The First ‘Urnfields’ in the Plains of the Danube and the Po

Journal of World Prehistory - Archaeological research is currently redefining how large-scale changes occurred in prehistoric times. In addition to the long-standing theoretical dichotomy between...     

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.     

Capturing Understanding of Women’s Embroidery Designs: A Methodology for Research and a Critique of Cataloguing Databases using the Example of Women’s Embroidery in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Daughter of a merchant, the amateur designer and embroiderer Sarah Bland came from an upper-middle-class family. She made an album of a collection of drawn and printed designs between 1835 and 1854 that includes her original designs, patterns traced from magazines, and commercial, printed designs for Berlin wool work. This case study explores her kinship networks, social context and environment as well as perceptions of a woman’s role. It concentrates on Bland’s designs, both made and collected, and compares these to her botanical illustrations, made while she was staying at St Leonards-on-Sea on the south-east coast of England from 1835 to 1843. These pieces are now held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum’s database is discussed in relation to other systems to explore its potential for cataloguing such designs as well as its shortcomings. This article posits that art historical databases can be used to catalogue designs for embroidery with a method which is both sensitive to gender and socially contextual. This allows women’s history in relation to designs for embroidered textiles and dress to emerge.     

The British Archaeological Association and the Genesis of J. C. Bruce’s The Roman Wall

On 31 July 1849, John Collingwood Bruce gave a lecture on Hadrian’s Wall at the British Archaeological Association’s annual Congress in Chester. This was his first lecture outside his native North-East on the subject on which he was soon to become the leading authority. Two primary accounts of the occasion survive, but are contradictory in several details. These contradictions are explored, the accuracy of the account in the JBAA upheld and the importance of the occasion emphasised.     

The Role of the Student Researcher: Notes from Hadrian’s Wall

Fieldwork carried out for a Masters dissertation examined, through interviews, how well a consultation on the future management of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site had been carried out. Unexpected access was granted during a tense and uncertain period for those involved in managing the Site, at least partly because as a student, the author was not affiliated with any of the organisations concerned. This paper will examine the roles and relationships that the student may find him/herself in, in such a situation, and the possible benefits and dangers these bring. It will also look at the student’s privilege of a sustained period to focus on a single topic, often denied to academics. In the case of an MA, this produces relatively quick results and the possibility of contributing to urgent current issues, if students can be persuaded to publish.     

‘The True Love of the People and the Motherland’: The concept of socialist patriotism,socialist nation and anti-nationalism in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter-concept to set against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra-nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid-1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.     

The Archaeology of Smuggling and the Falmouth King’s Pipe

This article demonstrates the potential of an historical archaeology of smuggling and the value of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of smuggling and its prevention. By exploring the previously unstudied history of the King’s Pipe in Falmouth, a large chimney used for the destruction of tobacco, a rare survivor of many that once existed in England’s port cities, it demonstrates that archaeology could transform our understanding of smuggling and its prevention, and more broadly the history of crime and punishment in eighteenth century England.

The Fabulous Tales of the Common People,Part 1: Representing Hadrian’s Wall

Abstract

Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most instantly recognizable ancient monuments in the UK. This paper explores the historical and contemporary visualization practices which have created this iconic image. Moving between the disciplines of archaeology, cultural geography, and heritage and tourism studies, the paper draws upon a variety of data sources such as paintings, photographs, models, and reconstructions to consider how the Wall is visually represented within contemporary public discourse. The paper focuses on digital photography and considers the ways in which images create and sustain particular readings of the Wall’s function and significance. These contemporary representational practices demonstrate strong continuities, and earlier images are used to provide historical context. Emphasis is placed on the monument’s landscape setting in visual representations and the importance of this environmental context for readings of the Wall’s cultural and political significance. The present paper deals primarily with representations of the Wall, but it is argued that these representational practices are also fundamentally embodied. The physical encounters of visitors and archaeologists will be considered in greater detail in the second part of this study (Witcher, forthcoming).     

Canada’s Supply Management System and the Dairy Industry in the Era of Trade Liberalization: A Cultural Commodity?

ABSTRACT

Canada’s dairy farmers have spent the last 40 years fighting to preserve their supply management system despite increases in the desire to liberalize trade through the expansion of regional free trade agreements and the targeting of agriculture in recent rounds of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). How has Canada’s supply management system resisted trade liberalization thus far? Moreover, what strategies have Canadian dairy farmers used to lobby the government to preserve this system? The answer to these questions lay within the intersection of culture and economics. Canadian dairy farmers have been successful in framing Canadian dairy as a distinctly Canadian cultural commodity, and therefore framing supply management as the economic tool needed to defend this cultural commodity. In exploring this topic, this article will touch on Canada’s history of preserving cultural institutions, as well as the historical importance of Canada’s supply management system.     

The ‘Ungallant Silence of the Historian’: Elizabeth Stone,Esther Owen and the Art of Needlework

This essay explores the challenges of authorship for two women authors of important needlework books during the 1840s. Elizabeth Stone authored the first British history of needlework, the Art of Needlework (1840), and Esther Owen wrote an influential pattern book, the Illuminated Ladies' Book of Useful and Ornamental Needlework (1844), but both women were powerless over their work when authorial mis-attribution and financial mismanagement hindered their efforts to engage in professional careers. Countless anonymous writers of needlework articles and guidebooks provided scholars with a treasure of textual artifacts that contain valuable cultural and historical information about women's lives, whether the women were readers, editors or writers. Yet the lack of specific bibliographical and biographical details about needlework books and their authors often frustrate adequate scholarly reappraisal. The tradition of anonymity and a general lack of respect for domestic women's art from publishers and contemporaries outside the woman's sphere created a dearth of archival material, and careless reviewers spurred mistakes and omissions that sometimes began as early as the first printing and continue from that moment until now. The careers of Stone and Owen serve as case studies of complications for women working in the writer's trade, and of problems encountered by scholars writing nineteenth-century women's history.     

The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland’s Celtic Revival

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owensons The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.     

‘A Sense of Crowd and Urgency’? Atmosphere and Inconvenience in the Chamber of the Old House of Commons

The house of commons before the 1834 fire that destroyed it was small, poky, and uncomfortable. Its effects on the health, audibility, and behaviour of its members were frequently a cause of complaint, and informed the consideration by two select committees in 1831 and 1833 of what could be done to replace the chamber. This article examines the background to the appointment of the committees, and what their discussions reveal about the unsatisfactory nature of the chamber. It considers why there failed to be a consensus on altering the chamber before its destruction.     

The Abeng’s Call: The Articulation of Place and the International in Black Power Print Production

This article engages with radical Black Power print production in order to examine the articulation of Black practices of place-making and Black internationalist spatial politics. These spatial politics and practices are developed through engagement with the Jamaican Black Power newspaper Abeng which was produced at the height of Black Power activity on the island in 1969. The paper draws on Black Geographies scholarship to demonstrate that Abeng represented a material and discursive means through which subaltern practices and places of resistance in Jamaica were enacted in opposition to and excess of plantation spatialities and regimes on the island. The carving out of such subaltern places allowed for the articulation of transnational imaginaries and translocal solidarities with similarly aligned communities and struggles across the diasporic world. The Abeng newspaper was again central in crafting these imagined Black internationalist geographies and coeval praxes of transnational solidarity.     

The colour of the facades in Siena’s historical centre: I. Glazings (calcium oxalate films s.s.) and other finishes on the stone materials of the Cathedral’s main facade

This paper focuses on the long-debated topic of the so-called calcium oxalate films: their origin and meaning but also their age and original appearance. The restoration of the main facade of the Siena Cathedral provided a unique opportunity to this end, thanks to the possibility of an extensive and detailed sampling and (as rarely happens) a sufficiently accurate historical knowledge of the construction vicissitudes. This work, mainly based on a polarising microscopy study (coupled with X-ray diffraction and SEM-EDS analyses) of over a thousand thin and ultra-thin sections of 400 microsamples, demonstrates that the current relicts of films are the result of alteration and decay of ancient treatments. In most cases, these were linseed oil-based glazings (the use of this substance is confirmed by historical documents) and pigments. Their role was essentially aesthetic; their use dates the beginning of the fourteenth century and continued at least until the eighteenth century.