First discovery of ancient soft‐stone (chlorite) vessel production in Arabia: Aqir al‐Shamoos (Oman)

Soft‐stone vessels are a prominent feature of ancient culture throughout south‐east Arabia and the Gulf. Chlorite and steatite occur naturally in the al‐Hajar Mountains of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman; but until now, apart from the discovery of a few unfinished pieces, ancient production of soft‐stone vessels had yet to be documented in Arabia. This paper reports the discovery and preliminary analysis of soft‐stone vessel production at the site of Aqir al‐Shamoos. At this small and secluded mountain village, a range of soft‐stone vessels that are well known in the south‐east Arabian Iron Age were produced on a scale far beyond what was needed for local consumption.     

CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS OF SPONSORSHIP IN THE ARTS

This article investigates consumers’ perceptions of three types of sponsors that play a role in backing financially Canadian artistic and cultural organisations: government ministries (or departments), Crown corporations and private companies. In addition to the type of sponsor and the nature of the sponsorship (philanthropic or commercial), the perceived congruence between the sponsor and the sponsored event (strong as opposed to weak), and the form of arts and cultural events (high art versus popular art and performing arts versus heritage arts) are explored in an experimental setting combining within‐subjects and between‐subjects factors. The main hypothesis of this research was that consumers’ perceptions are not the same when it comes to the different kinds of sponsors that evolve in the cultural and art fields. As the researchers explored this issue, they observed that significant differences do exist. It is believed that the rich findings of this study will be useful to civil servants.     

Tempi of Change: When Soloists don’t play Together. Arrhythmia in ‘Continuous’ Change

This contribution is centered on the question of tempi of change and the possibility of defining ternary scales of changes in a long archaeological sequence, which could match F. Braudel’s interpretative framework. Although I had recently considered a ternary scale of change to be a satisfactory framework even for a single category of artifacts, further analyses for this volume, on a longer time scale, revealed it as an intellectual construct that entirely depends on the choice of criteria. In addition, observed arrhythmia in change between two sets of data from the Franchthi Cave (Greece), chipped stone assemblages and ornaments, demonstrate the difficulty of defining global phases of change within a continuous sequence. In turn, this raises the fundamental problem of the choice of proxies used to define the prehistoric cultural entities whose transformations we seek to understand.