Understanding faunal contexts of a complex Tell: Tel Dor, Israel, as a case study

The complex stratigraphy of the large Levantine tells and the complexity of human behavior that took place on them, poses a major challenge in understanding site formation processes and their reflection in the faunal remains. We studied the contextual deposition of faunal remains in Tel Dor, as a model for complex tell sites, and the possibility of using faunal remains as a tool to distinguish between context types. In addition, we asked how can we use this knowledge to elucidate site formation processes. Our results demonstrate that most loci defined in the field as primary refuse or purposive disposal are indeed different from the loci defined as secondary refuse. Different types of contexts can be differentiated, to a degree, from one another based upon multivariate analysis of faunal remains. Statistical as well as spatial analyses may help elucidate site formation processes and the use of space. Bones can, and in many cases do, reflect primary activities. Lumping zooarchaeological data into a single ‘assemblage’, as done in most zooarchaeological studies today causes major loss of information. Consideration of the specific location of faunal remains can be used as further indication for context identity and for understanding specific activities in a site, with care this can be done even in complex sites such as the ‘urban mounds’ of the Levant.     

Divided sisterhood? Nationalist feminism and feminist militancy in England and Ireland

ABSTRACT

The generally accepted story is that British militant suffragists performed an unexpected and abrupt move away from the feminist movement and towards a fiercely jingoistic nationalist campaign once the war began in 1914. Yet, given the nature of exchanges between Irish and British militant feminists, Irish feminists should not have been surprised by this turn from gender solidarity to English nationalism. In this article, I argue that Irish-British militant feminist entanglements worked to expose the powerful role that English nationalism played in suffrage politics at a time when nearly all the focus was on the disruptive influence of Irish nationalism.     

Heaney and education

Seamus Heaney inhabited the world of teacher education, as a student, and later as a lecturer, in 1960s Belfast. That world was infused by three ideas: learning as a journey, learning through play, and learning as construction. This article traces correspondences between these and thematic trends in Heaney’s work. It presents the case that Heaney’s writing reflects an informed understanding of children and of learning peculiar to the mind of a great teacher. Moreover, Heaney’s contribution to education is remarkable in that it transcends the school and the academy, and offers a creative vision in which poetry and learning are inextricably linked. As Heaney put it in Among Schoolchildren, the “walls of the world expand” as reader and writer, teacher and learner, poet and child “go beyond our normal cognitive bounds and sense a new element where we are not alien but liberated, more alive to ourselves, more drawn out, more educated”.