One day in the late seventh century, the governor of Medina, Marwān b. al-Ḥakam, came to the Prophet's Mosque and found a man pressing his body against the wall of the Prophet's tomb. Indignant at this sight, Marwān grabbed the man by the neck and demanded, ‘Do you know what you are doing?’ ‘Yes’, the man replied, looking up, ‘I have come to the Messenger of God, not to the stone or the curtain.’ The man was Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī, a Companion of the Prophet, who had fought bravely in many of the Muslim community's early battles. Eyeing Marwān, Abū Ayyūb said, ‘I heard the Messenger of God say, “Do not mourn for the religion (al-dīn) when its people govern, but rather mourn for it when other people do.”’

A similar story is told of a meeting at the Prophet's tomb between Marwān and another Companion: Usāma b. Zayd, the son of the Prophet Muḥammad's adopted son Zayd b. Ḥāritha. When Marwān saw Usāma praying beside the tomb, he yelled, ‘You are praying at the Messenger of God's tomb?’ Usāma responded ‘I love him’, prompting Marwān to swear at him with ‘vile words’ (qawlan qabīḥan). With his back turned, Usāma then said, ‘O Marwān, I heard the Messenger of God say, “God hates both the obscene and the foul”, and you are the obscenest of the foul.’

In these two stories, prominent Muslims face off at the Prophet's tomb, with several themes on display in their narrativised encounters. One key theme is the piety of political rulers. After his tenure as the governor of Medina, Marwān b. al-Ḥakam was a short-reigned caliph (r. 64–5/684–5), whose rule initiated the Marwānid Umayyad dynasty that dominated much of the Islamic world until the ʿAbbāsid revolution. In a not-so-subtle critique of the Marwānids and their infamous impieties, Abū Ayyūb cites a Prophetic warning about the rule of people ‘other than’ the righteous followers of Islam: implicitly, that is, Marwān and his reprobate successors. Indeed, Usāma b. Zayd explicitly connects the Prophet's censorious words to Marwān, and places him in the category of those ‘hated’ by God. Circulated by proto-Sunnī and Shīʿī transmitters in the eighth to ninth centuries, these reports take part in the wider vilification of Umayyad rule (and of Marwān more specifically) that appears in many sources from this period.

In the essay ‘The Role of the Writer in a Minority Culture’, published as part of the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness in 1966, Derick Thomson (Ruaraidh MacThomais) notes that in ‘reviving, or renewing, or developing the life of a minority culture’ the writer's role is a crucially important one, and sketches what authors can do to contribute to the survival and flourishing of lesser-used languages and minoritised cultures. He stresses that the ‘writing in the minority language must not be too inward-looking, too introspective with regard to its own society, as this underlines the sense of isolation in the public’, and argues that employing the language for more general purposes has the potential to enhance the prestige of the minority society and increase its competitiveness with the majority. He also claims that ‘much can be done to foster writing by providing media for publication and a more widespread interest’ in literature, which goal can be accomplished both by societies and organisations and by small groups and even individuals, and emphasises the ‘usefulness of encouraging journalism’, underlining its twin psychological and propagandist value.

Thomson further proposes that ‘in a situation such as the Scottish Gaelic one, it would be most useful to have a reasonably close liaison between the scholar and the writer, if the work of rehabilitation is to go ahead smoothly and quickly’. He advises and warns that this imaginary writer should ‘cultivate a tougher skin, and should not be afraid of speaking his mind, even if by so doing he drives himself into some sort of voluntary exile’. To fulfil the role, the writer should endeavour ‘to increase the flexibility and the range of writing in the language, to provide a minimum bulk of such writing, to express the ethos of his society but also to interpret the outside world to it, and to satirise it periodically’.

With his typical readiness to follow his own advice and give a lead, Thomson's career and involvement with the Gaelic revitalisation efforts in the second half of the twentieth century are an exemplification of the essay's proposal, including the twinning of the role of the writer and the academic.

Many of Thomson's activities as a scholar, editor, organiser and translator can also be conceptualised as part of the Gaelic revitalisation efforts. As this part of his work is one of the least explored, this chapter summarises Thomson's scholarly output, organisational work, activism and translations in the first comprehensive overview, and discusses their intended and possible connections to the promotion of the language. MacAulay remarked that Thomson's Gaelic activism, such as the foundation and maintenance of Gairm and The Gaelic Books Council, spring from the same motivation that pushed him into active participation in nationalist politics, for he saw those activities as ‘offering at least a marginal possibility of the survival of Gaelic culture’.

Scholarship

Thomson's main career was that of a university lecturer and academic, and throughout his life he continued to write and publish research on various aspects of Gaelic literature, from medieval poetry to developments in Gaelic verse that were occurring in his own lifetime. His scholarly oeuvre includes publications designed as reference works that are accessible both to Gaelic scholars and to an international readership, and also detailed specialised studies that resonate most within the field of Gaelic literature.

The vast majority of Thomson's purely academic work was published in English, which contrasts with the importance he accredited to conducting research on Gaelic topics through the medium of Gaelic, noting that ‘a contemporary living literature needs a contemporary criticism in its own language’, and the conviction that published criticism in Gaelic could provide the needed impetus for more university courses and school classes conducted through the medium of the language. As McLeod notes, until the late 1990s almost no scholarly work was published in Gaelic, which was a general trend in academia, and the practice of delivering lectures and papers and publishing academic essays on Gaelic topics in Gaelic only became more common in more recent decades. Thomson followed his own advice mostly through the contributions to Gairm, where essays on Gaelic literature and an extensive corpus of reviews in Gaelic appeared across fifty years, but all these articles are relatively short, running to about five pages maximum. Thomson's Gaelic prose also remains uncollected and untranslated, and constitutes one of the least studied parts of his work.

In this chapter, I discuss traditional conceptions of the social formations that scholars imagine as having been in Rome and that present themselves as explanatory for understanding Paul's letter. I then outline an alternative scenario. I undertake this project as an experiment in what I take to be the best critical practices of the historian who works in the study of religion. Of course, “best practices of the historian” and “the study of religion” are rightly debated activities.

Among several possible critical issues one could raise about scholarship that tries to argue for social formations in Rome that would partly explain Paul's letter, I want to focus here upon the issue of parsimony. Many people are familiar with the Rube Goldberg cartoons depicting extremely complex sets of gadgets, levers, pulleys on a contraption designed to perform some simple task. These drawings are amusing because a good mousetrap does not need eighty working parts. Given the varied constraints of different fields of knowledge – and the application of the principle of simplicity does vary by field – among relatively plausible contenders, the more economical explanation is generally to be preferred. This is one of the bedrock principles of knowledge both in the academy and more generally. The historian wants to explain particular relatively-known outcomes in terms of antecedent processes (types of causes including human activities). The parsimony here is not reduction to some totalizing theory such as psychoanalytic, crude forms of Marxist ideology, or a Foucauldian idea that “all language, culture and practice is politically loaded,” but preferring that which most fully explains the antecedent processes with the greatest economy, the fewest assumptions. This is in no way to deny the great complexity and multiple causes in history. Romantic historiography such as R. J. Collingwood's revels in the irreducible complexity of the historical and the intuitive understanding of the historical interpreter, but even these historians rather inconsistently use the principle of parsimony in their actual historical work. In the case before us, the relatively known to be explained is Paul's letter to the Romans. I will argue that numerous scholarly accounts, taken as explanations, resemble Rube Goldberg contraptions.

Structuralism, lately freshening the air of many venerable institutions and discourses, has been fruitfully deployed in what Thomas Carlyle (1795– 1881) once termed the ‘dismal science’, economics. The opposition core/ periphery has been used to demonstrate the structural relationship between the wealth of the First World and the poverty of the Third. Like all productive oppositions, core/periphery signifies a relationship and not an essential condition. Thus, in one version, Scotland may be seen as part of the developed world, but in another version with a somewhat longer timespan, that country (like all the Celtic margins of the British Isles) may instead be seen in a peripheral relationship with the Anglo-Saxon core of England.

The core/periphery opposition fashioned within economic discourse is now being applied to questions of culture and ideology with dramatic results. The power of the core region does not lie simply in the disposition of its periphery or peripheries’ economic and political affairs. It also lies in the core's control over the institutions and practices of discourse production, such as the mass media, which contribute to the ordering of what goes on inside the heads of the peoples of the periphery or peripheries. Thus it is that (certainly over the last 250 years, and arguably for much longer) the identity of the Scots has been defined elsewhere than in Scotland. The new social type, homo oeconomicus, initially coming to ascendancy in the eighteenth-century dynamic core societies of England and France, was defined by the ideologues and artists of those societies within the mode of Romanticism, and by means of a process of structural opposition. Those core societal ideologues and artists created an Other (let us call the latter homo celticus, although similar identities were assigned to other so-called primitive peoples throughout the world) who was all the things that homo oeconomicus was not:

Oppressed peoples the world over know this discourse to their bitter cost. It may take an overtly hostile form (the ‘savage’ mode) or an apparently benign one (the ‘poetic’ mode), but it matters little. What is important is that the Celtic Other (or African, or Polynesian, and so on) is allocated their place and constructed within a discourse enunciated elsewhere.

Introduction

İhsan Aslan and Ali Karagöz were detained in their homes in Cizre in the early morning on 27 December 1993. Both were originally from the village of Şax (Çağlayanköy) at the foot of the Cudi mountain in Cizre, in the neighbouring district of Şırnak. The state security forces had burned and evacuated their villages and homes because they refused to be Village Guards, so they had to move to Cizre centre, a small city (or large town) with a population of more than 100,000 people.

İhsan was working in his brother's shop, and Ali was an animal dealer. They were detained by a group from the Special Police Teams, the Village Guards and the gendarmerie commander, who was known as the commander of JİTEM in Cizre. Their wives said that they saw İhsan and Ali being taken to the Village Guard's shelter, not to the gendarmerie or police station. After being detained, their families never heard from them again. Their bodies have still not been found. When family members insisted on asking about the fate of those disappeared, they were threatened by Village Guards, and the prosecutors repeatedly rejected their petitions. For years they were unable even to search for their disappeared relatives due to fear.

Beşir Bayar (1993), İzzet Padır (1994), Abdullah Özdemir (1994), Ramazan Elçi (1994) and Abdullah Efelti (1995) are just a few examples of the many people disappeared in the same way as İhsan Aslan and Ali Karagöz in Cizre at that time. Their fate was part of a general pattern of enforced disappearances and unsolved murders that became routine in Cizre. In order to understand the paramilitary violence in Cizre in the 1990s, the working methods of paramilitary groups, their relations with each other and their policies against civilians, the stories of those who disappeared are important.

In the incident described above, members of three different paramilitary groups were involved: JİTEM, the Special Police Teams and the Village Guards. This also determined the characteristics of paramilitary groups active in Cizre in the 1990s. There are a few factors that present as important in examining Cizre as a case study.

Introduction

Four important organisations emerged in the 1980s. In 1982, the Special Police Teams were established (and reorganised in 1993); in 1985 the system of Village Guards (established in 1924) was reorganised (and again in 1991); and in the late 1980s, JİTEM was established, which included repentants. These paramilitary groups were all formed by state institutions, primarily to deal with the situation in the Kurdish provinces (northern Kurdistan). Also, during 1991–5, the extreme Islamist Hizbullah organisation that had emerged in early 1980 in a Kurdish province, Batman, was utilised by state agencies, particularly against pro-PKK Kurdish civilians and politicians. The questions addressed here concern how and why these paramilitary organisations were established and what explains their characteristics.

On the basis of secondary literature, interviews, memoirs and newspaper reports focusing on the 1990s, it appears that these paramilitary organisations were established for three main reasons: (1) the threat to the national security of the Turkish state (as perceived), (2) the weakness of the military in irregular warfare and the institutional capacity of the state, and (3) the plausible deniability they afforded regarding violence carried out against civilians. The political conditions in which these paramilitary groups emerged were those of (1) ethnic conflict (more clearly, political demands of the Kurds), (2) the army and party politics, (3) tribal politics and (4) organised crime.

I use the concept of state rather than particular regimes or governments since, as mentioned above, the role of governments in the state administration was not determinant of the ideology and politics of the Turkish state, simply because of the network of hidden relations called the ‘deep state’, and the temporary placeholders on the democratic scene did not have real power. I make a distinction between immediate causes and deeper conditions because, first, I consider the reasons why the paramilitaries were actually set up, and then I analyse the conditions of the political, military and economic environment that reveal these. Developing an assumption implicit in the first chapter, the conditions are taken to be the more important. These conditions resulted in both small-scale, informal organisations and large-scale, hierarchically ordered organisations. Some of the organisations were an extension of the secret services, others of the army and of organised crime.

This chapter focuses on the structural role played by invisible architecture in Manchester, the ‘shock-city’ of the 1830s and 40s, in the writing of James Kay (1804–77; Kay-Shuttleworth from 1842), Friedrich Engels (1820–95) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65). In different ways, these writers each position hidden, underground and unconscious spaces, in particular the cellar-dwelling, as both structurally necessary and disruptive to the industrial capitalist system which generates such spaces. This arrangement is the result of a spatial and social repression that seeks to preserve the existing form of capitalist relations of production, but in doing so throws up spaces whose invisibility to dominant forms of power provides an opportunity for emergent or residual forms of thought and praxis to subsist within the city, albeit in tenuous and marginal ways. As I will show, such invisibility is a risk. It provides limited opportunities for selfdefinition to some working-class characters in Mary Barton (1848), such as Alice Wilson, but leads to absolute degradation for others, such as the Davenport family.

I approach visibility and invisibility in these texts as two sides of what Henri Lefebvre calls the ‘double illusion’ by which space conceals its socially produced nature. This double illusion consists of ‘the illusion of transparency’ on one hand and ‘the illusion of opacity, or “realistic” illusion’ on the other. In the illusion of transparency, visibility is foremost and space appears to be an open realm of free activity, in the same way as free-market capitalism appears to allow individual freedom. In the realistic illusion, invisibility takes precedence, so that objects encountered in space function as material blocks of ideology, appearing to have a ‘natural’ reality that conceals their origins. In this second illusion, contingent structures are given a cloak of permanence, obviousness and self-sufficiency. In Mary Barton, we might think of the attitude taken towards a desperately hungry Jem Wilson by the Carson family's servants, who ‘would have willingly given him meat and bread in abundance; but they were like the rest of us, and not feeling hunger themselves, forgot it was possible another might’.

Macbeth and Scotland: The Relevance of the Connection

Macbeth (c.1606) is habitually referred to as ‘the Scottish play’. In but one of the innumerable examples of that phenomenon, the distributor's campaign book for a 1960 film adaptation of the play opined that, ‘based in actual Scottish history, the film is a “natural” for Scots, wherever they may be – why not a Scottish Night complete with bagpipes and kilts?’ However, the central question with which this essay is concerned – how Scotland and the Scots are represented in William Shakespeare (c.1564–1616)'s original text and its subsequent (particularly cinematic) realisations – has only relatively recently become a possible topic of concern in the backwash of identity politics. The collective scholarly shift away from the politics of class to the politics of gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, dating roughly from the late 1960s, has fed into every area of cultural activity, not least Shakespearean productions and Shakespeare Studies.

Shakespearean criticism's historic lack of interest in questions of race and ethnicity (the figures of Shylock, Othello and Caliban excepted) has not precluded diverse versions of Macbeth from addressing such questions unconsciously. This essay argues that a few dominant discourses about Scotland and the Scots have lain, like deep-but-obscured foundations, within Shakespeare's original text and its diverse realisations. Those discourses have been activated only partially from case to case – in costume and/or scenic design here, in acting performance or incidental music there – all the way throughout history to the twentieth century's cinematic versions of Macbeth.

Asking how diverse versions of Macbeth constructed Scotland and the Scots exemplifies the core problem of any kind of ideological analysis: the interrogation of texts with regard to questions that they never set out to answer. Consider, for instance, what is often spoken of as the first fine art representation of Scotland and the Scots: an early-sixteenth-century Italian fresco depicting a papal emissary, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405– 64), addressing the court of Scottish king James I (1394–1437). Existing solely as a consequence of Piccolomini's subsequent status as Pope Pius II, the fresco was executed by the painter Pinturicchio (1454–1513) in 1505–07.

The original brief I was given for this piece was: ‘four thousand words on the possibility of political cinema in Scotland’. Having been landed in London by the backwash of that inexorable wave of history which, in earlier generations, beached our compatriots on the shores of Canada and New Zealand, I feel it would be presumptuous to attempt to fulfil that particular brief. It is best engaged with by the film workers who earn their bread in Scotland.

However, since I too am a film worker – as bureaucrat with the British Film Institute and as journalist with Tribune – my reflections on a closely related question might have some relevance, especially at this particular historical conjuncture when Scotland could be on the verge of radical political-cum-economic change.

The question is: How might Scottish film culture be politicised?

That question in its turn needs re-posing, for it is evident that Scottish film culture – or, more accurately, its discrete sections – has been highly politicised in the past. The problem has been the nature of the politics in question. Take Scottish filmmaking as example. On one hand, Scottish film workers have presented a picture of individualist effort which would gladden the heart of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) and which, theoretically at any rate, should have produced a great variety of films of very diverse aesthetic and, therefore, political tendencies. On the other, however, these same film workers were forced to compete with each other for limited funds disbursed by a few key Scottish institutions of patronage, the powerful voices of which, historically, have been extremely reactionary. Small wonder, then, that Scottish films critical of established aesthetic forms, cultural attitudes and political arrangements have been the exception rather than the rule.

It was no accident that, at its Film Bang held in Glasgow last January, the Scottish filmmaking community should have concentrated on this predicament above all else as the particular cross it has had to bear. It is to be hoped that the momentum towards democratic organisation generated at Film Bang can be sustained and the strength flowing from it used to readjust that inheritance.

Alongside the frontier landscapes of the Great Plains and the Southwest in Willa Cather's novels, one expects that the descriptions of desert environments in Paul Bowles's work from another colonial frontier, North Africa, will similarly emphasise extent. In this chapter, I will highlight a more prevalent element in his fiction that is the most basic and recognisable aspect of the view from above: verticality. That a figure must obtain a focal point higher than what is described is a definitional feature of aerial description – perhaps its only essential component. The process of getting to a lifted vantage point and the phenomenology of being up high is usually effaced by the immediacy of the view that is afforded by the climb. Conventionally, the transition from low to high takes the form of representations of transportation that open up a new setting for the plot to advance, prolonging time for extended representations of interiority. Often, the representation of travel will be skipped altogether. Here I will highlight the function of transition from down below to up above, while maintaining a focus on the form of environment that structures the climb and the eventual view.

Postclassical narratology (particularly approaches that utilise cognitive science) conceptualises space by drawing equivalencies between psychological processes of perceiving space and the linguistic construction of space in narrative discourse. Similarly, Bowles criticism has developed a psychologised spatial dynamic through its repeated emphasis on interiors and exteriors in both Bowles's fiction and his symbolic proximity to the American literary canon. These systems lack meaningful theories of verticality, or what makes the view from above different from ‘grounded’ perception and its representation. In this way, conventional analyses of description emphasise the ways that description helps construct or form the narrative story logic. But by turning attention to images of the environment, it becomes clear that descriptions have an opposing effect.

If narrative theory does focus on the vertical relationship between seer and seen, it often takes for granted the significance of transportation and the trip upwards in its construction of types of narration and description.

This book has explored the complex significance of relics and tombs within formative Islamic ritual and thought. Rather than rejecting them completely, many Muslims not only venerated material religious objects and spaces, but used them in conceptualising ideas about the Islamic community. These items and locations, and their varied significances, included the footsteps of Abraham in the Maqām Ibrāhīm as a marker of history, prayer and pilgrimage in Mecca; the corpses of unseen prophets sacralising the landscape of the emergent Islamic empire; the Prophet Muḥammad's tomb as a destination for pilgrimage and intercession in Medina; and the places where the Prophet stopped and prayed in the Ḥijāz as sites of communal memory, emulation and visitation. Rather than innovations of later centuries, many rituals and ideas that surrounded these places and objects were practised and discussed by early generations of Muslims, in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. The manifold ‘traces’ of the prophets were memorialised, visited, prayed at and debated by Muslims from very early in Islamic history.

At the same time, the avoidance of tomb and relic cult was undeniably a distinct and prominent theme within early Islamic juristic discussions and historical texts. Many figures criticised their fellow Muslims for touching the Maqām Ibrāhīm, for worshipping at the Prophet Muḥammad's tomb, and for visiting and praying at the Prophet's āthār. In no small part, the avoidance of such practices was presented as a rejection of Christian and Jewish tendencies towards the veneration of holy people. Efforts to distinguish Muslims from their near-others cannot totally and comprehensively account for these condemnatory attitudes towards the veneration of tombs and relics. Nonetheless, the enactment of Muslim difference was certainly an important component in the rhetorical framing of Muslim positions on the complex bundle of social, ritual and theological issues provoked by tomb and relic veneration.

Later Muslims would continue to perform rituals with relics and tombs, as well as to contest the validity of such practices. The continuing vitality of this debate is suggested, for example, by contemporary phenomena at the site in Mecca believed to be the place of the Prophet Muḥammad's birth, briefly discussed above.

The Muslim league

Gross salary

Net wage

Eternal rest

The submit of the mountain

New year

Capital

Nuclear head

Head over heels, topsy-turvy, upside down

Glad to have saved one’s skin (lit. content with returning without booty)

To comply with the decision

To respect s.o.’s wishes, to have regard for s.o.’s feelings

To respect s.b.’s feelings

Eager to buy

To take pity on s.b.

To accompany s.o.

All the best

To bet that . . .

To gamble on one’s life

To bet on s.th.

Under the circumstances

The present

To come into being (see the light of day), come into the world, be born

To find out, or see, with one’s own eyes

To regard it as one’s duty to . . .

Public opinion

Content and form

I saw its true nature, as it really is

Fragrance

The head of the family

Many people say

The lady of the house

Gross profit

To win a lawsuit

To remain calm, composed, be undismayed, to keep one’s self-control

To fortify s.o., give s.o. patience

To silence s.o.

Tie, necktie

The Empty Quarter

The Arab Spring

The prime of his life

The monotony of daily life

To collect one’s thoughts

To be prepared for s.th. or to do s.th.

A military rank

To order one’s affairs

Of shabby appearance

Firemen, the fire department

Serfs, bondsmen

The clergy, the ministry

Many men

All men

To return empty-handed, to lose the game

To retrace one’s steps, turn back, to turn on one’s heels

To regain one’s reason, get back to one’s senses, become reasonable again

Echo, reverberation

To revert to its original state or origin

To come round

To return with empty hands, without having achieved one’s mission

To go back on a decision

To go back on his word

He recalled, remembered

They turned back

A distinguished, capable, successful man

Such a man, a man like this

A man of the Quraysh tribe

A man whose situation is this, man who can be described as, a man in this situation

A resourceful, ingenious man

Vastness of outer space

Hospitable reception, generous entertainment

This chapter presents various contexts for Derick Thomson's thought and work. It provides a brief overview of the history of Gaelic in Scotland and of Scottish nationalism, and some general observations on the topic of linguistic and cultural revival. It also summarises Thomson's double commitment to revitalisation of Gaelic and Scottish political independence and outlines his involvement with the SNP. As Thomson never wrote any definitive treatise on his vision of the Gaelic revival, the chapter brings together opinions he expressed in essays, book chapters and pamphlets on the subject. It mentions Thomson's relationship to Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar and Hugh MacDiarmid, and finally his engagement with revivalist initiatives in Wales and Ireland.

Gaelic in Scotland

Several resources that outline the history of Gaelic in Scotland are now available: apart from McLeod's recent Gaelic in Scotland, which provides a general introduction and focuses on movements and policies between 1872 and 2020, the reader can also consult The Edinburgh Companion to the Gaelic Language (2010), edited by Moray Watson and Michelle Macleod, Kenneth MacKinnon's older study Gaelic: A Past & Future Prospect (1991) and Thomson's own overviews included in Gaidhlig ann an Albainn/Gaelic in Scotland and in Why Gaelic Matters. The following passage, which is based on these sources, presents a summary of selected important events and tendencies in the history of the language for the sake of convenience.

Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig) belongs to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family and is closely related to Irish (Gaeilge) and Manx (Gaelg) and more distantly to Welsh (Cymraeg), Cornish (Kernewek) and Breton (Brezhoneg). Regarding the emergence of Gaelic in the territory of today's Scotland, Gilbert Márkus, in his monograph Conceiving a Nation: Scotland to ad 900, seeks to rectify a widespread narrative of Gaelic migration from Ireland to Scotland, on the basis of recent archaeological evidence: