The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from nineteenth-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early nineteenth-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.     

Assessment of Multi-Wythe Stone Masonry Subjected to Seismic Hazards

Heritage stone buildings are typically vulnerable to seismic events. Results of an experimental program were analyzed to evaluate the shear strength and intrinsic damping of stone masonry representative of the West Block of the Canadian Parliamentary Precinct in Ottawa. Eight representative wall specimens with different rehabilitation schemes had been tested under different static and dynamic loadings. Each wall had wythes of sandstone and limestone connected by a rubble core. The results show the shear strength of the walls could be predicted accurately and that no strengthening scheme was particularly beneficial. The effective viscous damping ratios varied between 7 and 9%.     

An estimator for bidirectional (naviform) blade productivity in the Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic B

A method is presented for calculating the blade productivity of bidirectional (naviform) blade cores, a hallmark of Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) chipped stone tool assemblages. This approach involves estimating the volume of the core that furnished serial blades, together with the mean volume of a typical targeted blade blank. Simple computation of the volume of a wedge in both instances provides an estimate of the number of targeted blades that were produced in an average single reduction sequence. The method is checked against two replicated bidirectional blade reduction sequences, and a refitted bidirectional blade core from the site of Kfar HaHoresh, Israel. Finally, a case study from Kfar HaHoresh is presented in order to illustrate the application of the method, which may have ramifications concerning the evaluation of incipient craft specialization in the region.     

Editorial

Similarities in late Middle Cambrian trilobite, inarticulate brachiopod and molluscan faunas are apparent between Bornholm (Denmark) and New Zealand. Tuarangia gravgaerdensis sp. nov. is described from the late Middle Cambrian Andrarum Limestone of Bornholm, Denmark. The Andrarum Limestone is stratigraphically correlated with the Tasman Formation, New Zealand, from where the genus Tuarangia was first described. A single specimen, referred to Tuarangia, has been found in an erratic boulder from NW Poland. The boulder is estimated to be of early Late Cambrian age. The initial taxonomic assignment of Tuarangia to the Bivalvia, Subclass Pteriomorphia, is upheld. The distance between Bornholm and New Zealand, the position at opposite hemispheres, and the palaeogeography in general clearly indicate isocommunities with restricted possibility of exchange of the gene pool at species level.     

Down Jamaica Way with Theodore Roosevelt the Diplomat

Book reviewed in this article:
William Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft