Saints and Sinners: a tephrochronology for Late Antique landscape change in Epirus from the eruptive history of Lipari,Aeolian Islands

Assessing the impact of past human activity on landscape change in the Mediterranean has always presented challenges, requiring sound chronological frameworks for observed environmental change. The current research, focused on the environs surrounding the ancient city of Butrint (southern Albania) during Late Antiquity, c. 4th–6th Century AD, establishes a tephra-based chronology for landscape change through the discovery of ash horizons from a little known eruption on the island of Lipari (Aeolian Islands). Recovered glass shards were geochemically fingerprinted to a 6th Century AD event on the island, dated through local archaeological sequences and corroborated by hagiographic evidence. The presence of this marker horizon at Butrint shows a continuation of open water, estuarine conditions throughout Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval period (during which time Butrint ceases to function as an urban centre), disproving the widely held notion of increased soil erosion/deposition as a result of post-Roman landscape degradation. The study also shows that it is following the medieval revival of the town in the 13th Century that marked environmental change takes place, as estuarine areas silt, giving rise to marsh and wetland. The study highlights the importance of using a range of dating techniques to constrain landscape change, while the presence of the 6th Century Lipari tephra in Epirus, derived from an eruptive event larger than previously suspected, provides a useful regional dating marker for future landscape studies.     

书写和口传:论中国宗教的两种类型

基于对传统关于中国宗教类型划分观点的批判性解读,本文认为从教理授受角度看中国宗教经典宗教和民间宗教两大类,它们分别奠基于“书写”和“口传”这两种宗教理解和传播方式。文章的第一部分分析了学界关于中国宗教类型的五种划分,文章的第二、三部分阐述了“经典宗教”和“民间宗教”的具体意涵及它们之间的显著区别,章的第四部分探讨了经典宗教和民间宗教的相互交涉。     

Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions

As an historian of the American West, I find myself in the unusualposition of writing a review of a book, written by an archaeologist,for an audience of oral historians. But Ronald J. Mason's elegantlyprovocative Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North AmericanIndian Oral Traditions cries out for interdisciplinary linkagesand understandings. Mason spent his professional years as anarchaeologist among anthropologists and is the author of thehighly acclaimed Great Lakes Archaeology (1981). In InconstantCompanions, Mason "addresses a fundamental historiographicalproblem in archaeology, history, and anthropology":     

Naming,Mnemonics, and the Poetics of Knowing in Vula'a Oral Traditions

For the Vula'a people of south‐eastern Papua New Guinea names are a way of knowing that is intimately linked to a particular mode of being. The ethnography of Vula'a naming practices presented here, and an analysis of their stories – traditionally known as rikwana – suggests that names are essential in the Heideggerian sense that they bring the past, present, and future into proximity and thus may be understood as a form of historicity. In certain contexts names are also powerful because they are implicated in the kinds of transformations commonly described by anthropologists as magical. Magical names link knowing and speaking with a vital aspect of Vula'a cosmo‐ontology known as iavu (heat).     

History in Prehistory: The Oral Traditions of the Rarotongan Land Court Records

The records of the early 20th century Rarotongan land courts are an invaluable source of ethnohistoric information regarding pre-contact land tenure, social and political relations, and historical processes affecting tenure and relations. They are analysed here from the point of view of contextualising the archaeological record of the island. Pre-contact Rarotongan society is shown to have been fluid and flexible, although one notable trend is the gradual aggrandisement of ariki power. This trend continues into the missionary and early colonial periods, where political unity and ariki hegemony become established. European intervention was a single, though defining, episode in a long history. Although it transformed the political order, Rarotonga remained resolutely Rarotongan.     

Yusuf M. Juwayeyi: Archaeology and Oral Traditions in Malawi

African Archaeological Review -     

Religion, Policy, and Secrecy: The Latter Day Saints and Masons

On a vanished secret order: "Had politics, as in Masonry, been its main object, it would have held on with tenacity to its principles, as to the threads of life, and, disregarding its departure from sound morals, or patriotism, would still have contended, with the infatuation of a Mormonite, for the enjoyment, in secret, of that which in the eye of the public would overwhelm its members in confusions.""A Traveller in the United States", A Ritual and Illustrations of Free-Masonry and the Orange and Odd Fellows' Societies, Accompanied by Numerous Engravings, and a Key to the Phi Beta Kappa , S. Thrne, Devon (Shebbear, near Hatherleigh, England), 1835, 251.     

Palaeolithic Living Sites in Upper and Middle Egypt: A Review Article

Abstract

In 2000 Leuven University Press of Leuven, Belgium published a very important volume on the prehistory of Egypt entitled Palaeolithic Living Sites in Upper and Middle Egypt. Egyptian Prehistory Monographs 2, edited by Pierre M. Vermeersch. This impressive volume presents partial results of the fieldwork of the Belgian Middle Egypt Prehistoric Project of Leuven University in the Nile Valley, between Luxor and Assiut, carried out from 1976 to 1991, and in 1994. A second publication, Palaeolithic Quarrying Sites in Upper and Middle Egypt, also edited by Pierre M. Vermeersch, appeared in 2002 as the fourth volume of the series. The 2000 volume, under review here, is a collection of detailed reports on nine excavated Paleolithic living sites, ranging in time from Acheulean to Epipaleolithic, complemented by a chapter on Quaternary geomorphology and stratigraphy of the Makhadma area, near Qena, as well as a study of chronology, subsistence, and environment of the Late Paleolithic fishing sites at Makhadma. The reviewers discuss in detail most of the sites reported and address the conclusions reached by the Belgian authors in light of their own experiences with the prehistory of the Egyptian Nile. Of particular interest are differences in views concerning late use of Levallois technology in the Nile Valley and the geomorphological history of the river.     

The History and Historiography of American Diplomacy: Principles, Traditions and Values

The Council on Foreign Relations in New York is known throughout the world both as a leading centre for the study of international affairs and as having an influential voice in current debates on the future global role of the United States. Since the First World War the Council has promoted these goals through organizing working groups, sponsoring specialized monographs, and publishing a number of journals and yearbooks. The Council has now sponsored the publication of a multivolume encyclopaedic dictionary of American foreign relations. Michael Dunne's review of these four volumes concentrates on the broad themes which run through the many hundreds of essays, and asks whether the study of the American diplomatic past can help us to understand the special features of the course and conduct of US foreign relations.     

中国史学的遗产、传统和当前发展趋势

我国是一个史学大国,我国史学的特点是:历史记载和历史撰述的连续性;传世的历史文献十分丰富;历史编纂形式的多样性;重视人事、重视经世致用的社会性。中国史学在长期的发展中,为我们留下了丰富的史学遗产,形成了一些优良传统。近年来我国史学有了很大的发展,但也存在一些问题。有造诣的史学工作者,应该关注史学发展趋势,关注有倾向性的史学现象,促进中国史学沿着正确的方向健康地发展,这是我们史学工作者的社会责任和历史使命。