The recognition of multiple spatial patterns: a case study from the French upper paleolithic

A pattern recognition approach to spatial analysis is applied to artifact distributions from the Magdalenian site of Pincevent, Section 36. Patterning is investigated using a κ-means cluster analysis that permits iterative mapping of artifact distributions at several scales of spatial complexity. Multiple scales of patterning are recognized in the Pincevent distributions. These patterns are assessed in terms of those discovered by the excavators through intensive visual inspection of the materials. Basic concordance is seen between these two approaches. Finally, the analysis detects more detailed patterning. A relationship between artifact abundance and location seems to hold constant throughout the site.     

Charcoal analyses as an environmental tool for the study of Early Medieval sunken houses infills in Roztoky near Prague, Czech Republic

The research was focused on the testing of possible information value of charcoal analysis from infills of archaeological objects, when methodologically different approaches are used in the combination with the micromorphological and pollen-analytical approach. The case study site chosen for this type of study is the unique Early Medieval settlement at Roztoky, Czech Republic. The comparative study includes the infills of 20 pithouses from the extensive settlement comprising about 750 (323 excavated) such archaeological structures situated along the left bank of Vltava River close to what today is the city of Prague. A combination of three anthracological outcomes (the number of charcoal fragments, the anthracomass, and the qualitative frequency of charcoal species) proves to be a powerful tool in determining the vegetation pattern in the surrounding landscape. The study revealed a major effect of post-depositional processes and quantification methods on the final anthracological interpretation. A modification of the anthracological record in different layers was traced in order to assess the applicability of sedimentology and micromorphology in the interpreting of the primary use and ending of the objects found. The reliability of anthracological interpretations are then compared with the results of micromorphological analyses and with regional vegetation patterns interpreted from pollen analyses of an off-site pollen profile.     

POTASH,SALTPETER AND TAR

Quantitative calculations on the use of natural resources provide valuable tools, which can give new insights to old questions and rise new ones. In this article, I compare the wood consumption in the production of potash, saltpeter and pine wood tar in 19th century Finland. My calculations shows that in the 19th century the cumulative wood consumption in the production of potash might have been higher or at least on the same level as in the production of tar, while the production of saltpeter consumed only a fraction. In the 1830s their combined wood consumption reached the level of slash‐and‐burn cultivation.     

Merchandising and sanctity: the invasive cult of Padre Pio

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the Blessed Padre Pio da Pietrelcina (1887-1968) became a 'saint' of global stature. It is most exceptional for the cult of a saint to acquire such dimensions in so short a time. Further, this is the story not of someone with a modern profile of sanctity,but someone who on the contrary answers to the traditional model of sanctity, and whose cult is moreover characterized by an instrumental devotional repertoire. Despite this 'classic' model, his person and cult are extremely ambiguous. This article describes and analyses the processes which have brought and continue to bring this about, and the recent development of the cult in Italy. By these processes a controversial cult, often associated with anti-ecclesiastical devotional activities and of limited scope, has become one of the most important and irreproachable in Italy. In part through the personal support of Pope John Paul II, in about a decade Padre Pio has grown from a friar in a controversial fundamentalist context to an almost invulnerable national saint, who is beginning to become a part of the Italian identity. The power of his cult is so strong - a devotional avalanche - that it has sidelined other cults, and to an increasingly large degree defines the Italian sacred landscape. The Pio cult encroaches on other devotions, and moreover is becoming its own competitor: to an increasing degree Pio's central pilgrimage site at San Giovanni Rotondo is losing pilgrims to the secondary pilgrimage site at Pietrelcina and to the hundreds of chapels and local shrines that have sprung up the length of Italy.     

Origins of the Creutzfeldt and Jakob Concept

A review of the publications of Hans Creutzfeldt and Alfons Jakob pertaining to the concept which bears their name (CJD) reveals that they described a neuropathological syndrome and were opposed to its classi- fication as a neurological disease. The evidence on which Creutzfeldt and Jakob based their view is reevaluated, and studies by other workers are cited in which a range of environmental and genetic factors generated the CJ syndrome, challenging the proposition that CJD is a disease with a single cause..     

‘Our land is only founded on trade and industry.’ Economic discourses in fifteenth-century Bruges

Economic historians study production, consumption, market phenomena, and economic policies, while what is referred to as ‘the history of medieval economic thought’ largely remains the province of historians of ideas. However, participants in medieval industry and commerce, informed by daily production, market and financial practices, also uttered discourses on the state of the economy and on the measures governments should take to resolve crises or economic decline. When the burghers of Bruges formulated their economic demands in times of crisis, such as during the revolt of 1488, their utterances reveal commonly accepted presuppositions of which institutional levels, the prince, the town, or the guilds, should stimulate the economy by reducing transaction costs.