Polarized Light Microscopy: An Old Technique Casts New Light on Māori Textile Plants

Understanding the composition of an artefact has ramifications for advancing human history and behaviour knowledge, providing cultural information about trade, agricultural practices and adaptation to new environments. However, accurate plant identification from artefacts is problematic, since textile production, age, dirt and/or conservation treatments obscure morphological features, and specimen size and/or ethical considerations hamper modern analytical methods. This study tested the efficacy of polarized light microscopy (PLM) in the identification of New Zealand plant species commonly used in Māori textiles, and demonstrates that morphological and birefringent features observed using PLM have the potential to distinguish between‐ and within‐plant genera.     

Spinoza and architectural thinking

ABSTRACT

Although Spinoza makes few remarks about architecture, his use of architectural examples, understood in the context of his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, reveal the architect to be a distinctive kind of human thinker. In this paper I explore the kind of thinking the architect does, first by demonstrating that Spinoza distinguishes the architect's adequate way of conceiving a building from inadequate ways of imagining one, and second by considering how Spinoza might have understood the architect to translate that adequate thinking into the practice of building and construction. I argue that for Spinoza, the architect integrates imaginative, rational, and intuitive thinking, and the parallel forms of bodily action, to understand and construct a building in its causal connections to its component materials, environment, and users. To understand the true idea of a building is therefore to understand its embeddedness in the world and its functional place in a network of modal relations.     

Gallantry on the Shankill road: the British ‘soldier-hero’ and state-media relations in Northern Ireland, 1969-1979

ABSTRACT

The study of the British ‘soldier-hero’ as a political and cultural icon after 1945 has been largely confined to literature concerned with the memory of historical figures. Rarely have scholars considered how post-war military deployments not only created contemporary soldier-heroes, but also transformed their place within politics and society as the moral interrogation of these wars threatened to encroach upon the prestige of these icons. This article examines how the soldier-hero interacted with one of Britain’s most contentious deployments, Northern Ireland, and how politicians sought to control narratives surrounding this figure to avoid public relations controversy in unusual political conditions.