Unfinished Business from Potsdam: Britain,West Germany,and the Oder-Neisse Line, 1945–1962

Abstract

William Waldegrave Palmer, second earl of Selborne, took up his appointment as first lord of the admiralty in the marquess of Salisbury's third administration on 1 November 1900. This was Salisbury's recently acquired son-in-law's first experience of high office. Initially, as will be seen, Selborne regarded France and Russia as constituting the sole threat to British naval supremacy. Indeed, for reasons entirely to do with ‘economy’s, he was prepared to envisage the making of an alliance with Germany. He maintained this stance throughout 1901. At some point in the course of 1902, however, he displayed a dramatic change in outlook, which it is the purpose of this article to describe and, by pinning down the date with more precision than did Selborne himself in correspondence with Arthur J. Marder in 1938, to explain.1 A.J. Marder, TheAnatomy of British Sea Power: A Histo~ of B~tish Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880–1905 (London, 1940), p. 464.      

Late Devonian gastropods from the Canning Basin,Western Australia

Over 50 identifications of Tertiary pollen are reviewed. The pollen assemblages indicate rain-forest through most of the Tertiary, but the requisites for pollen preservation are biased towards the wetter climates.

The present day geographical affinities of the botanical groups are largely with taxa of the tropical zone and Australia-wide taxa. There is geographic variation in the fossil pollen assemblages when southeastern Australia is compared with Central Australia and Queensland.

The major changes in the fossil floras coincide with climatic change, indicating the influence of climate on the evolution of plant assemblages. The older phytogeographic concepts are inappropriate for the fossil record, especially when considered in conjunction with palaeoclimates and palaeogeography.

It is unfortunate that palynology has given little information of the evolution of floras in drier climatic regimes, or of the evolution of the eucalypts.     

Ichnofacies of the Stairway Sandstone fish-fossil beds (Middle Ordovician,Northern Territory,Australia)

The Stairway Sandstone is a 30–560 m thick succession of Middle Ordovician siliciclastic sedimentary rocks within the Amadeus Basin of central Australia, deposited in the epeiric Larapintine Sea of northern peri-Gondwana. The Stairway Sandstone is significant as one of only two known Gondwanan successions to yield articulated arandaspid (pteraspidomorph agnathan) fish. Herein we use the ichnology of the Stairway Sandstone to reveal insights into the shallow marine habitat of these early vertebrates, and compare it with that of other known pteraspidomorph-bearing localities from across Gondwana. The Stairway Sandstone contains a diverse Ordovician ichnofauna including 22 ichnotaxa of Arenicolites, Arthrophycus, Asterosoma, Cruziana, Didymaulichnus, Diplichnites, Diplocraterion, ?Gordia, Lockeia, Monocraterion, Monomorphichnus, Phycodes, Planolites, Rusophycus, Skolithos and Uchirites. These ichnofauna provide a well-preserved example of a typical Ordovician epeiric sea assemblage, recording the diverse ethologies of tracemakers in a very shallow marine environment of flashy sediment accumulation and regularly shifting sandy substrates. New conodont data refine the age of the Stairway Sandstone to the early Darriwilian, with ichnostratigraphic implications for the Cruziana rugosa group and Arthrophycus alleghaniensis.     

Local Markets and the Polarization of Public-Sector Schools in England and Wales

Notwithstanding the recent change of government, UK educational policy continues to stress school performance tables, parental choice and competition – reflecting an acceptance by New Labour of Tory notions concerning the role that market mechanisms play in improving school performance. In view of the 1997 Education White Paper's insistence that the new government's goal was to 'overcome the spiral of disadvantage … passed from one generation to the next', this implies that the DfEE remains unimpressed by long-standing arguments concerning the socially-divisive consequences of market forces in education.
This paper seeks to add empirical weight to this debate. Arguing that recent analyses of aggregate levels of social stratification have masked polarization occurring at the local level, our analysis places schools in the context of the local markets within which they operate. This yields clear evidence that educational markets tend to exacerbate existing differences between schools in terms of both their performance and social status.     

Facilitating Interaction: Board Games as Social Lubricants in the Ancient Near East

This re‐evaluation of existing data on board games from the Near Eastern Bronze Age demonstrates their function as social lubricants in cross‐cultural interaction. Board games are situated theoretically as liminoid practices, which lie outside the bounds of normative social behaviour and allow for interaction across social boundaries. Utilizing double‐sided game boards, with an indigenous game on one side and a newly introduced game on the other, the games of senet, mehen and twenty squares provide evidence for social interactions. Cypriots had adopted Egyptian mehen and senet by the third millennium BC, and indigenized the games. This lies in contrast to the game of twenty squares, which had a particular role among elites in the Late Bronze Age interaction sphere. This anthropological discussion of evidence relating to gaming seeks to inspire further research on the role of board games in society.     

On the urns of a dilemma: radiocarbon and the Peterborough problem

Radiocarbon dates are presented for distinctive types of British Late Neolithic pottery, identifying questions which cannot yet be resolved.     

ANCESTORS,TRICKSTERS AND DEMONS: AN EXAMINATION OF CHIMBU INTERACTION WITH THE INVISIBLE WORLD1

The fundamental premiss of Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965) was that the epistemology of people of the Seaboard of Papua New Guinea was more dominated by religion than was that of the Highlanders. Among the latter, the Chimbu have commonly been portrayed as supreme pragmatists. However, they believe in a complex and variegated spirit-world, described in some detail in this paper.