Evaluation of Quantitative XRF Analysis Applied to Determine Cobalt Sources in Chinese Blue‐and‐White Porcelain

A method using the ratios between MnO, Fe₂O₃ and CoO to differentiate the cobalt sources for Chinese blue‐and‐white porcelain was developed in Oxford in the 1950s using X‐ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis directly on the glaze. In this paper, six blue‐and‐white porcelain sherds from the Luomaqiao kiln were analysed by XRF on the glaze and by scanning electron microscopy with energy‐dispersive spectrometry (SEM‐EDS) in cross‐section. The ratios between MnO, Fe₂O₃ and CoO calculated by quantitative XRF and EDS analyses are different. The analysis depths for MnO, Fe₂O₃ and CoO are < 60 μm by XRF analysis. However, the average glaze thickness of samples is > 400 μm, and the MnO, Fe₂O₃ and CoO mainly remain in the lower layer of the glaze, which is beyond the analysis depths of XRF analysis. The limitations of major and minor quantitative analyses for differentiating cobalt sources are discussed.     

The Norman's Bay Shipwreck,East Sussex,UK: a possible 17th‐century Dutch ship from the Battle of Beachy Head

This report explores a hypothesis that the Norman's Bay shipwreck is the Wapen van Utrecht, a 64‐gun Dutch ship lost during the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690. The shipwreck, found off the Sussex coast, was designated by the Protection of Wrecks Act (1973) in 2006, when it was speculated that the wreck was the English 70‐gun ship Resolution, lost in the Great Storm of 1703. Dendrochronology dates the vessel after the middle of the 17th century AD, however, with timbers from Germany or the Low Countries. Initiatives by the Nautical Archaeology Society to bring the protected wreck to a wide public are also discussed.     

State production of cultural nationalism: political leaders and preservation policies for historic buildings in France and Italy

Although cultural and political nationalism have often been treated as separate, recent studies argue that they are linked because the state produces policies such as promotion of cultural heritage to further nation building. The article examines the conditions that favour national political leaders adopting policies to protect historic buildings for aims of political nationalism. It compares France and Italy, focusing on the period after 1870. It finds that in both countries, national political leaders have introduced extensive protection of historic buildings when faced with major challenges such as war, regime change or pressures from localism or supporters of cultural nationalism as part of wider strategies to build and reinforce the nation state. But Italy extended protection earlier and more deeply than France, suggesting in a later nation state with strong inherited cultural nationalism but major political weaknesses and, national political leaders may introduce earlier, more far‐reaching and more layered legal protection than in states created earlier and with fewer weaknesses.     

A Conflicted Nation. Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978)

This roundtable assesses the arguments and importance of Guido Formigoni’s book Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978). This book is essentially composed of seven 70–80-page broadly chronological chapters, each of which might almost be expanded into a short book in its own right. The chapters perform the difficult feat of shifting constantly between the foreign policy of the Italian state (which was so often driven by domestic political considerations) and the political consequences of international events on the debates (or polemics) taking place in the Italian polity. There can be few works of international history in which the linkage between the domestic and foreign policy ‘levels’ is so clearly demonstrated. Indeed, one of the key objectives of the book plainly is to show that although there may be countries where foreign policy is carried on with blithe indifference to domestic politics, Italy is certainly not one of them, or was not during the Cold War years. Mark Gilbert introduces the book on which Federico Romero, Maud Bracke and Michele Marchi engage in a detailed commentary, to which the author replies.     

Santo Domingo de Talaje: resurrecting a seventeenth-century Spanish mission at Darien Bluff,Georgia

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an overview of archaeological investigations conducted at Darien Bluff, McIntosh County, Georgia, over the past 75 years. The discovery of lost artifacts, missing excavation records, and several draft reports provided an opportunity to obtain a comprehensive overview of Spanish Mission period activity at the site of Mission Santo Domingo de Talaje, a primarily seventeenth-century mission that once stood on the banks of the Altamaha River. Included are archaeological and historical perspectives of the researchers who excavated the site and new interpretations by the authors that draw on recently relocated artifacts and excavation records.     

“Where nothing was before”: (re)producing population and place in Ghana's Volta River Project

Significant infrastructural projects, and especially large hydroelectric dams, were envisioned and deployed by postcolonial governments to promote particular visions of industrialization, agriculture, democracy, and modernity. Newly independent states sought to annihilate formerly so-called backward and primitive landscapes and populations alike, promising to re-create both places and people as rational, economically productive entities. In this article, we re-examine such narratives as they related to Ghana's Volta River Project (VRP). Relying on archival and media sources between the 1950s and 1960s, we interrogate the Ghanaian state's pursuit of the VRP from a perspective rooted firmly in cultural geography and pay careful attention to the issues of population displacement/resettlement and landscape reconfiguration that permeated all dimensions of the project. We analyze the ways in which Ghanaian leaders used the VRP to translate a particular suite of cultural, economic, and political values into material reality, utilizing the techniques of displacement and population resettlement in efforts to enroll Ghana into a modern, global, industrial economic system. As such, this article augments the body of literature examining the modernist and state-building aspects of the VRP as well as studies critiquing the various processes of development that have unfolded in West Africa since the mid-twentieth century.