Linguistic boundaries and geopolitical interests: the Albanian boundary commissions, 1878–1926

Since 1999, there has been much debate within the international community on what the future status of the autonomous province of Kosovo should be. However, there seems to have been little consideration as to why the Ottoman vilayet of Kosovo and the other majority Albanian-speaking areas (now parts of Montenegro, western Macedonia and north-western Greece) did not become either independent or part of an independent Albanian state, despite the legacy of these decisions. Focussing on British policy and perceptions, this article explores the role of the great powers in the delimitation of Albanian boundaries, particularly in two boundary commissions in 1913 and 1914: one determining the southern Albanian boundary with Greece and the other concerning the northern and north-eastern boundary with Serbia and Montenegro. The first part of the article considers the influences and interactions of two sets of factors in the boundary deliberations: the declared rationale of creating nation-states in south-eastern Europe based upon ethnographic criteria (linguistic boundaries) and the competing role of geopolitical interests in their decision-making, focussing particularly upon British interests. It illustrates that the decisions made to delimit the newly independent Albanian state primarily reflected the resulting great power conflicts and compensations, rather than the professed ethnographic rationale. The second part of the article explores some of the consequences of the decisions made to delimit Albanian boundaries, especially in ‘ethnic’ or national terms.     

Infant taphonomy

In almost all living creatures, in Primates as well as in seventeenth–eighteenth century human populations, a high infant mortality is the rule; therefore, the scarcity of children's bones in cemeteries is suspicious from a demographic point of view. Though possible in some cases, sociological causes appear less important than the peculiar behaviour of infants' bones in the tomb. This paper examines the physico-chemical properties of infants' bones and their consequences for the preservation of archaeological samples; it proposes a new way of approaching distributions at death in the past. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked A Nation

As I write this, Little Rock is gearing up for the fiftiethanniversary of the desegregation of Central High School, thatnigh archetypal event which seemed to pitch the forces of progressagainst those of ignorance and Southern intransigence. Preciselybecause it is often viewed in such starkly Manichaean terms,the Central High crisis has become the focal point in yet anotherbattle for memory, with some former students—white students—disparagingthe attention paid to the Little Rock Nine, insisting that they,too, suffered during that tumultuous school year. Further, theonly statewide newspaper in Arkansas is headed up by a formerplayer in the crisis who routinely recasts Governor Orval Faubusas a     

Gazelle bone marrow yields and Epipalaeolithic carcass exploitation strategies in the southern Levant

We measure the bone marrow yields of mountain gazelle (Gazella gazella) carcasses to reconstruct gazelle exploitation strategies during the Epipalaeolithic periods in the southern Levant. We present experimentally derived data on the bone marrow content of seven fresh gazelle carcasses, determine the range of marrow yields among individuals of different sexes and seasons of death, and compare the new data to gazelle skeletal element abundances from five Epipalaeolithic assemblages from Israel. We found extensive variation in marrow fat content among individual gazelles. Animals with the highest marrow yields were killed in the spring while animals killed in the early autumn had lower fat contents. Nevertheless, our results suggest that gazelle marrow provided a reliable, albeit small fat resource for prehistoric foragers in all seasons. Strong relationships between bone fragmentation and marrow content demonstrate that Epipalaeolithic people preferentially processed bones with high marrow yields.