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.     

Reflections into Ptolemaic glass: Colorless,white, blue,and green inlays from the workshop of Tebtynis

Inlays range among the most aesthetically pleasing and technically challenging glasses produced in the Ptolemaic period. Despite the central role of this phase in the history of glass technology, little is known about the recipes and the technological knowledge of the Egyptian artisans. This paper will thus focus on the study of the materials from the secondary workshop of Tebtynis (Fayum oasis, Egypt). We report the first multi-methodological study comprising textural, chemical, and mineralogical analyses (optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive system, electron probe microanalysis, and μ-Raman spectroscopy) on a set of 81 colorless, white, blue, and green samples carefully selected among the 800+ glasses from the craft area now stored at the Museo Egizio, Turin (Italy). Our study offers the biggest compositional database of well-dated Ptolemaic glasses currently available in the literature, highlighting some interesting novelties regarding the silica and alkali sources, and the coloring and opacifying techniques employed. The results suggest a specialized craft of traditional origin, but open to innovation and experimentation, as expected from transitional phases.     

氢氧化镁-凹凸棒土复合材料的合成及在纸质文献脱酸中的应用

凹凸棒土又被称为“万用之土”,在工业生产中有广泛应用。将其与纸质文献脱酸常用的碱性介质氢氧化镁复合,产生一种新的复合物。经反复研究,确定复合物中氢氧化镁的负载量最多为25%,同时通过透射电子显微镜(TEM)确定了复合物的状态,物性分析表明凹凸棒土是良好的脱酸材料载体,并验证复合物的形成。后将这种复合脱酸材料应用于纸张脱酸,经过对比,发现其脱酸性能优越且脱酸后纸张性能明显增强。     

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.     

Framing Food Policy: The Case of Raw Milk

Policies governing the sale of raw milk—making the sales of raw milk more permissive—are gaining traction on the legislative agendas of dozens of states. This paper examines one contributor to this movement on the policy agenda: the role of competitive framing. By combining theoretical approaches from policy studies and political psychology theories of competitive framing, we offer evidence supporting the recent relative success of raw milk activists in several state legislatures. Using an Internet survey‐based experiment with a sample size of 1,630 respondents from seven Midwestern states, we show that a frame emphasizing consumer choice and food freedom is more effective than the frame that dominates among the policy establishment, that emphasizing public health risks. This is true in both one‐sided and competitive framing contexts. We further show that those previously aware of this issue were less influenced by the public health frame than those naïve to the issue. Our results suggest that the pro‐raw milk movement may be making strides on the state policy agenda because their frames are more resonant among the public. We also highlight the advantages gained from considering psychological and policy processes simultaneously to understand policy change.     

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.