MODELS OF CONTINUITY

Summary. Recent discussions of continuity between Roman and Saxon Britain have not considered in detail the bases of dating, or the model which is being used to explain the transition from one state to the other. This builds considerable dangers and uncertainties into any future work. The problems inherent in late Roman and Early Saxon chronology are aired, the two most obvious current models of transition are considered, rejected, and replaced by a model involving minimal population movement but total change in fashions.     

AN UPPER PALAEOLITHIC FLINT AND CHERT ASSEMBLAGE FROM HOWBURN FARM,SOUTH LANARKSHIRE,SCOTLAND: FIRST RESULTS

This paper describes the discovery of the first open‐air Upper Palaeolithic site to be found in Scotland, at Howburn, near Biggar in South Lanarkshire. An account is given of the composition and distribution of the lithic assemblage, which is discussed in terms of its British and north‐west European context. Provisional parallels drawn are with the Late Hamburgian (Havelte) sites and assemblages of southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and the Netherlands. There is no absolute dating evidence for the site, but an age in the region of 12,000 ¹⁴C yr BP, towards the end of the earlier (Bølling) Lateglacial Interstadial stage, is proposed on the basis of the lithic artefacts.     

The death of Europe? Continental fates after Ukraine

The unravelling of the post‐Cold War security order in Europe was both cause and consequence of the crisis in Ukraine. The crisis was a symptom of the three‐fold failure to achieve the aspirations to create a ‘Europe whole and free’ enunciated by the Charter of Paris in 1990, the drift in the European Union's behaviour from normative to geopolitical concerns, and the failure to institutionalize some form of pan‐continental unity. The structural failure to create a framework for normative and geopolitical pluralism on the continent meant that Russia was excluded from the new European order. No mode of reconciliation was found between the Brussels‐centred wider Europe and various ideas for greater European continental unification. Russia's relations with the EU became increasingly tense in the context of the Eastern Partnership and the Association Agreement with Ukraine. The EU and the Atlantic alliance moved towards a more hermetic and universal form of Atlanticism. Although there remain profound differences between the EU and its trans‐Atlantic partner and tensions between member states, the new Atlanticism threatens to subvert the EU's own normative principles. At the same time, Russia moved from a relatively complaisant approach to Atlanticism towards a more critical neo‐revisionism, although it does not challenge the legal or normative intellectual foundations of international order. This raises the question of whether we can speak of the ‘death of Europe’ as a project intended to transcend the logic of conflict on the continent.     

La métropolisation à l’aune de la ‘loi’ taille/rang : Le cas Canadien, 1971–2001

Metropolization and the rank/size ’law‘: the Canadian case, 1971–2001 There is currently considerable interest in the process of metropolization. One of the consequences of this process, observed by numerous researchers, is the slower growth and even decline of small and medium cities. From a theoretical point of view, this process is compatible with endogenous growth theory: metropolitan areas offer economic actors certain key factors (access to information, to global networks, etc.) that smaller cities cannot. Concurrently, however, there is a resurgence of interest in Zipf's law and, more generally, in the stability of urban hierarchies. These two bodies of work appear to be in contradiction. However, using Canadian data from 1971 to 2001, we show that whilst metropolization is indeed occurring, this is not necessarily incompatible with a regular urban hierarchy. Indeed, if it is assumed that Zipf's rank‐size rule applies to urban systems in stable socio‐economic contexts, and that this regularity can be disrupted by fundamental social and economic changes, then the current wave of metropolization can be interpreted as a re‐ordering of cities in the face of the major social and economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s, which may eventually lead to a new equilibrium compatible with Zipf's law.     

Reading between the lines: national identity and attitudes to the media in Scotland*

ABSTRACT. The relationship between national identity and how people perceive and consume media is a central but largely untested assumption of studies of nationalism. Using a previously developed classification of identity among English migrants to Scotland, this paper explores associations between how people use the media and how they make sense of their national identity. Compared with Scottish nationals, who tend to adopt a more taken‐for‐granted and uncontentious view of the media, except when they feel that the media presented to them challenge their sense of identity, English migrants find that the agendas of the media in Scotland differ from those they are used to south of the border. Specifically, how they view the media tends to vary according to whether they view themselves as ‘English’, ‘British’ or as ‘becoming Scottish’.