Exploring Diversity in Household Pottery Traditions in Crusader Greece: a Case Study from the City of Thebes,Boeotia

This paper provides new data on an under‐documented topic in Aegean archaeology, that of the impact of Latin–Greek cohabitation on craftsmanship, socio‐economic organization and household pottery traditions. The chosen approach is a petrographic study of the provenance and technology of 37 cooking pots, jugs, basins and storage jars from the city of Thebes, Boeotia. The ceramics span from the late 12th to the mid‐14th century and thereby cover the periods of Byzantine, Frankish and Catalan control over the city. The analysis indicates that most pottery products were not locally made during these periods. Pottery consumption at Thebes involved, in the 12th/13th century, regional products from northern Boeotia, while pottery supplies from Euboea that had developed under Byzantine rule continued into the 14th century, well after Boeotia and Euboea came into the hands of, respectively, Frankish and Venetian lords in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (1204). The petrographic analysis also allows for the characterization of Byzantine and Latin tempering practices of the pottery fabrics. These results highlight phenomena of regional economic reliance in central Greece and provide rare evidence for the cross‐cultural diffusion of technological knowledge in the late medieval Mediterranean.     

Opportunistic Ports and Spaces of Exchange in Late Roman Cyprus

Ports served not only as interfaces between land and sea, but as central gathering spaces for economic and cultural exchange. Drawing on case studies from the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, this paper situates opportunistic ports lacking built facilities within a broader socioeconomic context of diverse maritime communications, expanding rural settlement, and increased agricultural productivity during late antiquity. Though simple, these sites served as active agents in the development of new maritime networks as well as local markets throughout their hinterlands, adding flexibility and dynamism to the economic ties between city, countryside, and the wider late Roman world.     

Urban geo-archaeology in medieval alzira (Prov. Valencia,Spain)

Alzira is situated in a cut-off meander loop of the Rio Júcar. Geo-archaeological study shows that the Islamic city wall was built during the second quarter of the 11th century AD, at a time when the river had a low-amplitude and low-energy flood regime. After mid-century, overbank silts began to invade the city as peak flood discharge increased, with a spate of destructive floods reflected by high-energy deposits during the late 11th century. Urban expansion within the city wall is dated to the later 11th or early 12th century, interrupted by local abandonment and moderate-energy flood silts. Major construction during the mid-12th century was followed by protracted abandonment (after a siege in AD 1171?) and further, moderate-energy flood silts that redistributed occupation and collapse debris. Reoccupation, during the late 14th century, was terminated by catastrophic floods in 1517 and 1571, after which much of the western end of Alzira was not rebuilt. Following further flood catastrophes during the 17th century, parts of the central walled city remained abandoned until the 19th century. with new occupation atop flood sands of yet another disaster in 1864. The change in flood regime after 1150 was a result of deforestation of the watershed, but progradation of a downstream tributary fan after 1517 created an unstable, aggrading floodplain increasingly prone to severe flooding. Climatic anomalies were responsible for periods of recurrent severe floods, archaeologically verified during the 11th and 12th centuries, and historically documented, beginning in 1318. The geo-archaeological methodology illuminates the constructional and settlement history of Alzira, allows distinction of fluvial and cultural components, and provides the necessary microstratigraphic detail and dating control to document the true complexity of alluvial processes during the last 1000 years.     

The Poor Man’s Goldmine?

This article analyses the career paths of Swedish and Finnish sailors from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The article shows that, for the most of the men, the seaman’s occupation was just a passing phase before taking up a job on shore, but many of them also created a long-lasting and advancing career by going to sea. There was not necessarily, however, a clear distinction between job opportunities at sea and those on shore in those days: men worked both at sea and on shore. We therefore argue that an individual’s advancement in a maritime career was a context-specific socio-economic phenomenon. In Scandinavia, work on board ships was dependent on features that characterized the division of labour in a predominantly agricultural domestic economy on land and emerging industrialization during the turn of the century. Here we present an analysis of the career paths of almost 60,000 men recruited to serve on Swedish and Finnish merchant vessels from the 1840s to late 1940s.     

LATE GALLEYS: The Fredriksvern Naval Shipyard and the coastal defence in Norway 1750–1814

From the early 18th century the Mediterranean galley experienced a new golden age in the Baltic Sea, as it was well adapted to the shallow sea with the islands and skerries found there. In Norway the Fredriksvern naval shipyard was founded in 1750 to build a galley fleet. For various reasons progress was slow, and when the galley fleet finally was built in the 1760s, it was probably the last one in Europe. New and more efficient inshore vessels were soon developed in the neighbouring countries, but they were not put into use in Norway in the 18th century. The explanation for Norway’s poor performance was probably too much peace: when Denmark-Norway became involved in the Napoleonic Wars, naval development was dramatically improved.     

The Mediterranean Lateen Sail in Late Antiquity

The Mediterranean lateen sailing rig has been studied since the early-to-mid-20th century. Recently-published depictions of sailing vessels rigged with lateen and settee sails, dating to the late-antique period, allow some of the principle characteristics of that rig to be established. This allows comparison with lateen- or settee-rigged vessels from both earlier and later periods. The sailing rigs depicted on other vessels can be identified and the level of technical continuity between the late-antique and medieval Mediterranean addressed. Finally it is possible to assess the extent to which the lateen sail was established in the Mediterranean by late antiquity.
© 2009 The Author     

The Akko 1 Shipwreck, Israel: the First Two Seasons

The Akko 1 shipwreck was found in 4 m of water inside the ancient harbour of Akko (Acre), 250 m from the ancient wall, with its stern touching a submerged rampart. The dense framing-pattern and relatively thin planking, the extensive use of oak and the origin of the timber, suggest that this is the remains of a small armed ship or auxiliary vessel built in the Eastern Mediterranean. The ship has been provisionally dated to the late-18th or early-19th century, the late Ottoman period. The finds testify to its involvement in one of the naval campaigns at Akko.
© 2008 The Authors     

幕末与明治时期日本人的上海认识——从高杉晋作的《游清五录》到远山景直的《上海》

对于幕末与明治时期的日本人而言,上海首先是中国的上海;同时上海也是世界、尤其是西洋的上海,租界区域出现了与此前的中国本土迥然相异的新的样态;再次是与日本紧密相关的上海,19世纪末期以后,在虹口一带形成了以日本居留民为主体的日本人社会。这样一个多元组合、多重叠加、既相对分离又互相交融、同时其经济政治文化的影响力日益凸显的都市,对于正在走向东亚乃至世界舞台的近代日本而言,无疑是一个巨大的存在,因此,这一时期日本人对于上海的认识,首先是对于以上海为媒介的中国的认识,其次是对于与上海相关的世界的认识,同时也是对于通过上海所体现出来的中日关系的认识因此,近代上海对于这一时期的日本人,实际上具有三层意义：观察中国的现场;透视世界的窗口;反观日本本身的泰照系,     

20世纪美国联邦政府行政改革的历史考察

美国联邦政府的行政改革贯穿于整个20世纪,可以划分为四个阶段,每个阶段有不同的侧重点：第一阶段改革开始于19世纪末、20世纪初,“效率政府”是这一时期行政改革所追求的主要目标;第二阶段改革实施于20世纪中期,“忠诚政府”成为联邦政府改革的特点;20世纪70、80年代改革进入第三阶段,强调官员的职业道德,改革特点为追求“道德政府”;20世纪90年代美国政府管理进入一个全面调整时期,“重塑政府”成为行政改革追求的主要目标,从而在实践上把20世纪美国联邦政府行政改革推向了高峰。从行政管理学的角度分析,精简机构、节约开支和提高效率,始终是20世纪美国联邦行政改革的核心内容。从政治学的角度分析,防止职业官僚垄断政府权力和整治官僚主义作风,也始终是20世纪美国联邦政府行政改革必须面对的问题。     

Jesuit thalassology reconsidered: the Mediterranean and the geopolitics of Jesuit missionary aims in seventeenth-century Ethiopia

During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus relied heavily on Portuguese trade routes in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in order to reach Ethiopia. However, geopolitical shifts, particularly the rise of Ottoman sea power in the Indian Ocean and the Spanish conquest of Portugal in 1580, ended this route’s viability for the Jesuits. In order to sustain Jesuit connections with Ethiopia, Father General Mutio Vitelleschi decided in 1627 to abandon the Portuguese and send four Jesuits with French passports through Ottoman territory and up the Nile, whence they would travel overland into Ethiopia. After arriving in Egypt, however, the Jesuits were arrested, interrogated and expelled by the Ottoman governor, who suspected that they were Habsburg spies. The course of this failed Jesuit effort to reach Ethiopia has three important implications for our understanding of the Mediterranean and its relationship with other sea spaces in terms of early modern empire building and Catholic evangelization. First, the decision to abandon the Portuguese in favour of the French illuminates how the Mediterranean remained at the fore of the Society of Jesus’s missionary efforts. Second, French willingness to protect the Jesuits demonstrates that Louis XIII of France saw the Mediterranean as an important theatre for achieving his political, religious and economic goals. Third, the Ottoman decision to arrest and expel the Jesuits due to fears that they were in Egypt to assist in a Coptic rebellion and concomitant Hapsburg invasion demonstrates both Ottoman anxiety concerning the rise of European religio-imperial ambitions and the Ottomans’ ability to control foreigners travelling through their lands. In sum, these developments illuminate a larger thalassological picture of the Mediterranean, which, like other sea spaces, obtained as an important contact zone where early modern powers competed to build empires and save souls.     

Maritime Worlds Collide: Agents of Transference and the Metastasis of Seaborne Threats at the End of the Bronze Age

Primary sources from the end of the Bronze Age have long been read as suggesting a time of chaotic transition, particularly with regard to threats from the sea that the established powers had no means of combatting. While the scale and severity of seaborne attacks seems to have increased in the late 13th century, these were not in themselves new phenomena, as a state of maritime threat seems to have been a constant for coastal polities and mariners in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. However, a combination of internal and external factors in the late 13th and early 12th centuries combined to make these attacks more effective than they had been in the past, and polities more vulnerable to them. These included the rapid spread of improvements in maritime technology, particularly from the Aegean and the Levant, via high–intensity ‘zones of transference’, as well as an increase in the scale of ship­–based combat operations, due in part to the displacement of people during the Late Bronze Age collapse. This paper addresses this in two parts, beginning with the ‘background’ evidence for a constant state of maritime threat in the centuries leading up to the end of the Bronze Age, and concluding with the ‘foreground’ evidence for zones of transference and the transmission of groundbreaking elements of naval technology in the years surrounding the Late Bronze–Early Iron Age transition.     

Traces of Fatty Acids from a Byzantine Sounding Lead Recovered off the Israeli Coast

Fatty acids, typical to large herbivores, were isolated from a 7th century Byzantine sounding lead recovered from a shipwreck off Dor, an ancient anchorage in Northern Israel. The fatty acids survived by being sheltered in an anaerobic environment provided through a site formation process induced by the disintegrating wreck. Previously established identification criteria for fatty acids, absorbed in ceramics, were used to show that tallow was used in this navigational instrument in the Eastern Mediterranean during late antiquity.     

Pliny the Elder and Sr–Nd isotopes: tracing the provenance of raw materials for Roman glass production

In Roman and Byzantine times, natron glass was traded throughout the known world in the form of chunks. Production centers of such raw glass, active from the 4th to 8th century AD, were identified in Egypt and Syro-Palestine. However, early Roman primary glass units remain unknown from excavation or scientific analysis. The ancient author Pliny described in 70 AD that besides Egyptian and Levantine resources, also raw materials from Italy and the Gallic and Spanish provinces were used in glass making. In this study, the primary provenance of 1st–3rd century AD natron vessel glass is investigated. The use of combined Sr and Nd isotopic analysis allows the distinguishing and characterizing of different sand raw materials used for primary glass production. The isotope data obtained from the glass samples are compared to the signatures of primary glass from known production centers in the eastern Mediterranean and a number of sand samples from the regions described by Pliny the Elder as possible sources of primary glass. Eastern Mediterranean primary glass has a Nile dominated Mediterranean Nd signature (higher than −6.0 ? Nd), while glass with a primary production location in the western Mediterranean or north-western Europe should have a different Nd signature (lower than −7.0 ? Nd). Most Roman glass has a homogeneous ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr signature close to the modern sea water composition, likely caused by the (intentional) use of shell as glass raw material. In this way, strontium and neodymium isotopes now prove that Pliny's writings were correct: primary glass production was not exclusive to the Levant or Egypt in early Roman days, and factories of raw glass in the Western Roman Empire will have been at play.     

Merchants on the margins: fifteenth-century Bruges and the informal market

During the late medieval period, Bruges acted as the prime hub of international trade in north-western Europe, with the town of Sluys as its outport. Trade along the Zwin, the waterway connecting the city to the sea, was subject to a series of tolls and a set of stringent and comprehensive staple restrictions, stipulating that all goods imported had to be sold on the Bruges market. The concentration of commercial activities which resulted from these rules allowed merchants with the necessary capital to trade more cheaply than elsewhere. For those with more modest means and ambitions, the trip along tollbooths to the heavily regulated and institutionalised staple market only jeopardised the profitability of their endeavours. Throughout the fifteenth century, local traders, international shipping crews, commercial staff and professional smugglers cut transaction costs by evading the restrictions of the staple and commercial taxation in Sluys. This article discusses the size of this informal market on the margins of Bruges' jurisdiction, analyses the backgrounds and motivations of its visitors and reconstructs the strategies they used to evade punishment.     

Medieval shipbuilding in Catalonia,Spain (13th–15th centuries): one principle,different processes

Late medieval shipbuilding in Catalonia followed the Mediterranean trend in adopting a frame‐first shipbuilding principle with planking placed edge‐to‐edge. The predetermination of frame shapes using moulds had modified the construction process, as seen in the 11th‐century Serçe Liman? vessel with the use of a series of moulds, and 13th‐century Culip VI, with the use of a master mould, rising square and rule. Between the 13th and 15th centuries all known Mediterranean shipwrecks were built using the master‐mould method, but other factors caused variation in the construction process—not the principle—as exemplified by the 14th‐century Les Sorres X built with two overlain keel timbers.     

Southern Iberia and the Mediterranean Trade-routes

The early Iron Age sites of southern Iberia (8th century to c. 600 BC) have produced large numbers of imports from the eastern Mediterranean, while only a very small number of southern Iberian objects found their way to other parts of the Mediterranean. Despite their scarcity these items can provide valuable information about the shift of trade routes in the Mediterranean at around 600 BC.     

Railway development as Symbolising ideas of social construction: (With Special Reference to Railway Development in Australia)

The townscape of “old” Lerwick reflects its traditional focus on the sea for its economic base. The major elements in this cohesive visual character are the closely clustered houses in the steep hillside district of the Lanes, the narrow, winding principal commercial street, and the lodberries projecting out into the harbour. The latter were constructed to meet the needs of the prosperous expanding trade period of the latter half of the 18th century and first half of the 19th century. Harbour improvements in the final quarter‐century of the 1800s ended their commercial usefulness. After a century of declining use and of neglect they are being restored as part of the renewal of “old town” Lerwick.     

The analysis of two historic fired artificial stonewares: Coade stone (18th–19th centuries) and a recent discovery from Oxnead Hall,Norfolk (16th–17th centuries)

Coade stone has played a significant role in architectural and ornamental design since its inception in the early 18th century. It is well known that earlier, experimental, architectural stoneware products existed, but few of these have been studied in detail scientifically, and only one major analytical study of Coade stone has appeared in the literature. This paper presents a new spectroscopic analysis of Coade stone along with that of a newly discovered sample from Oxnead Hall in Norfolk where it known that Sir Clement Paston experimented with artificial stone in the late 16th century. The results demonstrate that it is possible to differentiate between the two variants on the basis of both the raw materials used and the different phases formed in their production processes.     

Commissioning and Use of Charts Made in Majorca c.1400: New Evidence from a Tuscan Merchant’s Archive

The Datini Archive in Prato, Italy, a remarkable collection of a late fourteenth–early fifteenth century merchant’s business correspondence, includes a number of orders for charts from Majorca, one of the major chart-making centres in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The letters give information on prices, the length of time it took to make a chart, and its destination. The archive also contains unpublished information on how the charts were packed and transported. From these sources we conclude that the charts appear to have served not only to prepare business trips, but also to embody the memory of these trips.     

Clay Tobacco Pipes from a Colonial Refuse Deposit in Fort San Severino,Matanzas Province,Cuba

This article provides a detailed study of clay tobacco pipes excavated from a refuse deposit at Fort San Severino, Matanzas city, Cuba. The pipes date to the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century and are dominated by reed-stem typology. The collection includes Dutch, British, Spanish, and Balkan specimens. The study of these pipes contribute to the archaeology of clay pipes in Cuba and provide insight into the socioeconomics of pipe culture at fort San Severino. Moreover, it brings special attention to the occurrence of western Mediterranean reed-stem tobacco pipes, yet to be studied from other Spanish sites in the Caribbean.