Aberglasney: the theory,history and archaeology of a post-medieval landscape

Abstract

Printed and documentary sources, archaeological excavation, dendrochronology and geophysical survey are employed to investigate the history of Aberglasney, a small country house near Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire (SN 5815 2213). Traditions about its garden layout, parapet walkway, a gatehouse and a yew ‘tunnel’ are examined. Circa 1600, Bishop Anthony Rudd (1549–1614) probably built a ‘cwrt’ enclosure aligned north-south. The gatehouse belonged to this or a later house. In 1770 or later, the Dyer family rebuilt the house, probably redesigned and rewalled the entire estate layout, when an earlier farm building was converted into the parapet walkway and stock pens, in an area later known as the ‘cloistered court’. In Victorian times this feature, originally a farmyard, became a pleasure garden, part of a typical Georgian-Victorian complex including a kitchen garden, glasshouses, orchards and fishpond. A yew grove was established, most likely c. 1805, when the Philipps family began planting in a Picturesque style. Abandoned c. 1950, house and garden became dilapidated. The site is now the object of a radical development programme, involving inter alia the stabilization of all buildings fabric, and imposing 16th-/17th-century style formal gardens over the 18th-/19th-century kitchen garden and orchard.     

The Bullion Controversy and the history of political thought: experience,innovation and theory

ABSTRACT

In 1797 the British government relieved the Bank of England of the obligation to pay specie for its notes upon demand; then, after bitter debate and sustained inflation, it restored this burden in 1821. The episode is studied as the “Bullion Controversy”, and it is commonly assigned high significance in the development of monetary theory. Yet the Bank stood as an old target for so-called “country” thought, which suspected commerce of corroding virtue and undermining the proper functions of Parliament. Both the Bank and the Whig regime that created it in 1694 had withstood such attacks, but in the nineteenth century these critical voices were joined by political economists who reworked the existing lines of attack, above all by presenting themselves not as defenders of an ancient virtue but as the champions of a modern, commercial society that was being endangered by the government's and the Bank's ignorance and self-interest. This paper thus examines the Bullion Controversy in relation to the history of political thought, and reveals how the return to convertibility represented an early victory for political economy's self-styled “theorists” in reforming the state's institutions in the nineteenth century.     

Typologies,Databases, and Historic Ethnography

Historical Archaeology - Robert L. Schuyler’s 1978 edited volume Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions was a compendium of most of the field’s...     

Ancient history and contemporary political theory: the case of liberty

ABSTRACT

Providing an introduction to this special issue on the ancient notions of liberty and its modern perspectives, this essay contains, first, some reflections about the relation between the fields of ancient history and contemporary political theory. Building on the comments of the final roundtable with Kinch Hoekstra and Quentin Skinner, it then makes an attempt at extrapolating some theoretical understandings of liberty from a wide range of geographical and historical contexts covered in the contributions. Moving away from a strictly classical Graeco-Roman focus, these include investigations from the second millennium BCE polities in the Levant to the Byzantine empire in the fifth-century CE.     

Karl Marx's theory of history: A defense

A wave of recent publication connected to Hugh Trevor-Roper offers cause to take stock of his life and legacy. He is an awkward subject because his output was so protean, but a compelling one because of his significance for the resurgence of the history of ideas in Britain after 1945. The article argues that the formative period in Trevor-Roper's life was 1945–57, a period curiously neglected hit her to. It was at this time that the pioneered a history of ideas conceived above all as the study of European liberal and humanist tradition. Analysis of the relative importance of contemporary and early modern history in his oeuvre finds that, while the experience of Hitler and the Cold War was formative, it was not decisive. Trevor-Roper was at heart an early modernist who did not abjure specialization. However, he insisted that specialized study must be accompanied by “philosophical” reflection on the working sofa constant human nature present throughout history, a type of reflection best pursued by reading classical historians such as Gibbon and Burckhardt. Yet this imperative in turn fostered purely historical research into the history of historical writing–another branch of the history of ideas.     

Dictatorships and Revolutions in Portugal and Chile: Ethnography,Memory and Invisibilities

This article discusses the relation between ethnography and underexposure of memory. Displaying similar characteristics, the ethnographies we developed in Portugal and Chile dealt precisely with this thematic in different chronological periods. We are going to point out our fieldwork convergences, specifically in what concerns the data recollection process.     

Life‐history theory,past human populations and climatic perturbations

A sensitivity and elasticity analysis is performed on historical life‐tables, that of Swedish females from 1751–1755 and 1966–1970, i.e. during and after the Little Ice Age. Coupled with life‐history theory, this approach supplies us with some ideas on how stature can be understood as a proxy for conditions during the intrauterine growth, important if we aspire to calibrate proposed climatic perturbations and their effect on past societies. Matrix population models represent a versatile tool that has been used extensively in conservation biology, ecology, primatology and evolutionary demography. As of yet, applications in bioarchaeology/human osteology have been restricted to population forecasting. The following paper introduces matrix population models and discusses their use in bioarchaeology. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

深刻的历史反思和精辟的理论总结——龚荫著《中国民族政策史》评介

一部120余万字、图文并茂的巨著摆在我的案头,令我爱不释手。这就是龚荫教授新著《中国民族政策史》。这是他继《明清云南土司通纂》、《明史云南土司传笺注》、《中国土司制度》、《民族史考辨》等有影响的学术著作问世之后奉献给学术界的又一部大著,是集国内学术界对中国民族     

Archaeological Ethnography,Heritage Management,and Community Archaeology: A Pragmatic Approach from Crete

This article examines the introduction of archaeological ethnography as an approach to establish positioned research and bring context-specific and reflexive considerations into community archaeology projects. It considers recent critiques of heritage management in archaeology and the role of archaeologists as experts in it, contending that smaller and less prominent sites exist in different contexts and pose different problems than large-scale projects usually addressed in the literature. We describe how the ‘Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central Crete’ project, investigating prehistoric Minoan ritual sites, involves communities and stakeholders and what demands the latter pose on experts in the field. Archaeological work is always already implicated in local development projects which create and reproduce power hierarchies. It is therefore important that archaeologists maintain their critical distance from official heritage discourses, as they are materialized in development programmes, while at the same time engaging with local expectations and power struggles; they also have to critically address and position their own assumptions. We use examples from our community archaeology project to propose that these goals can be reached through archaeological ethnographic fieldwork that should precede any archaeological project to inform its methodological decisions, engage stakeholders, and collaboratively shape heritage management strategies.     

Ethnography and policy: Perspectives on reproduction in anthropology and public health

MacCormack, Carol, ed. Ethnography of Fertility and Birth. New York: Academic Press, 1982. x + 293 pp. including illustrations, notes, references, index. $35.00 cloth.

Mangay‐Maglacas, A., and H. Pizurki, eds. The Traditional Birth Attendant in Seven Countries: Case Studies in Utilization and Training. Geneva: World Health Organization Public Health Papers 75, 1981. 211 pp. including appendices, references. Sw. fr. 15.00.     

Telling More: Lies,Secrets, and History

This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not to tell describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas andimaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events.