Bioarchaeological preservation and non-elite diet in the Bay of Naples: An analysis of the food remains from the Cardo V sewer at the Roman site of Herculaneum

Due to its burial by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, the level of biological preservation in the Roman town of Herculaneum is very high. The recovery and analysis of large quantities of material from the city's Cardo V sewer has provided the rare opportunity to study the diet of middle and lower class Romans living in an urban context in mid-1st century AD Italy. The sewer lacked an outflow point and instead functioned as a cesspit to collect the human and kitchen waste generated by those living in the multi-storey shop and apartment complex (Insula Orientalis II) situated above. In total, 220?l of soil was examined for carbonised and mineralised material, seashells, eggshells, otoliths and fish bones. 194 taxa were identified, including 94 botanical, 45 fish, 53 shellfish and two bird taxa. One-hundred and thirteen of the 194 taxa can be considered edible foodstuffs indicating a high level of dietary diversity. This article compares preservation conditions with those found in Pompeii and assess diet in relation to these findings. The level of preservation is found to be comparable between the two sites and no major taphonomic biases are observed. The diet of non-elite individuals in Herculaneum is found to consist of a few staple foods that are frequently supplemented by a wide range of other goods. Subtle differences in diet are observable within the sewer assemblage, most likely related to differences in wealth.     

A cost surface model of volcanic glass quarrying and exchange in Hawai‘i

The spatial distribution of artifacts from the Pu‘u Wa‘awa‘a volcanic glass source (North Kona District, Hawai‘i Island) shows a pattern of direct access by those living in the immediately vicinity of the source with subsequent down-the-line exchange. Most quarrying and exchanges likely occurred within a single day’s travel from sites where artifacts were deposited. The exception to this is the discovery of non-local direct access evident in assemblages from the extreme southern end of Hawai‘i Island; these visits may have involved voyages by canoe. While people did not often travel far for volcanic glass they nonetheless appear to have had unfettered accessed to source material and freely conducted inter-community exchanges. This implies volcanic glass was treated as a common pooled resource and the existence of informal exchange relationships.     

The Colonial Religion of the Anglican Clergy: Western Australia 1830 to c. 1870

This article sets out to remedy an historiographical oversight in Australian history by identifying the principal characteristics of the religious culture of Anglican clergy in the colony of Western Australia between 1830 and about 1870. Using sources, both personal from clergy or clergy wives, and official correspondence with the colonial governments, and clergy correspondence to mission societies and their bishop, a number of features of clergy religion are delineated. They enable a comparison to be made between metropolitan and colonial Anglican clergy cultures. These include anxieties about status and income; the involvement of the clergy in charity, education, church building, and public worship; isolation and religious competition. While many of these were familiar to English clergy, they took on new aspects in the colonial context, which required the clergy there to become conscious that the colony was a new land, however much they attempted to remake it in their own ecclesiastical image.     

Ano te mahara e reka,how sweet the memory: The changing remembrance of Bishop Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier in the Twentieth Century*

In 2001, Catholic pilgrims, led by Māori priest Henare Tate, travelled to France to exhume the remains of Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier (1821–1872), the first Catholic Bishop of Aotearoa New Zealand. Placed in a lead-lined coffin, the remains were taken back to New Zealand and laid to rest in Motuti, Hokianga. The interment — 131 years after Pompallier's death — marked the end of an extraordinary renovation of the Bishop as a historical figure, shaped by the tides of Māori and non-Māori Catholic life, and fulfilling, it seemed, a sentiment expressed in this memorial song which Pompallier himself had composed as a parting gift to his Katorika (Catholic) faithful: “Ano te mahara e reka/a ki nga motu o Nuitireni i/sweet is the memory I hold/for the islands of New Zealand.” This article explores the shifting remembrance of Pompallier that underpinned the repatriation and its legacy for New Zealand Catholic communities, especially Hokianga Māori. Three interrelated themes emerge: locally, Hokianga as a foundational place of Māori Catholicism, and the institutional remembrance of Pompallier as the apostolic Bishop of Auckland; and, globally, the reshaping of collective memories in the theological and social changes of the Catholic Church.     

Book reviews

New works in geography

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Gregory A. Barton. Pp. xiii + 192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0 521 81417 0 (hbk).

Claiming Rural Identities: Dynamics, Contexts, Policies. Tialda Haartsen, Peter Groote &; Paulus P.P. Huigen (eds). Pp. viii + 166. Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000. Price €17.02, ISBN 90 232 3567 3 (pbk).

Geographies of Health. Anthony C. Gatrell. Pp. xv + 294. Oxford: Blackwell. 2002. Price £16.99 (pbk), ISBN 0 631 21985 4 (pbk).

The Peopling of Britain: The Shaping of the Human Landscape. Paul Slack and Ryk Ward (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002. Price £50.00 (hbk), ISBN 0 19 829759 9 (hbk).

Focus on Scotland

William Speirs Bruce: Polar Explorer and Scottish Nationalist. Peter Speak. Pp. 144. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 2003. Price £9.99 (pbk), ISBN 1 901663 71 X (pbk).     

A Wider Europe: the View from Moscow and Kyiv

The expansion of NATO and the enlargement of the EU will produce outside states in which perceptions and policies will be influenced by feelings of exclusion and isolation. Russia and Ukraine are two important examples. In Russia the sense of exclusion results from NATO expansion and it was exacerbated by the air strikes against Serbia. Although Ukraine also responded negatively to NATO's attack on Serbia, Ukrainian perceptions of exclusion are caused primarily by disappointment that EU membership is proving so difficult to attain. Based on elite interviews, opinion surveys and the analysis of focus group discussions, this article compares and contrasts the attitudes towards NATO and the EU in the two countries.     

‘Facing the future’: tourism and identity-building in post-socialist Romania

Tourism is an important component of the process of identity-building, representing one way in which a country can seek to project a particular self-image to the wider international community. As such, tourism has considerable ideological significance for the formerly socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe that are seeking to project and affirm distinctly post-socialist identities as part of the process of re-integration into the political and economic structures of Western Europe. This paper focuses on tourism and identity-building in post-socialist Romania. In particular, it focuses on one building — the so-called ‘House of the People’ — which is intimately linked with Romania’s totalitarian past and which is fast becoming Bucharest’s biggest tourist sight. The presentation of the building to tourists seeks to ‘reconfigure’ its past so that it accords better with Romania’s post-socialist identity, and particularly its aspirations to (re)establish itself as a country of ‘mainstream’ Europe.     

A wider Europe: the view from Minsk and Chisinau

The expansion of NATO and the enlargement of the EU will produce outside states in which perceptions and policies will be influenced by feelings of exclusion and isolation. Building on an earlier article published in International Affairs (January 2000) on Russia and Ukraine, this article analyses two countries 'inbetween' in which these feelings are particularly strong. Belarus and Moldova, two classic borderlands, are small, new states with borders not of their own choosing and little sense of identity. Their economies are in dire straits and each has a large problem that hampers European integration. For Belarus the problem is its president; for Moldova it is the separatist regime controlling 12 per cent of its territory. Based on elite interviews, opinion surveys and the analysis of focus group discussions, this article compares and contrasts the attitudes towards NATO and the EU in these two countries.