Web communication can help theaters attract and keep younger audiences

This paper focuses on the use of web communication tools as a policy device to regulate access to theaters. By comparing the profile of what we call ‘tech-savvy’ spectators (i.e. audience using the website of a theater) with the profile of the general audience we examine whether the web can be regarded as an effective tool to address regular spectators or to reinforce the participation of different segments within the audience. The study suggests that the web appears to be the favorite direct marketing tool for informing or retaining ‘inexpert drama lovers’, namely those who fish in different types of performing arts events (i.e. opera, ballet, and classical concert) or attend different types of theatres. Moreover, internet may combat the aging of the performing arts audience by giving priority to access to those that are more familiar with the new technologies (i.e. younger audience).     

A multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental investigation of the findspot of an Iron Age bog body from Oldcroghan,Co. Offaly,Ireland

In 2003, the remains of an Early Iron Age bog body, known as ‘Oldcroghan Man’, were recovered during the cutting of a drainage ditch in a bog in the Irish Midlands. Only some fingernails and a withe fragment remained undisturbed in situ in the drain face, providing the sole evidence for the original position of the body. A detailed reconstruction of the depositional context of the body has been undertaken through multi-proxy analyses of a peat monolith collected at the findspot. The palynological record shows that the surrounding area was the focus of intensive human activity during the Later Bronze Age, but was largely abandoned during the Bronze Age–Iron transition in the mid-first millennium BC. In the mid-4th century BC, a bog pool developed at the site, evidenced in the stratigraphic, plant macrofossil, testate amoebae and coleopteran records. Plant macrofossil and pollen analysis of peat samples associated with the fingernails suggests that the body was deposited in this pool most likely during the 3rd century BC. The absence of carrion beetle fauna points to complete submergence of the body within the pool. Deposition occurred shortly before or around the time that the surrounding area again became the focus of woodland clearance, as seen in the extended pollen record from the peat monolith. This period corresponds to the Early Iron Age in Ireland, during which renewed cultural connections with Britain and continental Europe can be seen in the archaeological record and widespread forest clearance is recorded in pollen records from across Ireland. The palaeoenvironmental results indicate, therefore, that the demise of Oldcroghan Man took place at a pivotal time of socio-economic and perhaps political change.     

Aristocratic Liberalism and Risorgimento: Cesare Balbo and Piedmontese Political Thought after 1848

The paper discusses the political thought of Cesare Balbo (1789–1853), a leading Risorgimento moderate liberal and politician, in the context of the efforts by the Piedmontese political elite to support and legitimise the constitutional regime introduced by King Charles Albert in 1848. Revising current interpretations of Risorgimento moderate liberalism as backward and provincial, it seeks to locate the political thought of Balbo and his colleagues at the heart of contemporary European, and particularly French, debates regarding liberty and aristocracy. In particular, it argues that the views of Balbo and more broadly Piedmontese moderate liberals on centralisation, the importance of a social elite to defend freedom, and equalisation, were conversant with the ideas of Guizot, Chateaubriand, Burke and Tocqueville. Their harsh condemnation of republican virtue, on the other hand, rendered their liberalism peculiar in the Italian context, where Tuscan moderate liberals continued to resort to the language of civic humanism after 1848 to defend their political and social model.     

An Unpublished Scottish Lullaby

DEUTSCHE VOLKSSAGEN. Herausgegeben von Leander Petzoldt, Munich. 1970. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Pp. 491, with 20 woodcuts and 5 maps. DM 24. Reviewed by Ruth Michaelis-Jena.

THRICE TOLD TALES. Folktales from Three Continents. Edited by KENNETH S. GOLDSTEIN AND DAN BEN AMOS. Privately Published by the Hammermill Paper Company, Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. 1970. Reviewed by K. M. Briggs.

JUMP ROPE GAMES. By ROGER D. ABRAHAMS. Published for the American Folklore Society. University of Texas Press. 1970. £3.10. Reviewed by F. Mary Wilson.

SVANGERSKAP OG FØDSEL I NYERE NORSK TRADISJON. By LILY WEISERAALL, Oslo, Norsk Folkemuseum, 1968. Pp. xiv, 303, 1 plate &; 2 text ills. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

FORSCHUNGEN ZUR FACHPROSA. AUGSEWÄHLTE BEITRÄGE. By GERHARD EIS. Bern (Francke Verlag) 1971. Pp. 438,6 plates &; 7 text ills. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF ORAL TRADITION. Edited by PIERRE MARANDA AND KÖNGÄS MARANDA. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1971. $20.00. pp.324. Reviewed by E. O. James.     

‘A Cunning Skill Did Lurk’: Susanna Perwich and the Mysteries of a Seventeenth-Century Needlework Cabinet

A seventeenth-century embroidered cabinet belonging to the Los Angeles Museum of Art includes a rare detail — a coat of arms. This essay explores the likelihood that the maker of this cabinet, as established by its coat of arms, was a member of the Perwich family, who ran a girls’ school in Civil War-era London, and the possibility that the cabinet was made by Susanna Perwich, a musical prodigy and subject of a 1661 biography published shortly after her untimely death. This essay discusses connections between Perwich’s life and the cabinet’s needleworked illustrations, revealing that the cabinet illustrates the Book of Ruth. Cabinets and caskets with their many compartments can be seen as metaphors for the compartmentalisation of the lives of late seventeenth-century Englishwomen who were excluded from many male-dominated physical and intellectual spaces in the aftermath of the English Civil War but who, nonetheless, created and meaningfully embellished personal objects in their own spaces.     

Seeds/fruits,pollen and parasite remains as evidence of site function: piazza Garibaldi – Parma (N Italy) in Roman and Mediaeval times

Archaeobotanical analyses were carried out on layers from the site of Piazza Garibaldi in Parma, a town located in the plain of Emilia Romagna, in northern Italy. The layers dated to the 3rd–2nd centuries BC, around the time of the foundation of the Roman town, and to the 10th–11th centuries AD. According to archaeological data, the site was a sacred area in Roman times, while it was a market square in Mediaeval times. Data from pollen and seeds/fruits were useful for both palaeoenvironmental and palaeoethnobotanical reconstructions, and together with NPPs including parasite remains contributed to add details on the function of the site in the different chronological phases.     

Saharan prehistoric basketry. Archaeological and archaeobotanical analysis of the early-middle Holocene assemblage from Takarkori (Acacus Mts., SW Libya)

The paper presents the large set of basketry and other worked fibre artefacts constituting the perishable artefacts assemblage from the Takarkori rock shelter. This site is located in southwestern Libya, central Sahara. Its well-preserved Holocene stratigraphy testifies to human occupations by foraging groups (Late Acacus culture; ca. 9000–7400 uncal years bp; ca. 8300–6100 BCE) and herders (Pastoral cultures; ca. 7400–4500 uncal years bp; ca. 6400–3000 BCE).