Millenarism and agricultural settlement in the Holy Land in the nineteenth century

The pioneers of modern agricultural settlement in the Holy Land were Christians. Foremost among these were several Americans who came in the 1850s and 1860s to settle—ignoring warnings from local experts and from representatives of the United States government. The leaders of the settlers were inspired by millenarist ideas and by faith in the Return to Zion—rife among fundamental Protestant sects in the early nineteenth century. The personal accounts of these visionaries provide insights into what drove them to attempt to migrate to remote and backward Palestine and also throw light on the economic concepts and practical plans for implementing their schemes. Despite their failure, these attempts were very important in the history of agricultural settlement in nineteenth-century Palestine. The settlers maintained a wide range of international contacts through letters, pamphlets, sermons and publicity in the press in America, England, Germany and Palestine. In addition, many people who heard indirectly about these ventures, took an interest in their ideology and practice. Millenarist schemes influenced early preachers and founders of Jewish societies for agricultural settlement in Palestine. The Jewish forerunners of the Hovevi Zion and Zionist movements promoted remarkably similar ideas. Millenarist and Jewish visionaries alike spoke of the hour being propitious for the coming of the Messiah and favourable for settlement in the land of Israel. Both groups established schools to teach the lore of the land and to educate youth in agricultural pursuits. Many years after the disappearance of American settlers from Palestine, their story reverberated in Jewish polemic literature.     

A regional examination of surgery and fracture treatment in Iron Age and Roman Britain

The study macroscopically examined 270 sexed adults and 190 subadult individuals for evidence of ante mortem fractures and surgical practice in Dorset, during the Iron Age (5th century BC to 1st century AD) and Romano‐British period (1st century to the end of the 4th century AD), in order to understand medical treatment in both periods and determine the extent to which these practices changed post conquest (43 AD). As treatment during these periods is not well understood, a conservative approach to fracture analysis was employed, which attempted to minimise the influence of fracture type and location on results by excluding bones in which fracture deformities may only be corrected by surgery. The study also excluded fractures resulting from bone mineralisation diseases or neoplasms. Skeletal evidence for surgical treatment was identified using funerary, taphonomic and osteological criterion to determine when the surgery took place, and to establish that changes were not caused by post mortem activity. The analysis of fracture treatment demonstrated that in both periods, adult fractures were well set with few secondary changes; a result also influenced by the stable nature of the fracture types. No evidence for sex‐differences in treatment was observed. Evidence for surgery was identified in two Romano‐British individuals: an unsuccessful limb amputation, and an embryotomy procedure that was most likely carried out in an attempt to save the mother. This regional assessment of medical treatment has shown that in both periods, highly skilled practitioners were able to successfully treat a range of fractures and by doing so, minimised the patient's risk of impairment. The study also supplements the very limited archaeological evidence for medical practice and surgery in Iron Age and Roman Britain, and suggests that post conquest, surgical knowledge rapidly increased in association with wider socio‐cultural developments in education, pharmacology and sanitation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rapid phytolith extraction for analysis of phytolith concentrations and assemblages during an excavation: an application at Tell es-Safi/Gath,Israel

A rapid phytolith extraction procedure is described, that allows phytolith concentrations and morphotype assemblages to be analyzed within hours. This procedure enables the results of these analyses to be used during an archaeological excavation, in order to better understand how plants were used. The new procedure was tested using a standard phytolith extract and two experimental phytolith-sediment blends and found to be both accurate and precise. The reliability of partial slide counting was evaluated and found to be as accurate and precise as existing phytolith quantification methods. The new extraction and counting procedures were applied to an archaeological site, Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel. The results demonstrate how information on phytolith concentrations in sediments that are available from one day to the next, can be used during an excavation to more effectively document the local features of interest and obtain better information.     

Characterization of bricks and tiles from the 17th-century brick Chapel,St. Mary's City,Maryland

The brick Chapel at St. Mary's City, Maryland, built around 1667, would have been an impressive structure on a colonial frontier where all the other buildings were built only of wood. While the building is no longer extant, the bricks remaining in the buried foundations hold information about the technologies and materials used by brickmakers in the 17th-century Chesapeake region. Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and petrographic analysis of thin sections were used to compare the Chapel bricks and other 17th-century bricks and tiles from several Chesapeake contexts to locally available clay sources. While the composition of the Chapel bricks is generally consistent with that of clays available in southern Maryland, these historic materials could not be linked to any one deposit, and may reflect the mixing of clays from multiple sources. In contrast, building materials from other 17th-century buildings at St. Mary's City could be more precisely “matched” to specific local clay deposits. This paper reports on our initial investigations toward understanding the technology of the Chapel bricks and their relationship to other bricks from St. Mary's City.     

The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe

The idea that Friedelehe and Muntehe constituted two distinct forms of Germanic marriage was based upon an attempt to reconstruct common Germanic culture with scraps of evidence from widely different times and places. A thorough re-examination of the sources for the institutions that were posited, based on this now outmoded methodology, reveals no evidence that transfer of Munt, or guardianship, distinguished between two different types of marriage, except perhaps in Lombard Italy, under the influence of Roman law. The idea that marriage with a dos is a different institution from marriage without one is not attested until the Carolingian period.     

ENCOUNTERING INDIGENEITY: RE-IMAGINING AND DECOLONIZING GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT. In an era of postcolonialism and postcolonization, Indigenous struggles continue. Within 'settler societies' issues of dispossession—particularly of lands—remain largely unresolved. As part of the discipline of geography's active movement away from its colonizing project, this introduction to this special edition of Geografiska Annaler B seeks to (re)focus a disciplinary lens, and (re)open a dialogue—and potential research trajectory - about 'indigenous geographies'. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, new cultural geographies have begun a process of re-engagement with issues of indigeniety through careful, sensitive, inclusive, representative and emancipatory research projects.