Tool hoards and Neolithic use of the landscape in north-eastern Ireland

Summary. Archaeologists frequently suggest that the Neolithic occupants of Ireland and Britain may not have been fully settled farmers, but were, instead, at least partially nomadic pastoralists. However, human use of any landscape is more complex than the current debate suggests, and this debate has included few systematic studies designed to evaluate this issue in detail. This paper examines hoards (or ‘caches’) of flaked stone tools in County Antrim, Ireland, to consider the links between anticipatory tool storage and human land‐use patterns. Our data imply regular human movements over the study area, possibly linked to transhumant use of different altitudinal zones, with functionally and, sometimes, technologically specific classes of tools stored in different areas. However, the larger context of data on the Irish Neolithic clearly indicates that these movements were part of a way of life centred on permanent horticultural homesteads.     

The Mid‐Victorian navy and imperial defence

British Naval Policy in the Gladstone‐Disraeli Era 1866–1880 by John F. Beeler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp.xviii + 354, tables, illus. $49.50 (hardback). ISBN 0–8047–2981–6.

Birth of the Battleship: British Capital Ship Design 1870–1881 by John Beeler. London: Chatham Publishing, 2001. Pp.224, illus. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 1–86176–167–8.

Imperial Defence 1868–1887 by Donald Mackenzie Schurman, edited by John Beeler. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Pp.xx + 192. £39.50 (hardback). ISBN 0–7146–5006–4.     

Mirrors of the Nation: The Construction of National Character and Difference in the Historical Writings of E. G. Geijer

This article suggests that marriageable young upper-class women can be taken as indicators of the longue durée of the ancien régime mentality and the stepwise advancement of the bourgeois mentality. This is so because of factors that made such women particularly prone not to break with established conventions. Source materials in this analysis are taken from contemporary non-fiction texts in which 19th-century St Petersburg and Helsinki serve as the scenes and in which marriageable young women feature as the protagonists or objects of appraising gazes. It is suggested that the differences emerging around the mid-19th century between the two societies with regards to the habitus and education of upper-class girls and marriageable women can at least in part be explained by different institutional settings vis-à-vis land, labour and the status of the bourgeoisie.