De-personifying Collaert's Four Continents: European descriptions of continental diversity, 1585–1625

Adriaen Collaert's personifications of the four continents are typical examples of how continents and their respective cultures were represented in the art and literature of Europe in the early-modern period. For example, Asia is the exotic double to Europe, possessing an ‘otherness’ upon which European identity has been juxtaposed. Such personifications of continents and broader tropes of ‘the other’ and ‘the exotic’ have greatly influenced the historiography of the idea of Europe. However, the creation of art and literature characterised by these tropes reflects only part of the European understanding of the wider world. This article will explore how travellers – such as missionaries, merchants and ambassadors – in Europe's encounters with non-European societies presented a complex picture of the world sought to offer practical guidance and knowledge. How travellers’ accounts and personifications interacted is important for understanding the European experience of other continents. In considering how travellers presented their knowledge of continents, it is possible to analyse both how early-modern Europeans viewed other continents and question how useful artistic representation of ‘other’ continents are for understanding how they viewed their own.     

Petrographic thin sections and exotic rocks provenience among hunter–gatherer societies in the eastern Pampa–Patagonia Transition (lower basin of the Colorado River,Argentina)*

Lithic assemblages recovered from sites located in the eastern Pampa–Patagonia transition include a great diversity of raw materials, some from neighbouring regions, such as the Humid and Dry Pampa subregions and Northpatagonia. Lithic raw material assignments to specific procurement areas were preliminarily proposed based on macroscopic characterizations. The aim of the paper is to present the results obtained from the petrographic thin sections of archaeological artefacts from Middle and Late Holocene sites recorded at the study area. The analyses corroborate most of the macroscopic determinations, and more detailed knowledge of the acquisition areas of these raw materials was obtained.     

Gardening the Wild: Change in the Flora and Vegetation of a Suburban Coastal Reserve 1911–2013

Intensively used and managed remnants of native vegetation in cities can have characteristics that result as much from ecological gardening as processes independent of humans. We test the degree to which the changes in vegetation of the Bayside Reserve, Melbourne, are consistent with the outcome we would expect from an ecologically gardened nature and to what degree they reflect ongoing processes of exotic invasion and synthetic vegetation dynamics. We compared species lists from 1911, 1971 and 2013 and sample area data from 1971 and 2013. The flora became richer and more exotic, although some native plant species lost in 1971 had been reintroduced to the reserve in 2013. Between 1971 and 2013, the vegetation increased in cover, shrub and tree density, sample areas species richness, and nativeness, the latter two results being inconsistent with the usual patterns of increasing exoticness and decline in species richness with shrub and tree encroachment. These variations from normality were likely to have resulted from the impacts of planting of natives and weeding of exotics, activity that has created combinations of species that probably never occurred in pre‐European vegetation. Although it might not be possible to return to pre‐European ecosystems within this vegetation remnant, the gardened approximation helps some locally uncommon species survive and may make people more sympathetic to nature conservation as a whole.     

浅论我国内外资企业所得税法合并的必要性

我国两套企业所得税制并存的局面从改革开放至今已经走过了20多年的历程。随着改革开放的推进和我国经济的市场化与国际化程度的不断提高,内外资企业继续分别实行不同的所得税制既不利于平等竞争,也不符合世贸组织规则,“两税并存”带来的问题日益显现。因此,应在目前良好的经济形势下把两税合并作为一项紧迫任务来实施,从而为经济增长提供持久的推动力。     

Reading menageries: using eighteenth-century print sources to historicise the sensorium of menagerie spectators and their encounters with exotic animals

Histories of exotic animal collection and display in Britain during the long eighteenth century have not been conventionally concerned with the sensory or bodily experiences of menagerie spectators. Olfactory, haptic and aural impressions – as well as the affective responses of laughter, disgust, anger and sympathy, are conspicuously absent in attempts to historicise animal collections. This paper principally argues that these often historically intangible and transient sensory experiences with animals were culturally significant acts or readings that produced meaning. To understand how spectators utilised their senses as an interpretive tool in reading menageries the article draws upon eighteenth-century understandings of the senses and bodily comfort. The manipulation of exotic animal bodies in menageries during the long eighteenth century had significant implications for British spectators. It is argued that their specific notions of Britishness in relationship to these captive animals from foreign climes articulated elite cultural notions of gender, climate and national character. In writing a sensory history of exotic animals in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain the author contextualises the reading of contemporary print material with the concomitant experience of the material animals to which this print matter referred. What emerges is a reminder that the act of reading should not be isolated from the production of knowledge through other embodied experiences since such a dichotomy is arguably problematic for historians.     

Some thoughts on art-historical dendrochronology

Imported timbers pose potential problems for the dendrochronologist. The problem is general and any particular dendrochronologist may run into difficulty when he attempts to correlate an exotic ring pattern against an indigenous chronology. Sufficient evidence exists to suspect that high quality oak boards and planks were extensively imported into England in medieval times. However, chronologies constructed from just such boards, namely the art-historical chronologies, have been treated as indigenous without being proven to be so. Almost identical comments can be made with respect to art-historical chronologies constructed by German workers using supposedly indigenous Flemish oak panels. This article explores how failure to allow for importation may well call into question the dating of these art-historical chronologies and in addition demonstrates how an art-historical dating system has been created wherein erroneous placement of the chronologies could escape detection (this latter aspect may well make the argument of general interest to scientists).