An Asian compound archaeocyath

Material from the Jindingshan Formation (Tsanglangpu stage) at Jindingshan, Guizhou province, China, confirms that Agastrocyathus grandis Yuan & Zhang is a massive compound archaeocyath with chaetetide architecture. A new genus Zunyicyathus includes this species and Z. pianovskajae from Central Asia.     

Performing race and gender: the exoticization of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong

Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong are two exceptions to white hegemony in early show business. They became the first Afro-American and Chinese-American stars in the 1920s and reached international stardom in spite of their ethnicity but also because of it. Their careers and success were based on their exoticization. Baker and Wong's exoticism has much to do with ethnicity, but also with sex and gender. Their exotic dances on stage or on screen can be considered to be forms of erotic shows. This article shows how sex, gender, and race are entangled in their movies and burlesque shows. It also discusses the ways in which the agency and the audience of the performer should be taken into account, and analyzes how these performances were both rooted in Western imaginative geographies and connected to symbolic and material spaces.     

Affamer les prisonniers de guerre: entre mythes et réalités, 1914–54

Since the end of the nineteenth century, prisoners of war must be taken in care by their guardians, in terms of food. Sometimes this food is not good enough and leads to cases of starvation. Considering ideological conditions as well as material and chronological evolutions, this paper tries to explain how the prisoners are very often hostages in hands of their guards and how starvation can be an ideological tool.     

A Late 17th‐Century Trade Cargo from Ponta do Leme Velho,Sal Island,Cape Verde

In 1973, while recovering copper cargo from a 20th‐century ship wrecked off the Ponta do Leme Velho on the south‐east side of Sal Island, Cape Verde, explosives revealed an earlier ship cargo with dozens of Portuguese faience plates and bowls, glass beads and metal objects, including buckles, ammunition and copper manillas. The assemblage, including the ceramics and a marked silver tastevin, provide a site date between 1680 and 1700. The research presented here is a result of collaboration between CPAS and the authors in 2008 to analyse this assemblage in the context of late 17th‐century maritime trade.     

Promise and challenge of European Memory

Abstract

This introduction identifies the ubiquitous, but controversial, public and academic debate on European Memory as a key for articulating assumptions and expectations about an enhanced process of European integration via references to Europe’s past. The authors outline contradictions that constitute this discourse by pointing to its inherently conflictive potential and carve out the implicit and explicit normative assumptions of European Memory. Albeit acknowledging differences in memories of twentieth-century mass violence, references to European Memory promise to overcome the conflicts inherent in the historical experiences of such violence. Confronting this bias, this special issue postulates an understanding of European Memory as a discursive reality rather than a normative ideal. European Memory becomes manifest whenever actors refer to ‘Europe’ in their interpretations of the past. Further developing an understanding of ‘entangled memory’, the contributions of this special issue share a common interest in the universalizing potential of references to European Memory. They demonstrate how mnemonic practices may lose contextual references and link or even transfer to other memories in order to articulate claims of relevance on a European level.     

Methods and Challenges for the Seismic Assessment of Historic Masonry Structures

ABSTRACT

Despite the high vulnerability of historic structures to earthquakes, the approaches for evaluating seismic demand and capacity still appear inadequate and there is little consensus on the most appropriate assessment methods to use. To develop an improved knowledge on the seismic behavior of masonry structures and the reliability of analysis tools, two real-scale specimens were tested on a shake table, and several experts were invited to foresee failure mechanism and seismic capacity within a blind prediction test. Once unveiled, experimental results were simulated using multi-block dynamics, finite elements, or discrete elements. This article gathers the lessons learned and identifies issues requiring further attention. A combination of engineering judgment and numerical models may help to identify the collapse mechanism, which is as essential as it is challenging for the seismic assessment. To this purpose, discrete modeling approaches may lead to more reliable results than continuous ones. Even when the correct mechanism is identified, estimating the seismic capacity remains difficult, due to the complexity and randomness of the seismic response, and to the sensitivity of numerical tools to input variables. Simplified approaches based on rigid body dynamics, despite the considerable experience and engineering judgment required, provide as good results as do advanced simulations.     

Urban Pattern Dichotomy in Tirana: Socio-spatial Impact of Liberalism

Transition from a centralized to a market economy yielded different responses from the former Eastern Bloc countries with economic performance directly affecting spatial composition of the cities. Post-socialist urban transformations across Central and Eastern Europe exhibit main, common features but always preserve singularities, characteristic of individual states. This paper, by using comparative methods and urban planning analyses, emphasizes differences in the degree of change for inner city areas under same transition conditions. Drawing on empirical evidence from Tirana, the paper stresses the fact that besides the obvious general change in the communism-inherited urban fabric, the degree of this change is predicated on the area's centrality and its pre-transitional urban pattern. It is pointed out that this spatial change follows a mutually interactive, parallel path with the socio-economic composition of the city. The peculiarity of Tirana stands in the fact that post-socialist socio-spatial transformations are better defined by Balkanization (implying individuality and hostility) rather than segregation (which implies clustering).     

Leroi-Gourhan, a Philosopher of Technique and Evolution

With the publication of two volumes on technology—L'Homme et la matière and Milieu et technique in 1943–45, and Le geste et la parole (translated into English in 1993 as Gesture and Speech)—-Leroi-Gourhan asserted himself as a major social anthropologist, prehistorian, and the founder of the French schools of the ethnology of technique and of prehistoric ethnology. This paper analyzes the innovative concepts and the content of these original works, which draw their inspiration and data from biology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, and prehistory to study evolution, and technique as its medium, to create a global science of humanity.     

Genealogies and Juxtapositions: Traces of Potting Communities and Firing Facilities in Lake Titicaca Basin

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - In this paper, we develop a genealogy of practice approach for the historical analysis and comparison of Andean ceramic firing. This effort was set in...