Mark Hudson, Junzo Uchiyama, Claudia Zancan
et al.
Maritime networks have been proposed as a mechanism for early agricultural and, by extension, language dispersals in several coastal and island regions. In Island Southeast Asia, such networks have sometimes been discussed as an alternative to the farming/language dispersal hypothesis. However, the relationships between Neolithic maritime networks and maritime economies are poorly known. Here, we summarise published information for three regions where Neolithic maritime networks are thought to have been associated with language dispersals (whether hypothetical or directly attested): the Mediterranean, Island Southeast Asia and Japan. We conclude that while maritime networks played an important role in the Neolithic dispersals considered here, maritime trade and resources did not necessarily represent alternative or opposing economic strategies to agriculture. It was only from the Bronze Age that long-distance trade integrated maritime exchange and resources into a broader economic system. Our review illustrates the complex relations between subsistence, technology and mobility in prehistoric maritime networks and the paper concludes with suggestions for future research.
In 1646, Faria e Sousa described El Greco as “the Statius and the Góngora of poets for the eyes.” This comparison between the painter and the poet arose on the margins of the Gongorist controversy, and can be understood through its intersection with another debate, quieter yet significant: Francisco Pacheco’s dispute with El Greco over the scientific nature of painting. In practice, this second controversy revolves around El Greco’s dual reputation—as both brilliant and extravagant, particularly in his theoretical views, as he resisted the formalisation of painting as an Art. The documents linked to this debate, examined alongside two of the Cretan artist’s masterpieces, Laocoön and View and Plan of Toledo, support our argument for regarding El Greco as an erudite painter, a culto. Here, we use the term in a sense akin to its meaning in contemporary poetry, drawing a parallel with Góngora’s poetics and the shifting tides of his reputation.
During the 1940s, the Valencia Trade Fair made an effort to showcase the riches of the Moroccan Protectorate and the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea and to arouse the interest of the metropolitan public in colonial affairs. To achieve this, the strategy of staging stereotypes of the two territories and their populations was used. In this architectural and human display, the image of the protectorate and the colony was configured dialectically; while Morocco, linked for historical reasons with Spain, was presented as a civilised territory and the Moroccans as fundamental agents in stimulating Franco’s economy and values, Guinea was defined as a territory to be civilised, with the rhetoric of National-Catholicism playing a crucial role in the public discourse that mixed business and missions. A fact that, as we shall see in this essay, is reflected in the texts and photographs that record this episode of colonial memory under Franco’s regime.
In the early 2000s a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write a historiographical essay on the war of 1936–9 in Spain, only then to say that they wouldn't be able to publish my text because their readers ‘wouldn't recognise in it the war they knew’. The essay I'd written analysed the conflict in 1930s Spain in the context of the many cognate ones catalysed across continental Europe by the war of 1914–8. All these conflicts were, in one way or another, conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world, already shaken by the First World War, and those who sought to effect some form of levelling social and political change, whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, including in Spain, such conflicts arose from a common hinterland of accelerating urbanisation, industrialisation and, crucially, from the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city.
Starting in the 1910s, revolutionary syndicalism spread and operated in both an inter and transnational direction. Starting with attempts to create an autonomous international coordination framework while overcoming the difficult period of the fascist repression and, finally, testing the soundness of the anarcho-syndicalist thesis in Spain, the militant networks were the true protagonists of the movement history. This essay focuses on the Italian movement in order to revise its activity –both in hiding and in exile– during the 1920s and 1930s. It analyses a political experience that was made possible thanks to the creation of militant networks in permanent contact with the syndicalist organizations of the host countries. The former tested those countries’ economic contradictions and, finally, were involved in the Spanish Civil War.
History (General) and history of Europe, History (General) and history of Europe
El número de voluntarios judíos que se enrolaron en las Brigadas Internacionales para defender a la República española de los rebeldes nacionalistas fue muy elevado. Su sobrepresencia se notaba entre los voluntarios norteamericanos, así como entre los que vinieron de Polonia, Francia e Inglaterra. Este es también el caso argentino. Tras una breve discusión sobre las repercusiones de la Guerra Civil española en la Argentina, este trabajo se centra en argentinos-judíos que se presentaron como voluntarios para combatir el fascismo en suelo ibérico. Hay una necesidad urgente de llenar importantes lagunas en la historiografía de los argentinos-judíos, especialmente en lo que se refiere a aquellos no afiliados a las instituciones comunitarias, y en la historiografía de la izquierda argentina en general. Como judíos, abrigaban una preocupación adicional sobre las viles consecuencias del fascismo en general y del nazismo en particular. Desde su punto de vista, el apoyo brindado a la rebelión nacionalista por la Alemania de Hitler y la Italia de Mussolini era causa de gran alarma. Al mismo tiempo, manifestar tal solidaridad transnacional con la España asediada era también una forma de promover causas sociales y étnicas en Argentina
The defeat of the military uprising on 19 July 1936 in Barcelona and Valencia unleashed the process of the collectivisation of companies, which came to be managed by committees comprised of their own workers. The anarcho-syndicalists were identified with this change, which the overwhelmed Republican authorities tried to channel. In the region studied, collectivisation was more important in industry than in agriculture. The critical anti-fascist testimonials of the phenomenon allow us to temper the versions of the propagandists, who blamed all the flaws in the process on its adversaries. Decentralised worker management lost ground after the test of strength in Barcelona in May 1937.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Spain
Professional and scientific activity regarding the “History of Spain in America” during the Franco dictatorship were both carried out in oblivion of the existence of a colonial past understood as a process of domination that determined the effective appropriation of the material culture of former Spanish colonies in the Americas and their subsequent preservation and exhibition in the mother country’s most important museums. This article analyzes how the Museum of America (1941) crystalized a sense of mutual belonging between Latin America and Spain, with which historians and anthropologists would dialogue for a long time, providing concrete evidence of its existence through the exhibition of material objects originating in a supposedly “harmonious mixture” of “natives” and “Spaniards,” but which ignores the conflictive dimension of the inter-ethnic relations established between them.
Ivories and ostrich egg shells, exotic materials par excellence, have a central place in the exchanges that took place in the Mediterranean basin at the beginning of the 1st millennium. The term transfer holds implicit a number of geographic, chronological and ethnic parameters that can arise in different combinations. Here we examine the origin of each component of the archaeological objects: the raw material, the form of the object and the techniques used in their manufacture. From these combinations, certain artistic features emerge. On a peninsular-wide scale we have managed to associate various crafts—ivory and bone, ivory and terracotta, ivory and beaten metal, egg-shells and stone or terracotta—constituting a community of art in the 8th-6th centuries BCE.