Ivane Tarkhnishvili (Ivan Tarchanoff) and His Links With Poland

According to some sources, Professor Ivan Tarchanoff (Ivane Tarkhanishvili) died in Saint Petersburg in 1908. In fact, he died in Poland in his house in Nawojowa Góra, a suburb of Krzeszowice, not far from Kraków. A student and later assistant of Tarchanoff in Saint Petersburg, Napoleon Cybulski, was then professor of physiology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and its rector and deputy rector. It is hardly known that Tarchanoff spent the last three years of his life mainly in Galicia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, near Kraków, he built himself a house and it was in Galicia (in Kraków and Lemberg [Polish Lwów, today Lviv]) that he worked on some of his last papers. The strong link between Tarchanoff and Polish physiology is not sufficiently well known and deserves to be recognized.     

A characterisation study of Ubaid period ceramics from As-Sabbiya,Kuwait, using a non-destructive portable X-Ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometer and petrographic analyses

The Ubaid cultural phenomena (6500–4200 BC) of southern Mesopotamia has been used to characterise other archaeological sites in the Arabian Gulf region. The aim of this inquiry is to explore the nature of the interaction between the homeland of the Ubaid and the wider Gulf region. Through the use of a non-destructive portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometer, this study seeks to characterise and identify the chemical and mineralogical compositions of the ceramic assemblage from the Bahra 1 site of the As-Sabbiya region, Kuwait. The chemical results demonstrated that a combination of six trace elements [rubidium (Rb), strontium (Sr), yttrium (Y), zirconium (Zr), niobium (Nb) and barium (Ba)] occur significantly enough to delineate clay-based artifact groups—local red coarse from Ubaid, while the mineralogical analysis confirms the pXRF result and identifies the source of the raw materials and temper as well. Also, the comparison between the Ubaid and Bronze Age assemblage results suggests that potters used different clay resources within their own regions and/or production techniques.     

Evaluating bone collagen extraction methods for stable isotope analysis in dietary studies

The specific purpose of this study was to compare three different collagen extraction methods commonly used in isotope laboratories conducting dietary studies. We evaluated their resultant differences in δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N, collagen quality and collagen yield. Our study was based on well-preserved skeletal material from the medieval period in Denmark. Our study shows that there is a systematic significant difference in the yield and the δ¹³C values between the three methods. Using the method of DeNiro and Epstein [DeNiro, M.J., Epstein, S., 1981. Influence of diet on the distribution of nitrogen isotopes in animals. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 45, 341–351] with NaOH as cleaning agent, will, according to our study, give δ¹³C values that are on average ±0.32‰ more positive than using the ultra-filtration method [Brown, T.A., Nelson, D.E., Vogel, J.S., Southon, J.R., 1988. Improved collagen extraction by modified Longin method. Radiocarbon 30 (2), 171–177, modified in Richards, M.P., Hedges R.E.M., 1999. Stable isotope evidence for similarities in the types of marine foods used by late Mesolithic humans at sites along the Atlantic coast of Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science 26, 717–722]. The third method, which is a modified version of the second method, excluded the ultra-filtration step. This method seems to give δ¹³C values that lie in between the other methods. Our study did not show any significant difference in δ¹⁵N values. Although the differences between the methods are very small, we conclude that the use of stable isotope analysis in food determination studies requires adherence to routine methods for preparing and measuring samples.     

Education for All: How Much Will It Cost?

In 1990, a target of universal access to basic education by the year 2000 was set by two global conferences. Ten years later, however, it was clear that the target had not been met. Too many countries had made insufficient progress, and although many of the reasons for this inadequate progress were country‐specific, one factor stood out in virtually all countries: inadequate public finance for primary education. In 2000, the Millennium Summit set a new target date for achieving ‘education for all’ of 2015. This article updates the global and regional cost estimates for reaching that target. The estimates are based on the most recent country‐by‐country data on budgetary expenditure, population and enrolment trends, and unit cost. The annual additional cost of achieving ‘education for all’ in developing countries by 2015 is estimated at US$ 9.1 billion. Although this is affordable at the global level, individual countries will need considerably more resources than are currently available. However, official development assistance (ODA) has been declining, and the share of ODA allocated to basic education has changed little over the past decade. Therefore, although affordable, the target of universal basic education by 2015 is likely to be missed, just as it was in 2000, without a major change both in ODA and national budgets.     

Net Multipliers Avoid Exaggerating Impacts: With A Bi–Regional Illustration for the Dutch Transportation Sector

Industries often promote their interests by arguing that they have a big impact on the rest of the economy. This poses the question of how to measure the importance of an activity. To answer this, the literature often uses (regional) input–output analysis. This paper critically reviews the traditional use of multipliers in such cases. To avoid double–counting impacts and to solve related conceptual problems, the net multiplier concept is introduced. This net multiplier is illustrated empirically for the Dutch transport sector using a Type II biregional input–output model for the Netherlands.     

The Medieval Colonization of Central Europe as a Problem of World History and Historiography

The author of this article asks two main questions. First, whatwas the nature of the so-called medieval colonization in theeastern half of central Europe? Secondly, which factors decidedthat in the second half of the nineteenth and in the twentiethcentury, during the era of a rising modern nationalism and imperialism,colonization became the—not always conscious—toolof manipulation in the fight for so-called ‘historic rights’in certain territories and the battle for the ‘forgingof nations’. In particular, in German historiography themyth of medieval colonization was born, which had very littlein common with medieval reality. Even German peasants were supposedto have marched East, not in order to seek out better livingconditions, as one Flemish song went, but to subject for Germany‘empty space’ in the barbaric East. At the sametime, the author presents the thesis that several ideas aboutthe topic of medieval colonization developed under the influenceof the colonization of North America, especially in California—contemporaryto many of these German scholars. This found its expressionin the terminology used, in numerous comparisons, and even inthe fundamental suggestion that German law legitimized the Germanclaim for almost the whole of central and eastern Europe. Thebasic conviction among German historians and politicians wasthat these territories should belong to the Empire under thesame conditions as India ‘belonged’ to the English,and Algeria to the French.     

On the Earliest Attestable Forms of the Pravargya Ritual: Rg-Vedic references to the Gharma-Pravargya,Especially in the Atri-family Book (Book 5)

Indo-Iranian Journal -