PIECING TOGETHER THE STORY OF A PAIR OF MAKRON’S FRAGMENTED CUPS

In 2022, an Athenian red-figured cup attributed to Makron was returned to Italy by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cup had been acquired in fragments, through purchase and gift, from multiple sources over several years, starting with two fragments from the restorer Fritz Bürki in 1978. A second cup, also attributed to Makron, was acquired in a parallel way. The sources for the fragments from both cups point to galleries collectors and donors – Summa Galleries, Frieda Tchachos, Elizabeth Hecht, and Dietrich von Bothmer – who have been associated with other material that has been repatriated to Italy in recent years. It is suggested that some of the incised ‘signatures’ by Hieron that are found on cups attributed to Makron may have been applied since antiquity.     

Sea routes and navigation in the third millennium Aegean

This article discusses evidence for interregional contact by sea in the Early Bronze Age Aegean. It outlines the relevant environmental background and changes since that period, and discusses the relationship between important settlements and preferred routes of movements between coasts and islands. After discussing some aspects of pilotage and navigational techniques used in the third millennium, it considers the role of different areas in reconstructed patterns of contact.     

Globalization and Entrepreneurial Response in Post-Socialist Transformation: A Case Study from Transcarpathia,Ukraine

This paper sets out to examine the extent and characteristics of the globalization process in a region undergoing a process of socio-economic transformation. In doing so it draws upon the experience of an entrepreneurial, globally orientated, garment-making enterprise in Transcarpathia, the western most region of the Ukraine. The bulk of earlier scholarly research focused upon the consequences of the strategies implemented by multinational corporations. We argue, that this study points towards an alternative mode of integration in the global economy-one which received little attention in the Central and Eastern European context. This takes the form of a set of sub-contracting relationships between parent enterprises in Western Europe, intermediaries located in economies which achieved significant advances in the process of transformation (such as Hungary and Slovakia), and manufacturers in the locality.     

The delocalization of production in labour intensive industries: instances of triangular manufacturing between Germany,Greece and FYROM

The clothing industry, by virtue of its labour intensity and low barriers to entry and exit, is at the forefront of the processes of integration in a global network of production and distribution. During the 1970s and 1980s ‘intermediate’ regimes (such as Greece) benefited from the diffusion in clothing production from advanced industrialized countries (such as Germany); however, this trend was reversed during the 1990s. This is because of the intensification of competition from both developed countries (for high quality products) and less developed countries (for price competitive items), as well as the new threat posed by competitors from post‐socialist economies that are trying to find a role in the ‘Newer’ International Division of Labour. Within this context, this article sets out to analyse to what extent collaborative forms of diffuse manufacture, and particularly triangular manufacturing, may be used in the context of south‐eastern Europe. This article argues that ‘triangular manufacturing’ between the industrialized core of the European Union (EU) (and especially Germany), Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) was the outcome of spontaneous entrepreneurial decision‐making. In the main, it was parent enterprises in Germany and to some extent Greek intermediaries who were the main beneficiaries of the emerging triangular relationships. Enterprises and workers in FYROM remained vulnerable and dependent. However, there were also a handful of instances of ‘good practice’, where relationships were beneficial to all the participating parties. We argue that these examples provide lessons for policy intervention both nationally and locally (in both Greece and FYROM).     

Skilled Natives,Inept Coolies: Marmot Hunting and the Great Manchurian Pneumonic Plague (1910–1911)

Taking as its setting the great Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–1911, this article examines the construction of epidemiological blame that targeted migrant labourers from the peninsula of Shandong employed in the hunting of the Siberian marmot (Marmota sibirica), a natural reservoir of the disease. The article demonstrates how Chinese epidemiologists sought to pathologize marmot-hunting migrants from Shandong as unskilled pestilent “coolies”, while at the same time valorizing Mongol and Buryat marmot hunters as a “native” counter-paradigm; a binary anthropology of skill and sanitation, which instituted “coolies” as an anthropological type essential to the construction of hygienic modernity in China.     

Ancient-DNA reveals an Asian type of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Scandinavia

Leprosy is a chronic infection of the skin and peripheral nerves caused by the pathogen Mycobacterium leprae. Its impact on human populations and societies of the past as well as its phylogeographic patterns around the world – at least in modern times – has been well documented. This slow growing bacterium has been shown to exist in distinct ‘SNP types’ that occur in relatively defined parts of the globe. The routes that the disease followed in the past are, however, still uncertain. This study of ancient-DNA typing of archaeological human remains from Sweden dated to early Medieval times provides genetic evidence that a transmission of M. leprae ‘SNP subtype’ 2G – found mainly in Asia – took or had already taken place at that time from the Middle East to Scandinavia. This finding is unique in the history of leprosy in Europe. All human specimens from this continent – both modern and ancient – that have been tested to date showed that the one responsible for the infection strains of M. leprae belong to ‘SNP type’ 3, whereas our results show that there were some European populations that were hosts to bacteria representing ‘SNP type’ 2 of the species as well.