Landscapes of Stone: Contextualizing Greenstone Working and Lithics from Clodgy Moor,West Penwith,Cornwall

Between 2004 and 2011 Graham Hill and Dave Edwards plotted nearly eight thousand prehistoric artefacts from ploughed fields across the Clodgy Moor area of West Penwith. In 2011 a project was carried out by the Historic Environment Service Projects team, Cornwall Council, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Cornwall Archaeological Society to catalogue and digitize all the finds recorded from the fieldwalking.

The project demonstrated that some places within the project area were persistent locales which were occupied throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The results were particularly significant because they shed light on the context of the production of greenstone axes, widely exchanged around Britain and across the Irish Sea during the Neolithic, and suggest why, despite large numbers of artefacts, no greenstone ‘axe factory’ site has been found close to the potential sources of the greenstone before.     

Review

In the course of the seventeenth century, ideas concerning the beliefs of Canadian Indians underwent a slow process of modification. Chroniclers at the beginning of the century, influenced by those who, the century before, had flatly declared a number of Indian nations to be “faithless, kingless and lawless,”; continued to describe them pejoratively. However, as they gradually came to see that the Indians were not irreligious, their declarations grew increasingly contradictory. An attentive reading of documents left by missionaries and explorers reveals that towards the middle of the seventeenth century — at a time when, in Europe, conceptions of witchcraft and religion were changing — the observation of American facts became more nuanced. The discovery of a “false religion”; launched the debate as to whether or not the Indians had preserved a secret sentiment of God.

Were the Indians monotheistic or polytheistic? At the beginning of the twentienth century, Paul Radinwasto take up the question and propose a tertium quid — namely that the Indians had practised monolatry or henotheism.     

The ‘Society’ at Bora Ceremonies: A Manifestation of a Body of Traditional Law and Custom in Aboriginal Australia relevant to Native Title Case Law

Anthropologists working on native title cases in Australia are commonly asked to identify the Aboriginal ‘society’ that holds the body of laws and customs that confer land ownership rights on certain groups of people. In this paper I investigate how the early documentation of bora initiation ceremonies is relevant to understanding contemporary Aboriginal societies and the normative laws and customs that give rise to rights and interests in land. The vast ethnographic oeuvre of R.H. Mathews (1841–1918) includes detailed documentation of bora gatherings, which allows the reconstruction of the wider social reaches of people's networks in the lower Darling Downs of eastern Australia, and can in turn be understood as the ‘society’ so often sought in current native title case law.     

Linking cultural policy from Great Britain to Canada

The Canada Council marks its fiftieth anniversary in 2007. The third national arts council to be established after the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946, it was created on the recommendation of a Royal Commission chaired by Vincent Massey, a Canadian philanthropist and diplomat. While it differed from the ACGB in its early scope and organization, it was and is an arm’s‐length body. Using unpublished and published sources, I track Massey’s social contacts during his tenure as High Commissioner to London from 1935 to 1946, where he served on the war‐time boards of the National Gallery and the Tate. This work put him in social contact with Samuel Courtauld, J. M. Keynes, and Kenneth Clark, who were engaged in the governance of British national arts organizations. My findings illustrate the influence that friendships and social networks played in arts policy formulation in these early years of the arts council model.     

Keynes’s legacy: an intellectual’s influence reflected in arts policy

As Western governments re‐examine the economic policies of John Maynard Keynes to solve a global financial crisis believed to be almost as severe as the Great Depression, this article examines his influence on arts policy. The article articulates and examines the central assumptions that underlie the arm’s length policy model, such as Keynes’s preference for semi‐autonomous non‐governmental bodies, and locates the sources of those assumptions and ideas in Keynes’s political philosophy and his involvement in higher education. Knowing this history enables policymakers and arts administrators to recognize how contemporary policy still reflects this thinking.