The Mississippian Site of Origin for the So-Called Moundville Spider

For 60 years, the origin of an iconographically significant example of Southeastern Mississippian symbolic art has been enmeshed in error and ambiguity. A trail of sleuthing over 25 years provides information used to assess museum curation records and published clues from 1887 to the present, contextualizing the mystery and finally allowing identification of a specific Mississippian period cemetery of origin for the so-called Moundville spider.     

Identification of a Deep-water B-29 WWII Aircraft via ROV Telepresence Survey

American-produced B-29 Superfortress bomber aircraft flew missions against Imperial Japan in the Pacific Theater from air bases in the Mariana Islands from November 1944 until the end of WWII. Mechanical failures forced many B-29s into the ocean surrounding Saipan and Tinian. Terrestrial wreckage of these aircraft has been located in the Pacific region, but no losses in deep water were located until 2016, when a NOAA exploration cruise investigated sonar targets in the Saipan Channel, between Saipan and Tinian. Disarticulated wreckage from a B-29 was located at 370 m over a large area of the seabed. Telepresence-enabled, non-invasive exploration from NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer allowed scientists on shore to view live streaming video and to work collaboratively to guide the investigation. Experts in aviation archaeology, corrosion studies, WWII history, forensic studies, marine biology, and oceanography participated in the survey using an ROV, highlighting components which could lead to possible identification of the B-29 in situ, and conducting an environmental characterization of the site. This deep-water aircraft site exemplifies multiple-stakeholder driven research in aviation archaeology and highlights several issues in the value of individual site identification.     

Positivism and Inwardness: Schopenhauer's Legacy in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil's unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities is testimony that Arthur Schopenhauer's legacy in early-twentieth-century European culture cuts across the familiar opposition between neo-romantic irrationalism and scientific positivism. I adduce evidence in Musil's unfinished novel and contemporaneous essays and journal entries that his utopian vision of an integration of ethical inwardness and scientific objectivity, an integration productive of an existence without qualities, is symptomatic of a Schopenhauerian outlook that prevailed in Europe êntre deux guerres and yielded a crisis of narratives and consequent moral ambivalence. Musil's literary style achieves a vivid rendering of the causes and conditions of the ethical paralysis afflicting the modern self committed to the exploration of inwardness.