As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

Contribution to the geology of Failaka Island,Kuwait: Evidence from sedimentological and petrographic data from the NE part of the island

Kuwait–Georgian archaeological work at Failaka Island showed the need for geological study. Analysis of sediments related to drinking water-collecting cisterns was performed on a Late Islamic settlement (NE part of the island) in 2018. Field sedimentological, grain size and XRD analysis of the sediment profiles showed that the shallow (about 1 m deep) cone-shaped wells are dug in the loose, porous, cross-stratified calcareous coarse-grained quartz sandstones. Three upper layers of quartz sandstones in the profile have high infiltration rate and provide a rare yet ideal material for water retention. The fourth dense layer below, composed of very fine sand and silt fraction, tends to hinder water movement and forms a relatively impermeable water-resistant surface. Thus, the distribution patterns of clay content, grain sizes and porosity of the well-hosting sediments are favourable for freshwater infiltration and harvesting. An additional petrographic analysis was conducted on different types of rocks discovered on the archaeological site, used as building material and fragments of stone artifacts to identify their origin. It was established that archaeological building material is of local origin, whereas the source rocks for stone artifacts were imported.     

评近年来关于知识分子研究的几本史著

学术界近年来关于知识分子问题的研究呈现三大特点：一,“体验中的理解”,利用研究主客体在血脉、情感上的亲密关系,勉力进入先辈生存的精神家园,以理解他们的所思所言所行;二,“建构中的阐释”,力求在某种独特、精致的理论建构中提出假设,表达观点完成叙述;三,“批判中的反思”,通过广义上的学术批判,对古往今来的士之论士、儒之论儒、知识分子之论知识分子的成果进行反思。此外知识分子研究的方法论问题,也值得引起关注。     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

Putting People on the Page: Material Culture as a Way in to Everyday Life behind the Facades of Tallis’s London Street Views

Tallis’s Street Views describe London as a commercial and professional centre but the visual representation of the street elevations gives an impression of quiet emptiness; it is hard to get a sense of the activity in and around the businesses portrayed. The household inventory of one of Tallis’s advertisers, a dentist who died in 1850, suggests a way of redressing this. An interpretive reading of the list of the dentist’s belongings, disposed around the different spaces of the premises, which housed his residence, his business and other households, gives some sense of the complexity and struggle at a daily level behind Tallis’s apparently orderly professional and commercial facades. This indicates that we can look more generally to material culture – whether in textual and visual representations or as actual artefacts – to provide a deeper understanding of people’s everyday life in a developing city.     

Organized Materiality

In the late medieval period the religious guilds along with trade guilds grew in importance, as did the role of material culture related to the guilds. This history has seen little examination from a Fenno-Scandinavian and particularly a Swedish vantage point. In order to analyse the role of material culture in the formation of this way of organizing people, the article investigates the existence of late medieval guildhalls, especially rural ones, and discusses remains of other material culture that can be connected to the guilds. The halls, drinking vessels and other material things were activated in the growth of a new more substantial way of organizing society outside the boundaries of feudal society and family control. It is argued that material culture had a significant role in the recurrent activities of the guilds of the Middle Ages and in the shaping of new ways of organizing people.     

Reading “wrecks of history” and the Harley family narrative

During the English civil wars, many elite families faced the destruction of the buildings, monuments, and movables that had served for centuries as testaments to their social standing. The Harleys of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire faced just this situation after their estate was demolished during a Royalist siege in 1644. While the family had ample cause to lament, this study reveals that destruction could also be framed as a generative force. In this framework, the broken artefact works in multiple ways, recalling the intact pre-war family while simultaneously attesting to its suffering and sacrifice. As the Harleys and those close to them wrote about loss and destruction, they evoke the family’s ancient prestige and re-frame loss in a way that lays the groundwork for local reconciliation and the success of the Harley line. Out of the ruins of their lives, the Harleys are re-created as a godly, genteel family.     

Geochemical Methods for Sourcing Lava Paving Stones from the Roman Roads of Central Italy

This paper documents the results of in situ analysis of 306 lava paving stones and 74 possible source rocks using pXRF. Data were collected from sites both in the city of Rome—on major roads beyond the city (including the Viae Flaminia, Cassia, Clodia, Praenestina and Appia)—and in the city of Ostia. Comparison of the pXRF data with lava compositional data from the geological literature allows broad identification of possible sources. The results point to quite distinctive patterns of exploitation for the city of Rome and Ostia, utilizing the Alban Hills lava flows, and the roads of the middle Tiber Valley, drawing on lava flows associated with the Vico and Sabatini volcanoes. The results show the potential of pXRF to produce data to elucidate the exploitation of lava flows for paving the Roman roads.     

柳诒徵的“史德”论及其史学批评

“史德”论是史学理论中的重要范畴之一。这一概念最早由清代史学家章学诚提出,后经梁启超等人进一步阐发。柳诒徵在对章学诚、梁启超等人“史德”论批评与继承的基础上,提出了自己的独到见解。他论述了“有史而德”及“从德而史”的辨证关系,并强调“治史以畜德”的重要性。柳诒徵的“史德”是对前人的补充和发展。