The background to the proposition that plankton be used as food in the United Kingdom during the Second World War

Food shortages, particularly of proteins, in Britain during the Second World War led to the suggestion re-surfacing that marine plankton might be harvested on an industrial scale first as human food, then turning to its potential use as a supplement to stock and poultry feed. The notion emanated in the United Kingdom from Sir John Graham Kerr, at Glasgow University. He encouraged Alister Hardy, at Hull, to develop the idea and the natural testing ground was the Clyde Sea Area (given the extensive history of plankton research at Millport). Unpublished documents from the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science shed new light on the interactions behind the scenes of this project between Kerr, Hardy and the Millport Marine Station's then director, Richard Elmhirst. Elmhirst, who was sceptical about the feasibility of the plan from the outset, went along with it; not least as a way of attracting welcome research funding during lean times but also, doubtless, regarding it as his patriotic duty in case the proposal proved worthwhile.     

Discipline or profession: Anthropology and its guilds

Chambers, Erve. Applied Anthropology: A Practical Guide. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1986. ix + 258 pp., including references and index.

Driben, Paul. Aroland Is Our Home: An Incomplete Victory in Applied Anthropology. New York: AMS Press, 1986. xiv + 185 pp., including chapter notes and index. $32.50 cloth.

Eddy, Elizabeth M. and William L. Partridge, eds. Applied Anthropology in America, Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. xiii + 571 pp., including bibliography.

Van Willigen, John. Applied Anthropology: An Introduction. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1986. xviii + 259 pp., including bibliography and index. $36.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.     

Ballistically anomalous stone projectile points in Australia

The emergence of stone-tipped projectile weaponry was an important event in hominin evolution. A common archaeological approach to identifying projectile weapons is to extrapolate from optimal values of ballistically-relevant attributes as determined from ethnographic North American weapons and modern experiments. Among the most significant of these attributes is “tip cross-sectional area” (TCSA) because it determines a point's efficiency in penetrating an animal. The warranting argument for projecting these data onto prehistoric artefacts is that past “research and development” necessarily led to stone projectiles with optimal TCSA values for a given delivery system. However, our test of this warranting argument, involving analysis of 132 hafted ethnographic Australian stone projectile points and 102 hafted knives, demonstrates that Aborigines did not optimize TCSA values, thus offering a challenge to TCSA-based narratives about the first appearance of projectile weaponry. This illustrates the difficulty of inferring ancient stoneworkers' design intentions from narrowly-defined optimal values. Instead, tool designs should be considered in the context of the reduction sequences that produced them and the dynamics of transmission of those reduction sequences across generations.     

Nineteenth-century Irish Anacreontics: the literary relationship of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Moore

The odes of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, celebrating wine, women and song, were made newly popular in the nineteenth century through the efforts of Thomas Moore, a writer whose first volume of verse, a loose translation of the Odes of Anacreon, published in 1800, marks him out today as a poet of Romantic sociability par excellence. I argue that the Anacreontic ode popularised by Moore continued to resonate through nineteenth-century Ireland – albeit in a heavily mediated form – in the work of the poet's successor, James Clarence Mangan, who picked up the cup in the series of drinking songs he wrote periodically throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the decades during which Mangan sank into alcoholism and emotional estrangement. The easy charm of Moore's Anacreontic song mutates in Mangan's verse into a more complex, often allusive and fragmented form, a perverse Anacreontics, which corresponds both to the poet's psychic trauma (his alcoholism and self-alienation) and to a broader cultural and political dislocation experienced by Ireland under British rule. This discomfort is registered in Mangan's verse in the playful refusal of a single authorial voice and in the poet's tendency both to ventriloquise and to distort influence – not just that of Moore but also of the British Romantics, notably Byron and Coleridge.