‘Cooler than a trip to Alton Towers’: Assessing the Impact of the Higher Education Field Academy, 2005–13

The Higher Education Field Academy (HEFA) is a University of Cambridge ‘Widening Participation’ programme designed to raise educational aspirations, enthusiasm, and attainment amongst teenagers through participation in archaeological excavation. Setting up, running, recording, and writing up a 1 m² excavation which contributes to university research is structured into a varied and challenging scheme of assessed work in which learners develop and refine a range of skills — cognitive, technical, social, and personal — vital to success in education and the workplace. A total of 3496 young people took part in HEFA between 2005 and 2013, and central to its success are characteristics unique to archaeology: an interdisciplinary subject in which novices can make discoveries for themselves which are genuinely both new and important. At a time of financial retrenchment when funding for heritage is being severely cut, HEFA demonstrates the capacity of archaeology to build social capital by broadening access to higher education and helping young people gain the qualifications they need to contribute most to society in the future. This paper assesses the origins, aims, structure, and impact of the HEFA programme 2005–13, focusing in particular on the ‘Aimhigher years’ from 2005–11.     

Montaigne,Tocqueville, and the Politics of Skepticism

Abstract

Shakespeare shows how enforceable contract not only undergirds the city of Venice, which makes a multicultural society possible, but its corrosive effects on non-contractual relationships like friendship, love, and marriage. This is evident in the decisions, actions, and relationships of Antonio, Bassanio, Portia, and Jessica. Although Shakespeare concludes the play on a happy note, the conclusion one can reach is that, despite its advantages, regimes based on commerce and contract fail to create the conditions for friendship, love, and marriage to flourish.     

A Review of “Never Enough”

Abstract

Three of Alasdair MacIntyre's published essays help to illuminate his critique of modern liberal individualism Liberalism, in the name of freedom, inculcates indifference to the developmental social needs of human agents, denies the ties that bind members of society to the common good, and prevents political communities from pursuing common goods effectively. Rather than freeing individuals for self-government, liberalism leaves the government of the community's goods to unacknowledged elites. Liberation demands self-government and self-government requires the virtues, which are formed, in part, through the community's shared pursuit of common goods.     

Miscellaneous Notices

This survey has revealed the remarkable extent of the earthwork remains in unploughed grassland inside the hillfort on Beacon Hill. At the summit there are the banks and ditches of an earlier enclosure. The hillfort's defences comprise a ditch set between two banks. At the south-east, a homwork protects the entrance passage, which is continued by straight inturns. A possible second, blocked, entrance has been noted on the west side. Some sixty certain or possible hut sites, of varying form, have analogies of iron age date at Hod Hill.     

Medieval ‘Bronze’ Tripod Ewers from Wales

THIS PAPER DESCRIBES six complete and one fragmentary tripod ewer found in Wales, and discusses their form, its origin, and their metallic composition. Six are simplified versions of a more elaborate prototype, and are of a type widely distributed and copied in Britain and N. Europe, which probably signals the more general adoption of metal vessels in 14th-century households.     

BOOKS RECEIVED

Deely, John. The Human Use of Signs or: Elements of Anthro‐posemiosis. Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield Publishers, 1994. xiii + 240 pp. including paragraphal glosses, appendix, references, and indices. $35.00 cloth.

Parmentier, Richard J. Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. xvii + 223 pp. including notes, references, and index. $35.00 cloth.     

Imagining Anthropology's History

Hager, Lori D., ed. Women in Human Evolution. New York: Routledge, 1997. xiii + 214 pp. including index. $69.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Morbeck, Mary Ellen, Alison Galloway and Adrienne Zihlman, eds. The Evolving Female: A Life History Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. xix + 332 pp. including literature cited and index. $60.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.