Between rocks and a hard place: prehistoric funerary practices at Wādī Ḍebayʿān,northern Qatar

Archaeological survey by the Qatar National Historic Environment Record Project (QNHER) in 2009, led to the discovery of a Neolithic flint scatter, a settlement and an ancient, raised shoreline associated with higher, mid‐Holocene sea levels at Wādī ?ebay?ān, north‐western Qatar (Al‐Naimi et al. 2010, 2011; Cuttler, Tetlow & Al‐Naimi 2011). The QNHER project is a collaboration between Qatar Museums and the University of Birmingham, which over the past five years has developed a national geospatial database for the recording of archaeological sites and historic monuments in Qatar. A significant aspect of the project involved archaeological survey and excavation in advance of major construction projects. Between 2012 and 2014 excavations at Wādī ?ebay?ān revealed a burial of a typology previously unknown in Qatar, the unmarked graves (Cuttler, Al‐Naimi & Tetlow 2013).     

The Port‐Vendres 4 Shipwreck Cargo: evidence of the Roman wine trade in the western Mediterranean

The Port‐Vendres 4 shipwreck is evidence of coastal export trade between Hispania Citerior and Narbonne in 40/30 BC. The cargo is made up of a particular assemblage of Roman wine amphoras (Pascual 1, Dressel 1B and Lamboglia 2) destined for Gallic markets. Archaeological and archaeometric analyses conducted on a selection of the amphoras allowed the provenance of the cargo to be identified as Hispania Citerior and the central‐southern Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. Iluro and/or Baetulo are proposed as the ports of departure, enabling the reconstruction of the trade route and the historical and economic significance of this shipwreck.     

Using Optical Coherence Tomography to Examine Additives in Chinese Song Jun Glaze

We use optical coherence tomography (OCT) to acquire microstructure images of Chinese Song Jun glaze to reveal the copper and quartz additives used and, in two typical samples, we show that the amount added is considerable. Focusing on these two additives, including the species, amount and granule (particle) size added in the glaze, the objective of the present study is to explore how they functioned in relation to the Jun glaze's visual characteristics, opalescence and sky‐blue colour, attributed to the unique liquid–liquid phase separation that occurs in Jun glaze.     

6. WHY WE NEED TO MOVE FROM TRUTH‐FUNCTIONALITY TO PERFORMATIVITY IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The central challenge of the philosophy of history and historiography is to find a principled way to rank different interpretations of the past without assuming their truth in terms of correspondence. The narrativist insight of the narrative philosophy of historiography was to correctly question historical realism. It analyzed texts and showed that they cannot reflect the past as it is. However, the rejection of the truth‐functional evaluation threatens to lead to an “anything goes” approach in terms of cognitive evaluation of historiography. In any case, no adequate theory of evaluation has so far been developed, although clearly not all historiographical interpretations are acceptable. Postnarrativist philosophy of historiography suggests that any history book includes a content‐synthesizing unit, but that it is problematic to think that it is “narrative” that structures texts. It is better to think of historiography texts as presenting reasoning for views and theses about the past. Arguments for these theses should be considered not as being true but as more or less appropriate, fitting, or warranted. The historian aims to produce as highly rationally warranted and compelling a thesis of the past as possible; its rational appropriateness depends on three dimensions of cognitive evaluation: the epistemic, the rhetorical, and the discursive.     

School holidays: examining childhood,gender norms,and kinship in children's shorter-term residential mobility in urban Zambia

This article discusses a practice of child residential mobility in Zambia that is frequently overlooked in migration studies and difficult to capture through standard survey methods: the practice of ‘going on holiday’ to the homes of relatives during breaks in the school term. Drawing on child-centered and quantitative research, this article examines the multiple dimensions of ‘going on holiday’ for children living in a low-income urban settlement in Lusaka. Findings suggest that the practice was gendered and may map onto changing norms in schooling in Zambia. Within a context where resources are severely constrained, going on holiday may serve as one means for cultivating reciprocity, sharing the burden of care and household labor, and strengthening kin ties. This work further demonstrates the importance of using locally meaningful terms and practices in survey research where general questions about children's mobility may fail to capture the nature and extent of children's movements.     

City as province in China: the territorial urbanization of Chongqing

Chongqing is a province-level city region in China’s interior with a land area larger than many small countries. Limited scholarship tends to treat Chongqing as a new jurisdiction formed in relation to development of the Three Gorges Dam and reform of historic state-planned industry from the Mao era. This analysis turns to the complex process of land redistricting in a process of “territorial urbanization” that has also simultaneously reshaped the economy of Chongqing. By conceptualizing Chongqing as a dynamic administrative territory, this analysis defines changes in the relational configuration of its administrative divisions (xingzheng quhua) as a multi-faceted state strategy of governing land use change and the fiscal regime to realize infrastructure development. Especially by establishing districts in Chongqing, territorial urbanization works to enhance the funding capacity of the Chongqing government to develop larger, expansive infrastructure projects. This urban transformation of Chongqing demonstrates how processes of land use change and government funding, materializing in the built environment, are directly related to changes in state territorial configuration.