scholarly journals The Ebb and Flow of Copper and Iron Smelting in the South Caucasus

Radiocarbon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel L Erb-Satullo ◽  
Brian J J Gilmour ◽  
Nana Khakhutaishvili

AbstractThe Eastern Black Sea region of the South Caucasus contains an extremely rich record of metallurgical remains that is poorly known outside of the former Soviet Union. Large numbers of relatively small smelting sites dot the foothill regions, forming a dispersed, yet large-scale metallurgical landscape. New fieldwork in the region has followed up on earlier Soviet period research, relocating and reanalyzing previously known sites and identifying new ones. This paper presents a series of 33 radiocarbon (14C) dates from copper and iron smelting sites in this region. Dates from copper smelting sites suggest that copper smelting occurred over a shorter and more intense period than previously thought, between about 1300 and 800 BC. Dates from newly discovered iron smelting sites place these activities in two episodes during the Classical-Hellenistic period (ca. 500–200 BC) and the High Medieval period (ca. AD 1050–1400). The dramatic expansion in bronze production immediately prior to the adoption of iron mirrors patterns in other regions of Europe and the Near East, and has implications for understanding the economic contexts in which iron emerged. While the new dates from iron smelting sites provide only an initial outline of the iron production chronology in the region, they represent an important step for resolving outstanding issues from previous investigations.

Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Masnyk

This article deals with the professional discussion about the so-called “difficult questions” of Russian history that involves historians and teachers in the now independent republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block. Both academic publications and teaching books are used as primary sources for the study. In the first section, the author studies several problems connected with the origin of Russian statehood, the Varangian question, and civilizational characteristics of East Slavic nations. The second section is devoted to the Russian imperial past and especially to the discourse on colonialism, which is often used as an explanatory model for the imperial period by historians and textbook authors in some of the post-Soviet countries. The third section is concerned with the conception of the 1917 revolution. The author emphasizes the fact that the conception of a continuous revolutionary process (1917–1922) has yet to be accepted by Russian secondary schools. In this part, the author considers several other factors significant for understanding the revolutionary process including issues such as the origins of the First World War and the developmental level of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. In the fourth section, the article discusses the conception of the 1930s Soviet modernization along with negative opinions about the Soviet period given by scholars of different former Soviet republics. In the fifth section, the author briefly observes contemporary studies of culture and everyday life. It is concluded that the history of culture is not represented well in Russian school textbooks, and it is also found that the studies on everyday life are often lacking in depth. Discussing various “difficult questions” of Russian history, the author highlights controversial historical ideas and opinions, formulated in the post-Soviet countries during the last decades.


1984 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 405-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Q.A. Parker ◽  
H.T. MacGillivray ◽  
R.J. Dodd ◽  
J.A. Cooke ◽  
S.M. Beard ◽  
...  

AbstractMeasurements made with the COSMOS machine on deep objectiveprism photographs taken with the UK 1.2m Schmidt Telescope are being used to obtain approximate redshifts (accurate to ~ 0.01 in z) for large numbers of galaxies in fields near the South Galactic Pole. The data are suitable for investigations of the distribution of galaxies, such as the detection of large-scale density enhancements or voids.


1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 1112-1143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemarie Rogers

The number of forced migrants—recognized refugees, persons in “refugeelike” situations, and internally displaced—is estimated today to exceed 40 million. The changed international climate of the 1990s (a renewed emphasis on human rights; broader concepts of national security; and the profound political changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union) has shifted the focus from the asylum and resettlement countries to the countries of origin: there is today a greater willingness to intervene in other countries’ affairs either to avert the creation of new flows of focused migrants or to assist internally displaced populations, and there is the expectation of large-scale voluntary returns of refugees in asylum. This article discusses these and other policy issues concerning forced migration in this new international environment.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-394
Author(s):  
Sara Brinegar

This essay, with a focus on Baku, Azerbaijan, demonstrates that the need to secure and hold energy resources—and the infrastructures that support them—was critical to the formation of the Soviet Union. The Azerbaijani statesman Nariman Narimanov played a pivotal role in the establishment of Soviet power in Azerbaijan by attempting to use Baku's oil to secure prerogatives for the Azerbaijan SSR. In part, Narimanov gained his position by striking a deal with Vladimir Lenin in 1920, an arrangement that I am calling the oil deal. This deal lay the foundations of Soviet power in the south Caucasus. Lenin charged Narimanov with facilitating connections between the industrial stronghold of Baku and the rural countryside of Azerbaijan and Narimanov agreed to do what he could to help supply Soviet Russia with oil. Lenin put Narimanov in charge of the Soviet government of Azerbaijan, with the understanding that he would be granted significant leeway in cultural policies. Understanding the role of the south Caucasus in Soviet history, then, is also understanding how the extraction and use of oil and other natural resources were entangled with more familiar questions of nationalities policy and identity politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1(16)) ◽  
pp. 34-49
Author(s):  
Ihor Annienkov

Scientific-technical borrowings are one of those types of scientific support for the work of industrial sectors, whose role in the conditions of exiting the crisis to acquiring the particular importance. Since the mid-1920s, they have become the main how of scientific support for the organization of the development of Ukrainian electric machine-building industry in the context of large-scale electrification of the country. That was due to the need for a quick withdrawal of this industry from the previous crisis in the absence in the Ukrainian SSR of its own scientific support system for the electric machine engineering. The first form of scientific-technical borrowings for the republican segment of the Soviet Union profile industry was the agreement between the State Electrotechnical Trust and the German electrotechnical company Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft on scientific-technical cooperation. The main objective of this act was to achieve at the lowest possible financial cost the fastest possible increase in productivity of the Kharkiv Electromechanical Plant. To do this, it was supposed using the American technologies for the production of electrical machines but implemented them on German technological equipment. Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft was the company that already made such it at the beginning of the twentieth century using the technologies of the General Electric Company. Moreover, in the pre-Soviet period, it made an attempt to hold a similar act at the Kharkiv Electromechanical Plant, which it owned in this time; however it ended in failure due to the revolutionary upheavals that began in Ukraine. Thus, the agreement concluded with the German company was a continuation of the same actions, what itself had begun, but, already in new historical realities. That is, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft actions were copied by the Soviet government, however, adapted to the Soviet way of organizing industrial production. Despite the fundamental difference between the latter and the working conditions of the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft in Germany, the concentration of the parties precisely on the scientific and technical component of the project made it possible to achieve the expected result in full. However, at the same time, Ukrainian electric machine builders focused specifically on the speed of duplication of scientific-technical knowledge missed the opportunity to study the methodology for obtaining them. This became the reason that these scientific-technical borrowings did not become the proper basis for the formation of the scientific component of the scientific-technical potential of the domestic electric machine-building industry.


Author(s):  
Alexander Burnasov ◽  
Ilyushkina Maria ◽  
Yury Kovalev ◽  
Anatoly Stepanov ◽  
Gulnara Nyussupova

The prospects and trends for the development of border regions of the former Soviet Union have become one of the profound research areas in the field of economic geography recently. In the conditions of planned economy in the Republics of the USSR, a vertical system of industrial complexes was formed, with the focus on performing national economic tasks. There have been some significant changes in the border regions of independent post-Soviet States in the process of transition to the market economy model. The analysis of the industrial and territorial structure is done on the example of Russia and Kazakhstan. The formation of a common market on the basis of the Eurasian Economic Union allowed the border regions to make the most of their competitive advantage in attracting investments. The unique geographical particularity of the research object is manifested in the fact that there are no analogues of the longest land border in the world as between Russia and Kazakhstan. The new forms of production organisation are implemented in the border regions of the studied countries over more than 7,000 km. More than a quarter of a century later, transformation processes are clearly observed in the mining and manufacturing industries, agriculture, transport and services. As a result, the “regional asymmetry” of industrial development can be observed when manufacturing regions with high added value become the “cores” of economic development of cross-border relations between Russia and Kazakhstan.


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