Experimental Boat and Ship Archaeology: Principles and Methods

The need for experiments to study physical aspects of craft of the past is stated, as well as the necessity for them to have clear aims and to follow the established principles of scientific enquiry. These principles are discussed in this joint paper by ten maritime archaeologists and others, together with methods and some points of management critical to their application in this field.     

Ansätze für ein Rigveda-motivverzeichnis. vorläufige ergebnisse und schwierigkeiten

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The value of empire: tenth-century Bulgaria between Magyars,Pechenegs and Byzantium

The article seeks to explain the connection between the migration of the Magyars and Pechenegs in central and south-east Europe, in the late ninth and early tenth century, and the conflict between Byzantium and Bulgaria during the same period. Through reference to anthropologists discussing the relations between nomadic and sedentary societies (Khazanov, Barfield), and historians studying medieval rituals (Buc, Althoff, Koziol), the article interprets the aggressive policy of the Bulgarian tsar Symeon as a consistent effort to displace Byzantium as major partner of the nomadic polities in the area. By subverting the principles of Byzantine diplomacy and political culture, Symeon turned his own kingdom into a society-structuring factor in the nomadic world. The article evaluates the very meaning of imperial claims not so much in legal terms, as an effort to guarantee Bulgaria’s sovereignty in a Byzantium-centred world, but in the real-time capacity of a ruler to make use of imperial symbols and act upon the dynamically changing conjuncture.     

Taphonomy and zooarchaeology of a high-altitude Upper Pleistocene faunal sequence from Hovk-1 Cave,Armenia

The Caucasus is a key region for the study of hominid evolution and Neanderthal ecology. Taphonomic and zooarchaeological studies of sites from this region are few and only focused on sites at low-to-mid altitude zones with evidence of relatively intensive hominid occupation. This study focused on the taphonomic and zooarchaeological characteristics of a high-altitude site from the Upper Pleistocene – Hovk-1 Cave – looking at diachronic change in both natural and cultural processes which shaped the faunal assemblage. Results best fit a model in which the bones of most large mammals, mainly ungulates (wild goat, Capra aegagrus and red deer, Cervus elaphus) and cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) accumulated naturally through pitfalls, with minimal input from human or carnivore activity. This accumulation is characterized by a high frequency of complete ungulate and carnivore bones, a bear assemblage which is dominated by young-adults and a wild goat assemblage that includes juvenile and young-adult individuals. Our taphonomic reconstruction serves as a point of reference for comparative studies of palaeoenvironments and human subsistence patterns of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites in the Caucasus and broadens our perspective on hominid occupation and ecological adaptation in other high-altitude world regions.     

Buddhist (Hybrid) Sanskrit Three Articles from a Panel of the XIIth Conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies

Indo-Iranian Journal -     

THE WEBER PROBLEM: FREQUENCY OF DIFFERENT SOLUTION TYPES AND EXTENSION TO REPULSIVE FORCES AND DYNAMIC PROCESSES*

ABSTRACT. The frequency of occurrence of the different types of solutions to the Weber problem is studied. These solutions are: a location at an attraction point due to a dominant force, to incompatible angles, or to concavity; a location at infinity; a location inside the polygon; and a location outside the polygon. Situations involving both attraction and repulsion points are examined in the triangle and in the more-than-three-sided polygon context, and methods for solving the corresponding problems are compared. A trigonometric solution is proposed for the triangle case involving one repulsion and two attraction points. The variation in the frequency of a location at an attraction point when the number of attraction points increases while the number of repulsion points remains the same is observed as well. Implications of the results are studied for the analysis of dynamic location processes.     

From liberal to conservative: shifting cultural policy regimes in post-Soviet Russia

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of Russian cultural policy from the end of the Soviet era through the current against the framework of welfare state regimes. The end of the Soviet Union 25 years ago ushered in a decade of liberalization marked by a withdrawal of the state from cultural responsibility and hopes that market demand and private support would emerge to fill in the void. With the latter hampered by the economic hardships of the transition and the loss of philanthropic traditions after more than 70 years of communism, a liberal policy regime did not take firmly hold and has gradually been replaced by a new cultural policy consensus more akin to a conservative welfare regime, marked by a return of the state to a more dominant role with the support of core cultural policy constituencies.     

Sur le terme yóga,le verbe yuj- et quelques-uns de leurs dérivés dans les hymnes védiques

Summary The term yóga must have designed an essential part of the sacrificial cult as known in the gveda: the putting in motion (“Int?tigkeitsetzen”, following Geldner), the launching of a specific activity with the ultimate goal to yoke, to join together or to pair the objects and the entities which match or can match each other or which can be viewed as comparable and even identical according to Vedic archaic speculative thought. Vedic sacrifice is in fact a powerful explicatory device, a set of gestures and of designs condensing a speculative experience. The verb yuj- and its derivates translate thus one of the central themes of the Vedic religion where the poet officiating in the sacrifice has to proclaim the connections and the identifications between the phenomena to be correlated (“yoked, harnessed”). The hippological vocabulary in the gveda as applied to the representation of the speculative practice is less an accidental metaphor than a true and meaningful translation of one of the basic principles this practice.