Mediterranean heritage: ancient marvel,modern millstone

ABSTRACT. The wealth, variety and seaborne accessibility of Mediterranean societies since late prehistory have made the region's cultural heritage the world's most widely acclaimed. But since the fall of the Roman Empire the Mediterranean has been increasingly disadvantaged, its history compromised, its legacy beleaguered. Two millennia of invasion and rapine, religious vendetta, foreign conquest, imperial dominion and colonial subjugation have left Mediterranean peoples with fewer resources and weaker infrastructures than those of transalpine and transatlantic nation‐states. The consequences for the care and control of Mediterranean heritage are parlous. That heritage is both the region's self‐defining pride and its economic mainstay, yet a crippling burden to protect and maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate. It is everywhere beset by natural and human attrition. Weathering and erosion, illicit excavation and pillage, tomb robbery and the international antiquities market exact tolls that legal codes and police forces are all but impotent to stem. Recent social and political trends suggest potential remedies for some of these dilemmas.     

Counter-lineages within the history of anthropology: On disciplinary ancestors’ activism

Anthropologists frequently conceive of their disciplinary history in terms of intellectual lineages linked to ‘schools’ of anthropological theory. This article considers the importance of what might be called ‘counter-lineages’ – intellectual lineages which have tended to be eclipsed from our intellectual history due to interference by the secret state. One such significant counter-lineage is found in the lives and works of American anti-fascist anthropologists during the mid-20th century. During World War II, anthropologists’ findings had tended to support racial equality and anti-fascism. This motivated many to contribute to the war effort. During the post-war period, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and loyalty committees actively targeted anthropologists speaking out against racism in America. The history of how these counter-lineages of public anthropologists eventually ended up marginalized within the discipline is easily forgotten. However, their study can help to inform anthropologists as we face our current crises.     

The Parliamentary Organisation of the Whig Junto in the Reign of Queen Anne: A Further Note

The parliamentary organisation of the whig Junto in the reign of Queen Anne was far superior to that of the tory party. At the centre were the meetings in which three or four of the five members of the Junto were present together with some of their followers. Evidence of such meetings is rare but here is presented a letter giving the details of a meeting of all five in April 1713 at the home of Lord Somers, together with their ally, the tory earl of Nottingham, probably to discuss the forthcoming peace proposals, to end the war of the Spanish Succession, and the protestant succession to the British throne.