‘Barons’ Wars,under Other Names’: Feudalism,Royalism and the American Founding

SUMMARY

The Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock's pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.     

北美西南部废弃行为研究

考古学家发掘的大多是废弃的遗址,我们过去在发掘和研究一处遗址或聚落时,可能很少有人关心它们废弃的原因,除非像庞贝古城这种极其特殊的灾难性案例。近来对环境考古的重视,这种关注开始出现,比如对齐家文化喇家遗址的灾难性事件和对萧山跨湖桥文化因海侵而消失的关注。本文提供了一种研究遗址废弃行为的范例,对我们的遗址发掘和聚落形态变迁研究颇具启发性。过去的研究往往将废弃看作是一种文化消亡或社会崩溃的结果,而现在则从环境、生计、人口、健康与疾病、营养条件、冲突、意识形态等原因所造成的推力和拉力来了解先民移动的生存策略。美国西南部以丰富的考古遗存而闻名。成千上万的史前房屋以及祭祀建筑仍旧有一部分保留下来,有些还形成了土墩,标志着这里曾分布着活动频繁的史前聚落。这些考古遗存激起了考古学家和普通民众对其废弃原因的兴趣。文章着重探讨了考古学家如何探究废弃的过程及原因。作者认为,废弃也是迁徙的过程。无论是狩猎采集社会还是早期农耕社会,环境波动和社会压力都会导致迁居移动(residentialmobility),而在大部分情况下迁徙是一种生存策略。迁徙过程通常也是个人、家庭和社群的一种决策过程,决定人们在何时迁往何地,并是否期望回来。突发灾难性事件以及不同决策的搬迁,都会在遗址中留下不同特点的物质遗存和遗迹。作者还根据西南部考古学研究成果,总结了四条有助于从考古物质遗存来判断废弃行为的经验标准。这也要求考古田野工作更加仔细地发掘和收集遗址中各种器物和迹象,分辨它们形成的原因和弃置形态,然后从生态环境、生计、社会结构和意识形态来探讨废弃过程,从而动态地重建个别遗址和区域聚落形态的变迁和兴衰。以本文的标准来判断三星堆祭祀坑的废弃方式,也许可以将其看作是当地遗址(聚落)废弃过程的终结性祭祀实践。     

Isotopic investigation of pre-Hispanic macaw breeding in Northwest Mexico

The pre-Hispanic settlement of Paquimé (ca. 1200–1450 AD) lay outside of urban Mesoamerica in arid northern Chihuahua, Mexico, yet the excavated remains of 322 scarlet macaws, tropical parrots whose northernmost habitat is 500 km to the south, suggest that Paquimé had relationships with distant communities. Here, carbon and oxygen stable isotope analysis of 30 macaw bones determines whether the Paquimeños actively bred these parrots or traded with Mesoamerican groups to obtain the birds. The δ¹³C values indicate that the macaws ate a diet of C₄ plants, foods that were unavailable to wild macaws. In addition, δ¹⁸O data suggest that the majority of the macaws spent their entire lives at Paquimé. We conclude that the ancient Paquimeños were in fact breeding scarlet macaws, although one bone with δ¹⁸O values outside the local range suggests that the breeders also maintained exchange ties with the source areas of the birds. By confirming that Paquimeños implemented a system of local macaw reproduction outside the Mesoamerican region itself, this analysis provides new evidence about the economic and ideological interdependence of pre-Hispanic societies in the Americas. It is also suggestive of the pre-industrial capabilities of humans to extend the natural ranges of animal species.     

Assessing individual systemic stress through cortisol analysis of archaeological hair

As a product of physiological status and the social and physical environments, stress has significant impact on health and well-being in both ancient and contemporary societies. In bioarchaeological research, stress is characterized using an array of skeletal indicators that record stressful periods during childhood and adulthood. In modern clinical research, exposure to stress can be assessed using systemic cortisol levels that have been shown to fluctuate in response to experienced stress. Analysis of cortisol levels in archaeological hair should enable assessment of stress during a short, but critical, period of an individual's life. For this pilot study, we selected hair samples from ten individuals from five different archaeological sites in Peru, and analyzed them in segments to determine cortisol levels. These data demonstrate that it is possible to observe biogenic patterns of cortisol production, and that individual experiences of stress can be reconstructed for the period of time represented by each hair sample. Analysis of cortisol levels in hair has the potential to be a valuable short-term dynamic stress indicator that will complement paleopathological and biochemical studies of health and stress, and permit the reconstruction of increasingly detailed life histories.     

Infinite conditions on the road to peace: the second New Labour government’s foreign policy approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict after 9/11

This article examines how a resurgent clash of Arab and Israeli nationalisms created tensions within New Labour as the leadership sought to reconcile claims of duplicity in its Middle East policy after 9/11 while retaining party unity and an international consensus for a war in Afghanistan. It argues that as European and international pressure to prioritise Middle East peace before pursuing a war with Iraq increased, Tony Blair’s emphasis on economic progress as a prerequisite to creating a state of Palestine was expanded to determine that Palestinian national rights also be considered on the evidence of fundamental reform and modernisation across the spectrum of political, civil and cultural life. These objectives, however, were not to be achieved following the deployment of a UN peace-keeping force, but the prevailing conditions of the Israeli occupation, provisos later inscribed in the US-led goal-driven, performance-based Road Map for Peace. This focus ran in parallel with his assumed role as a transatlantic ‘bridge’, and collectively helped to transform the multilateralist template of the Quartet into a classic trilateralist negotiating model—bilateral Arab-Israel talks, unilaterally overseen by the US—enacting the further exclusion of key European partners.