This article presents a social history of the Coalición de los Pueblos Mixtecos Oaxaqueños (Coalition of Mixtec Oaxacan Communities, CPMO), a grouping of mutual-aid associations formed by Indigenous migrants in Mexico City during the middle of the twentieth century. It draws on the coalition's archives to demonstrate how years of migration to Mexico City eroded traditional inter-village conflicts and created the conditions for a broader ethnic identity among Mixtec migrants in the capital. In addition, the coalition's collaboration with the federal government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenous Institute, INI) challenges common depictions of Indigeneity and modernisation as being inherently antagonistic with one another. The coalition's collaboration with the INI led its members to more consciously and visibly identify with their Indigenous roots; they had to become more Indigenous in order to become more modern.

This essay traces the diffusion of pigs and the introduction of new practices of pig husbandry in East Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to the cases of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Japan. Countering the trend in animal history to emphasize environmental and genetic factors, it demonstrates that discourses of property, sovereignty, freedom, and slavery, brought to the region with modern imperialism, played a decisive role in shaping relationships between people and domesticated animals. The essay concludes that global diffusion of capitalist forms of animal husbandry depended on a process of disembedding animals from earlier social roles. This process took different forms in different places. It was in part ecological and in part economic, but must be understood first in the context of the movement of political ideas.

Tracing the assumption behind China's nationality identification that the Dan constituted a littoral minzu, this article examines the rise and circulation of “Dan” as a racial entity in writings by Chinese thinkers, reformers, and scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains how “Dan” emerged as a zu, minzu, zhongzu, and renzhong in late-Qing political polemics and pedagogical texts, and how this notion was combined with Republican-era scholarship on the Dan within and across the disciplines of popular literature, folklore, ethnohistory, and anthropology. Both Western and imperial Chinese scholarly trends and racialist ideas shaped pre-1949 Dan studies. Modern intellectuals presented the Dan as a non-Han minority based on various nationalist concerns as well as their Han and regional identities. From a historical perspective, this article redraws the geoethnic landscape of modern China by taking transregional littoral fringes into consideration and calling for attention to those identified as non-Han before the nationality investigation in the 1950s but as Han afterward.

Material culture studies demonstrate how objects may act to communicate information regarding social identity. In this study we consider ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence for Postclassic spinning and weaving as symbols relating to female ideology in ancient Mexico. We then relate a contextual interpretation of texts and images to contemporary symbolism, particularly associated with members of the female earth/fertility deity complex depicted and described in precolumbian and early colonial pictorial manuscripts. For our case study we analyze decorative imagery found on baked-clay spindle whorls from Postclassic Cholula, Mexico. This collection is representative of an iconographic system relating to female ideology. Whorls, as well as other spinning and weaving tools, paralleled male-oriented weapons to create a symbolic equivalence or, as we argue, a usurpation of the male symbols within a female worldview as a form of resistance to male domination. We conclude that the symbolic system used on spindle whorls and in other aspects of female practice created a communication network understood by Postclassic women.

The motivations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers for selecting particular lithic raw materials are often explained in rigidly functional or symbolic terms. By examining the exploitation of crystal quartz at two Terminal Pleistocene rockshelter sites (Ntloana Tšoana and Sehonghong) in Lesotho, southern Africa, the authors reveal that lithic reduction required a form of engagement unique to that material's specific properties. The preferential use of quartz crystals—irrespective of the availability of a wider range of raw materials—demonstrates agency and variability in the technological decisions.

This essay draws on the skeptical opinions that some historians of science have of archaeoastronomy, on historians' changing interpretations of proper historical method, and on their varied understandings of the nature of science to discuss how these methodological issues apply to archaeoastronomy. The essay argues that archaeoastronomical research should bear as much attention to the external context of early astronomies as it does to their internal content, suggesting specifically that insights into the origins of science can be gained by paying greater attention to the practitioners of early astronomies—to the skywatchers.

The purpose of this invited commentary is to present some general closing remarks on the global content of the ‘Oxford IX’ International Symposium on Archaeoastronomy, taking into account how we evaluate the course archaeoastronomy has taken over the past few years. It is significant that the interdisciplinary field of archaeoastronomy has already, by common consent, changed its name into ‘astronomy in culture’ (or ‘cultural astronomy’). This happened several years ago, although it is still the case that the cultural aspect (cosmovision, or vision of the world) is not always taken sufficiently into account. The keynote presentations by Ruggles, Iwaniszewski and McCluskey addressed fundamental issues of method and theoretical concepts that should guide archaeoastronomical studies. The rest of the sessions as well as the posters were dedicated to case studies from different cultural regions of the world. This commentary synthesizes several common themes that were addressed in the many interesting papers from all over the world that were presented in the meeting. Finally I take up the proposition of Gary Urton that future efforts should be concentrated on the study of the production and maintenance of systems of knowledge in complex state societies as well as in more egalitarian rural communities. In my opinion it is an urgent task to begin discourse about the history of pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, a discipline of which the history of science and astronomy forms a fundamental part. The ‘Oxford’ International Conferences are a key forum for exchange and encounter regarding comparative studies with other ancient civilizations as well as indigenous traditions from all over the world.