THE PUZZLE OF THE BANQUET HALL OF THE DUKES: THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SWEDISH HISTORICAL RESEARCH STUDIED THROUGH LUDWIK FLECK'S “THOUGHT COLLECTIVE” AND “THOUGHT STYLE”

In 1312, the Swedish dukes Erik and Valdemar Magnusson married the Norwegian princesses Ingeborg Haakonsdaughter and Ingeborg Eriksdaughter at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. In 1313, the two couples were reunited at a purpose-built banquet hall, believed to have been located in the medieval Swedish town of Lödöse. The main source of information concerning these events is the Swedish medieval rhyme chronicle The Chronicle of Duke Erik. However, a closer reading of the chronicle reveals that Lödöse is never mentioned in relation to the banquet hall. The article discusses the passing down of knowledge through generations of the same professional collective, in this case the professional collective of Swedish historians during the twentieth century, and demonstrates how the validity of once-established prescientific knowledge persists. To achieve its goal, the article applies Ludwik Fleck's terms “thought collective,” “thought style,” and “tenacity in science,” as well as Thomas Kuhn's concept of the “paradigm,” to a historiographical case study of how the proto-idea of the banquet hall being located at Lödöse has survived to become an established scientific fact. The location of the banquet hall concerns but a minor detail in the turbulent political situation of the Swedish kingdom during the first decades of the fourteenth century. However, the continuing reiteration of this minor detail is evidence of a larger phenomenon, namely how contemporary historical research is influenced by scholars in the prescientific past.     

权力的让渡和主权的坚持:略析欧洲一体化中的“主权让渡”

欧洲一体化实行了一定程度的权力让渡和共享,但成员国仍然保持着主权,并主导着一体化。证诸欧洲一体化进程可以看到:一、所有的权力让渡都需要成员国全体一致同意,体现了成员国主权的行使;二、"辅助性原则"限制着权力让渡;三、偏向于"政府间主义"的"机构间平衡",共同体/欧盟的决策/立法权始终掌握在由成员国代表组成的理事会手中;四、种种"灵活性"和"例外",使成员国在权力让渡的问题上保持最大限度的自主性。     

Lower and middle paleolithic of northern Asia: Achievements,problems, and perspectives

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the study of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic of northern Asia. There is growing evidence for initial human occupation before 700,000 years ago—as early as elsewhere in Asia—and for a very early adaptation to the arctic desert environment. New models of Lower Paleolithic settlement involve expansion and reduction of occupation in response to climatic variation, rather than simple colonization followed by steady occupation. The Middle Paleolithic of northern Asia is better documented, including actual finds of archaicHomo sapiens. The transition to the Upper Paleolithic seems to involve the survival of earlier cultural traits, but the mechanisms and processes are not well understood. Further significant knowledge concerning these periods awaits the development of common methodologies for classification and analysis.     

What can supraspecies richness tell us?

Biogeographers, ecologists, palaeontologists, and conservation managers often deal with checklists in which not all individuals have been identified to a species level, or the accuracy of species identification is questionable. Is it possible and credible to investigate species richness based on such checklists? Studies on macrofauna in the Far Eastern seas, eastern Arctic seas, and adjacent waters of the Pacific and Arctic Oceans suggest that in different habitats and for diverse taxa, species, and higher taxa richness strongly correlate with each other and increase with an expansion in the study area and sample size according to the species–area law. Such an increase is higher in the bottom zone than in the pelagic. Species and higher taxa richness also show a decrease from lower to higher latitudes, which is in line with the Humboldt–Wallace’s law. According to Willis’ law and self-similarity in the organisation of taxonomic levels, species richness can be assessed based on the genus, family, and order richness. In other words, supraspecies richness itself can tell us the same as species richness and therefore certain global patterns revealed at the species level may also be revealed at the supraspecies level. Such a concordance in general trends among richness parameters at different taxonomic levels in practice implies that species richness can be studied based on lists that lack species identifications or lists with doubtful species identification. We suggest bolder use of supraspecies richness in science and practice, discussing the disadvantages and advantages of this approach.     

The predicament of pastoral sovereignty

This paper seeks to understand the conditions of possibility of “sanctuary” – the claiming of a “sacred” space of (humanitarian) exception - in the midst of civil war. Sanctuary codifies an exceptional space where sovereign and pastoral registers of power converge into a form of “pastoral sovereignty” that can temporarily “interrupt” the law of violence of sovereign power. In civil war this can enable civilians to be saved and protected from killings and suffering. However, this pastoral sovereignty is precarious as it depends on the belligerents' good will and tacit authorization: this is what we call the predicament of pastoral sovereignty. Using the case study of Church sanctuary in Sri Lanka's civil war, this paper explores how this predicament of pastoral sovereignty comes into effect in moments of acute crisis. Throughout Sri Lanka's brutal civil war, Catholic priests provided “sanctuary” to Tamil civilians in the form of territorial sanctuary (Church compounds), bodily sanctuary (the priests' bodies providing protection), and numerous other humanitarian activities. Our ethnographic material illustrates the force and fragility of the Church's claims to pastoral sovereignty and its sanctuary practices and provides detailed accounts of numerous constellations. The paper thereby raises fundamental questions about the ontology of sovereignty and its operability in moments of humanitarian crisis.     

A relational approach to walking: Methodology,metalanguage, and power relations

To better understand walking practices and the power relations informing them, Mattias Kärrholm and colleagues argue for a relational methodology and metalanguage. In the process, they propose a threefold approach: (a) identify different walking assemblages; (b) investigate how diverse types of walking assemblage relate in series; and (c) study how certain objects can gather or bind series together and act as boundary objects. In this article, we explore the worth of that approach, drawing on research interviews held over 2015–16 with residents from Wollongong, Australia, during a period when their municipal government was implementing a walkable city strategy. Here, we analyse participants' conversations with us for what they reveal about walking types, walking assemblages, interseriality, objects of passage, and boundary objects—five terms used by Kärrholm et al. to interrogate urban walking. Our work suggests that participants are adept at gauging the constant transformations that characterise their walks. This narrative evaluative capacity is, perhaps paradoxically, both compelling and mundane and suggests that participants make sense of a range of meanings from complex social and spatial dynamics and do so in ways that highlight privilege and disadvantage in the city. These findings have wider relevance for those interested in walking and mobilities studies and methodologies.     

Burial offerings in intramural tombs at Middle Bronze Age Megiddo

Tel Megiddo is a major type-site for the Middle Bronze in the Levant. During this period a new burial custom appeared in which the dead were interred beneath occupied houses. This tradition is well attested in Area K at the site. Area H, near the palatial complex, revealed a monumental masonry-constructed chamber tomb. This article presents the results of residue analysis conducted on ceramic vessels placed in these tombs as burial offerings. Hundreds of intramural Middle Bronze tombs with ceramic offerings were excavated in the Levant, but this is the first time the content of the vessels is revealed.     

Current archaeological research in the Middle Atlantic region of the eastern united states

A major theme of current archaeological research in the Middle Atlantic region of Eastern North America is the recognition of cultural variability across space and through time. The most significant culture change experienced during the entire time frame of regional prehistory occurred ca. 5000 B.P., when there were major changes in regional environments. Before 5000 B.P., adaptations were characterized by small groups of mobile hunters and gatherers. After 5000 B.P., there were continued growth in regional populations and increases in sedentism, intensive use of a limited range of food resources, social group size, and social complexity.     

Anatomy,behavior, and modern human origins

The fossil record suggests that modern human morphology evolved in Africa between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago, when the sole inhabitants of Eurasia were the Neanderthals and other equally nonmodern people. However, the earliest modern or near-modern Africans were behaviorally (archaeologically) indistinguishable from their nonmodern, Eurasian contemporaries, and it was only around 50,000-40,000 years ago that a major behavioral difference developed. Archaeological indications of this difference include the oldest indisputable ornaments (or art broadly understood); the oldest evidence for routine use of bone, ivory, and shell to produce formal (standardized) artifacts; greatly accelerated variation in stone artifact assemblages through time and space; and hunting-gathering innovations that promoted significantly larger populations. As a complex, the novel traits imply fully modern cognitive and communicative abilities, or more succinctly, the fully modern capacity for Culture. The competitive advantage of this capacity is obvious, and preliminary dates suggest that it appeared in Africa about 50,000 years ago and then successively in western Asia, eastern Europe, and western Europe, in keeping with an African origin. Arguably, the development of modern behavior depended on a neural change broadly like those that accompanied yet earlier archaeologically detectable behavioral advances. This explanation is problematic, however, because the putative change was in brain organization, not size, and fossil skulls provide little or no secure evidence for brain structure. Other potential objections to a neural advance in Africa 50,000-40,000 years ago or to the wider Out-of-Africa hypothesis, include archaeological evidence (1) that some Neanderthals were actually capable of fully modern behavior and (2) that some Africans were behaviorally modern more than 90,000 years ago.     

Chronology and palaeoenvironment of levantine prehistoric sites as seen from sediment studies

Analysis of sediments from the sites of et-Tabun, Jebel Qafza, and Sefunim in Israel, of Ksar 'Aqil in Lebanon, and of Yabrud Rockshelter I and Jerf 'Ajla in Syria leads to a reconstruction of the environments of deposition, periods of weathering and erosion, and relations to changing sea level during the times of occupation of these sites by prehistoric man. The overlapping sequences span the interval from part or all of the last interglaciation through the time of the last glaciation into historic time. Aeolians and from the last interglacial littoral zone and aeolian silt from more distant deserts dominate the site sediments until the early part of the last glaciation (especially at Tabun), whereas colluvial slope deposits, alluvium (Ksar 'Aqil), and angular rockfall debris are characteristic of the mid-last glaciation sediments in most sites, commonly with an admixture of reworked terra rossa soil sediment. These latter sediments seem to reflect a period or periods of greater available moisture or surface run-off. Prominent unconformities mark many sites at times coincident with the final middle palaeolithic (mousterian) occupations or in the interval between middle palaeolithic and upper palaeolithic occupations. It is not clear, in the absence of firm radiometric dates, whether these hiatuses should be correlated from site-to-site or whether they are site-specific. Freeze/thaw phenomena appear not to have played a significant role, if any at all, in the origin of sediments in coastal Levantine sites, although the middle palaeolithic of the Syrian Desert (Yabrud, Jerf 'Ajla) is contained in typical cryoclastic rubble. Finally, the reconstructed sedimentary environments are compared with the still-too-sparse palynological record for the Near East. Parallels of more humid and less humid climatic intervals throughout the past 60,000 to 70,000 years in both of these records reinforce the growing impression of a regionally fluctuating climate in the eastern Mediterranean region during the time of the last glaciation.