As the Worm Turns: An Enigmatic Calcified Object as Pseudopathology

A putative calcified soft tissue or parasite recovered in the pelvis of an adult male Late Roman burial from Aqaba, Jordan, is a fossil marine invertebrate. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Keeping to oneself: Hospitality and the magical hoard in the Balga of Jordan

ABSTRACT

Anthropologists have given copious attention to problems of exchange, of giving and receiving. Yet problems of taking, unequal accumulation, secret storage, predation, and refusal to share are no less central to social life. This is certainly the case among Jordanian Bedouin, whose notions of hospitality are a complex blend of reciprocity, protection, and coercive extraction. The families of dominant tribal shaykhs are often known for their ability to take, to store away wealth, and to protect hoards of found and inherited treasure, both magical and mundane. By reading the oral historical traditions of the Balga tribes against familiar Maussian ideas and the models of parasitism suggested by Michel Serres, I argue that hospitality, as Bedouin know it, is constructed in ways that resist the romanticism that besets anthropological portraits of ‘pre-capitalist' and ‘premodern' gift economies.     

Carboniferous platyceratid gastropods from Western Australia and a possible alternative lifestyle adaptation

Cook, A.G. &; Jell, P.A., September 2015. Carboniferous platyceratid gastropods from Western Australia and a possible alternative lifestyle adaptation. Alcheringa 40, XX–XX. ISSN 0311-5518

Platyceratid gastropods, common and in many cases abundant as elements of middle Palaeozoic gastropod faunas worldwide, are rare or absent in Australian Devonian faunas. In Australia, the earliest abundant platyceratids occur in the Lower Carboniferous (Tournaisian) echinoderm-rich Septimus Limestone and Enga Sandstone in the Bonaparte Gulf Basin, Western Australia. Four taxa, each with significant morphological plasticity, are recognized. In Platyceras (Platyceras) tubulosus (de Koninck, 1883 Koninck, L.G. De, 1883. Faune du calcaire Carbonifère de La Belgique, Quatrième Partie, Gastropodes (suite et fin). Annales du Musée Royal D’Histoire Naturelle de Belgique Tome VIII, Text, 1–240, pls 1–54. [Google Scholar]), three rows of long radially arranged spines and common pentameral symmetry of re-entrants on the aperture suggest an alternative possibility that a relationship between echinoderms and platyceratids developed, and that this may be with archaeocidaroids that are commonly preserved with the gastropods. Similarly in the singly spinose Platyceras (Platyceras) emmemmjae sp. nov., re-entrants suggest an echinoderm relationship. It is proposed that an echinoderm–Platyceras relationship possibly developed in Australia only after a suitable echinoid host had evolved allowing an alternative way for a gameto- or coprophagous habit to be exploited fully.

Alex G Cook [alex.Cook@y7mail.com] and Peter A. Jell [p.jell@uq.edu.au], School of Earth Sciences, The University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia.