Common ware production at Thamusida: dating and characterisation of Roman and Islamic pottery

Twenty-one samples of likely Roman, likely Islamic and unknown common ware from the archaeological site of Thamusida (Rabat, Morocco) were analysed in order to anchor selected types of pottery to a limited time span and, possibly, to a production area and technology. Analytical techniques were thermoluminescence, optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and X-ray fluorescence. The results arising from this research are definitely useful for the study of the site of Thamusida as well as for all researchers involved in archaeological and archaeometrical research in Morocco. Chronologies proposed on a typological base have been denied twice: a likely Islamic cup dates back to the second century a.d.; vice versa, a stewpot, framed into the Roman period, resulted to be an eighth century a.d. production. Moreover, the identification of an eighteenth century ceramic production is of outstanding importance, as it characterises a completely unknown production. Regarding the production area, four samples of both Roman and Islamic periods have been recognised as local productions of Thamusida.     

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.     

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

This article, which forms the introduction to a collection of studies, focuses on processes of state construction and deconstruction in contemporary Africa. Its objective is to better understand how local, national and transnational actors forge and remake the state through processes of negotiation, contestation and bricolage. Following a critique of the predominant state failure literature and its normative and analytical shortcomings, the authors identify four key arguments of the scholarly literature on the state in Africa, which concern the historicity of the state in Africa, the embeddedness of bureaucratic organizations in society, the symbolic and material dimensions of statehood and the importance of legitimacy. A heuristic framework entitled ‘negotiating statehood’ is proposed, referring to the dynamic and partly undetermined processes of state formation and failure by a multitude of social actors who compete over the institutionalization of power relations. The article then operationalizes this framework in three sections that partly conceptualize, partly illustrate who negotiates statehood in contemporary Africa (actors, resources and repertoires); where these negotiation processes occur (negotiation arenas and tables); and what these processes are all about (objects of negotiation). Empirical examples drawn from a variety of political contexts across the African continent illustrate these propositions.