从朝鲜时代的宫中仪礼看遮日的功能和特性——以19世纪以后宫中宴享为中心

朝鲜时代宫中举行仪礼行事时,经常排设和使用一种名为“遮日”的能够隔断日射和降雨的幕构造设施。作者以19世纪以后宫中宴享为中心分析了遮日的功能与特性,详细探讨了遮日的构成、种类、材料和排设方式等具体特性,并对在宫中仪礼行事的举行地如何使用遮日加以推断性的复原。     

殷墟青铜礼器铸造工艺研究综论

本文评述了与殷墟青铜礼器铸造工艺研究相关的技术史、考古学和艺术史文献,概述了殷墟治铸遗址的发现和研究状况,分析取得的认识和存在的局限,探讨了在技术演进、文化传播及治铸业的组织管理等方面值得深入的问题.     

Ancient DNA in human bones from Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Greece and Crete

Attempts were made to detect ancient DNA (aDNA) in samples of 88 human skeletons from eight Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Greece and Crete. Ancient DNA was absent in specimens from Nea Nikomedia, Lerna, Karaviádena (Zakro), Antron Grave Circle A and Mycenae Grave Circle A. For each of three skeletons from Antron Grave Circle B that were sampled, polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) gave products for nuclear but not mitochondrial DNA, but amplicon yield was low and inconsistent with replicate PCRs failing to give reproducible results. With specimens from Mycenae Grave Circle B, evidence for mitochondrial aDNA was obtained for four of the 22 skeletons that were studied, and at Kouphovouno evidence for mitochondrial and/or nuclear aDNA was obtained with eight of the 20 skeletons that were examined. We conclude that, although aDNA might be present in some Eastern Mediterranean skeletons from later centuries of the Bronze Age, it is not commonly found in material from this period and is likely to be absent from older material.     

Resurrections and rebirths: how the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics

The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Risorgimento by the left and by the Resistance during the 1930s and 1940s, the general semantic space carved by the post-war democratic forces on both right and left with reference to the Risorgimento, and the sudden return to the memory of the Risorgimento in the 1990s and afterwards. The aim of the article is to understand both continuities and changes in the reference to the Risorgimento in twentieth-century political discourse, and to put into perspective Italy’s ‘particular’ road to modernity within a comparative European frame.     

Unity in the trees: Arbor Day and Republican China, 1915–1927

ABSTRACT

Scholars of modern China have overlooked the role environmental policy played in early Republican efforts to promote both modernization and national unity. Beginning in 1916, the national government in Beijing mandated that each province and county throughout the Chinese nation celebrate “Arbor Day” in order to foster a modern Chinese environmental culture. This change was made in response to global discourses that linked forest cover to a modern nation’s moral and economic health. Arbor Day coincided with the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, a day traditionally reserved for ancestor worship. Due to the vast climatic disparities within China, many governments planted Arbor Day trees under conditions that made it impossible for them to thrive. Nevertheless, officials throughout China continued to celebrate Arbor Day as proof of their loyalty to the government in Beijing. Arbor Day thus served more as an exercise in promoting national unity than in creating a viable reforestation campaign.     

Experimental Pesah or,How do you Eat a Lamb while Holding a Staff in your Hand?

The Passover festival has been the ritual expression of Jewish cultural identity ever since the Old Testament got the form it has today. This article looks at the ways cultural identity was expressed in antiquity, critiques the traditional prioritising of the story of exodus over its biblical ritual expression in understanding ancient Jewish identity and explores various Pesah sacrifice instructions in Exodus 12 as an implicit polemical ritual discourse engaged in constructing a ritual of cultural distinction. The article pays close attention to the tension between the invented and the real of the instructions, and attempts to identify the possible cultural other against whom some of the Exodus instructions were constructed.     

Inhabiting Remote Tropical Seashores at 1500–1100 b.c.: Water,Practicalities, and Rituals in the Mariana Islands

When people first inhabited the Remote Oceanic region of the world at 1500 b.c., they generated archaeological sites attesting to their practical coastal adaptations in tandem with their ceremonial traditions, wherein water figured vitally in daily living and ritual performance. Of eight known first-settlement sites in the Mariana Islands, Ritidian in Guam uniquely incorporates one residential habitation plus two caves related to water collection, pictographs, consumption of unusual foods, and use of exceptionally decorative objects. The inter-connected findings clarify what was “special” about the special-use caves, in total articulating a fuller sense of cultural life and landscape than otherwise could be possible.