Rapid phytolith extraction for analysis of phytolith concentrations and assemblages during an excavation: an application at Tell es-Safi/Gath,Israel

A rapid phytolith extraction procedure is described, that allows phytolith concentrations and morphotype assemblages to be analyzed within hours. This procedure enables the results of these analyses to be used during an archaeological excavation, in order to better understand how plants were used. The new procedure was tested using a standard phytolith extract and two experimental phytolith-sediment blends and found to be both accurate and precise. The reliability of partial slide counting was evaluated and found to be as accurate and precise as existing phytolith quantification methods. The new extraction and counting procedures were applied to an archaeological site, Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel. The results demonstrate how information on phytolith concentrations in sediments that are available from one day to the next, can be used during an excavation to more effectively document the local features of interest and obtain better information.     

Iron Age hydraulic plaster from Tell es-Safi/Gath,Israel

Hydraulic plasters or mortars prior to the Roman period are rare. Here, we report the identification and characterization of 3000 year old (Iron Age) hydraulic plaster surfaces from the site of Tell es-Safi/Gath. This site, located in central Israel, was occupied almost continuously from prehistoric through modern times, and is identified as the Canaanite and Philistine city of Gath. A survey using an on-site Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR) identified the presence of amorphous silicates, in addition to calcite, in each of two superimposed plaster layers. This suite of minerals is characteristic of hydraulic plaster. An in-depth characterization of the plasters using FTIR, acid dissolution, X-ray fluorescence (XRF), X-ray powder diffractometry (pXRD), heating experiments and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM–EDS), shows that special silicate-containing minerals were brought from some distance to the site in order to produce these plaster surfaces. We therefore conclude that the plasters were deliberately produced, and were not the result of a fortuitous addition of local silicate minerals. A layer of around 150 μm thick enriched in carbonate hydroxylapatite was found in both plaster surfaces, and the same mineral was identified by infrared spectrometry in the surrounding sediments. This suggests that organic materials were used on these surfaces. These surfaces are among the oldest hydraulic plasters known.     

Dr John H. Kenneth

A technique for the detailed assessment of terrain capability is described. The method is used to evaluate the terrain capability of 81 sample farms in North East Scotland. The relevance of the technique is assessed by an analysis to determine the influence of terrain capability on type of farming. Results are also presented to indicate that farmers’ perception of their land type may be different to its actual capability. The need for a flexible approach to terrain capability evaluation is stressed.     

Polemic,Parliament and History: Michael Foot versus David Owen

Michael Foot had good reasons for resenting Dr David Owen, who played a prominent role in the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP) while Foot was Labour's leader. In Loyalists and Loners (1986), a book of political pen‐portraits, Foot duly delivered a blistering attack on Owen, focusing on two charges – that Owen was consumed by personal ambition from an early stage of his career, and that he was an ideological turncoat who had wilfully misused the word ‘socialism’. The present article examines Foot's allegations in the light of various historical sources, including the private papers of both protagonists. It is argued that, though Foot's charges seem devastating at first sight – and have never been refuted by Owen or his admirers – they cannot be sustained after an impartial review of the evidence. This reappraisal provides new insights into Owen's remarkable and controversial career at two pivotal stages – his initial rise to ministerial office, and his decision to leave Labour.     

Measuring Religious Preferences in Nineteenth-Century Urban Areas

The author applies David Galenson's work on the life cycles of modern artists to the study of the paintings of old masters, from about the early fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. Both the potential use of technical examination of paintings and the role of drawings for preconceiving compositions are explored as means for interpreting artistic behavior among pre-modern artists. Using a study of illustrations in texts to establish a list of canonical painters and the relative dates in which they are believed to have contributed their most important paintings, the author then analyzes a series of old master painters' working methods, demonstrating how their creative behavior corresponds to what their respective life cycles would suggest. Thus, the study of artists' life cycles could anticipate the use of optical and other mechanical devices for the production of premodern paintings based on such studies.     

THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER?

Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of “integrated history” and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non‐Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings.     

《论语》雌雉节新解

《论语》雌雉节汉代以来无定解。朱熹在《四书集注》中判此节两处有阙文,此说遂成定论。此节与《乡党》篇旨通意连,决无阙文。两千年来先贤大师释不通此节,关键在于离开“雌雉”之“雌”而去释解“时哉时哉”,结果变成离“礼’’释义。只要从“雌”字着眼,以“雌”释“时”,“山梁雌雉,时哉时哉”就与“礼”连接起来。雌雉节是子路惊飞孵卵雌雉,孔子强调此时正是雌雉孵卵之时,责备子路不应违反“不唐不卵”的时令之“礼”。子路打拱认错,雌雉终又惊飞。此解不见于《论语》讲读各家释义。     

肥致碑及相关问题

肥致碑,1991年出土于河南省偃师县(今改市)南蔡庄一座东汉墓内。偃师县文物管理委员会编写的发掘简报见《文物》1992年第9期。简报发表后,备受海峡两岸学者的关注。20年来,公开发表的研究文章不下20多篇。文章内容相对集中在碑文的释读、肥致碑的性质、碑文记述与墓内被葬者的问题、碑文反映的东汉社会风气和碑文的书法艺术等五个方面。后面两个问题,研究者的看法基本一致,兹不赘述。前三个问题,看法     

“Mixed up in a Bit of Do‐Goodery”: Judy Inglis,Activist Anthropology and Aboriginal History

As one of few people to study urban Aborigines in the early 1960s, Judy Inglis was well situated to comment on the workings of government policies such as assimilation. Her sudden death in 1962, aged thirty‐two, cut short her contribution to contemporary debates and froze in time her thinking. Inglis wanted her academic work to help the subjects of her study. Although she struggled with the idea of blending anthropology with activism, her desire to effect positive change ultimately outweighed other considerations. By her own account, she was “mixed up in a bit of do‐goodery”. In the decade after her death, the same impulse drove her friend Diane Barwick and mentor W. E. H. Stanner, both fellow anthropologists, to bring into being “Aboriginal History” as a field of study. This article explores the links between Judy Inglis’ approach to anthropology‐as‐activism and the origins of Aboriginal History.     

Protestantism and liberty: Catharine Macaulay’s politics of religion as a response to David Hume

ABSTRACT

Catharine Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James I (1763–1783) was intended by its author and received by its audience as, in part, a response to David Hume’s History of England. Macaulay’s writing has been read as a Whig counter to Hume’s Tory interpretation of England’s seventeenth-century history; more recent work has explored whether Macaulay or Hume has a better claim to be considered an “enlightenment historian”. This article will suggest that Macaulay’s views on the role of England’s Protestant belief and practice in the development and maintenance of the nation’s liberties contained, in the earlier volumes of her History, some of her substantive and important refutations of Hume’s arguments, and, further, that Macaulay’s well-argued claim that Protestantism was instrumental in the formation of England’s national character and potential enjoyment of political liberties was received by her readers as a particularly valuable part of her historical argument. Her accounts of Roman Catholic violence against Protestant victims at the Siege of La Rochelle and in the Irish Massacre of 1641 became some of the most quoted parts of her historical writing.     

释"馘"、"(目)"及其相关字

甲骨文、金文馘((戈耳)、(戈酋))字与其所从(目)字等的释读涉及相关甲骨文、金文数例.甲骨文、金文"( )、( )、( )"等字即馘字,馘字所从"( )、( )、( )、( )"等字即(目)字.     

‘Oh You Pretty Thing!’: How David Bowie ‘Unlocked Everybody’s Inner Queen’ in spite of the music press

The 1967 Sexual Offence Act decriminalised homosexual acts between men allowing gay men to discuss their sexuality in public. Few prominent popular musicians came-out until 1972 when David Bowie claimed that he was bisexual in an interview with Melody Maker. Music papers and Bowie had substantial cultural power: Bowie was a rising star and music papers recruited journalists who discussed and perpetuated social change. The subsequent conversation, however, reinforced negative stereotypes in constructing the queer subject and tried to safeguard commercial concerns due to the assumption that the market for popular music avoided queer music. This undermined arguments that associate permissive legislation with a permissive media and society, but, to some, representation alone empowered people and destabilised preconceptions about queer identity.     

小议方簋

方簋是青铜簋中形制罕有的一类,出土数量极少,未能引起学界的关注。而常见的簋的形制虽然多样,有无耳、双耳、三耳、四耳簋;有环耳、附耳、贯耳簋;有圈足、方座、三足或四足簋等,但都具有一个共性,即圆形的敞口、鼓腹、圈足。因此,彭裕商在《西周铜簋年代研究》一文中将其作为划分簋型式     

SUCCESS,TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY‐FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY1

This essay provides a close reading of Saul Friedländer's exceptionally successful comprehensive history of the Holocaust from the theoretical perspective of Hayden White's philosophy of history. Friedländer's The Years of Extermination has been celebrated as the first synthetic history of the “Final Solution” that acknowledges the experiences of the victims of Nazi genocide. But Friedländer has not simply added the voices of the victims to a conventional historical account of the Holocaust. Instead, by displacing linear notions of time and space and subtly deconstructing conventional concepts of causality, he has invented a new type of historical prose that performs rather than analyzes the victims' point of view. Friedländer's innovation has particularly radical consequences for the construction of historical explanations. On the one hand, Friedländer explicitly argues that anti‐Semitism was the single most important cause of the Holocaust. On the other hand, his transnational, multifaceted history of the “Final Solution” provides a wealth of data that escapes the conceptual grasp of his explicit model of causation. Friedländer chooses this radically self‐reflexive strategy of historical representation to impress on the reader the existential sense of disbelief with which the victims experienced Nazi persecution. To Friedländer, that sense of disbelief constitutes the most appropriate ethical response to the Holocaust. Thus the narratological analysis of The Years of Extermination reveals that the exceptional quality of the book, as well as presumably its success, is the result of an extraordinarily creative act of narrative imagination. Or, put into terms developed by White, who shares Friedländer's appreciation of modernist forms of writing, The Years of Extermination is the first modernist history of the Holocaust that captures, through literary figuration, an important and long neglected reality of the “Final Solution.”     

宋代施渚镇考

宋代施渚镇位于今湖州市埭溪镇。其地名变化过程包含三个阶段:唐时叫做上强,宋元时名为施渚,明清时更名埭溪。施渚镇位于连接湖州与杭州的陆路交通要道上,故北宋在此设税场征收商税。南宋时,江南运河交通地位愈发重要,施渚镇所在陆路通道之地位下降,导致该镇及税场被废除。随着商品经济的发展,明代在此兴起埭溪市,最终成长为镇。施渚镇之兴衰是其所在地区交通格局及商业格局之变迁的反映。     

放射性碳素测定年代报告(三四)

本报告发表的是中国社会科学院考古研究所考古科技实验研究中心碳十四实验室在2006年到2007年期间测定的30个考古数据。数据表示方式同此前所发报告。为方便应用另做几点说明如下。1.碳十四年代半衰期按5568年计算。2.校正年代所用程序为OxCal,校正曲线为1998年公布版本。3.与以往报告相同,所给年代误差范围均为±16,年代范围的概率分布为68.2%。4.由于树轮年代校正曲线各区段形状不同,校     

汉代便面功用小考

汉代的便面(扇子)功用主要为实用、礼仪及避邪。