Miscellaneous Notices

This survey has revealed the remarkable extent of the earthwork remains in unploughed grassland inside the hillfort on Beacon Hill. At the summit there are the banks and ditches of an earlier enclosure. The hillfort's defences comprise a ditch set between two banks. At the south-east, a homwork protects the entrance passage, which is continued by straight inturns. A possible second, blocked, entrance has been noted on the west side. Some sixty certain or possible hut sites, of varying form, have analogies of iron age date at Hod Hill.     

Medieval ‘Bronze’ Tripod Ewers from Wales

THIS PAPER DESCRIBES six complete and one fragmentary tripod ewer found in Wales, and discusses their form, its origin, and their metallic composition. Six are simplified versions of a more elaborate prototype, and are of a type widely distributed and copied in Britain and N. Europe, which probably signals the more general adoption of metal vessels in 14th-century households.     

BOOKS RECEIVED

Deely, John. The Human Use of Signs or: Elements of Anthro‐posemiosis. Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield Publishers, 1994. xiii + 240 pp. including paragraphal glosses, appendix, references, and indices. $35.00 cloth.

Parmentier, Richard J. Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. xvii + 223 pp. including notes, references, and index. $35.00 cloth.     

Imagining Anthropology's History

Hager, Lori D., ed. Women in Human Evolution. New York: Routledge, 1997. xiii + 214 pp. including index. $69.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Morbeck, Mary Ellen, Alison Galloway and Adrienne Zihlman, eds. The Evolving Female: A Life History Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. xix + 332 pp. including literature cited and index. $60.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.     

Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century

Samples drawn from marriage registers in Birmingham and rural Norfolk, England, which report the occupational status for both the groom and his father, were matched with the 1851 and 1881 English censuses, which also contain occupational information. After performing several checks for selection bias, the author concludes: First, although most occupational mobility took place within 10 years of marriage—when the groom was roughly between the ages of 25 and 35—some continued after he turned 50. Second, approximately 35 percent of the men in each area eventually had an occupational status different from their fathers, and about 30 percent changed occupational status over their careers, belying the stereotype of impenetrable walls between classes in Victorian England. Third, upward occupational mobility seemed to slow in both regions as the period under consideration progressed. Fourth, although occupational mobility rates overall were comparable in these urban and rural areas, it was much easier for an individual to rise from an unskilled to a skilled status in Birmingham than it was in Norfolk. Fifth, and perhaps most surprising, literacy had a greater effect on social mobility in rural Norfolk than in urban Birmingham.     

Mathematics of one day cricket

Abstract

The problem of setting a revised target for the side batting second when a game of one day cricket has been interrupted by the weather is one that has baffled the world's cricket authorities for more than 30 years. This paper describes how a fair method was devised based on a mathematical model of the run scoring process during an innings, and how this has led to the development of the ‘Duckworth/Lewis’ method which is now used in most parts of the world where cricket is played.