Shooting out the slate: working with flaked arrowheads made on thin-layered rocks

Although there are many archaeological and ethnographic evidences for the use of slate and similar rocks for flaking purpose, they raised little interest among specialists, leading to a general ignorance of specific problems associated with these raw materials. Starting from the study of several Neolithic and Chalcolithic slate collections of the Western Iberia, the mechanical properties of slate and its impact on knapping process has been defined; subsequently, manufacturing and use of slate and phyllite projectiles have been undertaken. The results show that the ease with which these materials break into sheets of uniform thickness and morphology would provide an ideal basis for a fast and easy manufacture of arrowheads. In addition, these projectiles have shown a penetration capability and resistance statistically equivalent to those made on more standard materials (i.e. chalcedony or rock crystal). Therefore, slate and other rocks with a high degree of fissility would have been very attractive to prehistoric knappers endeavouring to make arrowheads.     

Hafted armatures and multi-component tool design at the Micoquian site of Inden-Altdorf,Germany

Excavation of the Micoquian site Inden-Altdorf (Weisweiler-124) near the former German capital Bonn in western Germany has revealed the first valid open-site habitation features with hut-like structures and associated hearths for the Middle Palaeolithic in Central Europe. It has been dated to the Eemian interglacial (OIS 5e), a warm interglacial between 128 and 115 ka BP. Various wear traces and especially organic residues have been detected on a large number of stone tools using microscopic use-wear analysis of lithics recovered from the site. A multi-level analysis developed through an experimental framework and archaeological study using optical light microscopes, scanning electron microscopes and energy-dispersive X-ray microprobes identified the adhering residues as birch pitch. Birch pitch is the oldest synthetically produced material and was used as an adhesive to attach lithic implements to wooden shafts. While such hafting technology is commonly associated with modern humans in the Upper Palaeolithic, the birch pitch residues found on the Micoquian tools of Inden-Altdorf suggest that hafting technologies and the frequent use of multi-component tools already existed in the Middle Palaeolithic, c. 120 ka BP in central Europe.     

适应时代步伐 改进教学方式

随着现代社会高新技术的不断发展和改革,信息技术的更新与进步都在发生翻天覆地的变化,信息技术课程作为信息技术教学的重要组成部分,发挥着举足轻重的作用,本文针对信忠技术教学的最新需求,分析了信息技术教学的现状,并提出了一些改革建议。     

The Cables and Cablets of the Mary Rose (1545)

Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent on 19 July 1545, during an engagement with a Franco/Papal invasion fleet. During excavation between 1979 and 1982, four cable coils and a number of lengths of cable and cablets were discovered. Direct study of these, combined with the excavation, finds, and conservation records, have established the number of cables found on the wreck, their spatial organization on the vessel, and their function at the time of the wrecking. Analysis of the cables has illuminated 16th‐century rope‐making techniques. The possible presence of Tudor salvage cables is also discussed.     

The Jewish Communities of Central Asia in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

When the Jews first settled in Central Asia is uncertain, but circumstantial evidence clearly indicates that this happened at least two and a half thousand years ago. In the first millennium AD, the Jews lived only in cities no farther than 750?km east of the Caspian sea (in the eighth–eleventh centuries the sea was called Khazarian). Only later did they migrate to the central part of the region, to cities like Samarkand and Bukhara. It is possible that Jews from Khazaria joined them, since they already had tight trade connections with Central Asia and China. There is no trace of evidence regarding the existence of Jews in the entirety of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century. At the very end of the sixteenth century Bukhara became the new ethnoreligious center of the Jews in that region. In the first half of the nineteenth century, thanks to European travelers visiting Central Asia at that time, the term “Bukharan Jews” was assigned to this sub-ethnic Jewish group. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary source materials, this article aims to prove that the presence of Jews in Central Asia was not continuous, and therefore the modern Bukharan Jews are not descendants of the first Jewish settlers there. It also attempts to determine where Central Asia’s first Jewish population disappeared to.     

An experimental ethnoarchaeological approach to understanding the development of use wear associated with the processing of river cane for split-cane technology

Southeastern Indians have been using cane (Arundinaria spp.) for basketry and matting for thousands of years. Unfortunately, it is only under extraordinary preservation conditions that such items survive archaeologically. Inferring the production of split-cane technology requires an understanding of prehistoric manufacturing and processing techniques. It is hypothesized that stone tools were once used to process cane for use in split-cane technologies. In the Southeast, it is not uncommon to find stone tools with traces of plant use; however attributing wear to specific plants has been problematic. Pilot experiments, grounded on ethnoarchaeological observations, were conducted with river cane (Arundinaria gigantea) in collaboration with expert basket weavers in the Cherokee Nation. The experimental ethnoarchaeological program was designed to test the efficiency of stone tools in cane processing and document use wear through microscopic observations. The results found that non-retouched flakes were efficient for processing river cane and that the different stages of splint preparation resulted in the differential development of use-related wear. Additional experimentation with river cane is necessary to better define use wear and establish criteria for identification in archaeological contexts. Nonetheless, the collaborative and experimental approach undertaken demonstrated the utility of combining traditional archaeological methods with experimentation, ethnoarchaeology, and tribal knowledge.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

Raw Material and Technological Changes in Ceramic Productions at Sai Island,Northern Sudan,from the Seventh to the Third Millennium BC

This study presents the results of integrated mineralogical, petrographic and chemical analyses of different ceramic assemblages and local sediments from Sai Island, northern Sudan, dating to between the seventh and the third millennium bc , and highlights a significant variability in the raw materials and technology of these productions. Although archaeometric analyses of ceramics are widely employed in many parts of the world, a lamentable scientific gap exists for African pottery, which this paper aims to bridge with new and compelling results.     

Cyclical downturn or structural disease? The decline of the Italian economy in the last twenty years

Italy is experiencing at present the most serious economic recession of the post-war period. Between 2008 and 2013 national income fell by 9 per cent, per capita incomes by 11 per cent, and industrial production by 25 per cent; and unemployment doubled. In this essay we argue that, while this dramatic situation has been made worse by the policies of ‘expansive austerity’, its origins can be traced back to changes that took place in the 1990s (notably globalization, competition for emerging new markets and the diffusion of new technologies – ICT) to which Italy failed to react speedily or effectively by reorganizing its entire productive system. Instead, many of the reforms that have been introduced with respect to the labour market, for example, have reduced costs but in ways that have encouraged firms to stay in traditional sectors where products are poorly differentiated and of low technology content. If the Italian economy is not to become even weaker, new reforms are urgently needed to encourage innovative investment and push through to completion a restructuring of the industrial system that can no longer be deferred.     

THE CRISIS OF HUMANITY: OR,WHAT IF WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN?

This collection of nine essays brings together a variety of responses to the question of the “nonhuman turn” within the humanities and the social sciences, understood broadly as a developing concern with overcoming anthropocentrism in its diverse manifestations. Emerging from The Nonhuman Turn conference held at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee in 2012, which was hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies, it represents the first attempt to account for and consolidate the many intellectual approaches and developments that may now be regarded as constituting the nonhuman turn. The nonhuman turn is contextualized as both “yet another” turn but also a necessary one, and as something critically distinct from “the posthuman turn”—whereas the posthuman turn is concerned with what comes after the human (ways of being, ways of thinking), the nonhuman turn insists (according to editor Richard Grusin) that “we have never been human.” My reading of this volume suggests that this claim is not borne out across the chapters it contains, and that the notion that we have never been human, though a noble gesture to Bruno Latour's widely lauded claim that “we have never been modern,” does not enable a new philosophy, nor does it advance the two primary streams of philosophical thought featured here: object‐oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism.