bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ritual activation: altars, cult statues, and temples
Authors: Potts Charlotte R.
Published: November 2020

Religious buildings, altars, and cult statues are often conceived of as complementary, if not indivisible, elements of Roman republican and imperial cult sites. The design and function of religious architecture have been ascribed to their interaction, with the result that it is not uncommon for one to be used to explain the presence of the others: buildings were constructed to shelter cult statues, which were aligned with external altars to provide sightlines between the gods and their worshippers. Together the three components shaped ritual space and made communication with the divine intelligible and tangible. Yet these three elements were not inherent parts of all ancient religious rituals and venues. There is no evidence of dedicated religious buildings, altars, or cult statues at the water sources that received some of the earliest votive deposits in central Italy, such as the spring at Campoverde, and the arrangement of accumulated votive offerings and statuettes in caves such as the closed deposit of the Caverna della Stipe similarly suggests that no image was accorded particular prominence or accompanied by a permanent altar. Proposals that some Iron Age residences hosted ritual meals do not theorize the complementary presence of cult statues and open-air altars, nor do suggestions that Greco- Roman temples developed from aristocratic banqueting halls. If the resulting impression of an era without cult statues and prominent altars is correct, then histories of religious architecture should consider the evidence for the introduction of such features and their influence on the form and function of relevant cult buildings. This chapter will accordingly examine the archaeological evidence for pre-republican altars and cult statues in Latium and Etruria. It will explore the problematic identification of these religious accessories, and identify the quantity and nature of those that can be connected with cult buildings. The significance of altars and cult statues as religious markers, or potential means of distinguishing cult buildings from other structures, will also be considered. Finally, it will evaluate the theory that the introduction of altars and anthropomorphic cult statues stimulated the construction of monumental temples.
Ritual topographies: landscapes, cityscapes, and temples
Authors: Potts Charlotte R.
Published: November 2020

The construction of monumental temples and sanctuaries during the sixth century BC changed the appearance of cult sites and settlements in Archaic Tyrrhenian Italy. The relationship between monumental cult buildings and their settings, however, is not well understood. As will be discussed below, scholars have argued that the placement and orientation of Archaic temples was influenced by the terrain, pre-existing cult sites, ritual geography, and the requirements of those within settlements. It has also been unclear whether religious monumentalization followed recognizable topographical patterns, particular to each region, culture, or religion, or alternatively varied according to local needs and customs. Thus, although the archaeology of landscapes and settlements has become an increasingly common element of Latial and Etruscan studies, the religious dimension of these landscapes and cityscapes may benefit from further analysis. This chapter accordingly examines the topography of early monumental temples in Latium and Etruria both in terms of their position in the landscape and in relation to features such as votive deposits, roads, and other buildings. The first part of the chapter presents an overview of the organization and characteristics of settlements in central Italy in the seventh and sixth centuries BC to establish the context for the introduction of the first monumental temples. The second and third parts test hypotheses about the location of Archaic cult buildings against the archaeological evidence. It will be suggested that what at first appears to be great diversity may actually represent a variety of responses to the same concern, namely a desire to be accessible to visitors, travellers, and an increasingly mobile population. The fourth and final part uses these findings to argue that it may be timely to review traditional typologies for cult sites that are based upon topographical relationships with urban centres. The incorporation of landscape archaeology into Etruscan and Latial studies over the last five decades has generated new data and models for reconstructing regional settlement hierarchies, population densities, and relationships with the physical environment. It is now possible to recognize broad, if complex, patterns in the location and organization of settlements as well as changes to those patterns over time.
On Not Believing What You Read
Authors: Rose Jonathan
Published: November 2020

Every student should, before graduating, see the 2006 teen-comedy movie Accepted. It’s a broad satire built around some high-school misfits whom no college admissions officer in his right mind would accept, not even in this economy. So they commandeer an abandoned mental asylum and construct their own college based on Marxism (Groucho), and they do to higher education what A Night at the Opera did to Il Trovatore. To a flabbergasted visitor, the teenage president of the college recommends the school newspaper, The Rag. “There’s a great op-ed piece in there about not believing everything you read,” he explains. Like all absurdist comedy, Accepted poses that subversive question, “Who’s absurd here?” It stands upside-down all the pretenses of university life, including its most fundamental pretense, that if we spend years here reading, we will get closer to the truth. Is there, though, any necessary relation between reality and what we find on the printed page? It’s a question that has become particularly acute today, when it seems that every man is his own deconstructionist. When Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase “hermeneutic of suspicion,” he was only recommending this reading strategy to literary theorists, but his students took it quite seriously and in 1968 turned the University of Nanterre into, well, something like the campus in Accepted. And today that skepticism is thoroughly mainstream. According to the Gallup Poll, only 32 percent of Americans in 2016 have confidence in the media, down from a high of 72 percent in 1976, post-Woodward and Bernstein. Among millennials (18-to-29-year-olds), just 11 percent trust the media. In Britain, back in 1975, only about a third of tabloid readers and just 3 percent of readers of “quality” broadsheets felt that their paper “often gets its facts wrong.” But by 2012 no British daily was trusted by a majority of the public “to report fairly and accurately.” In something of a contradiction, the Sun enjoyed both the largest circulation and the lowest level of trust (just 9 percent).
Kings’ Jelling: Monuments with Outstanding Biographies in the Heart of Denmark
Authors: Hvass Steen
Published: November 2020

On 16 April AD 2000 the 60th birthday of Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark was celebrated. To mark this particular day seventeen new tapestries were placed in Christiansborg Palace, in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. The tapestries depict the history of the Danish monarchy throughout 1,000 years. In the middle of the banqueting hall hangs the first and one of the largest tapestries about the Viking period. Here the history of King Gorm’s lineage begins: King Gorm the Old, his Queen Thyre, their son Harald Bluetooth, his son Svein, and Svein’s son Canute the Great, who ended up ruling over the whole of Denmark and England. Above the heads of the kings, ‘paganism’ fights against Christianity (Hornum 2000, 85). The most stately and noble monument in the history of Denmark are the Jelling Monuments. The Jelling Monuments stand as a key site in the archaeological and historical explanation of the political and religious transformations of the Scandinavian world at the end of the Viking Period. The site consists of the two largest burial mounds in Denmark, two runic stones dating from the Viking Period, and the church situated between the burial mounds. Since 2005, new excavations have expanded the monument area with the discovery of a huge stone setting depicting the outline of a ship measuring almost 360 metres in length, and a four-sided wooden palisade, which once encircled an area of approximately 12.5 hectares. The Northern Mound with a burial chamber is the centre for both the stone-ship and the entire expanse of the newly discovered palisade. Archaeological investigations in Jelling began as early as AD 1586, when Caspar Markdanner, King Frederik II’s lord lieutenant at Koldinghus Castle, raised one of the two rune-stones known at the site to an upright position so that its honour and dignity would be restored. In 1591 the lord lieutenant had an etching made of the entire site, and in 1643 Ole Worm drew up the first description of the monuments.
Megaliths and Holy Places in the Genesis of the Kingdom of Asturias (North of Spain, ad 718–910)
Authors: Blas Cortina Miguel Ángel de , Díaz-Guardamino Marta
Published: November 2020

Flowing from the Picos de Europa mountain range into the Bay of Biscay (in a SW–NE direction), the River Sella is the main dividing axis of the highly mountainous territory of Asturias, northern Spain, with peaks up to 2,500 metres. The ﬁrst known human traces in the Sella river basin date back to the Middle Palaeolithic and include remains of thirteen Neanderthal individuals found in the cave of El Sidrón. Archaeological remains dating to the Upper Palaeolithic and the Epipalaeolithic are frequent throughout the region. The adoption of the Neolithic way of life in Asturias was modest. The polished axes found in large numbers and mostly manufactured with rocks imported from other regions, are one of the main sources of evidence to study the Asturian Neolithic. The most noticeable archaeological evidence for this period is, however, the megalithic phenomenon, the earliest monuments dating to the beginning of the fourth millennium BC. Unlike the usual concentrations of barrows and dolmens in other areas of northern Iberia, these constructions are often found on high ground, strategically overlooking the main stretches of well-travelled pathways. The most prominent Asturian megalith, Santa Cruz (Cangas de Onís), however, differs from the pattern outlined above, as it was placed on a ﬂuvial terrace, on a location often ﬂooded by the Sella and Güeña rivers, which meet here (Blas Cortina 1997a; 1997b). The low altitude and the fair conditions of the optimal Holocene would have provided the basis for a densely forested environment throughout the ﬁfth and fourth millennia bc. Historically, the most populated town of this region has been Cangas de Onís, located in the conﬂuence of the Sella and Güeña rivers, where the best agricultural land is also found. These apt conditions also extend to the adjoining valley of Güeña, home to the sites of Covadonga and Abamia, which bear witness to the interweaving of prehistoric memory and Medieval affairs that will be discussed in this chapter.
What Happens When Tombs Die? The Historical Appropriation of the Cretan Bronze Age Cemeteries
Authors: Herrero Borja Legarra
Published: November 2020

Nobody can escape the past on Crete. The remainders of the past are part of the lives of modern Cretans in a way that is applicable to earlier historical periods (Bradley 2002, 112–13). It could at ﬁrst be thought that the present awareness of the past may be a consequence of the long history of archaeological work on the island, or the modern emphasis in developing attractions for the tourists (Duke 2007), but the truth runs much deeper. Any conversation with people in a small village discovers a rich rationalization of the remains of the past that is mostly independent of modern interpretations of Minoan culture. This understanding cannot be entirely explained either by the proud look of the past that deﬁnes important aspects of modern Greek and Cretan identity (Hamilakis 2007), but it relies heavily on their everyday experience of the place where they live, and on the human necessity of making sense of their immediate world. Particularly, given the agricultural emphasis of the island, the earth, and what it contains is intimately known. It was not unusual (and it is still not unusual) for archaeologists to conduct Kafenio (local coffee shop) surveys, in which a friendly chat at the local coffee place can shed much information about the archaeology of the area. Local knowledge is detailed and exhaustive and therefore a rich source of information. While locals may not be aware of what the site may be, concentrations of ceramics on the ground, piles of stones traditionally known as Trochalos (Xanthoudides 1924, 54) or memories of ﬁnd-spots of strange or valuable items are part of the local shared knowledge. There are a couple of good reasons that allow us to project this picture onto the past. First, the intrinsic knowledge of the land where one lives may be assumed to be a trait of any population. Second, the island had one of the most archaeologically complex Bronze Age civilizations in Europe, lasting for more than a millennium.
Getting Dirty: What Charcoal Can tell us
Authors: Scott Andrew C.
Published: November 2020

Most of us are familiar with charcoal from sketching with it at school, or using charcoal bricks for a barbecue. You will have noticed that it got your hands dirty, that it is brittle, and that it is quite light—at least, lighter than an equivalent piece of uncharred wood. You may also have associated the black residues left after a bonfire with charcoal. If you have been to an area where the vegetation has been destroyed by wildfire, you may have also noticed black residues of charcoal on the ground that make a crunching sound beneath your feet. Our first two examples of charcoal are both products of human manufacture. The bonfire charcoal is a naturally formed material, but still the link with wildfire may not be made. When we see images of burning vegetation it is natural to imagine that all the plant material is consumed by the flames. Yet, as I came to realize on my visit to the site of the Hayman Fire, there is often a significant quantity of unburned material, and charcoal residues as well. Why are we left with charcoal after a fire? Charcoal is produced by heating plant material (most commonly wood, but not exclusively so) in the absence of oxygen. So it isn’t a product of the fire itself, but of the intense heat from the fire. Wood is essentially made up of two organic compounds: cellulose and lignin. Both compounds consist of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but they differ in structure and therefore in properties. In cellulose, the carbon atoms are arranged in straight lines (it is an example of an aliphatic compound). It is the material from which paper is made. In lignin, on the other hand, the carbons are arranged in rings (it is an aromatic compound), and it is this structure that gives wood its toughness and strength. Industrial charcoal is used for a variety of metallurgical processes, and as adsorbents and food additives, as well as for barbecues and artists’ materials, so its formation has been carefully studied.
“Mementos of the Prehistoric Races”: Antiquarians and Archaeologists in the Centennial Decade
Authors: Snead James E.
Published: November 2020

The long Worcester slumber of the Kentucky Mummy came to an end in 1875, with a letter to Joseph Henry from Samuel Haven, then in his fourth decade as Librarian of the American Antiquarian Society. “Nearly a year ago,” Haven wrote, “I received from you a request that the mummy (so called) from a cave in Kentucky, which had for many years been in possession of this Society, should be transferred to the Smithsonian Institution . . . I therefore . . . now feel at liberty to forward the body by express; hoping that you may find it convenient to make such return in exchange as seems proper.” Thus the Kentucky Mummy was packed up and sent south—by train, rather than by wagon, as in her northward journey—with little fanfare at either end. It is uncertain whether the return exchange was completed, but the episode provided an opportunity to highlight the Antiquarian Society’s collections, and perhaps thereby its priority in the study of the indigenous past. Earlier in 1875 the Society had called the attention of the membership to the display of antiquities in its halls. “Anything connected with the North American Indians is deemed worthy of the study of the antiquary,” noted the Council’s report, pointing out that even remains from lowly shell heaps “make known the character of their food with all the certainty of a bill of fare at the Parker House.” The same note, however, also acknowledged that the center of gravity for North American archaeology in New England had definitively shifted away from Worcester. The establishment of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard in 1866 was the initial cause of this realignment, which provided for scholarship a new venue, relatively unburdened by institutional culture. The museum’s first curator, Jeffries Wyman, died in 1874 and was replaced by a younger and more ambitious man, Frederic Ward Putnam. In the same year the Council of the Antiquarian Society was joined by Stephen Salisbury III, a dynamic patron with interests in the ancient Maya. With new leaders, the two institutions moved in different directions.
Control of caries lesion development and progression
Authors: Kidd Edwina , Fejerskov Ole
Published: November 2020

The first three chapters of this book have introduced the basics of what dental caries is and how to detect lesions. The next chapter will consider the concept of caries control and begins by explaining why throughout this book the preferred term is caries control, rather than prevention. Remember, the formation of the dental biofilm, and its metabolism is an ubiquitous natural process; it cannot be prevented. So: Question: Who is susceptible to caries lesion development? Answer: Everyone with teeth, from cradle to grave because the metabolism in the dental biofilm is an ubiquitous, natural process. Lesion development and progression, which may occur over time, are symptoms of the process. We should aim to control these processes so that the development of a clinically visible lesion is avoided. However, if clinical lesions develop and progress these symptoms can be arrested by controlling the environment. Thus, all patients with teeth should know how lesions may form and progress, and how to control this. Please note the emphasis on the patient. It is the patient who controls caries with the support and encouragement of the professional. The goals of medicine (and dentistry) are to promote and preserve health if it is impaired, to restore health, and minimize suffering and distress. These goals are embodied in the word ‘prevention’. It is agreed that, with dental caries, this is basically what the dental profession is doing—and has always been doing. In many ways this has become a mantra—the dentists rightly claim that they are conducting prevention when recommending the population to eat less sugar, use fluorides, brush teeth, and when lesions occur, drill and fill, in order to restore the dentition and reduce pain and discomfort. Unfortunately, when dentists go for restoration—without ensuring that the patient understands how to control further caries lesion development—they indirectly stimulate the repair cycle, which ultimately may lead to loss of teeth (see Chapter 5). Sometimes the filling may be described as ‘treatment’ to contrast it with ‘prevention’. The dentist is paid for fillings (treatment) and minimally rewarded for so-called prevention.
Military Presence around and beyond the Base Area
Authors: James Simon
Published: November 2020

The C3 bathhouse, in the heart of the old lower town, the grandest Roman bath in Dura, was not originally envisaged to form part of the present project as it lay well outside the area previously recognized as forming the Roman military base. However, it has long been thought that this bath, and the similar facility M7 at the other end of Main St near the Palmyrene Gate, were constructed by the soldiers. In the case of the C3 bathhouse it also became apparent post-2010 that the zone taken over by the military extended all the way into the adjacent block B2, while the S frontage of B4 opposite the bath on Lower Main St may well have been the edge of the unified military base. Consequently, had it been possible to conduct further fieldwork as projected for 2012, full re-survey of the C3 and (for completeness and comparison) M7 baths would have been undertaken. Circumstances prevented this; however, discussion of these facilities is still necessary, especially as both were only summarily published. This review draws on a preliminary inspection undertaken in 2010, as well as archival material. It concludes that the C3 facility was significantly larger and grander even than already understood. Like the other bathhouses, the C3 facility was visible as an upstanding mound, and especially noticeable as the Ottoman road ran directly through it. The bath was partially excavated during the sixth season, and archival records are relatively good including a six-page typescript document, ‘Notes on Roman Bath in Block C3, excavated Jan.–Mar. 1933’, annotated ‘M. Crosby?’ There is also partial photographic coverage of the structure. The finds registers record 262 finds from the building, over 100 of them ascribed to specific rooms; however, few can now be specifically identified. Brown published a brief account of the bath, composed from ‘the notes of the excavator, Miss Margaret Crosby, carefully checked by personal observation of the author’ (PR 6, 95, n. 7). This, the only publication on the C3 facility, formed part of Brown’s comparative study of Dura’s bathhouses (PR 6, 95–104 and pl. IV, reproducing archive drawing Bath N.12; note on the mosaics and inscription 631: PR 6, 104–5; pls XVI.2–3; XXXIX.1–3).
Conclusion
Authors: Kiddey Rachael
Published: November 2020

An archaeological approach to contemporary homelessness contributes to existing literature on the subject by materializing this familiar yet alien social status in a number of ways. Globally, homelessness continues to suffer from being conceptually constructed according to essentially British nineteenth-century ideologies that are class-based and heavily gendered, whilst, increasingly commonly, manifesting physically as a diverse and phenomenological experience. Approaching homelessness using participatory cultural heritage methodologies enabled those involved in the Homeless Heritage project to collectively destabilize some of the pernicious myths that surround homelessness, present alternative perspectives, and identify practical ways in which homeless people might be better helped to survive and recover. Positive outcomes from the Homeless Heritage project include the ways in which people involved experienced increased social connectedness and enhanced well-being. Homeless colleagues actively chose to (re)engage with existing social and public services with more robust commitment than had previously been the case, while reconnecting with family also emerged as a strong and important outcome from the Homeless Heritage project. There were theoretical implications too. Where archaeology may be considered an ‘intervention’—a methodology for engaging with the material world— heritage is the human context by which such engagement is made possible. Heritage, a mode of cultural production, has an important role to play in facilitating redemptive and cathartic conversations about difficult or distressing human experiences and could powerfully affect the course of social policies in the future. Conversations facilitated through Applied Heritage can produce more nuanced understanding, which could feasibly be used to improve and enhance social justice on local levels and promote tolerance, understanding, and peace on the wider international stage. The initial aim of the project was to see whether an archaeological cultural heritage approach to contemporary homelessness might contribute to wider understanding of the social condition. A significant outcome was a more nuanced understanding of homelessness in the twenty-first century. This helped to powerfully counter definitions and rationalizations of homelessness in terms of nineteenth-century constructions of vagrancy. A more surprising outcome concerns evidence that Applied Heritage can function as a powerful therapeutic form of social intervention. In approaching homelessness archaeologically, from the perspective of a range of individual agents, the Homeless Heritage project clearly showed why a homeless person might ‘choose’ to appropriate, for example, space beneath a willow tree or a bin cupboard over conditions in temporary accommodation deemed ‘suitable’ for statutorily homeless people.
Bombes
Authors: Copeland Jack
Published: November 2020

Turing’s Enigma-cracking ‘bombe’ was one of his major contributions to winning the war. His revolutionary machine gave the Allies open access to Germany’s secret military communications. This chapter explains what the bombe was for and how it worked. Jean Valentine and Catherine Caughey, both Bletchley Park ‘Wrens’, describe their first encounters with Turing’s awe-inspiring bombes. They speak of the morale-sapping secrecy that surrounded the work of bombe operators. Jean Valentine also describes a visit to the secret factory where the bombes were made. Poland’s codebreakers were reading German military Enigma from early 1933. Their intellectual leader was the legendary Marian Rejewski, one of the twentieth century’s greatest codebreakers. As explained in Chapter 11, Rejewski and his colleagues invited a party of their British opposite numbers to Poland a few weeks before Hitler’s army poured across the frontier. An ultrasecret meeting took place at the Biuro Szyfrów (the cipher bureau), a cluster of buildings hidden in the forest at Pyry, near Warsaw. The visitors included Dilly Knox, at that time Britain’s most experienced warrior against Enigma (see Chapter 11), and Commander Alastair Denniston, head of British military and civil codebreaking. ‘The Poles called for us at 7 a.m.’, recalled Denniston, ‘and we were driven out to a clearing in a forest about 20 kilometres from Warsaw’. The Poles had decided to reveal everything before it was too late. ‘At that meeting we told everything we knew and showed everything we had’, Rejewski said. After the meeting, Knox sang for joy—although his immediate reaction, as he had sat listening to Rejewski’s codebreaking triumphs, had been undisguised fury that the Poles were so far ahead of him. In 1938 Rejewski and his colleagues had built a small machine they called a ‘bomba’. Their reasons for choosing this distinctive name, whose literal meaning is ‘bomb’ or ‘bombshell’, went unrecorded at the time, and theories later abounded. At Bletchley Park Turing told Joan Clarke, to whom he was briefly engaged, that the bomba ‘got this nickname because it made a ticking noise, like an anarchist’s time bomb’ (as she recollected).
Computer music
Authors: Copeland Jack , Long Jason
Published: November 2020

One of Turing’s contributions to the digital age that has largely been overlooked is his groundbreaking work on transforming the computer into a musical instrument. It is an urban myth of the music world that the first computer-generated musical notes were heard in 1957, at the Bell Laboratories in the United States. In fact, computer-generated notes were heard in Turing’s Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University about nine years previously. This chapter establishes Turing’s pioneering role in the history of computer music. We also describe how Christopher Strachey, later Oxford University’s first professor of computing, used and extended Turing’s note-playing subroutines so as to create some of the earliest computer-generated melodies. A few weeks after Baby ran its first program (see Chapter 20) Turing accepted a job at Manchester University. He improved on Baby’s bare-bones facilities, designing an input–output system based on wartime cryptographic equipment (see Chapter 6). His tape reader, which used the same teleprinter tape that ran through Colossus, converted the patterns of holes punched across the tape into electrical pulses and fed these to the computer. The reader incorporated a row of light-sensitive cells that read the holes in the moving tape—the same technology that Colossus had used. As the months passed, a large-scale computer took shape in the Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory. Turing called it the ‘Manchester Electronic Computer Mark I’ (Fig. 23.1). A broad division of labour developed that saw Kilburn and Williams working on the hardware and Turing on the software. Williams concentrated his efforts on developing a new form of supplementary memory, a rotating magnetic drum, while Kilburn took the leading role in developing the other hardware. Turing designed the Mark I’s programming system, and went on to write the world’s first programming manual. The Mark I was operational in April 1949, although additional development continued as the year progressed. Ferranti, a Manchester engineering firm, contracted to build a marketable version of the computer, and the basic designs for the new machine were handed over to Ferranti in July 1949. The very first Ferranti computer was installed in Turing’s Computing Machine Laboratory in February 1951 (Fig. 23.2), a few weeks before the earliest American-built marketable computer, the UNIVAC I, became available.
Pioneer of artificial life
Authors: Boden Margaret
Published: November 2020

Alan Turing’s 1952 account of ‘The chemical basis of morphogenesis’ pioneered the use of reaction–diffusion equations in explaining the origin of bodily form. This exciting paper showed how it is possible for various familiar biological structures to develop by referring to chemical ‘morphogens’ whose actual identity was still unknown. Some forty years later, his work began to inspire research in computer graphics, artificial life, and structuralist developmental biology: the follow-up had needed to await huge advances in computer power, computer graphics, and experimental biochemistry. Turing’s unpublished mathematical notes found after his death are still not fully understood: they very probably contain further insights into biological form. In 1794 the Romantic poet William Blake asked a deep question:… Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? . . . Did He who made the Lamb make thee?... The answer was a mystery. But Blake apparently assumed that it must involve some supernatural power—perhaps the Christian God. Most of his contemporaries would have agreed with him. Even 150 years later, in the middle of the 20th century, this answer was still widely accepted. But by this time the study of embryology had progressed enough to suggest that the marvellous development of an undifferentiated egg-cell into an embryo of increasingly complex form could in principle be given a scientific answer. Moreover, embryologists believed that the answer would refer to chemicals—called ‘organizers’—that cause successive changes in the cytoplasm as the egg gradually develops into organs of differing types. But this was about as far as it went. Just what those so-called organizers were was unknown; how they might be able to produce not merely chemical changes but also novel patterns and shapes—like the tiger’s stripes and its magnificent muscles and head—was equally mysterious. The then-fashionable talk of ‘self-organization’ served more to prohibit reference to Blake’s immortal hand or eye than to offer specific answers: indeed, that notion was a highly abstract one. It was understood as the spontaneous emergence (and maintenance) of order out of an origin that is ordered to a lesser degree—where ‘spontaneous’ meant not magical or supernatural, but somehow caused by the inner nature of the system itself. However, the ‘order’ and ‘origin’ (not to mention ‘emergence’ and ‘maintenance’) were unspecified.
Turing’s legacy
Authors: Bowen Jonathan , Copeland Jack
Published: November 2020

In terms of public appreciation Turing has risen quickly from zero to hero. The decades of obscurity (Who did you say? Turning?) came to an end with the much-publicized Royal Pardon of 2013 and, before that, the widespread international celebrations in 2012 during the centenary of his birth—celebrations that formed a spontaneous collective decentralized yell, by academics, artists, broadcasters, politicians, athletes, and others: ACCLAIM HIM! Suddenly Turing went viral. This final chapter surveys his burgeoning legacy: cultural, political, scientific, and linguistic. It is a work in progress. Turing’s renown is growing too fast for any final assessment. Turing invented the universal machine, representing the stored-program computer in its most general and abstract form; and with hindsight his seminal 1936 paper ‘On computable numbers’ foretold the capabilities of the modern computer. During the Second World War he recognized that computing machines could carry out important tasks fast and reliably, even tasks requiring intelligence when done by human beings. Unlike some theorists, Turing had a strong practical bent and was as happy to wield a soldering iron as to wrestle with an abstract mathematical problem. The story of his post-war contributions to the design and development of electronic computers was told in Chapters 20–22. Yet placing Turing is always difficult. He was not the inventor of the computer, but one among a diffuse group of mathematicians and engineers who brought the new machines into existence (see Chapter 6). For the same reason he was not the founder of computer science; and in any case the title ‘founder of computer science’ is anachronistic: Turing had been dead for 6 years before George Forsythe coined the term ‘computer science’ and the first university departments of computer science began to emerge. Nevertheless, the new discipline of computer science was certainly grounded in the fundamental ideas of Turing and his contemporaries, including John von Neumann, Maurice Wilkes, and Tom Kilburn.
The Ancient Near East
Authors: Mitchell Peter
Published: November 2020

The donkey was domesticated from the African wild ass in Northeast Africa some 7–6,000 years ago. This chapter looks at what happened when donkeys turned right and exited Africa into Asia. Though tracking their movement as far as India and China, its principal focus lies in the Ancient Near East, the region stretching from Israel north to Turkey and eastward into Iraq and Iran that is often termed the ‘Fertile Crescent’. Within this vast area, donkeys were used in daily life, including the agricultural cycle, just as they were in Egypt. But like there they also acquired other, more specialized uses and associations. Thus, after tracing the donkey’s spread I look at its role in three key aspects of the Near East’s earliest civilizations: the organization of trade; the legitimization of kingship; and religion. By 3500 BC the earliest cities had already emerged in Mesopotamia, the ‘land between the rivers’ Euphrates and Tigris. Over the course of the next 1,500 years, urbanization gathered pace across Palestine and Syria in the west, northward in Turkey, and east through Iran. Within Mesopotamia the independent Sumerian city-states of the south developed increasingly monarchical forms of government, seeing brief unity under the kings of Akkad and the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late third millennium BC. Then and later a city-state pattern of political organization also held in northern Mesopotamia (for example, at Aššur and its neighbour Mari) and in the Levant. In the mid-second millennium bc, however, much larger kingdoms emerged: the Hittites in central Turkey, Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, and Babylonia in its south. The Hittites, in particular, competed with Egypt for control of Syrian and Palestinian cities like Ugarit. When these Bronze Age powers collapsed around 1200 BC, their disappearance opened a window for smaller states like Israel to flourish briefly in their wake. Subsequently, however, first Assyria (911–612 BC) and then Babylon (612–539 BC) established much more centralized and extensive empires across the Near East before being subsumed within the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and his successors.
The Classical World
Authors: Mitchell Peter
Published: November 2020

Donkeys are the quintessential Mediterranean animal. This chapter explores the first two millennia and more of that association. It starts with the Bronze Age societies of the Aegean, but principally emphasizes the donkey’s contribution to the Classical world of the Greeks and Romans, a topic richly informed by literary, as well as archaeological, evidence. Summarizing that contribution, Mark Griffith noted that ‘Without them there would have been no food for the table or fuel for the fire; nor would the workshops, markets, and retail stores have been able to conduct their business’, while the Roman writer and politician Cicero simply observed that it would be unduly tedious to enumerate their services. Around 4,000 years ago urban, state-organized societies centred on large, multiroom ‘palaces’ were already active on the island of Crete. By the mid-second millennium bc similar societies had emerged on the Greek mainland in the form of the Mycenaean kingdoms. Bronze Age societies further west, however, were organized at a less complex level and did not use writing. The same holds true of Greece itself once Mycenaean civilization collapsed: only after 800 BC did the material culture and city-state political systems characteristic of the Classical period emerge. Without discussing the latter’s archaeology or history in detail, it is worth remembering that the Classical Greek world was far more extensive than the modern country, a result of early settlement of the west coast of Turkey, followed by large-scale migration into southern Italy and Sicily (‘Magna Graecia’ or ‘Greater Greece’) and smaller scale colonization elsewhere along the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Greeks—and the Phoenician merchants who preceded them—were attracted into the western Mediterranean by opportunities for trade as much as settlement. Of the region’s indigenous populations Italy’s Etruscans were among the first to engage with them, undergoing a rapid process of urbanization and increasing political and economic complexity from about 800 BC. On the Etruscans’ southern periphery emerged Rome. Through luck, strategy, and a geographically central location, by the third century BC it dominated the Italian Peninsula. Moreover, following wars with Carthage, an originally Phoenician city in Tunisia, and with the Macedonian kings who succeeded Alexander the Great, its sway extended across the whole of the Mediterranean by the time Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.
New Worlds for the Donkey
Authors: Mitchell Peter
Published: November 2020

One of the signature historical phenomena of the past 500 years has been the global expansion of European societies and their trans-Atlantic offshoots. The mercantile networks, commercial systems, and empires of conquest and colonization that formed the political and economic framework of that expansion involved the discovery and extraction of new mineral and agricultural resources, the establishment of new infrastructures of transport and communication, and the forcible relocation of millions of people. Another key component was the Columbian Exchange, the multiple transfers of people, animals, plants, and microbes that began even before Columbus, gathered pace after 1492, and were further fuelled as European settlement advanced into Africa, Australasia, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Donkeys evolved in the Old World and were confined there until the Columbian Exchange was underway. This chapter explores the introduction of the donkey and the mule to the Americas and, more briefly, to southern Africa and Australia. In keeping with my emphasis on seeking archaeological evidence with which to illuminate the donkey’s story, I omit other aspects of its expansion, such as the trade in animals to French plantations on the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius or, on a much greater scale, India to meet the demands of the British Raj. These examples nevertheless reinforce the argument that mules and donkeys were instrumental in creating and maintaining the structures of economic and political power that Europeans and Euro- Americans wielded in many parts of the globe. From Brazil to the United States, Mexico to Bolivia, Australia to South Africa, they helped directly in processing precious metals and were pivotal in moving gold and silver from mines to centres of consumption. At the same time, they aided the colonization of vast new interiors devoid of navigable rivers, maintained communications over terrain too rugged for wheeled vehicles to pose serious competition, and powered new forms of farming. Their contributions to agriculture and transport were well received by many of the societies that Europeans conquered and their mestizo descendants. However, they also provided opportunities for other Native communities to maintain a degree of independence and identity at and beyond the margins of the European-dominated world.
Separating the Emotions: Archaeological Mentalities in Central Italian Funerary Archaeology
Authors: Rajala Ulla
Published: November 2020

This chapter defines the concept of archaeological mentality and suggests that it is a useful tool in characterizing archaeological thinking and practice. It is argued that pre-designed interviews, even considering their limitations (see Everill 2009: 105–7), are a good method of studying contemporary archaeological mentalities. For this purpose, the chapter presents an ethnoarchaeological investigation among a group of central Italian archaeologists, researchers, and field archaeologists involved in the study of the past peoples of the region, who are or have been engaged in pre-Roman funerary archaeology, the field of study of the author of this chapter. The study was aimed at exploring different attitudes central Italian archaeologists have towards their work, its various aims, guiding principles, and possible outcomes. This research was carried out as part of the preparatory phase of the Remembering the Dead project (Rajala 2008), with the duration of its field phase defined by financial and time constraints. The idea was to investigate the local archaeological context of the project in its planning phase, and this pilot study fulfilled its purpose from this view point. For archaeologists, the discovery, recovery, and study of human remains can be the most direct encounter with past individuals they have, giving a way to interpret the character of ancient customs, rituals, and communities (Parker Pearson 1999). Archaeologists are constantly dealing with the dead either indirectly, when trying to reconstruct the living conditions of past peoples, or directly when excavating and studying funerary remains. Although much effort has been devoted to understanding different funerary contexts (e.g. Parker Pearson 1982; Morris 1987; Lucy 2002; Tarlow 2011), less emphasis has been put upon understanding how our modern concerns and experiences may affect our work (Rajala 2007; Leighton 2010). In contrast, attitudes towards death have already been studied among other professions engaged in handling the dying and the dead (e.g. Cooper and Barnett 2005). Most of the archaeological treatises of the subject at the time of this study have been accounts of archaeologists’ own personal reactions or descriptions of specific cases (cf. Kirk and Start 1999; Reeve and Cox 1999).
‘Tomb to Give Away’: The Significance of Graves and Dead Bodies in Present-Day Austria
Authors: Weiss-Krejci Estella
Published: November 2020

Several years ago, my son and I moved into an apartment on the northern fringe of Graz, the capital of Styria, Austria. One day I decided to take a walk in a nearby forest through which a small stream, the Gabriachbach, flows. As I walked along the stream, I noticed in the water coloured glass shards as well as many nicely cut stone blocks. I became increasingly more curious and started to search the stream bed systematically. Picking up more and more artefacts, my collection grew at a great speed and soon the pockets of my trousers and the plastic shopping bag that I happened to have on me started to burst. Among other items, I found a water container, a broken lantern, several small glass bottles, and the fragment of a human long bone. As I gradually moved upstream, I found more worked stones in association with the remains of an iron fence. At that moment the realization dawned upon me that I was standing in the midst of the cleared out and dumped remains from a cemetery. Inquiring about the provenance of the remains, I was told by a friend of mine that they derive from a nearby graveyard, most likely of St Veit, and date to the first half of the twentieth century; he found a gravestone with the inscription ‘1943’. The dumping probably took place at the end of the 1970s since at that time the stream channel had been reconstructed, apparently with stones and other materials deriving from the cemetery. To find myself amidst discarded cemetery remains did not particularly shock me at the time. I assume it is my cultural disposition as an Austrian—we have a reputation for concerning ourselves with death quite happily—not worrying about such types of confrontations with the inevitability of death. I remember feeling a bit sad about all the dead people, their grave stones, flower vases, candle holders, and all the other belongings. My thoughts also went to those who had cared for the graves and who were also long gone. What really stuck in my mind though, is that overwhelming feeling of the futility of any material accomplishment by the dead as well as the lack of remembrance for them.