Quality Quartz: working stone at a bronze age kerbed Cairn at Olcote,near Calanais,Isle of Lewis

This paper discusses an assemblage of worked and smashed quartz associated with a Bronze Age kerbed cairn at Olcote. Most analytical treatments of quartz in Scottish prehistory have been structured around a pervasive dualism: quartz working is either the mundane use of a low quality raw material or the ritual use of a symbolically laden referent. The assemblage from Olcote highlights the dangers of such dichotomous analytical positions.     

Ruwayda: an historic urban settlement in north Qatar

SUMMARY: Ruwayda was first identified as an archaeological site in the 1970s and was excavated between 2009 and 2014. Despite a paucity of documentary evidence, this large settlement, which extends over an area of more than 90 hectares, contains a number of features indicative of an urban settlement including two mosques, a series of warehouses, a large multi-period fort, large courtyard houses interspersed with smaller, less substantial structures and a number of cemeteries. In addition to these buildings, there is also evidence for associated field systems and a walled garden.     

The history of econometric ideas. Historical perspectives in modern economics

This article presents a comparative analysis of the concepts of totalitarian democracy and positive liberty in the work of Jacob Leib Talmon and Isaiah Berlin. Its main purpose is to show that a combined analysis of Talmon and Berlin's biographical relationship and their individual texts demonstrates that Talmon's idea of totalitarian democracy may have had a greater influence on Berlin's notion of positive liberty than Berlin seems to have ever acknowledged. The article first summarises the intellectual and biographical relationships that tied these two authors together in a personal friendship and an intellectual fellowship that lasted for more than three decades. In the second part, the insights drawn from the investigation of the authors' intellectual and biographical relationships are linked to an analysis of their texts, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Two Concepts of Liberty. Finally, in the third part of the article, three crucial aspects of Talmon's definition of totalitarian democracy are considered: the interpretation of the Enlightenment and Rousseau's thought, the view of the French revolution, and the possible impact each of these has on subsequent Marxist and socialist reflection, to see how they are addressed in Berlin's idea of positive liberty.     

On the tracks of the earliest dinosaurs: implications for the hypothesis of dinosaurian monophyly

From the record of dinosaurian skeletal remains it has been inferred that the origin and initial diversification of dinosaurs were rapid events, occupying an interval of about 5 million years in the Late Triassic. By contrast numerous reports of dinosauroid tracks imply that the emergence of dinosaurs was a more protracted affair extending through much of the Early and Middle Triassic. This study finds no convincing evidence of dinosaur tracks before the late Ladinian. Each of the three dinosaurian clades — Theropoda, Sauropodomorpha, Ornithischia — produced a unique track morphotype that appears to be an independent modification of the chirotherioid pattern attributed to stem-group archosaurs (thecodontian reptiles). The existence of three divergent track morphotypes is consistent with the concept of dinosaurian polyphyly but can be reconciled with the hypothesis of dinosaurian monophyly only by invoking many and rapid reversals in the locomotor anatomy of early dinosaurs. The origin of dinosaurs was not the correlate or consequence of any single event or process, be it global change, competitive replacement, or opportunism in the wake of mass extinction. Instead the origin of dinosaurs is envisaged as a series of three cladogenetic events over an interval of at least 10 million years and possibly as much as 25 million years. This scenario of dinosaurian polyphyly is as well-supported by fossil evidence as is the currently favoured view of dinosaurian monophyly.     

Poromoi Tamu and the Case of the Drowning Village: History, Lost Places and the Stories We Tell

Archaeological excavations at an ancestral village site within rainforest in Papua New Guinea has revealed buried cultural evidence that can be explained in a number of ways. While interpretations based on Western archaeological methods suggest regional landscape dynamics informed by geomorphological processes, Indigenous Rumu oral traditions suggest an interpretation of the site’s stratigraphy based on the workings of spiritual forces. The role of story-telling and new information in site interpretation and understanding is explored in light of these different yet complementary accounts.     

Two long-snouted temnospondyls (Amphibia,Labyrinthodontia) from the Triassic of Queensland

Fragmentary remains of the first long snouted temnospondyls from the Triassic of Queensland are described. One is the first vertebrate fossil from the Glenidal Formation, while the other adds another member to the extensive fauna of the Arcadia Formation. Both specimens are placed provisionally in the Family Trematosauridae.     

Permian non-marine bivalves of the Falkland Islands and their palaeoenvironmental significance

Simões, M.G., Quaglio, F., Warren, L., Anelli, L.E., Stone, P., Riccomini, C., Grohmann, C.H. & Chamani, M.A.C. December 2012. Permian non-marine bivalves of the Falkland Islands and their palaeoenvironmental significance. Alcheringa 36, 543–554. ISSN 0311-5518.

We describe the occurrence of non-marine bivalves in exposures of the Middle Permian (Capitanian) Brenton Loch Formation on the southern shore of Choiseul Sound, East Falklands. The bivalves are associated with ichnofossils and were collected from a bed in the upper part of the formation, within a 25 cm thick interval of dark siltstones and mudstones with planar lamination, overlain by massive sandstones. The shells are articulated, with the valves either splayed open or closed. At the top of the succession, mudstone beds nearly 1.5 m above the bivalve-bearing layers yielded well-preserved Glossopteris sp. cf. G. communis leaf fossils. The closed articulated condition of some shells indicates preservation under high sedimentation rates with low residence time of bioclasts at the sediment/water interface. However, the presence of specimens with splayed shells is usually correlated to the slow decay of the shell ligament in oxygen-deficient bottom waters. The presence of complete carbonized leaves of Glossopteris associated with the bivalve-bearing levels also suggests a possibly dysoxic-anoxic bottom environment. Overall, our data suggest that the bivalves were preserved by abrupt burial, possibly by distal sediment flows into a Brenton Loch lake, and may represent autochthonous to parautochthonous fossil accumulations. The shells resemble those of anthracosiids and are herein assigned to Palaeanodonta sp. aff. P. dubia, a species also found in the Permian succession of the Karoo Basin, South Africa. Our results confirm that (a) the true distributions in space and time of all Permian non-marine (freshwater) bivalves are not yet well known, and (b) there is no evidence for marine conditions in the upper part of the Brenton Loch Formation.     

Actualites

Nora, P., ed., Les Lieux de memoire (Gallimard, 1984–1993), 7 vols; last published, Les France, 3. De l'archive à l'emblème, 1034pp., ISBN 2 07 072304 6