Good Tongues,Bad Tongues: Denunciation,Rumour and Revenge in the French Basque Country, 1943–1945

This article provides the first ethnographic study of denunciation and rumor during the Gernam Occupation and its aftermath. In one French Basque village, “a good tongues” accused a female shopkeeper of adultery, multiple denunciations and economic collaboration with the enemy. She, in turn, played wtth “public rumour”, a product of human communication and imagination that citizens constantly reshaped as they evaluated and responded to accusations of wrongdoing. By making public, oral denunciations to the Germans, the shopkeeper competed with a female arch rival in the Resistance.

Basques had their own traditional means of sanctioning moral treachery in their community. I show how one particular practice, La Jonchée, provided an anonymous, non‐violent alternative to female head‐shaving, carried out by men who wished to punish women for sexual collaboration.     

Nursing mothers and feeding bottles: reconstructing breastfeeding and weaning patterns in Greek Byzantine populations (6th–15th centuries AD) using carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios

Traditionally, documentary evidence (mainly medical works and the vitae and miracles of saints) served as the primary source of information for perinatal nutrition in the Byzantine era. In the last decade, however, stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis has also been applied for the reconstruction of Byzantine breastfeeding and weaning practices. This paper reviews the documentary evidence for Byzantine weaning and compares it to isotopic data for eight Greek Byzantine skeletal samples from the sites of Eleutherna, Kastella, Messene, Sourtara, Stylos, Nemea, Petras and Servia (6th–15th centuries AD). The documentary evidence suggests that Byzantine children were weaned at a relatively late age. The age patterning of the stable isotope data is not as clear as normally seen at single sites. However, the presence of a higher proportion of elevated values in juveniles aged three years or less suggests that weaning was completed by the fourth year—a pattern consistent with the written sources. The data available from this study allow us to make some tentative suggestions about cultural and temporal differences in weaning, and to recommend directions for further research. A comparison of the Byzantine data presented here to data published for Roman-era sites from the Mediterranean and Western Europe suggests that the Byzantines maintained a Roman-era practice of relatively late weaning. In contrast, medieval data for Western Europe and the few measurements made on post-Byzantine Greek material suggest more variation, with some groups weaning late and others weaning earlier, by two years of age.     

A new method of dentine microsampling of deciduous teeth for stable isotope ratio analysis

Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratio analysis of dentine is a powerful tool for examining early childhood diet in past populations. Serial sampling of the dentine can reconstruct an individual's changing diet. Previous serial studies have used homogenized samples that give broad results for age categories. This study presents a new dentine microsampling technique for use in stable isotope ratio analysis that provides stable isotope signals for three important juvenile life stages: fetal life, breastfeeding, and weaning.     

Multiple traumatic dental injuries: a case report in a young individual from the Samnitic necropolis of Opi Val Fondillo (VI-V century BC; Central Italy)

Traumatic dental injuries, although apparently rare in archaeological populations, can be found under certain circumstances affecting the dentition in a variety of ways. This paper contributes to the paleopathology literature by reporting one case of dental trauma. Evidence for differentiating antemortem/perimortem dental trauma from postmortem damage is presented, and it is suggested that these injuries were sustained due to an accidental fall, supported by the morphology, location and extension of the injuries and characterization of the impact. These data provide a valuable information for a reconstruction of past behaviors in the Samnitic necropolis of Opi Val Fondillo (VI-V century BC; Central Italy).     

Next generation sequencing of DNA in 3300-year-old charred cereal grains

We investigated whether ‘next generation’ methods can be used to sequence ancient DNA molecules in charred cereal grains. We prepared a DNA extract from a mixed sample of barley, einkorn, emmer and broomcorn millet, taken from a 3300-year-old assemblage of charred cereal grains from Assiros Toumba, Greece. Using the SOLiD 5500 system, we obtained 21,112,844 unique sequence reads. Of these, 178,779 had a 75% or greater nucleotide sequence similarity with one or more entries in the full nucleotide sequence database; 496 of these matches were to previously reported sequences from barley, einkorn, emmer, broomcorn millet or related species such as hexaploid wheat. The unique reads were also compared with a database comprising only wheat sequences. This analysis identified 1658 charred grain sequences that had 90% or greater similarity with segments of the wheat genome. The presence of barley, wheat and millet sequences in the next generation dataset confirms the presence of ancient DNA in this charred grain assemblage. Enrichment of extracts by hybridization capture or equivalent methods is likely to enable sequences to be obtained for entire genes and other genomic regions of interest.     

Urban Planning in Italy: The Future of Urban General Plan and Governance

This article aims to highlight and, whenever possible, demonstrate that the urban general plan is still the instrument of the utmost importance to trigger and steer urban transformations. Within the current Italian context, the article examines the characteristics, contradictions, weaknesses and opportunities of urban planning set of rules and practices and tries to propose concrete answers to questions and issues strictly connected that affect the municipality's urban planning: how to manage and govern a contemporary metropolis or city agglomeration, the concerns associated with overlapping jurisdictions and different rules for various hierarchical administrative levels, the costs of social and common services, the need to include in the urban plan the possible use of European Union Structural Funds, the real estate market affecting new development and urban regeneration programmes and investments. All these aspects should be included in a unifying and strong planning instrument, the urban plan, which could address and steer effectively the urban planning policies and their governance.     

Italian identity: Catholic responses to secularist definitions,c.1910–48

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.     

Winning back more than words? Power,discourse and quarrying on the Niagara Escarpment

This paper explores the controversy and public hearing on the proposed extension of the largest limestone quarry in Canada, operated by Dufferin Aggregates at Milton, Ontario. The quarry constitutes an important source of construction material for the nearby Greater Toronto Area. However, the quarry is protected by the provincial Niagara Escarpment Planning and Development Act and located inside the UNESCO-designated Niagara Escarpment Biosphere Reserve. The proposal has therefore attracted considerable opposition from the public institution charged with its protection, the Niagara Escarpment Commission, as well as environmental groups and local residents. To make sense of the tensions, conflicts and outcome of the Dufferin case, we consult and apply several critical literatures. We see the conflict as part of a transformation of the countryside from a space of production to a space of consumption, where there is a shift in emphasis from resource extractive to scenic and ecological landscape values, and the displacement of productive classes, farmers and workers, in favour of a service class of professionals and retirees. Within this transformation, we identify a 'power geometry' of actor networks of different coalition groups that form allegiances and engage in struggles at different geographic scales. These actor networks operate within the set frames of a dominant development discourse and a popular environmentalist discourse that both include and exclude other ways of seeing and managing the escarpment.     

Advocacy Coalitions, Policy Entrepreneurs, and Policy Change

The advocacy coalition framework (AC) explains policy stability The policy entrepreneurship model (PE) explains dynamic policy change. Thus, augmenting the AC with insights from the PE provides a method of explaining a common empirical phenomenon: policy stability punctuated by dynamic policy change. This analytical strategy could be used to explore stability and change in many policy arenas. Here, we use it to interpret the background lo and dynamics of recent education policy reform in Michigan.