REIMAGINING ROMAN PORTS AND HARBOURS: THE PORT OF ROMAN LONDON AND WATERFRONT ARCHAEOLOGY

This paper explores some theoretically informed ways in which to use the rich evidence relating to ports, harbours and other waterfront installations in archaeology. It argues that studies of waterfront structures within the specialisms of nautical/maritime and wetland archaeology are extremely important in their own right, but they could also be used to explore broader issues connected with their use and context. These include the cultural and religious significance of water and its dangers, the symbolic significance of landscape change, the relationship between people and their environment and the negotiation of the land/water interface. Examining the evidence of the port of Roman London as a case study, this paper explores the archaeology in its local setting and addresses a number of subjects relating to both its temporal and spatial position. It focuses on the religious significance of water and the implications of altering waterscapes through artificial construction.     

THE HIGH-WATER MARK: THE SITING OF MEGALITHIC TOMBS ON THE SWEDISH ISLAND OF TJÖRN

Summary. In 1977 Grahame Clark suggested that the siting of megalithic tombs along the west coast of Scandinavia reflected the distribution of productive fishing grounds. Unlike the situation in other parts of Europe, these monuments were not associated with agriculture. Opinions have varied over the last quarter century, but enough is now known about changes of sea-level for his interpretation to be investigated on the ground. There seems to have been considerable diversity. On the large island of Örust some of the tombs located near to the sea appear to be associated with small natural enclosures defined by rock outcrops and may have been associated with grazing land. On the neighbouring island of Tjörn, however, the tombs were associated with small islands and important sea channels. During the Bronze Age the same areas included carvings of ships. Recent fieldwork in western Norway suggests that such locations were especially important in a maritime economy.     

THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE IRONIC FATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE PRAXIS OF RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Despite its title and stated objectives this edited volume does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post‐apartheid South African historiographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post‐apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti‐apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post‐apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general “crisis” of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post‐apartheid democracy is the volume's primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and possible explanations for that crisis. A marked feature of the accounts of “history making” provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians' lack of self‐reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.     

宋代金银货币铭文解读四则

在宋代银铤和金铤、金牌、金叶子上, 常见有一些戳打或压印上去的阴刻铭文,作 用是用以说明这些金银货币的成色、用途、 制作人、重量等。由于有些铭文原本就不太 清晰,加之年久受损,又因古代一些文字书 写及用法与今天存有差异,造成了释读的困 难。因此,正确解读这些铭文,便成了认识 宋代金银货币的一项重要任务。以下就四则 铭文试作说解。 一、银铤“京销浪银”的铭文解读 2000年福建漳州发现数枚南宋12两半 银铤,所见银铤表面四角各砸一“京销浪 银”戳记(图1)。我们以往见到的南宋银 铤,大多铭“真花银”、“花银”、“京销铤 …     

虚拟腹地：中国大陆口岸地位的度量与解释

口岸是对外开放的门户,支撑起了中国大陆全方位对外开放的格局。章引入虚拟腹地的概念,通过分析进出口商品流向,定量描述口岸对内影响能力,确定口岸的相对地位。并以虚拟腹地面积和通过口岸的进出口总量两个指标对39个口岸子群进行了类型划分。基于沿海、沿边口岸在整个开放体系中的重要性,章进一步分析了沿海、沿边各口岸群的相对地位和对内联系腹地的经济特征。     

THE DEVELOPMENT PATH OF NEW TIBET ENSURES THAT THE PEOPLE ARE MASTERS OF THEIR OWN FATE

<正>Editor's Note:The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China on April 15 published a white paper titled"Tibet's Path of Development is Driven by an Irresistible Historical Tide".The full text contains foreword,five chapters and conclusion.We select some part and share with our readers.The transformation of the old serf-owning Tibet into a new Tibet where the people are masters of their own fate was an essential precondition of Tibet's     

THE SITING OF NEOLITHIC STONE QUARRIES—EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT GREAT LANGDALE, CUMBRIA

Summary. Although the general distributions of stone axes and their sources have been studied for many years, it is not clear whether the production of these artefacts was carried out by specialists. One way of resolving the problem may be to consider the efficiency with which raw material was extracted. This paper describes an attempt to assess the factors influencing the siting of the Group VI stone quarries at Great Langdale. It is concluded that there is only a limited relationship between the most suitable locations, as suggested by detailed sampling of the outcrop, and those sites where stone working actually took place. This suggests that some of those using such sites may have lacked a detailed knowledge of the area.     

SURVIVAL AND BETTERMENT: THE ASPIRATIONS OF FOUR MEDIEVAL GENTRY FAMILIES AS REVEALED IN THEIR LETTERS

Abstract

Covering the period 1290–1584, the Paston, Plumpton, Cely and Stonor letters, although for the most part ‘business letters’, concerned with the administration of their households and estates, nevertheless throw fascinating light on aspects of contemporary society. They reveal that the lives of those who strove to survive and prosper as landowning gentry were played out against a background of civil war, violent Scottish incursions over the northern borders, and military reversals in France. Closer to home, they struggled with predatory lords, tight-fisted dowagers, disgruntled sons, wretched daughters and bitterly contested wills.

Faced with many imponderables, they marshalled their defences: judicious marriages and kinship networks, compliant children, the patronage of influential magnates – perhaps even of the king himself, such protection as was afforded by the law and unceasing vigilance.

Parental affection and true love and devotion also find welcome expression among what were severely practical concerns.     

FOUR GENERATIONS OF HOUSES IN THE TSUSUM VILLAGE: A MINIATURE OF THE GREAT CHANGES IN CHINA'S BORDER AREAS

正Tsusum, a border village some 2,000 kilometers east of Lhasa and 6,000 kilometers from Beijing, is in the Tsosisumkyi Township of Zanda County in Ngari Prefecture. The road to the village is both longer and tougher than even the well-known difficult road leading to the Metok County.Tsusum means"dried-up lake"in Tibetan. With an elevation of 4,000     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR AND THE CALLING OF HISTORY

What happens to history as a set of practices and intellectual protocols when the assumed subject of our historical narratives is not a product of the European Enlightenment? Such has been the question motivating much of Dipesh Chakrabarty's work for almost thirty years. This essay offers a largely chronological account of Chakrabarty's major works. It begins with his first book, published in 1989, which provided a culturalist account of working‐class history in Bengal. It then tracks his movement in the early 1990s toward a position positing radical disjuncture and even incommensurability between the worlds of Indian subalterns and Western moderns, and his subsequent attempts to soften and blur precisely this kind of disjuncture. Meditating on the problems posed by the experiences of subjects who did not live within the time of history led him to answer in the affirmative the question of whether there are experiences of the past that history could not capture. Soon thereafter, however, he drew back from the most extensive articulation of this claim, suggesting that the experiences of the non‐Enlightenment subject could function as a positive resource and not merely as the source of a profound and destabilizing critique. I argue here that this solution to the problem of incommensurability is not entirely satisfactory, for it relies implicitly on precisely the kinds of argumentative asymmetries of which his earlier analysis taught us to be wary. Chakrabarty himself, meanwhile, has continued to step further away from the radicalism of the early 1990s; his most recent book may be read as a defense of rationalist history in the face of contemporary threats posed by the rise of a politics of identity in India.     

PROBLEMS OF THE LEVEL OF THE CASPIAN AND THE STABILITY OF ITS SHORELINE

The first of two papers on the problem of forecasting the level of the Caspian Sea evaluates factors widely believed to have been responsible for its lowering during much of the present century (including tectonic movements, climatic cycles, human activity). It concludes that previous forecasts have been inaccurate because of the failure to adequately model the complexity of processes involved, specifically the internal mechanisms of “self-regulation” of water levels. Continuation of the recent slight rise in the Caspian's level is predicted at least into the early 1990s (translated by Andrew R. Bond).