Mundane mobilities,performances and spaces of tourism

The extension of information and communication technologies is purported to provide great opportunities for women, with the potential for empowerment and feminist activism. This paper contributes to the debate about women and cyberspace through a focus on the role of the internet in the lives of a group of technologically proficient, socially advantaged white heterosexual new mothers. The internet played a central role in providing virtual social support and alternative information sources which increased these women's real sense of empowerment in the transition to motherhood. Simultaneously, however, very traditional stereotypes of mothering and gender roles persisted. A paradox is evident whereby the internet was both liberating and constraining: it played an important social role for some women while at the same time it encouraged restrictive and unequal gender stereotypes in this particular community of practice. An examination of new virtual parenting spaces therefore has a contribution to make in understanding changing parenting practices in the new millennium.     

The Summer Meeting at Northampton

In the study of relict landscapes the definition of layers or phases may be logically necessary but can be fundamentally misleading. The real world normally involves a continuum of activity, in which continuity is more important than cataclysmic change. Detailed field maps of landscape survivals in a Westmorland township are used to formulate a possible temporal framework of development, which casts doubt upon existing chronological assumptions and illuminates the processes of village development. The discussion shows how complex multi-period landscapes, including both relict features and functioning elements, can be recorded, interpreted and presented with a measure of reinterpretable objectivity.     

Saucer Barrows: Places for Ritual within Wessex Early Bronze Age Chalkland Barrow Cemeteries

The Bronze Age barrow groups of Wessex have primarily been classified as places of burial where lineages were marked and mourners deployed to create mythologized links with the recently dead and the ancestors. These chalkland barrow cemeteries are associated with a range of barrow forms – bowl barrows and ‘fancy’ barrows, the latter comprising disc, bell, pond and saucer types. Whilst funerary activity was undoubtedly an important activity within these barrow groups, this paper examines the evidence for other forms of ritual practice within one particular barrow type, the saucer barrow, and considers whether there was more to ritual activity in Wessex barrow cemeteries than the disposal of the dead and the commemoration of ancestors.     

Protecting the honour of the daughters of Eire: welfare policy for Irish female migrants to England, 1940–70

Across the middle decades of the twentieth century, approximately 500,000 people left Ireland for Britain. Around half were young, single females migrating alone. Drawing on archival material in Ireland and England, this paper analyses the ways in which Catholic and secular agencies became aware of female Irish migrants; and how they understood and responded to their needs. Catholic organisations focused on maintaining religious belief and practice as a means of avoiding social problems in migrants. Some female migrants, such as nurses, were considered exemplars of Catholic and Irish femininity. However, female sexuality was problematised when associated with single motherhood, prostitution and cohabitation. The Irish hierarchy expected to lead policy development for migrant welfare. The framing of female migrant social needs within a moral and religious discourse led to solutions prioritising moral welfare delivered by Catholic priests and volunteers. Both the Irish government and British institutions (state and voluntary) accepted the centrality of Catholicism to Irish identity and the right of the Catholic Church to lead welfare policy and provision for Irish female migrants. No alternative understanding of Irish women's needs within a secular framework emerged during this period. This meant that whilst the Irish hierarchy developed policy responses based on their assessment of need, other agencies, notably the British and Irish governments, did not consider any specific policy response for Irish women to be required.     

Landscapes of Stone: Contextualizing Greenstone Working and Lithics from Clodgy Moor,West Penwith,Cornwall

Between 2004 and 2011 Graham Hill and Dave Edwards plotted nearly eight thousand prehistoric artefacts from ploughed fields across the Clodgy Moor area of West Penwith. In 2011 a project was carried out by the Historic Environment Service Projects team, Cornwall Council, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Cornwall Archaeological Society to catalogue and digitize all the finds recorded from the fieldwalking.

The project demonstrated that some places within the project area were persistent locales which were occupied throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The results were particularly significant because they shed light on the context of the production of greenstone axes, widely exchanged around Britain and across the Irish Sea during the Neolithic, and suggest why, despite large numbers of artefacts, no greenstone ‘axe factory’ site has been found close to the potential sources of the greenstone before.     

TREGIFFIAN: THE CHRONOLOGY OF AN ENTRANCE GRAVE

The Tregiffian project involved the analysis and dating of the archive from unpublished excavations in the 1960s and 1970s at an entrance grave in Penwith, Cornwall. A major aim of the project was to establish a robust chronological basis for the use of the entrance grave for burial: 10 samples of cremated human bone were submitted for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling undertaken. The modelling indicates that the use of the chamber for burial between began in 1780–1510 BC and ended in 1595–1425 BC. The results are hugely significant as they provide the first modelled dating from a Penwith entrance grave. This paper discusses the results from the radiocarbon dating project and reconsiders entrance graves in the wider context of the Early Bronze Age megalithic tombs which are found around the Irish Sea.     

A Faithful Interpreter? Li Zibiao and the 1793 Macartney Embassy to China

Abstract

This paper is about the interpreter of the first British embassy to China. Li Zibiao was a Chinese Catholic priest who Lord Macartney recruited in Europe and brought with him to China. This account of his participation in the embassy aims to help us understand the role of the interpreter in intercultural negotiations in the late 18th century. Interpreting is something we tend to think of as invisible, but in these negotiations, where only a single interpreter was present, the interpreter had significant power. In effect, he acted as a mediator, shuttling between the two parties to enable each to accept the positions of the other so that the negotiations could come to a more or less successful conclusion. This position of power meant that the interpreter’s own institutional and personal interests could also be important to the negotiations. Thus loyalty was crucial to how interpreting worked. Li’s achievement during the negotiations was to create a situation where both Lord Macartney and the Qing officials were willing to accept him as a mediator and where he survived to tell the tale.