Experimental reconstruction of a short cist

An experiment was carried out to determine the methods, labour force and time needed to reconstruct a cist of massive slabs. The most difficult and time-consuming task was the bringing of the slabs to the site. It was concluded that the whole operation of construction would occupy at least eight able-bodied adults for to 3 days.     

In search of policy makers

Hylda A. Rolfe, The Controllers: Interlocking Directorates in Large Australian Companies, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne 1967, pp. xvii + 126, $2.95 (paperbound).     

Book reviews

Stephen G. Hall and Fred Atkinson, Oil and the British Economy. London, Croom Helm, 1983–208 pp. $12.95.

Harvey B. Feigenbaum, The Politics of Public Enterprise: Oil and the French State. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985. xvii + 194 pp. $US 33.00.

H.W. Arndt, A Course Through Life: Memoirs of an Australian Economist. Canberra, National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University, 1985. ix + 177 pp. $10.00. Alan Rix (ed.), Intermittent Diplomat: The Japan and Batavia Diaries of W. MacMahon Ball. Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1988. $37.50.

Benjamin Higgins, The Road Less Travelled. A Development Economist's Quest. Canberra, National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University History of Development Studies 2, 1989. x + 204 pp. $20.00.

Francis Stuart, Towards Coming of Age. A Foreign Service Odyssey. Brisbane, Griffith University Centre for the Study of Australian‐Asian Relations. Australians in Asia series no. 2, 1989. vi + 264 pp. $12.00.

Edward L. Warner III and David A. Ochmanek, Next Moves: An Arms Control Agenda for the 1990's. Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 1989. xi + 163 pp. $US10.95.

Malcolm Saunders and Ralph Summy, The Australian Peace Movement: A Short History. Canberra, Peace Research Centre, Australian National University, 1986. 78pp. $3.75.

Malcolm Saunders, A Bibliography of Books, Articles and Theses on the History of the Australian Peace Movement. Canberra, Peace Research Centre, Australian National University, 1987. 115pp. $10.00.

Robert O'Neill, Alliances and International Order. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988. No price given.

Christine Jennett and Randal G. Steward (eds), Politics of the Future: The Role of Social Movements. Melbourne, Macmillan, 1989. xii + 471 pp. $69.95 (cloth), $34.95 (paper).

John Ravenhill (ed.), No Longer an American Lake? Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1989. ix + 226 pp. $17.95.

Peter Dennis, Troubled Days of Peace. Mountbatten and South East Asia Command, 1945–46. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987. xi + 270pp. £40.00 (cloth), £13.95 (paper).

Geoffrey M. White and Lamont Lindstrom (eds), Pacific Theater. Island Representations of World War II. Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1990. xiv + 433 pp. $44.95.

Rodney Tiffen, News and Power. Sydney Allen and Unwin, 1989. $19.95.

Janet Hunt el al. One World or ... None: Making the Difference. Canberra, Australian Council for Overseas Aid, 1988. 58pp. $5.95.

Tran Tri Vu, lost Years: My 1,632 Days in Vietnamese Reeducation Camps. Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1988. xv + 381 pp. $US15.00.

Richard J. Kessler, Rebellion and Repression in the Philippines. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989. xii + 227 pp. $US25.00.

Margaret Jolly and Martha MacIntyre (eds), Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. xiii + 296pp. $49.50.

Frank G. Jarrett and Kym Anderson, Growth, Structural Change and Economic Policy in Papua New Guinea: Implications for Agriculture. Pacific Policy Paper No. 5. Canberra, National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University. 1989. xx + 122pp. $20.00.

Trevor W. Parfitt and Stephen P. Riley, The African Debt Crisis. London, Routledge, 1989. vii + 228 pp.     

Fornicating with nuns in fifteenth-century Bologna

The article opens with the prosecution in 1432 of a spicer for abducting a nun. This is first of all presented as the story of a trial: the formation of the indictment, the defence tactics, the deposition of witnesses, and only then are the experience of the nun, and the gender relations in the event, examined. This leads to numerous contexts: legal (the development of the law on sexual relations with professed nuns); judicial (similar cases in late fourteenth-/fifteenth-century Bologna); monastic (the unstable history of convents); social (the place of the nunnery in the local sexual economy); and historiographic (Ruggiero's ‘culture of illicit sexuality’).     

Linguistic Imperialism and Minoan Archaeology (Greece)

This contribution to the debate about Anglo- and non-Anglo archaeologies briefly describes the issue from the point of view of Minoan Archaeology (Crete, Greece). The authors seek to problematise (English) language use within this discipline and highlight the complexity of archaeological discourses.

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Resumen Esta contribución a la discusión sobre arqueologías anglófonas y no anglófonas describe brevemente el asunto desde el punto de vista de la arqueología Minoica (Creta, Grecia). Los autores buscan a problematizar el idioma (en este caso el inglés) utilizado en esta disciplina y destacar la complejidad de los discursos arqueológicos.

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Résumé Cette contribution au débat entre archéologues anglophones et archéologues non-anglophones présente brièvement la question du point de vue de l’archéologie minoenne (Crète, Grèce). Les auteurs cherchent à problématiser l’utilisation de la langue (anglaise) dans le cadre de la discipline et à souligner la complexité du discourt archéologique.

     

Supra-Regional Networks in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia

When prehistoric archaeologists write accounts of the Epi-palaeolithic or Neolithic of southwest Asia, they resort to an archaic narrative style of culture-history that was formulated by Gordon Childe in the first half of the last century. These narratives frame their account of events within the format of a succession of archaeological cultures. In addition, the received form of the narrative is founded within a core-area of the Levant, the Mediterranean corridor zone; it is assumed that all the important social and economic innovations of the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic occurred within that corridor, from where the cultures and their innovations spread through diffusionary processes to dominate wider parts of the region. The first part of this paper is a critique of the unwarranted assumption of the existence of archaeological cultures, and of the Levantine primacy hypothesis. The second part proposes an alternative to the notion of the archaeological culture. First, we review the evidence for wide-area cultural networking through the exchange of goods and materials and the sharing of cultural behaviours that characterises the Neolithic. We can view the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic periods as a time when new cultural processes were being employed to build and maintain novel sedentary, permanently co-resident communities of unprecedented scale. At a higher level, we see communities engaged in the construction and maintenance of more and more extensive networks of communities, in a form similar to, but not identical with, the peer polity interaction sphere model first described by Colin Renfrew in a different context.