Medieval ‘Bronze’ Tripod Ewers from Wales

THIS PAPER DESCRIBES six complete and one fragmentary tripod ewer found in Wales, and discusses their form, its origin, and their metallic composition. Six are simplified versions of a more elaborate prototype, and are of a type widely distributed and copied in Britain and N. Europe, which probably signals the more general adoption of metal vessels in 14th-century households.     

The evolution of rice: molecular vignettes on its origins and spread

The domesticated species Oryza sativa or Asian rice evolved starting approximately 9,000 years ago and from its centers of origin in China and India has subsequently spread throughout the Old World (and in historical times in the New World as well). This species is one of the key domesticated crop plants in the world and has emerged as a model for studying the origins and spread of domesticated taxa as well as in investigating the genetic basis for plant variation under domestication. Archaeological data has been critical in dissecting the origins and spread of rice throughout Asia, but molecular information has also provided a complementary approach to examining the evolutionary dynamics of this species. The evolutionary history of a species can leave its footprints within its genome. Moreover, genetic studies allow us to study the history of traits that do not leave an archaeological record—for example, grain stickiness or flowering time—which can provide insights into how crop species are adopted by different cultures. In this review, several molecular studies into the origin and spread of Asian rice are discussed and we explore the advances these genetic studies offer in our understanding of the evolution of domesticated species. We also explore how archaeological data can provide critical insights that can help refine genetic models of the origin and spread of domesticated species.     

内蒙古鄂尔多斯市乌兰木伦旧石器时代中期遗址

乌兰木伦遗址由邻近的第1、第2和第3地点组成。其中在第1地点获得了石制品2780件、动物化石3423件,并发现用火遗迹。遗址年代为距今7～3万年,属旧石器时代中期。遗址为原地埋藏,其石制品类型及工业组合与欧洲旧石器时代中期文化近似,动物化石则属于华北晚更新世的萨拉乌苏动物群。     

《文馆词林》阙题残篇考证

在日藏弘仁本《文馆词林》中,有一作者与题名不明的残篇。对作品流传情况、文体及内容进行考察,发现都与马融的《上林颂》相合。最后,马融的生活时代与残篇文字所表达出来的年代相合。这个残篇很可能就是马融的《上林颂》。     

Three Styles in the Study of Violence

Studying violence is likely to put the observer at risk, both physically and psychologically, making it unlike studying kinship, religion, or other topics. Violence fragments experience, making it difficult to construct coherent or effective narratives. To overcome these difficulties, recent works combine experience-near accounts with experience-distant analysis. Experience-near reportage must rely on material that is fragmentary, oblique and restricted, but which is also emotionally intense and involving; experience-distant analysis can achieve objectivity, systematic understanding, and intellectual closure, but at the price of immediacy and expressive power. Experience-near accounts convey trauma and depersonalization; experience-distant ones convey coherence and idealization. The middle range provides a compromise.     

叶梦得作品辑佚

叶梦得是两宋之交著名的文学与文化名人,由于其《石林总集》百卷已经亡佚,为叶梦得研究带来不少遗憾。本文从有关文献中辑佚叶梦得现存著述及相关总集未收的作品共33篇,分别是诗歌1篇,词作1篇,散文24篇。书法绘画7篇。另有残诗二句。     

The Making of Fired Clay Bricks in China Some 5000 Years Ago

Fired bricks are a hard and durable masonry material that has played a major role in the emergence of early human urban civilization. In China, fired clay bricks have been widely used as a building and flooring material since the Qin Dynasty (476?206 bc ), although a few lines of evidence show that fired clay bricks might have been invented as early as 5500 years ago in eastern central China. However, these burnt clumps of clay appear not to be bricks in the strict sense, and our knowledge about the origin of fired clay bricks in China still remains fragmentary. Archaeological excavations at a Middle Neolithic cultural site in northwestern China reveal that the making of fired clay bricks began some 5000 years ago. Our findings also open a window into the process of prehistoric brickmaking in East Asia.     

Conscripting the breast: lactation,slavery and salvation in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca,c. 1250–1300

This essay examines the ideals and practices surrounding motherhood and wet nursing in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca c. 1250–1300. Despite powerful messages — from ecclesiastical pronouncements to lay devotional manuals to artwork in churches — that linked maternal breastfeeding to an educative and caring ideal of mothering, social and economic pressures on wealthy urban and knightly women to remain as sexually available and as fecund as possible caused a shift to increased use of wet nurses, many of whom were of Muslim origin. Although the latter would have been nominally baptized, in practice, if not normative legal ideal, they maintained their enslaved status no matter how many children they bore. Indeed, it is possible that such women's bodies were doubly exploited: first, as sexual chattel available to their masters and other men, and then, having been made pregnant, as nursing mothers whose own children could be put away in favour of their mistresses'. Only fragmentary examples of such women ‘conversing’ with one another have been found, but the observations offered here open up to the historian's view a social scenario in which we know many conversations among women must have taken place.     

陕南出土的摇钱树佛教图像

陕西南部城固和汉中的东汉砖室墓中出土的摇钱树枝和树干上面分别发现佛像以及莲花图案,这是陕西省目前发现的最早的佛像,也是我国发现的最早的佛像之一,对于探讨陕西省佛教艺术的起源具有重要意义.     

Heritageisation as a material process: the bishop’s crosier of Turku Cathedral,Finland

The old episcopal crosier of Turku Cathedral is a typical heritage item: a clearly identifiable object pregnant with traditions, including both medievalism and nationalism. A subject of the heritageisation process, it has become a familiar and discursive part of the past. The damaged and worn state of the crosier, which has lost its hook of silver, is a necessary indicator of the passage of time traced back to the Middle Ages. In 1931, the crosier was used as a model for a new one made for the Archbishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, which aroused public debate. The crosier was re-examined scientifically in 2009, and the results complicate its history, providing a new angle to its heritageisation. Not only does the fragmentary state of heritage objects destabilise the familiarity of the past, but also materiality as such is both a necessity and a risk for heritageisation.     

Conscripting the breast: lactation,slavery and salvation in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca,c. 1250–1300

This essay examines the ideals and practices surrounding motherhood and wet nursing in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca c. 1250–1300. Despite powerful messages — from ecclesiastical pronouncements to lay devotional manuals to artwork in churches — that linked maternal breastfeeding to an educative and caring ideal of mothering, social and economic pressures on wealthy urban and knightly women to remain as sexually available and as fecund as possible caused a shift to increased use of wet nurses, many of whom were of Muslim origin. Although the latter would have been nominally baptized, in practice, if not normative legal ideal, they maintained their enslaved status no matter how many children they bore. Indeed, it is possible that such women's bodies were doubly exploited: first, as sexual chattel available to their masters and other men, and then, having been made pregnant, as nursing mothers whose own children could be put away in favour of their mistresses'. Only fragmentary examples of such women ‘conversing’ with one another have been found, but the observations offered here open up to the historian's view a social scenario in which we know many conversations among women must have taken place.     

Notes on the shell and bone rings from Sharm

A group of thirteen fragmentary and complete shell and bone rings was excavated at Sharm, including one example likely to be a bracelet. The function of the objects as rings is undisputed. A number of the rings appear to be manufactured from Conus sp., whereas the remainder are apparently made from bone.     

The trouble with transformations: Effects of sample size and sample composition on meat weight estimates based on skeletal mass allometry

The application of skeletal allometry in zooarchaeological analysis has increased in recent years. Two approaches can be distinguished, one based on linear measurements of bones for the purpose of estimating animal size and the other using skeletal weight to estimate dietary contribution. Here the application of the latter is examined. It is suggested that this method, as presently used with fragmentary remains, may not provide a dependable characterization of the relative contributions of identified taxa.     

认同与批判:清末留日学生的地域文化观

留学异邦所造成的空间区隔和参照系的变化,不仅激发了清末各省留日学生的民族主义精神,也使他们的地域意识得到升华。在爱国先爱邦、谋国先谋邦的理念指导下,各省留学生们均强调本省对全国关系之重,期望本省在民族建国的运动中发挥领导作用。他们调查研究本省的历史地理文化状况以作为自治的基础,从而形成了一股地域文化热。留学生们一方面认同本省文化、赋予其正面价值,另一方面又对地域文化中不适应社会竞争、不符合自治需要的成份进行反思与批判,警醒同胞谋求革新。留学生们通过重新评价赋予了地域文化不同的品格,并通过创办杂志、传播新学新知等实际行动,在一定程度上改绘了本省地域文化的形象。     

Comparing seeds/fruits and pollen from a Middle Bronze Age pit in Florence (Italy)

The recovery of a Middle Bronze Age pit in Florence offered the opportunity of studying seeds/fruits and pollen coming from the pit fill layers. Both datasets resulted similar in their mixed composition of cultivated, synanthropic, and wild plants. They represent different traces coming from the plants which were stored and voluntarily or involuntarily introduced into the structure. Foodstuff and fodder storage activities are testified in the pit. Particularly, plant gathering is better represented by seed/fruit remains, while fodder procurement is mainly clarified by pollen. In this study, the use of pollen as evidence of economic activity is validated by the hypothesis that the origin of the pollen in the pit is from the stored plant material more than from the pollen rain. Therefore, comparing these datasets proved to be useful to assess the sources of the plant remains found in the pit, to interpret the origin of the fill layers and make some inferences on the structure and its uses, and to attempt some palaeoethnobotanical considerations.     

Modern revolutions: An introduction to the analysis of a political phenomenon

This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt's thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt's political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt's private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ‘political not metaphysical’.     

Religion and nationalism: four approaches*

ABSTRACT. Building on recent literature, this article discusses four ways of studying the relationship between religion and nationalism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The article concludes by reconsidering the much‐criticised understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon.     

Nation‐freezing: images of the nation and the migrant in citizenship packages

ABSTRACT. New nationalism differs from classical nationalism in terms of its content and focus. Whereas classical nationalism distinguishes itself from other nation‐states in defining its national identity, new nationalism distinguishes the ‘native’ national identity from that of its current and prospective citizens of migrant origin. The terms of integration thus become conditions of membership in the national community. Citizenship and integration policies emerge as central arenas where the discourse of new nationalism unfolds. This study looks into the discourses of cultural citizenship by studying the content of the official ‘citizenship packages’ – materials designed to welcome newcomers and assist them in their integration – in three Western European countries: The Netherlands, France and the UK. What images are depicted of the nation‐state and the migrant in citizenship packages, and (how) do these images freeze the nation?     

Roman London

This paper discusses two fragmentary stone pillars, one decorated, which were recently discovered at Trefollwyn, near Llangefni, Anglesey. These are the first examples of their kind from Britain but they belong to a tradition of La Tène carved stone pillars from the Rhineland, Brittany, and Ireland. They may be connected with burial. In antiquarian sources an early Christian inscribed stone (fifth-sixth centuries A.D.), now lost, was reported from Capel Heilin in the same immediate vicinity and suggests that the area was used for burial in the early medieval period.