Aufklärung durch Täuschung,Die Natürliche Magie im 18.?Jahrhundert

Mechanical speaking figures are very popular in the 18th century. Purportedly they are not only able to answer questions but also to divine. The enlightened philosophers are alarmed in the face of apparent fraud fostering superstition. The most successful weapon against the ‘charlatans’ seems to be the public imitation of their tricks. This leads to a ‘division of labour’ between popularisers of science, instrument‐makers and even some showmen, and natural philosophers. The former expose the imposture thanks to their special skills, the latter support these fraudbusting activities with their growing cultural authority. This paves the way for a close alliance between professional magicians and scientists in the 19th and 20th century exposing spiritistic mediums and spiritual healers.     

Transnational Development on the Frontier: The FAO's Fishery and Forestry Missions in the Brazilian Amazon

In the early 1950s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) organized a mission to the Brazilian Amazon Valley to assess development needs and help implement a development plan. The Brazilian government saw this as part of an initiative to integrate a sparsely populated and ‘backward’ region more firmly into the nation. The FAO's local partner was the Superintendancy for the Plan of Economic Valorization of the Amazon (SPVEA), a regional development agency created in 1953. This article analyzes the operation of the Mission, specifically its fishery and forestry sections, to understand the dynamics of transnational development cooperation. The mission eventually failed because the Brazilian state never offered sufficient support on FAO terms; SPVEA never acquired the necessary financial resources, administrative capacity and technical expertise. The FAO experts recognized the problems, but had no means to enhance the resources or change the approach of the local partner. The government's decision, in the late 1950s, to prioritize the building of a major road from Brasília to Belém, aggravated the lack of resources for the Mission's work. Importantly, the failure was not a question of ideological resistance to foreign meddling or a fundamental opposition to the FAO development strategy.     

A systematic approach to the recovery and identification of starches from carbonised deposits on ceramic vessels

Starch granules are being successfully recovered from an increasing range of artefacts. Here we present the recovery of starches from carbonised ceramic ‘foodcrusts’ from late Mesolithic–early Neolithic residues at the site of Neustadt in northern Germany. A method for investigating background loading of residues with contaminant starches is proposed by comparing interior ‘foodcrusts’ versus exterior ‘sooting’, for the purposes of eliminating samples with insignificant quantities of grains from subsequent identification procedures. The classification of starches to plant taxon is traditionally achieved by manual observations and measurement of nominal and ratio morphological variables. Here, we present a method for the automated classification of granules, using software developed in-house. The results show that when multiple granules are considered, the species selected as modern reference examples can be classified to high levels of specificity. When applied to the archaeological samples we show that wild plant resources persist in importance across the transition to agriculture, with high proportions of granule forms consistent with acorn (Quercus sp.) occurring in all samples. Hazelnut (Corylus avellana) types are less well-represented suggesting it was not an important food in the context of pottery, and may have been over-represented in the repertoire of hunter–gatherer resources. Cereals are not represented in any of the samples, supporting the notion that their adoption may have been a slow process, occurring more gradually than for other domesticated foods, or that they were not initially processed in ceramic vessels.     

A New Artefact Typology for the Study of Medieval Arrowheads

ARCHAEOLOGICALLY recovered arrowheads from the British Isles. dated to between the roth and 16th centuries are examined. Hie exisiting arrowhead typology in the London Museum Medieval Catalogue is assessed and a new typology consisting of 28 generic forms, and subdivided into functional groups, is suggested.     

Review article

Franklin Hugh Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism. The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, xv + 458 pp., ISBN 0–521–433406–8 hbk, £40.00

Giuseppe Berta, Il governo degli interessi. Industriali, rappresentanza e politica nell'Italia del nord‐ovest 1906–1924, Marsilio, Venice, 1996, xv + 175 pp., ISBN 88–317–6342–3 pbk, 32,000 Lire

Giorgio Fiocca, Storia della Confindustria 1900–1914, Marsilio, Venice, 1994, 266 pp., ISBN 88–317–5850–0 hbk, 70,000 Lire