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While doing fieldwork in the modernizing Javanese city of Solo during the late 1980s, Suzanne Brenner came upon a neighborhood that seemed like a museum of a bygone era: Laweyan, a once-thriving production center of batik textiles, had embraced modernity under Dutch colonial rule, only to fend off the modernizing forces of the Indonesian state during the late twentieth century. Focusing on this community, Brenner examines what she calls the making of the \"unmodern.\" She portrays a merchant enclave clinging to its distinctive forms of social life and highlights the unique power of women in the marketplace and the home--two domains closely linked to each other through local economies of production and exchange. Against the social, political, and economic developments of late-colonial and postcolonial Java, Brenner describes how an innovative, commercially successful lifestyle became an anachronism in Indonesian society, thereby challenging the idea that tradition invariably gives way to modernity in an evolutionary progression. Brenner's analysis centers on the importance of gender to processes of social transformation. In Laweyan, the base of economic and social power has shifted from families, in which women were the main producers of wealth and cultural value, to the Indonesian state, which has worked to reorient families toward national political agendas. How such attempts affect women's lives and the meaning of the family itself are key considerations as Brenner questions long-held assumptions about the division between \"domestic\" and \"public\" spheres in modern society.

The romantic image of the fierce Iron Age horse-riding pastoralists of the first millennium BC who roamed the Eurasian steppe has dominated our historical imagination of nomadic confederacies. The Scythians, Saka, Sarmatians, Wusun and Yuezhi, when described by ancient Greek historians and Chinese chroniclers, have been identified as the 'barbarians' (Beckwith 2009). In such accounts these nomadic barbarians occupied the 'edges' or peripheries of core agrarian states. In this article I explore how the Iron Age archaeology of settlements and burial mounds (kurgans) of a remote area along the Tian Shan Mountains of south-eastern Kazakhstan provides a different picture of the so-called barbarians. In order to build an archaeological case that allows for a different interpretation of the formation and evolution of Iron Age agro-pastoralism at the southern edge of the Eurasian steppe, this story must be told through the lens of a field archaeologist.

This paper discusses a rare bronze Sogdian coin of an appanage ruler nny'βy't smyδ'nč (Nanaiabiat Samidanian) found at the Ming Tepe hillfort, about 20 km. north-east of Samarkand. The authors date this coin to the first half of the eighth century, i.e. to the time of the Arab conquest of Central Asia.