‘our children have only known war’: children's experiences and the uses of childhood in northern uganda

This article describes the situation of children forcibly abducted by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. The involvement of children complicates efforts to end rebellion, and particular notions of childhood circulate through government and aid agencies to affect children's ‘rehabilitation’. This paper examines national, ethnic, and generational causes of the conflict, discussing the ways in which normative and ideal concepts of childhood are employed by different players. Through a situated analysis of children's circumstances, I suggest the need for interlocutors to re-evaluate their goals and methods of assisting war-affected children.     

Split phalanges from archaeological sites: evidence of nutritional stress?

Broken animal phalanges from archaeological sites have been widely used as an indicator of nutritional stress of the prehistoric people due to the low caloric return rate (caloric yield/processing time) of the phalanges. Although it sounds logical, this widely popular argument is based on Binford’s (1978) interview with the Nunamiut and lacks empirical support. In this study, we present the results of experimental studies conducted on 142 modern cow (Bos taurus) and deer (Odocoileus virginianus) first phalanges to document the processing of phalanges, such as the required force and processing time to break them open, possible methods of breaking phalanges, and the resultant breakage and surface modification patterns. This comparative dataset and ethnographic data from contemporary hunter-gatherer groups indicate that broken phalanges in and of themselves cannot be taken as evidence of resource stress. The phalanges do not require substantial amount of processing time and marrow from the phalanges could have been preferred for its taste and soft texture during the period when resources were not scarce. This may explain the bone breakage pattern from an 8800 year old archaeological assemblage from Tangzigou in southwest China, where phalanges were intensively broken without any other evidence of resource stress.     

A cost surface model of volcanic glass quarrying and exchange in Hawai‘i

The spatial distribution of artifacts from the Pu‘u Wa‘awa‘a volcanic glass source (North Kona District, Hawai‘i Island) shows a pattern of direct access by those living in the immediately vicinity of the source with subsequent down-the-line exchange. Most quarrying and exchanges likely occurred within a single day’s travel from sites where artifacts were deposited. The exception to this is the discovery of non-local direct access evident in assemblages from the extreme southern end of Hawai‘i Island; these visits may have involved voyages by canoe. While people did not often travel far for volcanic glass they nonetheless appear to have had unfettered accessed to source material and freely conducted inter-community exchanges. This implies volcanic glass was treated as a common pooled resource and the existence of informal exchange relationships.     

Voice: sonic geographies of childhood

This article uses the sonic geographies of childhood as an entry point into long-standing and important debates in the sub-discipline on ‘voice’. The article uniquely explores children’s voices from the past through considering a different type of research material – archival audio recordings. It argues that literally listening to past children’s voices (and noises, sounds and silences) can offer fresh insights into the concept of voice that tends to be associated with contemporary contexts. Drawing on archival encounters with ‘second hand’ field recordings of children across different schools and playgrounds in London in the 1960s, this article engages and extends wider theoretical debates about childhood, voice and memory. The article calls for more attention to the unique characteristics of sound and wider soundscapes of childhood. The article critically reflects on the possibilities and tensions associated with such work.     

On the dissolution of pottery for diatom studies

This paper deals with a study of the pictographs at Trontveit, Nissedal parish, County of Telemark, by scientific methods. The observations lead to the conclusion that the pictographs were not painted.     

The Reception of ‘That Bigoted Silly Fellow’ James Beattie's Essay on Truth in Britain 1770–1830

This article examines the Scottish philosopher James Beattie's (1735–1803) controversial work of moral philosophy An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), noted for its pugnacious attack on the sceptical philosophy of David Hume. Usually treated only as an ephemeral success in the early 1770s, the Essay actually had two distinct periods of enormous popularity that account for its contemporary significance in the period between 1770 and 1830. The prominence of the Essay is demonstrated by its widespread positive reception, evinced in both published and private responses, in both England and Scotland, by the high estimation in which it was held within pedagogical circles as an anti-sceptical philosophical primer, and by its continual use as a textbook in both university and dissenting academy logic and moral philosophy classes. In these senses, Beattie's Essay was arguably the most significant work of the Common Sense School of Scottish philosophy.     

Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia (1653), religious compendia and the seventeenth-century study of religious diversity

Recently, our scholarly understanding of how religion was studied during the seventeenth century has changed. Contributions made by historians of scholarship have provided a more detailed picture through studies of the emerging genre of the history of idolatry. This article, however, looks at another new but overlooked genre in the seventeenth century: the religious catalogue. It does so through an examination of the most popular compendium of the age: the Scottish-born, England-based Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia: Or, A View of All the Religions (1653). Ross’s work contains the first attempt to comprehend and understand religious diversity on an exhaustive scale. Using Pansebeia, we can tell a story of how religious compendia gave the embattled, anxious Christian the information necessary to defend themselves against the threat of religious diversity in the seventeenth century, and which unintentionally contributed to the emergence of the modern concept of “religion” as a distinct sets of theological beliefs and rituals.