Early Navajo land use in northwestern New Mexico: Big Bead Mesa in regional perspective

Big Bead Mesa (LA 12351) is the most famous Navajo archaeological site ever investigated and has played an important role in the interpretation of Navajo culture history. It remains a sacred place to the Navajo, both for historical and spiritual reasons. Pioneering work by Dorothy L. Keur resulted in the publication of the first Society for American Archaeology Memoir and brought Navajo archaeology national recognition. James Hester used Big Bead Mesa as the type site for his Cabezon Phase, although he conducted no research at the site. Big Bead Mesa is not the only Early Navajo site in the Rio Puerco Valley; however, the surrounding area has never been adequately investigated or reported. This paper documents a variety of Navajo sites in the Rio Puerco Valley and indicates that Big Bead Mesa was only a small part of a much larger Navajo occupation that extended to the north, west, and south.     

The Big Buddha of Hong Kong: an accidental Buddhist theme park

ABSTRACT

The Tian Tan Buddha is the core of a tourism site on Lantau Island, Hong Kong, around which a cable car ride, the Po-Lin monastery and its museum, and the village of Ngong Ping have come to comprise an eclectic set of tourism nuclei that ‘accidentally’ became the ‘Buddhist theme park’ of Hong Kong due to the spatial juxtaposition in an isolated site of these disconnected and even dissonant components built at different times by different jurisdictions. The first objective of this article is to explore the developmental process of a religious site into a theme park of sort through a lengthy process filled with contestation and manipulations. The history-dependent and erratic nature of this process validates the notion of ‘accidental’ theme park used here. It is shown that over time, the Big Buddha went from being a Buddhism-themed leisure site to being generally perceived and promoted as essentially a theme park through a process of partial Disneyization. The second objective is to examine how the ‘theme park’ is perceived by its visitors, more precisely how they see it after their visit and what first-time visitors expect from it beforehand. The first enquiry, performed through the analysis of TripAdvisor reviews, indicates that ex-post, the visitors typically describe having experienced a visit to a theme park. The second enquiry, performed by interviewing first-time visitors about to access the site, suggests that while many first-time visitors expect to visit a theme park as well, others, mainly Western tourists, are expecting a more cultural experience. The findings of the two inquiries are compared to each other and to the image of the site promoted by the local tourism authorities. The subdued political message of the Big Buddha and the degree to which it is discerned by visitors are also discussed.     

Analysis on Future Personalized Education under Background of Big Data Era

In order to provide some thoughts and suggestions for future personalized education, this paper mainly analysis the background, opportunity, development and prospect of future personalized education under the background of big data era.On above foundation, the paper presents that future personalized education based on big data era will be a new tide of education.     

Personality and national identity: How the Big Five relate to civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood

In recent years, the concept of national identity has recaptured the imagination of public opinion research and with it individuals' conceptions of what it takes to be a “true” member of their nation. This investigation aims to add to the explanation of varying conceptions of nationhood by scrutinising their personality-based foundations. It provides the first systematic analysis of a yet unstudied link between the Big Five personality traits and two ideal-typical conceptions of nationhood: civic and ethnic national identity. Using 18 samples from six European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom), each containing around 1000 individuals, we uncover psychological underpinnings of attitudes towards national membership, revealing several consistent trait patterns. We find a negative relationship between openness to experience and an ethnic national identity, while conscientiousness associates positively with the civic ideal type of national identity content. The findings presented extend current understandings of how people conceptualise national belonging and provide evidence that distinct conceptions of nationhood are related to different dispositional foundations.     

Big Philosophical Questions: Why They Matter and Why They Are Still Around

Big philosophical questions—about the mind, the idea of the good, justice, beauty, knowledge—have been the prime interest of philosophers ever since Plato first raised them in his dialogues. However, regardless of how hard philosophers have been trying to find answers to them, it seems that all they have ever managed to do was to find reasons for disagreements, and, on the whole, to have failed to reach a consensus on pretty much anything. Some philosophers now claim that there hasn’t been much progress in philosophy, especially when compared to the sciences. I take up this verdict and try to refute it, first by offering an alternative view on what counts as progress, and then by analyzing big philosophical questions and their relevance for our intellectual and practical pursuits. I argue that, due to the distinctive nature of philosophical curiosity, coming up with answers to the big philosophical questions is an ideal that can hardly be met, but that philosophy nevertheless delivers various benefits, intellectual and practical, which the proponents of the No-Progress View tend to ignore.     

北斗星是古人心目中的历书和钟表

年、月、日、时,是人类生活、生产,生存最重要的时间概念。五、六千年以前科学推算的历法和钟表还没有产生以前,我国先民依靠对日月星辰运行规律的观测来确定年月日时等时间概念。北斗七星则是一部摆在天空的历书和时钟。凭着对北斗柄指向变化的观测,人们便可以精确得知春夏秋冬四季及其月、日和一日的具体时间。     

巴尔干的“大阿尔巴尼亚”:地缘政治关系与演化

阿尔巴尼亚人是巴尔干半岛上的一个古老民族 ,历史上 ,阿尔巴尼亚人曾在 1190年建立起一个独立的阿尔巴尼亚公国 ,其疆域达 10万km2 ,远远超出目前阿尔巴尼亚的范围之外。公元 14世纪 ,随着奥斯帝国的入侵 ,阿尔巴尼亚公国覆灭。到 2 0世纪初 ,巴尔干各国相继独立。由于诸多原因 ,阿尔巴尼亚族被多条国境线划分在国土毗连的不同国家之中 ,形成跨国民族。长期以来 ,阿尔巴尼亚人一直为建立“大阿尔巴尼亚国”而努力。但在冷战时期 ,受两极格局的影响 ,这一问题一度被掩盖。冷战结束以后 ,“大阿尔巴尼亚”问题再度浮出水面 ,成为巴尔干半岛一个突出的政治地理问题。本文从政治地理的角度对“大阿尔巴尼亚”问题产生的地缘政治背景进行了分析 ,并对“大阿尔巴尼亚”的前景进行了预测。     

博物馆大数据运用初探——以上海博物馆数据中心项目为例

对博物馆数字化建设来说,大数据的运用是一个无可避免的话题。为广泛发挥大数据在博物馆业务工作中的作用,从上海博物馆的数据中心项目入手,阐述了数据中心如何在加强收集和存储博物馆各项数据同时,紧紧围绕数据采用智能化的分析手段,挖掘更加有价值的信息。利用大数据对业务进行分析,加工形成有用的数据模型,进而为形成博物馆数字化运营管理体系打下了初步的基础。本研究介绍了数据挖掘技术的有效应用情况,并提出了博物馆大数据建设未来的发展思路。     

New Guinea Leadership as Ethnographic Analogy: A Critical Review

Increasingly, archaeologists are recognizing cultural anthropological work in New Guinea as an important source of ethnographic analogy for understanding the initial stages of cultural evolution. This article critically reviews the literature on leadership in contact-era New Guinea. It is intended as an introduction both to different theoretical interpretations of leadership, as these have developed from Marshal Sahlins's Big-man archetype to the present, and to the primary literature on the topic. It points to several implications for archaeological theory, identifies a number of problems in the ethnography and theory of contact-era New Guinea leadership, and concludes with a brief guide to deploying the ethnographic and theoretical literature.