Starch grains analysis of stone knives from Changning site,Qinghai Province,Northwest China

Plant residues recovered from prehistoric stone artifacts can be used to help explain tool function and plant use. At the Changning site in Qinghai Province, Northwest China, dating from 4000 yr BP, we examined starch granules extracted from three slate stone knives. A total of 153 starch grains were retrieved from three stone knives, from which we identified starches from legumes, the Triticeae tribe, foxtail millet (Setaria italica), broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), roots and tubers. These results indicate that the stone knives may have been used for a variety of activities that included reaping grasses and food processing. The species of starch grains retrieved from the study sample reveal that diverse crops were cultivated at the Changning site 4000 years ago.     

‘Are We Ready?’: Belgium and the Entente’s Military Planning for a War Against Germany, 1906–1914

Abstract

While historians have consistently focused on the development of German, French, and British planning in the years preceding the Great War, few have truly acknowledged neutral Belgium’s role in defining the strategic paradigm of 1914. Belgium held the strategic key to the opening salvos of a future Franco-German war, and each of its Guarantors were determined to obtain the initiative. While German planners were prepared to seize it by force, the Entente (particularly Britain), remained wary of its obligations. Instead, Britain sought to determine Belgian intentions and capabilities through secret and unbinding staff conversations in 1906 and 1912. The former proved useful in establishing a framework for co-operation but ultimately came to nothing. By the time they were resumed in 1912, Anglo-Belgian diplomatic relations had soured, while Belgium’s military reforms and its emergence as a colonial power gave it a renewed sense of confidence. Belgian officials were determined to retain the kingdom’s agency in the formulation of its defence policy and resented Entente suggestions of pre-emptive action. Neutrality was subordinated to independence, which itself could not be guaranteed were Belgium to conclude even the loosest of military accords. Consequently, Entente plans were forced surrender the strategic initiative to the Germans.     

The Heroic Image of the Warrior in the First World War

Abstract

Sun Tzu asserts that true success is not winning every battle fought, but subduing the enemy’s will without fighting at all. The author asserts that the U.S. planning efforts for post-WWII Japan from 1942 to 1945 reveal a unique period where military and political planners actively pursued a greater understanding of the role an enemy’s will-to-fight plays in conflict. The historical record reveals an iterative — and often heated — discourse among experts in diplomacy, governance, political culture, anthropology, and military intelligence. Consequently, Allied commanders entertained and ultimately executed a war plan for the occupation of Japan with fewer forces and less fighting than called for by the alternative plan for invasion. The fundamental difference in the two plans — an assumed effect that safeguarding the Imperial Institution would have on the Japanese people’s will-to-fight. In the end, meaningful discourse enabled Allies to target the enemy’s will separately from their means, enabling conditions where subduing the Japanese will required the Allies not to fight.     

Between the General and the Particular: Reminiscences of Plato's Timaeus in Piotr Rawicz's Le sang du ciel

Piotr Rawicz's novel Le sang du ciel depicts a Jewish protagonist, Boris, who manages to escape the Nazi genocide and, as a result, doubts his own legitimacy to bear witness to the other Jews' fate during that period. His difficult relationships with the Jewish community find expression in an intertextual construction, founded on the ontocosmology developed in Plato's Timaeus. Boris uses—and sometimes perverts—Plato's world vision both to measure his own inauthenticity and to define new ways of creating a state of "fusion" with the "beings" surrounding him. Another technique to overcome Boris's inability to testify is the use of a frame narrative, which, moreover, sheds new light on the protagonist's identity as a witness.     

Some Literary Cafes of the Late Nineteenth Century

A concern with the use and abuse of power, how it is exercised, by whom, and to what ends runs throughout the fiction of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré. His 1984 novel Fra Junoy o l'agonia dels sons, which was awarded the Premi Prudenci Bertrana, Crítica Serra d'Or, and Nacional de la Crítica, dramatizes the intransigence of ecclesiastical authorities in conflict with the desire for tolerance of a friar. Cabré employs different temporal and spatial planes, shifting points of view, and one of his favorite strategies, that of beginning his novels in medias res and showing the consequences of actions before narrating the actions themselves. A contrapuntal technique contrasts not just characters, but differing concepts of religion and religious life, and sets quotations from the Bible against passages from the governing documents of the convent where Fra Junoy serves as confessor. The clash between his doubts and the certitude of the convent's rigid abbess calls to mind the contest between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn in John Patrick Shanley's Doubt: A Parable (2005).     

Emplotment as Epic in Archaeological Writing: The Site Monograph as Narrative

To emplot a narrative as epic is to present a story of vast scope and multiple plots as a legitimate member of a tradition of other such stories. This article argues that emplotment as epic is the broadest of three levels of plot in archaeological writings. At that level, the site monograph emerges as a characteristically archaeological form of narrative, fundamental to archaeology as a discipline and a source of chronic anxiety for archaeologists. The ‘stories’ told in site monographs are epic in length, diversity of materials covered and multiplicity of themes, plots and authors. Indeed, the more complexities of that sort the better, since those are features that help to emplot the work as good archaeology.     

Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories

In this article, I explore the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a site through which social memories are transmitted and connected to the realities of Argentina’s present. The conjuncture or disjuncture between people’s direct and individual memories of the past, their memory of the society’s collective past, and the “official” history can be used as a prism for seeing how power, and resistance, work through and reinforce a complex political economy. By giving testimony and re‐contextualizing the events of the dictatorship, the Mothers have been able to challenge the historical narratives of the state and construct competing ones. Furthermore, the present‐day activism and goals of the Mothers, as individuals and as a collective, are based on political commitments that have arisen in great part out of maternal relationships and maternal memories. Their maternal memories have led to a re‐signification of neoliberalism as a type of structural violence.     

Literary geography: setting and narrative space

This paper explores some of the ways in which analytical strategies developed within narrative theory might be combined with recent developments in literary geography in the study of setting and narrative space. It suggests that despite narrative theory's urge toward categorization and its associated tendency to conceive of space as relatively stable and fixed, the technical vocabulary developed within the discipline has much to offer the literary geographer. The first section of the paper reviews some of the areas of potential collaboration in this cross-disciplinary overlap, while the second section offers three brief case study readings designed to suggest the potential of a combination of the analytical specificity of narrative studies with the imaginative stretch of spatial theory. The case studies look at setting and narrative space as they emerge in relation to narrative voices and multiple audiences in three case study texts: P.K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), J.A. Mitchell's The Last American (1889), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).     

试论中国水下文化遗产的法制建设与国际合作

我国水下文化遗产保护受到关注的时间较晚,虽然近年发展速度较快,但距离形成一种更为理想的水下文化遗产保护体制和机制的要求还相差很大。本文初步对我国水下文化遗产的法律建设进行了介绍和分析,并介绍了联合国《保护水下文化遗产公约》试图由水下文化遗产的国际合作的视角,探讨如何利用国际规则促进我国水下文化遗产事业的发展。     

LET MANY FLOWERS BLOOM

In this rich and sensible assessment of historians' practice and prospects, Allan Megill focuses on the obligation that historians have to support their accounts with evidence. He does this, first, by illustrating the difference between real and merely claimed evidence and, then, by giving an analysis of the underlying nature of evidence in historical accounts. Turning later to the question of how historians and their public should feel about diminishing unity (fragmentation) in historiography and the practices that generate it, Megill explains the sources of fragmentation and then argues that it doesn't matter whether historians are doing the same thing and/or doing it in the same way. What matters, rather, is whether they are doing interesting things and doing them well.