Starch granules,dental calculus and new perspectives on ancient diet

Recent work in various parts of the world has suggested the possibility of ancient starch granules surviving and adhering to archaeological artefacts. Often this information is used to infer aspects of diet. One additional source for recovery of archaeological starch granules is dental calculus. The presence of plant food debris in dental calculus is well known but has not been not widely investigated using archaeological material. The extraction of starch granules from dental calculus represents a direct link to the consumption of starchy food by humans or animals. Using dental calculus also sidesteps many other questions still inherent in using starch granules to reconstruct aspects of ancient diet, such as the effects of diagenesis on their morphology; as the starches are trapped inside a concreted matrix they are less likely to alter over time. We used amylase digestion by a starch-specific enzyme to confirm the material as starch.     

Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Eighteenth‐century England is, for many scholars, the time and place where modern domesticity was invented; the point at which ‘home’ became a key concept sustained by new literary imaginings and new social practices. But as gendered individuals, and certainly compared to women, men are notable for their absence in accounts of the eighteenth‐century domestic interior. In this essay, I examine the relationship between constructs of masculinity and meanings of home. During the eighteenth century, ‘home’ came to mean more than one's dwelling; it became a multi‐faceted state of being, encompassing the emotional, physical, moral and spatial. Masculinity intersected with domesticity at all levels and stages in its development. The nature of men's engagements with home were understood through a model of ‘oeconomy’, which brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's activities. Indeed, this essay proposes that attention to how this multi‐faceted eighteenth‐century ‘home’ was made in relation to masculinity shifts our understanding of home as a private and feminine space opposed to an ‘outside’ and public world.     

Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the 17th-Century Anglo-Dutch East-Indiaman Avondster in Bay of Galle, Sri Lanka

The Avondster was a 17th century British ship captured by the Dutch and used by the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading with Asia until it was wrecked in Galle Harbour, Sri Lanka in 1659. The shipwreck was found in 1997 to be in very good condition but under threat from development in the harbour. From 2001–2004 an archaeological project was implemented by the Dutch/Sri Lankan Mutual Heritage Centre. The aims were to record and recover important cultural material as well as to build up the capacity of a Sri Lankan Maritime Archaeology Unit for implementing future work.
© 2005 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

King Stephen,the English church,and a female mystic: Christina of Markyate's Vita as a neglected source for the council of Winchester (August 1139) and its aftermath

One of the central reasons for the disintegration of royal authority (sometimes called ‘the Anarchy’) during the reign of King Stephen of England is generally thought to have been his troubled relationship with the English church. The king was summoned to appear before the legate in England, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (who was also Stephen's brother), at a church council called for Winchester on 29 August 1139, in order to show cause for his conduct in arresting several prominent bishops and in confiscating their property. Several major chroniclers discuss the events leading up to and occurring at the council of Winchester, especially William of Malmesbury in his Historia novella and the anonymous Gesta Stephani. The versions of events contained in these sources are not entirely consistent. The present paper examines yet another recounting of the events of the council, seldom appreciated by historians of twelfth-century England, presented in the Vita of Christina of Markyate (c.1096/98–c.1155/66), composed by an anonymous monk of St Albans between 1140 and 1146. Christina was close to the abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey de Gorham, who was probably the patron of the Vita and who quite likely attended the Winchester council and apparently became involved in its aftermath. These events are recorded in some detail in the Vita, presenting us with a vivid recounting of the council and the immediate consequences thereof. The narrative of the Vita contains a somewhat different picture of the personalities and occurrences surrounding the Winchester council than we encounter in the chronicles. The current essay compares the Vita to the standard accounts. We argue that the Vita may be the earliest and possibly most reliable source for the events of the council. Moreover, if we privilege the report of the Vita, the council becomes an especially significant moment in the breakdown of relations between Stephen and the English church.     

Characterisation and blind testing of radiocarbon dating of cremated bone

The success of radiocarbon dating of burned or cremated bones depends on the exposed temperature during burning and the degree of re-crystallisation of the inorganic bone matrix. We present a method for characterisation of likely cremated bones by employing visual inspection, infrared spectrometry and carbon stable isotope analysis on the bio-apatite fraction. The method of radiocarbon dating of cremated bones was tested by dating paired samples of bone and associated context materials such as pitch, charcoal and a dendrochronologically dated oak coffin. The dating of these paired test samples were largely performed as blind tests and showed excellent agreement between pitch and bone. The weighted mean age difference of all test samples is observed to −9 ± 60 ¹⁴C yr. To test the indicators and the effects of the degree of burning, a Late-Neolithic human individual has been studied, as this individual exhibits the full spectrum from low temperature burning (charred) to high temperature (“cremated”) from one end of a single bone to the other. This is reflected as a marked step in numerous parameters as well as in a significant difference in ¹⁴C age between the charred and the cremated bone samples.     

British Women Travellers and Constructions of Racial Difference Across the Nineteenth-Century American West

At a time coinciding historically with the height of the British Empire, the immigrants' rush to occupy American West lands and the wholesale removal of Native Americans onto reservations, encounters between Native peoples and British women travellers became emblematic of a whole range of socio-spatial relationships of domination, subordination and resistance. In this paper, I examine representations of western Native Americans in the travelogues of ten British women travellers to the late nineteenth-century American West, produced primarily during encounters at sites along the western rail lines. Constructions of racial and gender differences in the texts can be tied to British colonial discourses, as well as to the social relations inherent in the multiple contact zones within which the encounters took place.