Biocultural Consequences of Spanish Contact in the Lambayeque Valley Region of Northern Peru: Internal Enamel Micro‐Defects as Indicators of Early Life Stress

The present study utilises dental histological methods to analyse enamel micro‐defects as indicators of early life stress in indigenous Muchik individuals interred at two sites: La Capilla Santa María Magdalena de Eten (CSMME) (n = 15) and La Capilla del Niño Serranito (CNS) (n = 15), both located in the Lambayeque Valley region of northern Peru. Individuals interred at CNS date to the Early Colonial Period (AD 1533–1610), and individuals interred at CSMME date to the Middle/Late Colonial Period (AD 1625–1760), thus permitting comparison of childhood stress events between the Early and Middle/Late Colonial Periods. Results reveal a high prevalence of Wilson bands at both sites, although a lower prevalence at the CSMME was observed in comparison with the CNS. This indicates that, over time, Muchik individuals in this town may have been able to acclimate to life under Spanish oppression. Stress chronologies suggest that early life stress possibly resulted from inadequate and less than desirable food and/or water available for supplemental feeding during early infancy, especially around the ages of 4 and 5 months. Furthermore, results show that individuals with enamel defects in the form of Wilson bands at both the CNS and CSMME had an earlier mean age‐at‐death (9.6 and 4.05 years, respectively) in comparison with those without observed Wilson bands (19.75 and 8.8 years, respectively). These results underscore the importance of not only regional and temporal studies of the biological consequences of Spanish contact in the Americas but also of investigating the relationship between early life stress and adult health and longevity in archaeological populations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Covering up spying in the ‘Buster’ Crabb Affair: A note

Abstract

F EWER COLD WAR myths are more enduring in the United Kingdom than that of ‘Buster’ Crabb. In April 1956, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) coaxed Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, a naval frogman from the Second World War, out of retirement to dive under the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, while it was docked in Portsmouth. It had brought the Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita S. Khrushchev, to the United Kingdom on a state visit. The operation, routine by all accounts, ended in both personal and diplomatic failure. Fourteen months later, the decomposed body of a frogman washed up in Chichester harbour. Despite the British government’s hope that the discovery might be the end of the affair, it fired up the conspiracy theorists, who alleged that the body could not be Crabb’s; that, in fact, he had been kidnapped, taken to the Soviet Union, and renamed Korablev.¹ The government did little to dispel such myths. A few days after Crabb’s disappearance, The Times succinctly summed up the situation: ‘official reticence about the activities which led to the death of Commander Crabb has caused much speculation.’² Curiosity was further piqued a few days later when the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, stated m the house of commons on 9 May that ‘it would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.’³     

Sacred,but not surveyed: Nineteenth‐century surveys of Palestine

Abstract

Nineteenth‐century Palestine mapping projects based on systematic land surveying reached a peak with the Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine between 1871 and 1877, conducted on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund by officers of the British Royal Engineering Corps. Various other nineteenth‐century proposals for an organized survey of the country—some of which bore partial results while others were never implemented—are also presented. The surveying of one region, Mesopotamia, during the 1830s and 1840s, forms the basis for the discussion of the reasons for the relative lateness of the topographical survey. The sacredness of the region seems not to have been a sufficiently convincing motive for entrepreneurs to organize and finance such a survey. The main reason for the delay in mapping the country as a whole was that it was not especially important, either strategically or geo‐politically, for the European nations engaged in the international struggles in the Middle East until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.     

Pterygotid eurypterid chelicera from the Lower Devonian of Victoria

A single eurypterid (Arthropoda: Chelicerata) chelicera, assigned to Acutiramus sp. cf. A. bohemicus, is described from the Wilson Creek Shale, Turtons Creek inlier, north of Foster, Victoria, Australia. The specimen comprises the proximal portion of both rami. This pterygotid chelicera supports an Early Devonian (?Lochkovian) age for the stratum at this locality, by comparison with occurrences of A. bohemicus from the Czech Republic and closely related species in northern Gondwana.     

‘… that great swollen belly’: the abject maternal in some recent Northern Irish fiction

This essay will consider the representation of the maternal in some contemporary Northern Irish fiction written by men. It will examine, using feminist theories of embodiment and subjectivity, the power of the maternal image in Irish literary and critical discourse. The work of Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and Mikhail Bakhtin will be employed in this argument. The pregnant body has the power to radically unsettle order, and this essay will explore the way in which men write their fears of this all-consuming imago. Northern Irish men write out their fears of all-consuming national ideology through infanticide and grotesque mother figures and this essay will trace how this figure is complicated through political ideology in Northern Ireland. The texts under consideration will be Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson and Resurrection Man and The Last of Deeds by Eoin McNamee, as well as a glance towards the work of Glenn Patterson as a possible alternative to the hegemonic view of the grotesque or abjected maternal.     

威尔逊国际政治思想探源

长老派家庭的宗教背景是构成威尔逊国际政治思想的哲学来源。威尔逊的国际政治思想深深根植于他对英美民主政治的信奉。威尔逊对美国独特性的理解(美国例外论)和对边疆学说的接受影响着他对美国在世界事务中作用的看法。威尔逊国际社会改造的思想是美国国内进步主义改革思潮向国际关系领域的一次延伸。     

American propaganda and Ireland during world war one: the work of the Committee on Public Information

Soon after America entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) which used the tools of propaganda and persuasion to fight the war in the US and in allied, enemy and neutral foreign countries. This article examines the CPI’s work in relation to Ireland and Irish issues during the First World War. Among the questions examined are: What was the nature of the CPI’s Irish work between 1917 and 1918? What does it reveal about first, the CPI and second, Wilson’s view of Irish-American loyalty during the war? Why did the CPI’s British and Irish services become involved in Irish military recruitment? Was there any contact between the CPI officials in London and their British counterparts in the Ministry of Information to co-ordinate the push to encourage Irishmen to enlist? How did the CPI negotiate a space for its messages in post-rising Ireland where home rulers, republicans, unionists and British authorities pursued their respective agendas? The article seeks to add an American dimension to the narrative of Ireland and the First World War and examines themes relating to Anglo-American co-operation on the Irish question and diasporic identity.