Recent Excavations in the Keep of Farnham Castle,Surrey

Abstract

Several alternative schemes for the dating if Pictish relief sculpture have been advanced during the last century. Representations if artifacts which can be dated archaeologically, decorative devices associated with the Viking Period and details if animal ornament are used to provide new date-ranges for some stones usually dated earlier. The early dating often advanced for some low-relief sculptures is accordingly questioned, and a tentative scheme for the dating if Pictish relief sculpture proposed.     

Is X-ray diffraction able to distinguish between animal and human bones?

The possibility of determining the human or animal origin of bones from the lattice parameters of their inorganic bioapatite phase, when subjected to a high temperature treatment using the powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique, has been explored on a wide number of specimens. Forty-two animal bones were treated in a furnace at 1100 °C for 36 min and compared to 53 cremated human bones from a range of ancient necropolises. The X-ray diffraction patterns of bioapatite were simulated using both monoclinic P21/b and hexagonal P63/m structures to verify any occurrence of phase transformation and any difference in the lattice parameters due to the model. It was determined that the differences between the a-axis and c-axis of the monoclinic and hexagonal lattice were unimportant. Some outlying values were revealed to be caused by the presence of chlorine ions diffused into the apatite structure increasing its average unit cell values. Nevertheless, our results clearly show that in terms of lattice parameters the variability of human specimens are completely overlapped by the non-human variability making the use of XRD in order to distinguish animal from human bones questionable.     

Paleodiet in northern Chile through the Holocene: extremely heavy δN values in dental calculus suggest a guano-derived signature?

Dental calculus extracted from the teeth of 28 prehistoric human skeletons from coastal and valley archaeological sites in northern Chile that date from the Archaic period (∼2300 BC) to the Late Intermediate period (AD 1476) was analyzed for stable isotope (δ¹⁵N, δ¹³C) compositions. δ¹⁵N compositions were extremely heavy (+17.8 to +33.1‰), but comparable to some studies using conventional human biomaterials (hair, nail, muscle) at other prehistoric sites in northern Chile. There was a negative correlation between δ¹⁵N and δ¹³C for coastal sites, but a positive correlation for valley sites. Results for the valley sites point to a diet that was influenced by marine resources throughout all time periods. The unusually heavy δ¹⁵N values for the coastal sites require a dietary component with a δ¹⁵N composition significantly heavier than that of marine resources. The hyper-aridity at the study area (mean annual rainfall of 0.5–0.6 mm/year) is a likely contributing factor to the production of heavy δ¹⁵N values, but is unlikely to account for the heaviest δ¹⁵N values (>+30‰). One possible explanation for the heaviest δ¹⁵N values is that dietary components were impacted by isotopically-heavy guano, which is abundant in the region. Guano may have been used as a fertilizer during crop cultivation at the onset of the Formative period, continuing through the Historic period after Spanish contact. The indirect impact of guano from abundant bird habitats in the region may have influenced wild foodstuffs harvested throughout the pre-agricultural period. Results provide support for the utility of dental calculus as a proxy for obtaining stable carbon and nitrogen isotope signatures for use in paleodietary studies.     

Covert Operations,British Views of Islam and Anglo-Sanusi Relations in North Africa, 1940–45

Recent scholarship has shown how conceptualisations of religion were not a given but the site of historical conflict in the creation of nation-states. In light of this insight, it is time to revisit the history of Britain's political engagement with the phenomenon of nationalism during the era of decolonisation. One important but under-studied case involves Britain's relationship with Muhammad Idris ibn al-Mahdi al-Sanusi (1889–1983) and the Sanusi brotherhood during the Second World War, a crucial phase in the evolution of Anglo-Libyan relations. Although the assessment of military exigencies and the calculation of strategic interests played an important part in determining Britain's attitude towards the Sanusi they do not tell the whole story. British support of Idris was also premised on the adaptability of the Sanusi Order and the probable reformulation of the role of Islam in the context of an emerging nation-state. By charting the evolution of the pro-Sanusi, pro-Idris case within British circles, this article highlights the interesting interaction between orientalism, religion and nationalism that shaped Anglo-Sanusi relations during the Second World War. While historians have long recognised the links between orientalism and formal imperialism there were also interesting connections between orientalism and nationalism that deserve equal consideration.     

Foucault, fields of governability, and the population–family–economy nexus in China

It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so on—as an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population–family–economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault's studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the “family-responsibility system” in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as part—mutatis mutandis—of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.     

A Realist Response to the Appeal for Pacifism

Abstract

Political philosophy is a discipline related to all other disciplines in a manner that prevents it from becoming autonomous but at the same time not absorbed into other disciplines. When political philosophy ceases to be itself, other disciplines rush in to take its place and thereby themselves undermine their own being.     

The State of Research on Gender and Political Participation

Woodrow Wilson declared the early Gilded Age to be a time of Congressional Government, when the legislature “reigned supreme” and was the federal polity's “motivating force.” Yet that same Congress, and era, have been immortalized pejoratively as bastions of corruption; of politicos, spoils–and, most especially, of omnipotently evil lobbyists. This essay argues that both lobbying and the notoriety it aroused in the Grant years were essentially by-products of systemic change. Corruption did exist, but much of what contemporaries saw as illicit was merely new; neither Washington nor the polity as a whole had yet devised mechanisms, or even language, appropriate to emerging conditions. In fact, lobbying was a necessary and even beneficial force in post-Civil War America, one that actually helped officials and citizens to function as the scope, procedures, and agenda of governance underwent dramatic transformation.