On the “Belgic Ditches,” and the Probable Date of Stonehenge

The acceptance of Caerlaverock castle into guardianship was followed by consolidation of the masonry and the clearance of the silted moat. In parallel with these operations, a series of excavations was carried out to investigate the nature of the outer defences and any surviving evidence for earlier bridges. Four different phases of timber bridges had crossed the moat to the gatehouse; the first three were dated by dendrochronology to 1277, 1371 and to the second quarter of the fifteenth century. An outer earthwork, originally intended purely to retain the water of the moat, was remodelled in the sixteenth century as an artillery defence. The approach to the castle was remodelled with an additional rock-cut moat, crossed by a timber bridge dated by dendrochronology c. 1559–94. Documentary evidence is examined for the use of these artillery defences, especially in the final siege of Caerlaverock in 1640. A rich assemblage of finds was recovered, mainly from unstratified contexts, both from the excavation of the bridges and from the general clearance work of the moat.     

A park of the people: the demotion of Platt National Park,Oklahoma

Platt National Park, Oklahoma, was the smallest national park in the United States until it was combined with an adjacent, reservoir-centered recreation site in 1976 to form Chickasaw National Recreation Area. Set aside as Sulphur Springs Reservation by agreement with the Chickasaw Indians in 1902 and designated a national park in 1906, Platt is the only American national park to be demoted since World War II. The story of Platt's creation and demotion reflects the changing mission of the National Park Service (NPS), shifting images of nature and recreation among the American public, and broader social forces that frame park purposes. What started as local boosterism of hydrotherapy in cold mineral springs grew into one of America's most visited national parks by the 1920s. Despite its popularity, Platt lacked both scenic grandeur and political influence; it did not fit prevailing images of wild nature among NPS bureaucrats and the urban elite who formed the core of the environmental movement; it was too small, too humanized, and too ordinary. As images of people embedded in nature have gained wider acceptance in recent decades, would this small, geographically distinctive, and culturally rich “park of the people” have met a similar fate today?     

Illustrations of Domestic Manners During the Reign of Edward I

Abstract

A small ivory head of a tonsured man, expertly carved in relief, was found in 1991 during excavations at the great eighth-eleventh century Lombard monastery at San Vincenzo al Volturno. The head was excavated with other fragments of carved ivory, antler and bone, in the vicinity of the collective workshop of the monastery, and was doubtless carved in this workshop. The head-type is a variant on an early Byzantine formula which was employed in Rome by the sixth century and subsequently, in the eighth century, was adopted by artists working for noble Lombard patrons in northern Italy. The painters responsible for decorating the churches and claustral buildings of San Vincenzo in the first half of the ninth century also used this type, and in details of its carving the new ivory head seems to show the direct influence of painted heads of early ninth-century date from the walls of the monastery. The relief was probably intended for the embellishment of a small casket or the cover of a book. The new head, besides being a significant addition to the tiny corpus of surviving carvings in ivory from early medieval Italy, shows the craftsmen in the monastery's workshop had at their disposal a material which was both rare and prestigious in the period.     

Consumer city

Urban economics has traditionally viewed cities as having advantagesin production and disadvantages in consumption. We argue thatthe role of urban density in facilitating consumption is extremelyimportant and understudied. As firms become more mobile, thesuccess of cities hinges more and more on cities' role as centresof consumption. Empirically, we find that high amenity citieshave grown faster than low amenity cities. Urban rents havegone up faster than urban wages, suggesting that the demandfor living in cities has risen for reasons beyond rising wages.The rise of reverse commuting suggests the same consumer cityphenomena.l     

Histoire et dialectique des idéologies et significations religieuses

The aim of this article is to consider the possibility of a new analytical methodology that could include multidisciplinary approaches into the study of religious ideologies and practices, taking benefit from historical and ethnographic interpretations, but also from linguistic and philological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, sociological, and anthropological considerations. If one tries to study the role or function played by religion in society, considering human beings as builders of symbolic worlds, one should set out to analyze, if not rules, at least general processes of the religious readjustment with respect to the rest of social life, whenever the gap is much too wide, or the religious transfer from one realm to another entirely different.     

CONSTRUCTION COSTS AND THE SUPPLY OF HOUSING STRUCTURE*

ABSTRACT Construction costs account for the bulk of the price of new houses in most markets, but their study has been relatively neglected. We document that there are economically large differences in construction costs across U.S. housing markets. We also estimate a very elastic supply for physical structure; hence, differences in construction activity across markets do not explain the variation in costs. Supply shifters that collectively do account for differences in building costs include the extent of unionization within the construction sector, local wages, local topography in terms of the presence of high hills and mountains, and the local regulatory environment.