Over two centuries: Black people in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi

ABSTRACT

This article charts the history of Black people in nineteenth-century Hawai?i, an Indigenous and non-White society that prohibited slavery. Far from the Black Atlantic, African-descended people in the Pacific found acceptance and refuge. Since the late 1700s, Black mariners and notable figures – including former slaves from the US as well as Cape Verdeans – arrived in a non-slave society which was in the process of adopting race. Largely unrecognized, they worked in concert with Native Hawaiians – as spouses, educators, attorneys, and advisors to the monarchs – to influence and resist the development of American racial ideologies. Combining Hawaiian language sources, missionary journals, and ship logs with the scant existing historiography, this article accounts for Black people in the Hawaiian Islands during its tumultuous shift from an independent nation to a US Territory – a period and people neglected in twentieth-century scholarship on the Black Pacific.     

An innovative methodology of assessing the climate change impact on cultural heritage

Climate change is expected to have a severe impact on cultural heritage in the future. This study presents the methodology developed during the FP7 project Climate for Culture, of assessing the climate change impact on collection objects in cultural heritage buildings. The main innovation lies in coupling new high resolution future climate projections with building simulation tools in order to predict future indoor climate and identify future risks in historic buildings. The case study is an intermittently heated wooden chapel in Croatia. The whole building simulation model of the chapel was validated using a newly developed method of accuracy assessment in the context of preventive conservation. Even though modeling intermittent heating induces limitations in the model, it can be used for computing of future indoor data. Future indoor climate data was assessed for possible risks of biological, mechanical, and chemical damage to painted wooden panels using the newly developed specific climate risk assessment. When using this method of damage assessment on buildings with active climate control, especially with intermittent heating, it is recommended to determine the relevant season for the damage process in order to objectively analyze results.     

Scenarios of climate change and natural resource development: Complexity and uncertainty in the Nechako Watershed

Climate change and resource development interact to have significant impacts on both natural and human systems within watersheds. It is, however, difficult to conceptualize and communicate these intersections, as climate change and resource development are each independently uncertain and complex. We facilitated a process whereby stakeholders created plausible future scenarios for the Nechako Watershed in British Columbia, Canada. This region is reliant upon, and has been significantly affected by, many types of resource exploitation. During a full-day workshop, 32 stakeholders created scenarios for 2050 envisioning high and low levels of both resource development and climate change. The high and low levels of climate change were based on downscaled projections from global emissions scenarios, and the resource development levels were determined at the beginning of the workshop by the participants. The exercise was educational, and motivated stakeholders to conceptualize plausible future changes and their impacts, and the outcomes should motivate stakeholders to work towards realizing a more desired future. All scenarios (even low-low) were deemed to have significant negative impacts, suggesting that the Nechako Watershed is in a vulnerable state. The complexity of the exercise suggests that more capacity building may be necessary.     

Of Śüdras,Sütas,and Ślokas: Why is the Mahāabhārata Preeminently in the Anustubh Metre?

One striking difference between Vedic and post-VedicHindu literature lies in the fact that while the anustubh metre is sparsely represented in the Veda asa whole, it is the standard metre of post-Vedicreligious literature of Hinduism available inSanskrit. Thus the Mahābhārata, a major documentof post-Vedic Hinduism, is preeminently in the anustubh metre. How is this striking metrical fact tobe explained? This paper discusses the variousexplanations that may be offered to account for it. Inpart I it discusses the explanations that could beoffered on the basis of modern critical scholarship.In parts II–IX it develops the suggestion that theanswer may lie in the association of the Mahābhārata with the śūdras and of theśūdras with the anustubh metre.

     

From appropriation to conservation: Mughal monuments,colonial tourism and the Dak Bungalow

ABSTRACT

The rise in colonial tourism in the post-uprising decades propelled the need for tourist infrastructure in the Indian Subcontinent. This need was met by appropriating historic monuments and reusing them as tourist rest houses, called Dak Bungalows – a common occurrence in Agra and Delhi, former Mughal capitals and popular tourist destinations. Even as the state established the Archaeological Survey of India to safeguard the Subcontinent’s monuments, the transformation carried out by colonial engineers undermined their historic worth in the absence of guidelines. Critical of the engineers’ undertaking, Viceroy Curzon, took up the challenge of ridding monuments, particularly Mughal monuments, of modern interventions. While being instrumental in providing monuments with statutory protection, Curzon appropriated these monuments to legitimize the colonial state’s authority. This paper examines the seventeenth century Mughal city, Fatehpur Sikri, a popular tourist destination in the nineteenth century, where three historic buildings were appropriated and transformed into Dak Bungalows prior to the building of a new Dak Buangalow at Curzon’s behest. Examining these developments against the backdrop of the colonial state’s post-uprising political dispensation, through the prism of monument conservation and colonial tourism, it argues that all forms of engagement with monuments operated within the colonial framework.     

ESR response in tooth enamel to high-resolution CT scanning

High-resolution CT scanning of teeth with a resolution on the 20 to 30 μm scale introduces doses in the range of 250 to 420 Gy in the tooth enamel. If the induced doses cannot be precisely estimated, subsequent ESR dating analysis becomes impossible. Considering the increased availability of portable, high-resolution CT scanners, curators of valuable human dental fossils have to make an informed decision whether they want to preclude ESR analysis, one of the few dating methods that can be applied to older fossils.