Writing Inside the Kaleidoscope: Re-Representing Victorian Women Public Figures

‘The myths that crystallize in the literary imagination are the buried lives of women whose lives are themselves further emboldened by these same myths.’¹     

The changing biosphere: recent insights from paleoenvironmental science into drivers,mechanisms and impacts

Paleoenvironmental science has experienced a recent surge in interest and activity as concerns grow over global environmental change. Key research questions in the biotic realm of paleoenvironmental science focus on explaining climatic change at time scales of decades to centuries and understanding ecosystem responses to these changes. Biotic responses are increasingly being studied at smaller spatial scales to identify local factors that determine the sensitivity of a particular system to climatic change. These findings can then be applied to solving a variety of problems, such as setting conservation targets or testing mechanisms for observed climatic and biogeographic phenomena. Research approaches commonly used today include hypothesis testing, which has now become more sophisticated as paleoecologists and paleoclimatologists integrate with modellers. Other frameworks involve the quantitative integration of multiple proxy indicators and the use of extensive publicly available data networks to produce new datasets for paleoclimatic reconstructions and other applications.     

A PROVENANCE STUDY OF THE GILGAMESH FRAGMENT FROM MEGIDDO

A Late Bronze Age fragment of a clay cuneiform tablet with the Gilgamesh Epic was found in the 1950s on the surface at Megiddo. The presence of scribes in Megiddo is evident from the el‐Amarna letters. This is the only first‐class literary Mesopotamian text ever to be found in Canaan. The aim of the present study was to examine the origin of this tablet, by mineralogical and elemental methods. The petrographic and NAA results indicate that the tablet was not Mesopotamian, but was written in southern Israel. The implications of this result in view of the small corpus of scholarly cuneiform texts discovered in Egypt and the southern Levant in the second millennium bce are discussed.     

RADIOCARBON-DATED DESTRUCTION LAYERS: A SKELETON FOR IRON AGE CHRONOLOGY IN THE LEVANT

We present a full-sequence radiocarbon-based chronological system for the Iron Age in the Levant, anchored on the dating of ten destruction layers for the years 1130–730 BC. We establish the sequence using two methods – the 'uncalibrated weighted average' and the Bayesian modelling. Utilizing four dating tools in combination – radiocarbon measurements, field stratigraphy, pottery typology and ancient Near Eastern historical records – facilitates solutions to chronological problems that are far beyond the resolving power of ¹⁴C dating alone. The results shed light on disputed issues related to biblical and ancient Near Eastern history, such as the expansion of the early Israelite polity from the highlands to the lowlands; the nature of the Shoshenq I campaign to Canaan; and the evolution of the conflict between northern Israel and Aram Damascus.