Finding Vikings in the Danelaw

Historical, artefactual and place‐name evidence indicates that Scandinavian migrants moved to eastern England in the ninth century AD, settling in the Danelaw. However, only a handful of characteristically Scandinavian burials have been found in the region. One, widely held, explanation is that most of these Scandinavian settlers quickly adopted local Christian burial customs, thus leaving Scandinavians indistinguishable from the Anglo‐Saxon population. We undertook osteological and isotopic analysis to investigate the presence of first‐generation Scandinavian migrants. Burials from Masham were typical of the later Anglo‐Saxon period and included men, women and children. The location and positioning of the four adult burials from Coppergate, however, are unusual for Anglo‐Scandinavian York. None of the skeletons revealed interpersonal violence. Isotopic evidence did not suggest a marine component in the diet of either group, but revealed migration on a regional, and possibly an international, scale. Combined strontium and oxygen isotope analysis should be used to investigate further both regional and Scandinavian migration in the later Anglo‐Saxon period.     

A Lingering Diminuendo? The Conference on Devolution, 1919–20

This article looks at one of the more obscure moments in British constitutional history, the rise of federal devolution in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century and, in particular, the context to the Conference on Devolution that sat between October 1919 and April 1920. The conference, as this article will briefly discuss, has been relegated to footnote status in the historiography on federal devolution and British politics. However, while the conference has not been the subject of detailed academic attention, the claim that devolution and constitutional reform in this period was a by‐product of the crisis in Ireland pre‐partition has gathered considerable traction among political historians. This article will redress both the paltry analysis of the Conference on Devolution within the academic literature and the Irish‐centric historiography on federal devolution in the early 20th century. On the latter front, this article will demonstrate that the conference was the product of forces that extended beyond the Irish crisis, in particular parliamentary congestion. As for the conference itself, this article will use a wide range of archival sources to examine critically the conference's deliberations and in doing so will challenge prevailing assumptions regarding the supposedly one firm source of agreement during the conference: the powers that the devolved bodies should enjoy.     

Exploring the potential linkages between oil‐field brine reinjection,crystalline basement permeability,and triggered seismicity for the Dagger Draw Oil field,southeastern New Mexico,USA, using hydrologic modeling

We used hydrologic models to explore the potential linkages between oil‐field brine reinjection and increases in earthquake frequency (up to M_d 3.26) in southeastern New Mexico and to assess different injection management scenarios aimed at reducing the risk of triggered seismicity. Our analysis focuses on saline water reinjection into the basal Ellenburger Group beneath the Dagger Draw Oil field, Permian Basin. Increased seismic frequency (>M_d 2) began in 2001, 5 years after peak injection, at an average depth of 11 km within the basement 15 km to the west of the reinjection wells. We considered several scenarios including assigning an effective or bulk permeability value to the crystalline basement, including a conductive fault zone surrounded by tighter crystalline basement rocks, and allowing permeability to decay with depth. We initially adopted a 7 m (0.07 MPa) head increase as the threshold for triggered seismicity. Only two scenarios produced excess heads of 7m five years after peak injection. In the first, a hydraulic diffusivity of 0.1 m² s^?1 was assigned to the crystalline basement. In the second, a hydraulic diffusivity of 0.3 m² s^?1 was assigned to a conductive fault zone. If we had considered a wider range of threshold excess heads to be between 1 and 60 m, then the range of acceptable hydraulic diffusivities would have increased (between 0.1–0.01 m² s^?1 and 1–0.1 m² s^?1 for the bulk and fault zone scenarios, respectively). A permeability–depth decay model would have also satisfied the 5‐year time lag criterion. We also tested several injection management scenarios including redistributing injection volumes between various wells and lowering the total volume of injected fluids. Scenarios that reduced computed excess heads by over 50% within the crystalline basement resulted from reducing the total volume of reinjected fluids by a factor of 2 or more.     

FINGERPRINTING OF ROMAN MINTS USING LASER‐ABLATION MC–ICP–MS LEAD ISOTOPE ANALYSIS*

In this paper we present data to demonstrate the applicability of laser‐ablation MC–ICP–MS isotope analysis to archaeological artefacts, in this case Roman silver coins. The technique requires no chemical preparation, does minimal damage to the sample and yields external reproducibility that is better than conventional TIMS analysis; ²⁰⁷Pb/²⁰⁶Pb =±0.015% 2σ in comparison with ²⁰⁷Pb/²⁰⁶Pb =±0.04% 2σ, respectively. We show that Pb isotope compositions give isotope fingerprints to mints despite the likely reworking of the metal during coin production.     

Oxygen and strontium isotope evidence for mobility in Roman Winchester

Artefacts and burial rites in the late Roman cemetery at Lankhills School, Winchester, southern England, were used by Clarke (1979) to distinguish between local Romano-British individuals and migrants thought to be from the Danube region, a suggestion tested through isotope analysis by Evans et al. (2006a,b). This paper reports strontium (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) and oxygen (δ¹⁸O) isotope data for tooth enamel sampled from a further 40 individuals from more recent excavations on the same site. Results suggest that up to a quarter of the sampled Lankhills individuals were incomers, with several individuals possibly originating from the Hungarian Basin and the Southern Mediterranean. However, there was no clear link between isotopic signature and archaeological origin attribution, suggesting that in many cases burial practice was dictated by factors other than ‘ethnicity’, such as kinship, marriage or cultural and political preferences.     

Reaping the rewards: the potential of well designed methodology,a comment on Vardi et al. (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1716–1724) and Goodale et al. (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1192–1201)

The recent articles by Vardi et al., “Tracing sickle blade levels of wear and discard patterns: a new sickle gloss quantification method” (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1716–1724), and Goodale et al., “Sickle blade life-history and the transition to agriculture: an early Neolithic case study from Southwest Asia” (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1192–1201), are two papers that seek to address interesting archaeological questions through the development of new approaches to measuring the duration of stone tool use. Here comment is made on the fashion in which research design and analytic procedures contribute to limit the capabilities of each of the techniques presented. Whilst the authors support the investigation of novel techniques, in order for the results of any use-wear analysis to be accepted as reliable the methods employed must be demonstrably sound.