Taphonomy and contextual zooarchaeology in urban deposits at York,UK

Zooarchaeological research on assemblages from deeply stratified sites in historic towns is complicated by the reworking of bones through intercutting and disturbance. Conversely, structural association with buildings and property boundaries may allow detailed spatial analysis, and interpretation at a close contextual level that reveal small details of people’s lives. Five years of excavation at the Hungate site in York has yielded a very large animal bone assemblage ranging from Roman to early modern times. Assessment of this assemblage has focussed on identifying context groups of good integrity and high research value. In this paper, we present preliminary results from Hungate to show the potential of contextual analysis in urban deposits, and the challenge presented by redeposition and time-averaging.     

Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment,Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939

From the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, approximately 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around locations across the British Empire. This article explores the scale, reach and significance of these convict flows in the period after 1788, arguing for a transnational history of penal transportation in the Australian colonies and Indian Ocean. It quantifies convict numbers, and maps convict destinations, providing comparative data on their intra-imperial character to construct a new cartography of criminal justice and Empire. Focusing on Asian convict flows, this enables an articulation of the relationship between transportation, population management and repression, as well as other forms of coerced labour migration, including African and Asian enslavement and indenture. The history of penal transportation proposed here thus moves beyond an exploration of its role in the outward metropolitan expansion of Empire, and towards an appreciation of its importance in labour extraction and governance within the larger imperial world.     

Trust and Understanding in Participatory Policy Analysis: The Case of the Vermont Forest Resources Advisory Council

Participatory policy analysis (PPA) has been recommended as a means for better informing the policy process and reinvigorating citizen participation in government decisionmaking. This study analyzes the Vermont Forest Resources Advisory Council (FRAC), a stakeholder form of PPA, to assess trust and understanding, which PPA proponents suggest is important for democratic governance. Findings indicate that process design and the roles of science and social values in decisionmaking affected trust and understanding among participants and in the FRAC process. This case highlights challenges in making PPA operational and in addressing positivist and postpositivist perspectives within PPA.     

Multi-element soil analysis: an assessment of its potential as an aid to archaeological interpretation

Multi-element soil analysis is now an established technique in archaeology. It has been used to locate archaeological sites and define the extent of human activity beyond the structural remains, and to aid interpretation of space use in and around archaeological remains. This study aimed to evaluate the consistency of these soil element signatures between sites and hence their potential usefulness in archaeological studies. Known contexts on abandoned farms across the UK were sampled to test the relationships between element concentrations and known functional area and to assess inter-site variability. The results clearly show that there are significant differences in the soil chemistry of contrasting functional areas, particularly for Ba, Ca, P, Zn, Cu, Sr and Pb. Despite significant site specific effects, which appear to reflect individual anthropogenic practices rather than geological influences, there is sufficient similarity in the pattern of element enhancement to allow reliable interpretation of former function using discriminant models. Relating these enhancements to precise soil inputs, however, is more problematic because many important soil inputs do not contain distinct element fingerprints and because there is mixing of materials within the soil. There is also a suggestion that charcoal and bone play an important role in both the loading and post-depositional retention of Ca, Sr, P, Zn, and Cu and thus may be significant in the formation of soil element concentration patterns.     

Marina Carr’s Hecuba: agency,anger and correcting Euripides

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on Marina Carr’s 2015 adaptation of Hecuba for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hecuba sees Carr return to a fascination with Greek tragedy, difficult female characters and reimagining foundational myths. Of all Euripides’ plays Hecuba has rarely been popular, yet the themes Carr prises open – of violence, desire, gendered experience and the politics of perspective – are acutely topical. Indeed, Hecuba seemed to anticipate the frustrations that erupted on 28 October 2015 in response to the Abbey Theatre’s “Waking the Nation” programme. Drawing on twentieth and twenty-first century debates around the politics of tragic form, Roland Barthes theorising of myth, and the tradition of Greek adaptation in modern Irish drama, this paper examines how Hecuba reorients its sources. It goes on to assess the outcomes of these reorientations in order to problematise the critical predisposition to find an inevitably progressive poetics/politics in her engagement with tragic myths.     

CULTURAL AND SOCIAL DISCONNECTION IN THE CONTEXT OF A CHANGED PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

The context of the study was provided by the enforced relocation of an old coal mining community in the UK and describes the changes that were experienced by relocatees. The study is longitudinal in design over a six year period and this article is based on the qualitative part of the study. The old village had consisted of five straight rows of terraced houses whereas the new village was built in a curvilinear design with additional housing, occupying a much larger space. Reduced visual access to others not only diminished a sense of connectedness but also restricted an information flow which had been part of the functioning of the previous community, leaving indigenous participants with a sense of isolation. This unwanted isolation diluted the previous collective identity and weakened social support. In addition, an abrupt change in the community's socio‐cultural patterns occurred and previously learned privacy mechanisms were found to be inappropriate in the new setting. New values, priorities, lifestyles and overt materialism were evident and the data suggest that the earlier mostly collective functioning of the community had been replaced by individual functioning. It is proposed that spatial aspects provide constraints and opportunities for different behaviour patterns, highlighting the crucial importance of the physical environment and illustrating the essentially dynamic relationship between person, group and place.