The Western River Steamboat Heroine, 1832–1838, Oklahoma,USA: excavations,summary of finds,and history

This paper describes the excavation, discoveries relating to the hull, machinery, and artefacts, and the history of an early steamboat wreck discovered in the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas. The wreck has been identified as the side‐wheel steamer Heroine, a vessel in service on the Mississippi, Ohio, and other western rivers of North America during the 1830s. It is the earliest example of this famous type of vessel yet studied.     

The Western River Steamboat Heroine, 1832–1838, Oklahoma,USA: construction

This paper describes the design and construction of the side‐wheel steamer Heroine, a representative of the ‘western river steamboat’ type and the earliest example of its kind to undergo archaeological study. Heroine was built at New Albany, Indiana, in 1832 and sunk on the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas in 1838. The extensive remains of the lower hull show assembly practices in use during the developmental era of Mississippi River steamboats. The wreck also reveals a heretofore‐unknown technique for longitudinally strengthening these long, narrow, and very lightly built hulls.     

In Search of the Social: Steamboats, Square Wheels, Reindeer and Other Things

This paper examines the concept of the ‘social,’ particularly from an archaeological perspective, and explores how it relates to the ways in which we seek to understand the processes of technological innovation and change. It is demonstrated that the concept ‘social’ is far from well defined and that enquiry is bedevilled by artificial polarization between subject-centred approaches and object-centred particularism. Through the medium of early United States steamboat technology a different approach is forged through the melding of people and things with the idea of viewing artefacts as active social actors along with people. Ultimately, it is argued that maritime archaeologists should be more bullish in their approaches to material things—instead of adopting social theories ‘wholesale,’ we should insist that they include the things we study: boats, material objects, people, artefacts, landscapes and animals.     

Preliminary assessment of a wreck in the Red River, Choctaw County, Oklahoma, USA

This paper reports the initial recording of an early riverboat wreck located in the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas. The wreck is probably the Caddo lost in 1842. The visible wreckage is described and the history of the Caddo is discussed. This is the earliest western rivers steamboat investigated by archaeologists to date.     

Revisiting nineteenth-century U.S. interventionism in Central America: capitalism,intrigue, and the obliteration of Greytown

In October 2016 the Congressional Research Service published its latest version of “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad.” One of the “instances” occurred in 1854, and the entry reads in its entirety: “Naval forces bombarded and burned San Juan del Norte (Greytown) to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.”¹1. Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2016, 4.View all notes The following article posits that Greytown was not destroyed to avenge an insult to an American diplomat. Rather, two groups of prominent American businessmen used this and related events and their antecedents as pretexts to enlist the federal government in destroying Greytown. One group, representing a U.S.-owned isthmian steamboat company, sought to seize the port of Greytown as a private fiefdom; the other wanted it as the prospective capital of a new colony based on a huge, dubious land grant they owned.     

Contesting Commerce: Gibbons v. Ogden, Steam Power, and Social Change

The U.S. Supreme Court case Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) ¹ represents one of the most significant yet least understood cases in the history of American jurisprudence. Most accounts depict the case as a constitutional showdown between former New Jersey Governor Aaron Ogden and his estranged business partner, a Georgian businessman and planter named Thomas Gibbons. Ogden charged Gibbons with operating a steamboat on the Hudson River in violation of the Fulton–Livingston Steamboat monopoly that controlled steam travel in the state of New York. In March 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for the Supreme Court that Gibbons' federal coasting license trumped a state grant issued to Ogden by the Fulton–Livingston syndicate. ²     

Earliest evidence of spinal tuberculosis from the Aneolithic Yayoi period in Japan

Tuberculosis has existed from early prehistoric days to modern times. The main causative agents of tuberculosis worldwide are Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) and M. bovis, along with M. africanum, M. cenettii and M. microti; these species make up the ‘M. tuberculosis complex’. This worldwide infection has been of special interest to palaeopathologists due to its characteristic bone lesions as well as its great antiquity. Historically, tuberculosis has been recognised in Japan for more than a thousand years. However, the origin and early prevalence of tuberculosis remain unknown. In the present study, we present the earliest evidence of skeletal tuberculosis found in the Aneolithic Yayoi period in Japan (ca. 300 BC to AD 300). The skeletal remains showing typical pathological changes of spinal tuberculosis were dated to between 454 BC and AD 124 by dendrochronological methods using coburied arrow-shield board and house columns made of Japanese cedar. We discuss the early prevalence of this infectious disease and its influence on the population history of the Japanese from prehistoric to Aneolithic times. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” as Workshop Poetry

ABSTRACT

Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” is a playful improvisational verse epistle, widely praised for its urbanity and its display of the poet’s invention. The verses turn on a catalogue of the collection of odd scientific and mechanical objects that Shelley found scattered around him in the place he composed the letter, the Livorno workshop of Gisborne’s son, a young engineer who was building a new-model steamboat at the time (with Shelley’s financial and intellectual backing). In the context of that space, the poem reads as a response to competing notions of invention. For Shelley, the engineer’s workshop is an attractive alternative to the poet’s tower—which was uncomfortably close to a Grub Street garret. Verbal and visual images of poets’ and scientists’ workshops, from Hogarth and Mary Robinson, to Joseph Wright of Derby and Frankenstein, illustrate the tensions embodied in the physical location and poetic performance of Shelley’s celebrated “Letter.”     

Ais Giorkis: An unusual early Neolithic settlement in Cyprus

Abstract

For over a century, archaeologists have been intrigued by the inception of food production and sedentary lifeways, the so-called “Neolithic Revolution.” Research focused on the Near Eastern and Anatolian mainlands has documented some of the earliest Neolithic cultures known. The adjacent Mediterranean islands were generally believed to have been late recipients of Neolithic economies. Recent research challenges this by establishing both Late Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic occupations on Cyprus. Ais Giorkis contributes to this revision. It is an early Neolithic site (ca. 7500 cal b.c.) in the uplands, unlike most contemporary sites, which are near the coast. Ais Giorkis is more complex than originally believed, containing unusual architecture, abundant and sophisticated artifacts, and some of the oldest directly dated domesticated plants in the Near East. It also has a faunal assemblage that includes small numbers of cattle bones, previously undocumented before the Bronze Age, but now shown to be present at three early Neolithic sites.     

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the “Big Book” of His Generation: Man Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels starting with The Englishman’s Boy (1996) have been widely discussed and celebrated in academic books and journals, but his first collection of stories, Man Descending (1982), has been largely neglected by the academic critics. An examination of sociopolitical references, with a special focus on gender and masculinity, in a coherent group of these stories (“The Watcher,” “Drummer,” Cages,” “Man Descending,” and “Sam, Soren and Ed”), reveals a writerly personality that, while acutely sensitive to contemporary social and political developments, and itself deeply implicated in these trends, nevertheless stands uncomfortably apart from and assumes a critical attitude toward the prevailing, generally progressive, sociopolitical trends of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last story of Man Descending, the protagonist-narrator Ed emerges as an aspiring thirty-year-old author who has attempted, but could not finish, two novels of his society and times, and these early stories constitute Vanderhaeghe’s own notes toward a never fully realized “Big Book” of his generation of Saskatchewan men, born in the early 1950s, coming to young adulthood in the socially and politically transformative 1960s and 1970s, and surviving into an embattled early manhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, as it is depicted in these stories, in which the aspirations of 1960s progressivism were hardening into a conformist sociopolitical orthodoxy.     

Fusulinoideans from the early Midian (late Middle Permian) Metadoliolina dutkevitchi-Monodiexodina sutchanica Zone of the Senkina Shapka section,South Primorye,Far East Russia

Fusulinoideans from the Metadoliolina dutkevitchi-Monodiexodina sutchanica Zone of the lower part of the Chandalaz Formation in the Senkina Shapka section in South Primorye, Far East Russia, are described. The fusulinoidean zone is assigned to the early Midian (=Capitanian: late Middle Permian) based mainly on the morphologie and biostratigraphic characteristics of Metadoliolina dutkevitchi. Previously, a Midian age has been established for the Metadoliolina dutkevitchi-Monodiexodina sutchanica Zone by the coexistence of Lepidolina species. However, the occurrence of Lepidolina with the two zonal species in this area has not been verified by the illustration of Lepidolina specimens. We examined a fusulinoidean-bearing sample from the Metadoliolina dutkevitchi-Monodiexodina sutchanica Zone, and three fusulinoidean species, Monodiexodina sutchanica, Pseudofusulina sp. and Metadoliolina dutkevitchi, are de-scribed and illustrated.     

THE BEGINNINGS OF ISLAMIC STONEPASTE TECHNOLOGY*

A multidisciplinary programme of research on Islamic pottery has been focused on questions of the dating, provenance and technology of Islamic pottery. One particular question has been the development of stonepaste, a material made primarily of crushed quartz with added frit-glass and clay. The combination of the different approaches of this study has revealed early foundations for the technology in ninth-century AD Iraq, apparently originating in the clay ceramic rather than the ‘Egyptian faience’ tradition. Subsequent and final practice developed in tenth- and eleventh-century AD Egypt. This technology becomes the primary body for all fine Islamic ceramics.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Archaeological heritage management in Dutch waters: exploratory studies (Scheepsarcheologie V), THIJS MAARLEVELD II Manoscritto dell'Abbazia di Finalpia: una fonte par I'archeologia navale dei primo Seicento, FURIO CICILIOT Underwater Archaeology, 1998 (Proceedings from the Society for Historical Archaeology meeting, Atlanta), LAWRENCE E. BABITS, CATHERINE FACH and RYAN HARRIS (Eds) The persistence of sail in the age of steam; underwater archaeological evidence from the Dry Tortugas (Plenum Series in Underwater Archaeology), DONNA J. SOUZA The Archaeology of Whaling in Southern Australia and New Zealand, SUSAN LAWRENCE and MARK STANIFORTH (Eds) Diving up the Human Past—perspectives of maritime archaeology with specific reference to developments in South Africa until 1996 (BAR International Series 749), BRUNO E. J. S. WERZ Transport in Ancient Egypt, ROBERT PARTRIDGE The First Antarctic Winter, JANET CRAWFORD Icy Heritage, DAVID L. HARROWFIELD The earliest recorded bridge at Rochester (BAR British Series 252), COLIN FLIGHT Les archéologues aux pieds palmés: la fabuleuse histoire de la fouille archéologique d'un baleinier Basque du 16^e siècle échoué au Labrador, MARC‐ANDRÉ BERNIER and ROBERT GRENIER The Search for the North West Passage, ANN SAVOURS Deutsche Fischdampfer Technik Entwicklung Einsatz Schiffsregister (German fishing trawlers), WOLFGANG WALTER The material culture of steamboat passengers: archaeological evidence from the Missouri River (Plenum Series in Underwater Archaeology), ANNALIES CORBIN Ships fittings and rigging components recovered from the 1983 underwater archaeological excavation at Red Bay, Labrador (Parks Service Canada Research Bulletin no 300, January 1993), CHARLES S. BRADBURY Texas’ Liberty Ships: from World War II working‐class heroes to artificial reefs (Texas Parks & Wildlife Bulletin no 99.1), J. BARTO ARNOLD III     

A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

This article explores a series of Carolingian historians, writing in the early ninth century, who marginalized the role of God’s agency, in sharp contrast to the pattern established by the Annales Regni Francorum. Where this has been noted before, largely in relation to Einhard’s Vita Karoli, it has been explained either as a clash between lay and monastic ideals or as a by-product of the classical renewal at the Carolingian court. Examining this process across multiple texts suggests, however, that these historians can be understood as self-consciously ‘secularizing’ in response to contemporary crises.     

Semi‐Authoritarian Incorporation and Autocratic Militarism in Turkey

This article argues that, since the early 1980s, there have been two regimes in Turkey. The first, which is broadly akin to Michael Mann's characterization of Semi‐Authoritarian Incorporation, has predominated in areas of the country not administered through emergency legislation. In keeping with his model, it has been most fully asserted in areas of key economic value — particularly the Marmara region and the environs of the capital, Ankara. In the thirteen predominantly Kurdish provinces of the south‐east of the country, on the other hand, a second of Mann's regime types, Autocratic Militarism, is discernible. This was institutionalized under a new constitutional structure introduced following the 1980 coup as a means of dealing with a rise in pro‐Kurdish insurgency.     

La prudencia de Cortés: teoría política y práctica retórica en la Historia de la conquista de México de Antonio de Solís

The Historia de la conquista de México, published by Antonio de Solís in 1684, and later extensively reissued and translated, has been praised for the ‘elegance’ and ‘sweetness’ of its style. From very early on these qualities made the Historia to be read as a prose model worthy of imitation. Different scholars have studied Solís's sources and the way he manipulated them on the one hand, and, on the other, the extent of the reliability of his account. However, very little has been said about the actual writing practices of the Historia in the context of contemporary historiographical theories, or the author's own ideas about history or politics. This paper analyzes how some of these rhetorical techniques (I particularly focus on the use of oratio figurata, sententia, and epiphoneme) gave shape to Solís's political ideas, in particular the concept of prudence.     

Reconstructing Kilmainham: the topography and architecture of the chief priory of the Knights Hospitaller in Ireland,c.1170–1349

ABSTRACT

For almost 400 years the Knights of St John of Jerusalem – the Knights Hospitaller – maintained a priory in Kilmainham, Co. Dublin, as their principal residence in Ireland. Nothing survives of it above ground. The priory's early history and topography are mainly shrouded in mystery, but a fourteenth-century registrum illuminates the workings of its community and the character of its members, and provides valuable evidence relating to the appearance of its architecture and layout when it was at the peak of its prosperity. Yet the registrum has never been subjected to detailed scrutiny. Recent research on the Hospitallers in Ireland on the one hand, and on the organisation of domestic space in medieval contexts in Ireland on the other, has prompted this comprehensive appraisal of the evidence in Kilmainham's registrum.     

The Use of Copper and Lead Sheathing in VOC Shipbuilding

Much has been written on the use of lead and copper sheathing in post mediaeval shipbuilding, yet evidence for such hull protection by Dutch shipwrights in the 17th and 18th centuries has received little attention. A discussion of the archaeological and historical evidence pertaining to the application of copper and lead sheathing by the Dutch long‐distance trading companies outlines the argument for the innovative character, experimental use—on ships’ hulls—and standardization—on sternposts—as early as 1602. Archaeological evidence presented mainly comes from the Dutch East Indiamen Nassau (1606), Mauritius (1609), Batavia (1629), Vergulde Draak (1656), and Buitenzorg (1760).