathering for God examines the career of Rev George Brown who servedas Methodist Missionary in Oceania and later general secretary of the Australian Methodist Overseas Mission for forty-eight years. It examines Brown's early life and conversion; his role as a missionary in Samoa, Duke of York Island and New Britain; his interests as a collector of ethnographic information and artefacts; and his contribution to public life in Australia. Of particular interest is the chapter devoted to an examination of the controversial incident in the Bismarck Archipelago in 1878 in which Brown led an armed raid of retaliation against villages which he believed to be responsible for the killing and dismemberment of indigenous evangelists. Brown's party exacted revenge by attacking and burning villages killing between ten and hundred men. This was, as Gardner notes, an incident unprecedented in missionary experience in the Pacific. Her meticulous dissection of Brown's own accounts and of Methodist and wider public responses to his actions, provide a fascinating snap shot of colonial and racial attitudes of the period. Further light is shed on Brown's attitudes through an examination of his newspaper articles in the 1880s on the subject of the desirability of the annexation of New Guinea. Brown's ethnographic and collecting interests [End Page 200] are also considered including correspondence with his contemporaries in the field of anthropology. The book is illustrated with numerous photographs taken by Brown himself and Gardner provides a conclusion which traces the fate and curatorial interpretation of Brown's artefacts in the years since his death in 1917. This is a very readable book with a clear narrative line that will be accessible even to those who are not familiar with mission history in Oceania. The life of George Brown provides an intriguing introduction to many issues of the period and will prove very useful for students. Brown himself is placed inside a cabinet of curiosities and at the head of each chapter a line drawing of a pith helmet stands as an unelaborated comment, perhaps on his own character or perhaps on the times in which he lived. Kirsteen Murray University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2007 Edinburgh University Press

Comments

Because of the climate and the nature of the sites, most archaeological material in the Near East has survived the passage of time in a reasonably well preserved state (at least, until recent decades). It remains true, however, that occasional deposits with exceptional preservation provide a level of detail that opens up new areas of interpretation to archaeologists. The classic examples are, perhaps, Çatalhöyük and Nahal Hemar. The ‘Burnt Village’ at Sabi Abyad is proving to be another where the new evidence is leading to a series of publications offering interpretations of the settlement which will have profound implications for our perception of the late Neolithic in northern Mesopotamia. This stimulating article amplifies one area of discussion, attempting to bring some of the most striking features of the ‘Burnt Village’ into a single, unified interpretation. Importantly, this unified interpretation draws on a range of contemporary approaches to understanding the past and, given the tendency of near eastern archaeologists to function in a degree of isolation from wider archaeological trends, this article is to be particularly welcomed. Inevitably it can be criticised in certain areas and it might have gone further in others but these comments start from the basis of welcoming, enjoying and being stimulated by this piece of work.

Death, fire and abandonment

AbstractThis article offers an interpretation of the structure and meaning of a mortuary ritual at Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria. Remains of this funeral have been uncovered in the ‘Burnt Village’, a late neolithic settlement largely destroyed by fire. The possibly intentional and ritual burning of the settlement is related to the mortuary ritual; it is suggested that here we have evidence for an extended ‘death ritual’ ending, but also transforming, human and material life. Death, fire and abandonment, then, seem to have been closely related. Some examples suggest that these relations also existed at other neolithic sites in the Near East.

Interpreting the Unique

Presumably it is because I work at Çatalhöyük, a site referred to in just about every publication on ritual in the prehistoric Near East, that I have been asked to respond to Verhoeven's stimulating and thoughtful paper. It is certainly welcome to see an approach to ritual practice in the prehistoric Near East from a comparative and anthropological perspective rather than one in thrall to the search for origins of much later religious practices - as the discoverer of Çatalhöyük, James Mellaart (1965a, 77) puts it, ‘a cult of the Mother Goddess, the basis of our civilization’. At Çatalhöyük the debate has been dominated by the discourse of the goddess to the extent that other interpretations have been excluded, often subconsciously, so strong is this metanarrative (Meskell 1995). For instance, recent virtual reality reconstructions still depict the buildings as austere, atmospheric shrines rather than busy, smoky, dirty places of domestic work and (often rather restricted) movement. In a paper cited by Verhoeven I suggested that in order to counter this we should concentrate less on the iconography of the Çatalhöyük images and more on the mode of their experience and consumption (Last 1998). It is the need for an explicitly contextual consideration of meaning that forms my main criticism of the present paper. While a lot of detail is presented about the deposits found in the Burnt Village, the citing of various parallels from sites not necessarily greatly connected in time and space ultimately leaves a sense of vagueness, particularly in attempting to assimilate the fascinating clay ‘monsters’ to a widespread Near Eastern ritual interest in horns. In this contribution I wish to discuss the problems of interpreting the unique, offer some thoughts on how to get at the meaning and significance of these objects, and conclude by mentioning a recently discovered deposit from Çatalhöyük which raises similar issues.

Caring for ethnic Albanians in Macedonia's refugee camps

THE LANCET • Vol 353 • May 15, 1999 1701 Giota Koutsoukou is haunted by the memory of a 7-year-old boy. When I visited Macedonia in mid-April, 1999, the nurse had spent 5 days working in hellish circumstances treating refugees from Kosovo who were violently forced to leave their homes by Serbian police only to be kept waiting in a no-man’s land at the Macedonian border. About 45 000 traumatised people spent as long as a week interned in a freezing, muddy makeshift camp known as Blace with little food, water, or shelter and no proper sanitation. Koutsoukou tended to hundreds of people suffering from exhaustion, bruises inflicted by Serbian and/or Macedonian police, convulsions, hysteria, frostbite, and respiratory infections. People with diabetes went into shock from a lack of insulin. Others emerged needing to have stitches removed or dressings changed from previous operations. Dozens died. But it is the 7-year-old who dwells in Koutsoukou’s thoughts. “The 7-year-old was just hysterical. It was incredible”, says Koutsoukou, who works for Medecins Sans Frontieres. “It was an adult hysteria, and children just aren’t supposed to get that hysterical. I was shocked. The people were shocked. These people just couldn’t understand what was happening to them.” The ethnic Albanians who comprise the overwhelming majority of the population in the Serbian province of Kosovo are the victims of the worst ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. The Kosovo Liberation Army has been fighting for the province’s independence for over a year. The Yugoslav authorities have attempted to eradicate the rebels by burning villages and massacring civilians in its quest to keep Kosovo within Serbia. (Serbia and Montenegro are the two remaining republics in Yugoslavia.) About 800 000 Kosovars had been displaced within the province. But when NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in late March, the country began a systematic expulsion of ethnic Albanians which has created a humanitarian nightmare. More than 6 0 0 000 have fled into Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania, catching humanitarian relief organisations by surprise. And there is little rest for the overworked aid agencies as refugees continue to flee. The situation is the worst in Albania, Europe’s poorest country, which is hosting more than 350 000 refugees. A combination of the vast number of refugees, poor infrastructure, and mountainous terrain has made delivering aid very d i f f i c u l t . The situation is better in Macedonia, which is hosting about 120 000 refugees. But reports that another 50 000 people could be heading for the Macedonian border are causing a panic in overcrowded refugee camps. Doctors say is nothing short of a miracle that the camps have escaped epidemics but now staff are concerned that their luck could run out. Brazda, the largest camp in

Traces and spaces : microwear analysis and spatial context of Later Neolithic flint tools from Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria

In this article the results of a microwear analysis of flint tools from Late Neolithic levels of occupation (dated at ca. 6 000-5 000 ВС) in Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria are presented. This analysis has been carried out as part of a spatial analysis of the so-called Burnt Village, one of the Neolithic settlements excavated at the tell. Evidence for plant-processing, wood-processing, butchering, skin-processing, plant and animal-processing, boring and carving is discussed, and attention is given to the provenience of these activities in the Burnt Village.

An Image of Complexity: The Burnt Village at Late Neolithic Sabi Abyad, Syria

The site of Tell Sabi Abyad in the upper Balikh valley of northern Syria is the focal point of a regionally oriented research project investigating the socioeconomic organization of later Neolithic society in the region. Recent excavations at Tell Sabi Abyad have brought to light a well-preserved settlement dating from the late sixth millennium B. C. and heavily affected by a violent fire, the so-called Burnt Village. The village consists of rectangular, multiroomed houses built of pisé along very regular lines and surrounded by smaller circular structures. Thousands of finds were recovered in situ from the burned houses, including ceramic and stone vessels, flint and obsidian implements, ground stone tools, human and animal figurines, labrets, axes, and personal ornaments. Most exciting, however, are the hundreds of clay sealings with stamp-seal impressions and the small tokens, which point to a very early but well-developed system of recording and administration. The Burnt Village was part of extensive networks of long-and short-distance exchange, and its inhabitants maintained relationships with groups of people in distant areas, such as the coastal regions of the Levant, the piedmont of southeastern Turkey, and the plains of Mesopotamia. External resources were mobilized and exploited in a regular manner and to a considerable extent, i.e., beyond the level of incidental transactions.

Border Pastoralism in Eastern Sudan

Border Pastoralism in Eastern Sudan