The possible influence of post-harvest objectives on Cucurbita maxima subspecies maxima and subspecies andreana evolution under cultivation at the Argentinean Northwest: an archaeological example

This paper investigates the possible links between postharvest activities and methods of plant husbandry or management of Cucurbita maxima ssp. maxima and C. maxima ssp. andreana in the prehispanic Argentinean Northwest area. Microscopic methods were used to assess the micromorphological characteristics of modern specimens of South American Cucurbita and Lagenaria species to obtain diagnostic anatomical traits. These traits were then used as criteria for identifying archaeological Cucurbitaceae rind remains from domestic to funerary contexts of the Pampa Grande archaeological site (1720 ± 50 bp, cal. 259–433 ad). Following the taxonomic identification of the archaeological plant remains, they were futher assessed for signs of human selection or possible cultivation, including: rind thickness, qualitative characters (lobbing, wartiness and colour) and postharvest traits (artificial shape, charring, staining and decoration of sherds). The results indicate the presence of Lagenaria siceraria together with spontaneous, intermediate and domestic C. maxima morphotypes. Different subspecies maxima morphtypes were recognized: those intended as food, having thin pericarps to facilitate consumption and those intended also as food, but as containers too, as in Lagenaria, in which the rinds are thickened and lignified. The latter morphotype may possibly represent a strategy of postharvest intensification, but not through new processing techniques, but through the development of landraces with a longer fruit shelf life, resulting from changing husbandry criteria to selective pressures over cultivated stands.     

Women’s magazines and socioeconomic change: Para Ti,identity and politics in urban Argentina

Popular media plays an important role in the production and reproduction of hegemonic cultural norms, as well as in the construction of class and gender identities. Periods of economic crisis generate struggles over ways of understanding social reality that can destabilize or reinforce different identities. The media often plays an important role in the reconfiguration of identities. Expanding on these ideas, I conduct a discourse analysis of a women’s magazine to examine how popular media reflected and influenced shifting gender and class identities in Buenos Aires, Argentina between 1995 and 2008, a period of major socioeconomic change. By drawing attention to supposedly ‘non-political’ actors and spaces, I argue for expanding the range of sites we investigate in order to make sense of changing class and gender subjectivities during times of socioeconomic crisis.     

Minateda rock shelters (Albacete) and post-palaeolithic art of the Mediterranean Basin in Spain: pigments,surfaces and patinas

The inorganic and organic fractions of two microsamples of prehistoric paint from the same site, the Minateda rock shelters, are analysed here for the first time. The two samples correspond to two rock shelters of different styles (Levantine and schematic) – Abrigo Grande de Minateda (The Great Rock Shelter of Minateda) and Abrigo del Barranco de la Mortaja (Del Barranco de la Mortaja Rock Shelter). Since its discovery, historiographical tradition has emphasised the Abrigo Grande de Minateda, with its magnificence and complexity, as emblematic of the origin and evolution of rock art in the Mediterranean Basin of the Iberian Peninsula (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Four complementary techniques –Microphotography, Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), Raman Spectroscopy and Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectroscopy (GC–MS)– were combined to identify and characterise the physicochemical properties of the paint and of the surface. We present an interpretation of the results that leads us to define complex taphonomic alterations beyond the usual distinction of layers that include the surface, pigments and patinas.     

Italian religious historiography in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines Italian religious historiography of the past decade, taking into account the difficulty of this national limitation, given the increasingly frequent arid profitable exchanges among the diverse European traditions. The review first examines some general works and then focuses on certain themes that mark the historiographical trends: ecclesiastical institutions, with particular reference to the period of the Reformation and the Counter‐Reformation; religious complexity, with special reference to heterodox movements, to Jewish culture and to the Islamic presence; and people's religious experiences, with particular emphasis on those of women, in their interaction with both cultural production and social history.     

Les «yeux d’Argos» et les «étoiles d’Astrée» pour mesurer l’univers les jésuites italiens et la science nouvelle

As what happened for thenova in 1604 and for the three comets which appeared in 1618 starting the debate between Galileo and the Jesuits of the Roman College, even the comet of 1644 enhanced the curiosity and expectations in astrometers’ and astrologers’ minds. This work focuses on some aspects of the European debate, by fixing our attention on the Bolognese observatory school of Santa-Lucia in particular, where Giovan Battista Riccioli and his socios had started an experimental activity which was known and appreciated for its accuracy all over Europe. It also closely examines the revaluation of the «medium sciences», such as geography and hydrometry, to point out the sociocultural conditions that originated the growth of new professional characters like engineers and technicians in Bologna.     

The Kiss of Death: Farewell Letters from the Condemned to Death in Civil War and Postwar Spain

Right from the start of the Spanish Civil War, thousands of prisoners were executed by shooting. Today, many of them remain anonymous, but others, thanks to their writing, have passed into history. In the final hours before their execution, these men and women had the chance to write a few farewell letters to their nearest and dearest. These letters, known by historians as “chapel letters,” passed either through official channels exercising prior censorship or else were sent clandestinely. In their farewell letters, the condemned to death informed their families of their tragic fate and dedicated their last words to them. Genuine family relics, material and spiritual testaments, instruments of denunciation and propaganda, these chapel letters are regarded as the most sincere documents of any historical period. Since prisoners expressed in them their most intimate feelings and thoughts, they constitute the most exceptional testimony of all epistolary forms practised behind bars. By using an interdisciplinary approach this essay seeks to define the material and functional characteristics of this genre and to contextualise it in the framework of ordinary writings and scribal culture.     

‘Defending the race’: the Italian reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism

Abstract In 1938 the regime's popular periodical La Difesa della Razza published the portrait of Saartjie Baartman (a Khoisan woman known to the western world as ‘The Hottentot Venus’) to discourage miscegenation in the empire of Italian East Africa. But by 1938, Italian public and scientific interest in the Hottentot Venus had long faded away. In addition, readily available photographs of Italo-Eritreans could have been used to show the ‘outcome’ of miscegenation. Why then did the regime's organ publish a portrait of ‘The Hottentot Venus’? This article addresses this question, and explores how Baartman's story could serve the regime's aim of forging a new ‘racial consciousness’ among Italians. By focusing on the transformation of scientific discourses from the 1850s to the late 1930s, and on their silences, the article illuminates the process through which some of the regime's anthropologists constructed a new, ‘made in Italy’ story for the Hottentot Venus. Deliberately leaving out all the main issues long debated during the previous century, they turned this figure into an empty icon to support Fascist colonial obsession with the purity and prestige of the Italian race.