A company of women and men: men's recollections of childbirth in medieval England

The events that took place in medieval English birthing chambers were witnessed and assisted by a company of women. Although these events may have been isolated, they did not exist in isolation. Rather, they interacted in complex ways with the lives and activities of the men in the manor hall. This article examines those interactions as they are evidenced in proof-of-age inquests, legal documents that record the recollections of husbands, fathers, and male relatives and neighbors regarding the events surrounding the birth of an heir to crown land. It concludes that even though men rarely entered the birthing chamber, their dynastic interests and social politics routinely penetrated its walls, blurring the boundary between private and public spheres, female and male space.     

Geographical Education in Higher Institutions in China: a Personal Viewpoint

Editor's Note The following article was written by Chun-fen Lee, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Geography in the East China Normal University, Shanghai, during his tenure as a Fulbright scholar in the United States in 1980. Minor editing was done by Marie Sanderson, University of Windsor. Professor Lee has a special tie with Canada. He was a student of Griffith Taylor's, with whom he is shown in Figure 1, and in 1943 received the first PhD in geography awarded by the University of Toronto. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, geographical education in universities and colleges has made a great deal of progress: in the establishment of specialized geography departments, in the training of teachers and geographical workers (some 40,000 in all), and in the publication of geographical textbooks. These were the main accomplishments of Chinese geographers during this period 1949–81, but we also experienced setbacks and traversed a tortuous road. Long before liberation in 1949, the first department of geoscience in China was founded in 1919 in the Higher Normal College of Nanking (now the University of Nanking) with Dr Co-ching Chu, a climatologist from Harvard, president of the Geographical Society of China and vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as the head. There were then three sections in the department, of which geography was one. In the 1920s and 1930s several more geography departments were established. Until liberation, however, the departments were few and small, generally with a full-time faculty of fewer than 10 and an enrollment of some 20–50 students. Most of the graduates became teachers in the middle (or secondary) schools. After liberation, China entered a new stage of development in socialist revolution and socialist construction. By 1952 economic restoration was nearing completion and the first five-year plan was about to begin. In order to adapt to the needs of national construction, higher educational institutions underwent a nation-wide adjustment. Geography departments were classified into two categories: those in the comprehensive universities which concentrate on the training of specialized workers, and those in the normal colleges and normal universities, where teachers for the middle schools are trained. Only the geography departments of the two major normal universities (Peking Normal and East China Normal) do not fit this pattern. They might be regarded as an intermediate type of institution in which the functions of the comprehensive university and the normal college are combined. There are now about 35 departments of geography in China, most of them of a size that would have been undreamed of in the pre-liberation period. In each department there are about 100 to 300 geography majors and a faculty of 30 to 100, though most of the faculty members are assistants and instructors; there are rarely more than 20 professors and associate professors in a department. A number of the better equipped and stronger departments are now offering graduate programmes as well. Generally, it takes two to three years for the master's degree; the first one and a half to two years for course studies, including a foreign language, and the third for thesis work. Upon graduation, the more promising students are selected to proceed into doctoral programmes.     

University-Industry Collaboration on Technology Transfer: Views from the Ivory Tower

This article reports the results of a national survey that examines the concerns of American faculty about close university industry collaboration and explores how these concerns may impinge upon their participation in industrial innovation. The data show that while academics are generally, but cautiously, in favor of close collaboration, they live with deep tension that is caused by two powerfully competing realities: the instrumental need for industry funding, and the intrinsic need to preserve intellectual freedom. A challenge to public policy is to fashion a positive-sum strategy (e.g., tax incentives) in which firms would be encouraged to increase funding for their academic collaborators, who then may fulfill their research mission better while contributing to industrial innovation.     

A New Algorithm for Graph-theoretic Nodal Accessibility Measurement

Accessibility is a useful concept in the study of the spatial structure of a region, if it can be calibrated appropriately. While graph-theoretic analysis has been used widely as a measurement scheme for the nodal accessibility in various transport networks, several limitations have been pointed out in the existing graph-theoretic accessibility measurements. This study proposes a new algorithm for deriving the nodal accessibility measure, as an attempt to improve the conventional graph-theoretic accessibility measurements. Corrections are made in such a way that irrelevant loops are excluded and relevant indirect connection paths are included selectively. In particular, the new algorithm is developed for intraurban subway networks, and includes the characteristics of intraurban subway traffic behavior. The concept of inconvenience of transfer is introduced, which is one of the most influential factors in the intraurban subway traffic. Nodal differentiation is allowed, if the nodes play different roles in the travel behavior and eventually in the accessibility. For this purpose, we employ a weighting procedure, according to which the influence of transfer on a sequence of linkages is taken into account. The new accessibility measurement scheme is then applied to the Seoul subway network. Here GIS techniques are utilized to generate accessibility surfaces from the discrete nodal accessibility values, and the changes in the spatial structure of the nodal accessibility are analyzed. Finally, based on the resulting changes in the spatial structure of accessibility in the subway network, the direction of changes in the land value and the land use pattern in Seoul is discussed.     

Reconstruction of diets based on the Δ15N values of individual amino acids at three sites in Sichuan,China

This study analyzes the nitrogen isotope composition of individual amino acids in collagen extracted from human bone samples from the Gaoshan, Yingpanshan, and Xinyicun sites in Sichuan, where the isotope baseline is unavailable or incomparable with the isotopic data derived from human remains. It aims to understand the food compositions of the inhabitants at these sites, spanning the period from the late Neolithic to the middle Bronze Age, during which time agriculture and domestication of animals were introduced to the region and became increasingly important. The δ¹⁵N values of two amino acids, phenylalanine (δ¹⁵N_Phe) and glutamic acid (δ¹⁵N_Glu), indicate that the peoples on the Chengdu Plain mainly consumed terrestrial foods. The contribution of aquatic resources to their diet was limited. A possible explanation for the low dependence on aquatic foods is that the developed agriculture and domestication of animals offered sufficient foods. Such subsistence economies and dietary patterns were shaped in the early Baodun period (ca. 2,500–2000 BCE) at the latest and did not seem to change when transiting to the Bronze Age. This study also assesses the significance of these subsistence practices in supporting the social development of the Chengdu Plain.     

Mortuary behaviour reconstruction through palaeoentomology: a case study from Chachapoya,Perú

This paper explores the contribution that applied forensic entomology can make to our understanding of prehistoric mortuary behaviour. Samples of insect remains were recovered from a mummy bundle that has been attributed to the Chachapoya people who occupied the northern highlands of Perú from ca. AD 800 to ca. AD 1532. The insects were identified to the family level and used to create a hypothetical timeline of post‐mortem interval before the construction of the mummy bundle. The individual in question suffered from a number of blunt force insults to the head, followed by two and possibly three trepanation events. We speculate the initial insect colonisation to have taken place almost immediately following injury and subsequent surgery, occurring before the individual's death. Insect succession patterns and timing estimates for the appearance of periosteal reactive bone suggest that the individual was wrapped shortly following death. The application of such modern forensic techniques holds vast promise for addressing issues concerning Chachapoya mortuary behaviour and, further, these results can expand our understanding of mummy studies in general. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.