Hemp in ancient rope and fabric from the Christmas Cave in Israel: talmudic background and DNA sequence identification

The “Christmas Cave”, a cave in the Qidron Valley near the Dead Sea and Qumran, has yielded a complex collection of plant-derived rope and fabric artifacts. Using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify DNA of the samples, we estimated the sizes and determined restriction patterns and base sequences of chloroplast genes, primarily rbcL (gene for the large subunit of ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase). DNA was successfully extracted from all samples, but was limited to sizes of approximately 200–300 base pairs. As expected, the DNA extracted from the samples was identified as coming primarily from flax (Linum usitatissamum L.), but two samples had a significant fraction, and all samples had at least a trace, of hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) DNA. Artifacts from the Christmas Cave were thought to date from Roman times, but it was thought possible that some could be much older. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS)-based ¹⁴C dating confirmed that the samples contained representatives from both the Roman and Chalcolithic periods. This paper provides a synthesis of DNA, isotope, and literary analysis to illuminate textile history at the Christmas Cave site.     

东西对话：中国政治地理学研究展望

中国政治地理学的发展尚处于起步阶段。中国与西方政治地理学者的学术交流相对有限,这主要是由于语言的障碍,以及中国学者对于研究课题政治敏感性的担忧,普遍缺乏对政治地理学研究内涵的理解。本文基于对中西方政治地理学发展现状及相关研究可能性的理解,指出以下五个在中国具有进一步拓展空间的政治地理学课题：广域行政与空间政治;国际关系与地理想象;边界冲突与划界研究;边界与边界区域研究;环境政治地理学。这些课题的开展不仅可以加强中国自身的政治地理学研究,而且对西方正在进行的政治地理学研究也会起到积极的推动作用。     

From practice to theory to practice: William Penn from prison to the founding of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for toleration in Restoration England. The broader political theory that Penn articulated in England and attempted to realize in Pennsylvania contained economic, political, social, legal, and religious components, worked out in drafts of founding documents over the course of many months. But the foundation of that theory – its unshakeable commitment to liberty of conscience, its faith in juries as a potential restraint on the arbitrary exercise of power by civil governors, its unsteady mix of principled and pragmatic underpinnings – was laid in Penn’s early years as a Quaker, intertwined with his experiences of imprisonment in England and Ireland. In a very real sense, then, the road to Pennsylvania, for Penn, began in the Cork prison 15 years before he set foot in America.     

Life on the Edge of the Arctic: The Bioarchaeology of the Keldudalur Cemetery in Skagafjörður,Iceland

Burials were examined from the late Viking Age early medieval Christian cemetery at the farm of Keldudalur in the Skagafjörður region, Northern Iceland. The cemetery likely served a single household for about 100–120 years, from the beginning of the 11th century AD to the turn of the 12th century. Cemetery inhabitants represent a population that lived through the transitional period when Christianity was established in Iceland. The changes are visible in the mortuary record with the changeover from outlying pagan graves to enclosed Christian cemeteries situated on the farmsteads. Keldudalur is one of the numerous early Christian family cemeteries that littered the 11th century Skagafjörður landscape. The burials included 53 well‐preserved skeletons of 27 adults and 26 subadults. Various factors such as fluctuating climate and environmental conditions, and seasonal or periodical availability of resources have the potential for impacting human diet and health over time. To assess the health status of the burials, data were collected for a number of health status indicators such as stature estimation, developmental enamel defects, porotic hyperostosis, infectious disease, trauma, degenerative joint diseases, dental caries, calculus and tooth loss. Results suggest that inhabitants of Keldudalur experienced periodic stress and rigorous living conditions. Infant mortality was great, although if individuals survived childhood, the age expectancy was fairly high. There was no obvious evidence for interpersonal violence or endemic infectious disease. However, the common occurrence of growth disturbances, generalised periostitis, trauma and degenerative joint disease all point to a number of stressors in the lives of the people at Keldudalur, which is suggestive of a resilient people living and adapting to a harsh and periodically resource scarce subarctic environment. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia Project: New Data and Method from the Insular Mediterranean

Sardinia has played a vital integrative role in the Holocene Mediterranean, most notably—although not only—as a key locus in emergent maritime “Mediterraneanization” and as an object of contestation among mainland polities over the last three millennia. Yet, despite the florescence of Mediterranean survey archaeology, this standard method has only been sparsely employed in Sardinia, with a pronounced focus on large, urban, coastal sites. Accordingly, we have little understanding of the ebb and flow of human settlement in the Sardinian interior. This represents a significant lacuna in the study of Mediterranean archaeology and history. Here, we report data from the first two seasons of the Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia (LASS) Project, a multidisciplinary project designed to correct this bias and to investigate how episodic integration into—but also disintegration from—larger economic and political structures drove sociocultural and socioeconomic change in southwestern Sardinia over the Mid-Late Holocene.