Protocol for lapis lazuli provenance determination: evidence for an Afghan origin of the stones used for ancient carved artefacts kept at the Egyptian Museum of Florence (Italy)

Despite that the Badakhshan Province (Afghanistan) remains the most plausible hypothesis for the lapis lazuli used in antiquity, alternatives proposed in literature are worth to study to confirm or disprove their historical reliability. In this work, a protocol for determining the provenance of lapis lazuli rocks used for carved artefacts is described. Markers for the univocal attribution of the raw material to a source were identified analysing 45 rocks of known provenance (among which 15 georeferenced) from 4 quarry districts. To the best of our knowledge, this reference database is the widest in provenance studies on lapis lazuli. All the markers are recognisable by means of Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) techniques, in particular micro-proton-induced x-ray emission (PIXE) and micro-ionoluminescence (IL). These techniques are non-invasive and applicable in air, allowing to analyse artworks and rocks of practically any shape and dimension without sample preparation.The protocol was applied to determine the provenance of raw material used for carved lapis lazuli artefacts kept at the Egyptian Museum of Florence, the second most important Egyptian museum in Italy, second only to the museum of Turin. The collection in Florence has a great historical value and includes several lapis lazuli pendants, scarabs, small statuettes and amulets ascribable mainly to the first millennium BC. Following the protocol, 11 of these artefacts were analysed by means of IBA techniques. Results ascribe the raw material to the Afghan quarry district.     

The world's most powerful number: An assessment of 80 years of GDP ideology (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Economic measurements and indicators play an important role in governance. As time passes, some of these indicators, like the gross domestic product (GDP), have come to shape our lives more than we can imagine. Here Lorenzo Fioramonti, the author of two books on economic indicators, is invited to reflect on the 80th anniversary of GDP.     

Economic Regionalism and Social Stabilisation: the International Labour Organization and Western Europe in the Early Post-War Years

The International Labour Organization (ILO) played a concrete role in shaping the mechanisms of international economic co-operation created in Western Europe in the early post-war years. Its tripartite composition and orientation towards social dialogue were perfectly in tune with the productivist principles sponsored by the United States after the Second World War, which largely permeated European economic integration. Thanks to its solid know-how in the field, the ILO made a key contribution in promoting labour mobility, by helping the organisation and co-ordination of national employment services and vocational training systems and, most of all, by assisting institutions such as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) and the European Communities in implementing freedom of circulation between their member countries. At the same time, in the mid-1950s it offered theoretical support to the economic liberalism on which the European common market was being modelled, arguing against claims for social harmonisation as a precondition to economic integration, and thus contributing to giving European co-operation the shape which still characterises it today.     

Mediterranean trade of the most widespread Roman volcanic millstones from Italy and petrochemical markers of their raw materials

The petrochemical study of millstones can contribute to improve the archaeological research into reconstruction of ancient communication routes and trade networks. Volcanic rocks are geographically restricted and rather rare in the Mediterranean regions, and during the Roman period Italian volcanoes were important sources of raw materials for millstones, so the task of determining their geological origin is relatively straightforward. The Italian vesicular volcanics most frequently employed for this purpose were: trachytes from Euganean Hills (Veneto), leucite-bearing lavas from the Vulsini Volcanic District (Latium), basic-intermediate leucite-bearing lavas from Somma-Vesuvius (Campania), silica undersaturated lavas from Monte Vulture Volcano (Basilicata), a rhyolitic ignimbrite from Sardinia and basic products from Mount Etna and the island of Pantelleria (Sicily). This paper contains a general outline of the trade network for each volcanic typology used for millstones during the Roman period – updated with data concerning the leucite-bearing lavic items discovered in the archaeological sites of the ancient Cuicul (now Djemila, Algeria) – together with a summary of their petrographic and geochemical features.     

Traces of a computational mind

The image of writing is singularly frequent in cognitivistic explanations of the functioning of mind, not only as a metaphor but also as a conceptual paradigm: the Turing machine, particularly, displays a complete structural isomorphism with the use of alphabetical writing. The Turing machine performs exactly the same operations carried out by a man writing with pen and paper and this depends on two reasons: 1. it has been conceived in image and likeness of the human concrete practice of writing; 2. it is the typical product of the western rationality, whose development has been made possible only by the specific features of the alphabetical treatment of information. This is useful to understand why the mind started being depicted as a writing machine just when the alphabet began spreading: a genealogical investigation will show how in mnemotechnics treatises and in Plato's and Aristotle's metaphysics we can find the very first foundation of every logico-symbolical model of mind.