Study and School in the Lives of Children in Migrant Families: A View from Rural Jiangxi,China

Millions of children in China have been ‘left behind’ in the countryside while their parents work in distant places to support the social reproduction of their families. This article examines the role of study and schooling in this process. The analysis shows that family strategies to pursue socio‐economic mobility are intricately connected to state frameworks for providing support, and schools are central to this. This is because both family and state interests in the attributes and prospects of the next generation converge in schools. At the same time, on a day‐to‐day basis, the labour of children in schools and the labour of parents in the cities are intertwined. Specifically, by communicating with each other about study, and by focusing on the child's educational future as the key purpose of their daily work, both children and parents carry out their obligations towards each other, while finding ways to cope with the emotional difficulties that protracted physical separation entails.     

Dating the Ramat Saharonim Late Neolithic desert cult site

The Ramat Saharonim site, located in the central Negev desert, Israel, consists of four shrines in a shallow valley and 30 tumuli, aligned on two cuesta cliffs on the valley's sides. Previous assessments based on site surveys suggested a general chronological span from Late Neolithic period (ca. 5000–5500 BC) through the Early Bronze Age (third millennium BC). Excavations in one shrine and three tumuli revealed a well-constructed double wall at the shrine and seven primary adult burials in the three tumuli. Quartz from sediment samples post-dating the construction of the burials and shrine was dated by optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) using the single aliquot regenerative dose (SAR) protocol, and charcoal and leather samples were dated by ¹⁴C. The OSL results for a burial in one tumulus are 7500 ± 700 to 6000 ± 600 years. In a second tumulus, OSL ages of 2000 ± 200–1800 ± 170 years and a ¹⁴C age on leather of 390–200 BC (2340–2150 cal BP) imply that this burial is Nabatean and that the site was used also in the Hellenistic period. Two ¹⁴C ages on charcoal from the shrine give an age between 5280 and 4710 BC (7230–6660 cal BP). OSL single aliquot ages for sediment from the shrine are highly scattered and far too old (60,000 to 12,000 years). The unlikely old ages are due to insufficient resetting of the OSL signal of some of the quartz grains when sand was blown onto the site. Indeed, single grain measurements for six samples of sediment postdating the shrine show a very large range of grain ages, but with a distinct young population in all samples. Ages calculated from these young populations average 5400 ± 800, in better consistence with the ¹⁴C dates and confirming our supposition that only some of the transported grains were reset at the time of deposition. The combined OSL and ¹⁴C dating shows that the shrines and tumuli are contemporaneous and attributes the complex to the Late Neolithic. This has clear ramifications for our understanding of the period and the rise of desert pastoral societies.     

Fishing Gear from a 7th-Century Shipwreck off Dor, Israel

The ancient anchorage of Dor, Israel, contains wreck-sites from several periods. Underwater exploration of one Byzantine wreck discovered the remains of a medium-size boat constructed with iron nails. Coin-finds dated it to c .665 AD, after the Muslim conquest. The wreck was probably caused by natural agents, but an event in the Byzantine-Muslim conflict can not be discounted. The artefacts include a group of objects testifying to the practice of light-fishing. Literary sources indicate a prevalence of light-fishing, but archaeological finds are very rare. This discovery clearly indicates light-fishing in late antiquity. A sounding-lead and steelyard can be seen as auxiliary to the fishing.
© 2007 The Authors     

Gothic memory and forgetfulness in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love and ‘The Demon Lover’

Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love (1954) and ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) share an uncustomary usage of Gothic conventions: the Anglo-Irish writer invests the Gothic genre with new meaning for the war-torn Irish and the post-World Wars generation by skewing Gothic conventions, reflecting a new Gothic for a new age – one that has seen the effects of two catastrophic wars and not only dead soldiers, but dead-in-life survivors. In A World of Love, Bowen uses not a ghost that haunts the attic, but a nearly forgotten dead World War I soldier; not a male power of place and a fleeing female, but a female power of place and a displaced male; and not a lonely, menacing castle, but a dilapidated farm. In both the novel and the short story, the dead-in-life survivors must remember in order to successfully exorcise the war and the dead soldiers of war, thereby revitalizing themselves. Those who cannot remember are doomed to the past. This article examines the twist on the Gothic novel and its statement about the possibly disastrous effects of forgetting and of remembering incorrectly – anxieties shared by other twentieth-century Irish writers in terms of their eroding cultural identity and past.     

Elemental analysis and characterization of ochre sources from Southern Arizona

Iron oxides and other associated minerals (ochre) were widely used in ancient times, however, the use and procurement of these materials is not well understood and there has been little research on the elemental characterization of the material compared to other artifact classes. To assess the possibility of identifying ochre differences between locations, the original potential geological sources should be thoroughly characterized. This paper describes the collection of potential geologic sources of ochre in the Tucson basin of Arizona, sampling of those sources, instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), and subsequent multivariate analysis of the data. This paper has several goals, including characterizing geochemical trends within and between ochre sources, identifying the important elements in geochemical characterization of ochre, and establishing a database for further investigations. This preliminary study indicates that the inter- and intra-source variations in geological sources of ochre in the Tucson basin region can be differentiated. Future analysis of iron oxide artifacts will be performed to examine correlations between artifacts and sources and provide a basis for further deductions concerning ancient ochre procurement.