scholarly journals I.—The Kishon and Jordan Valleys

1904 ◽  
Vol 1 (12) ◽  
pp. 575-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. G. Bonney

That broad trench through the Palestine Highlands, an ancient highway and battlefield of nations—the plain of Esdraelon or the valley of Megiddo, together with the plain of Acre—has for long presented to me a difficult problem in Physical Geology, for it seemed inexplicable by subaerial denudation under existing conditions. Its floor varies roughly from five to eight miles in breadth; running approximately from south-east to north-west, it is bounded on the more western side by the limestone mountains of Samaria and on the more eastern by those of Galilee. The former descend from the ridge of Carmel (1,742 feet at highest) with a fairly steep escarpment, which becomes a little less regular as we follow it to the bastion-mass of Mount Gilboa; the latter correspond in their general outlines with those of the eastern portion of Samaria, but the advance of a lower spur towards the south-west divides the plain of Esdraelon from that of Acre, by a kind of strait in which, so far as I could see, there is but little level ground on either side of the Kishon. This spur, however, of the northern hills, hardly does more than interrupt the floor of the Kishon valley, for above it the great trench is continued between two hill masses, much of these ranging from thirteen to sixteen hundred feet above sea-level. Beyond the strait the upper basin (plain of Esdraelon) quickly broadens out, extending towards the south-east for about fifteen or sixteen miles, where it is divided into two arms by Jebel Duhy (Little Hermon) (1,690 feet), which is thus isolated from Tabor (1,846 feet) on the north, and from Gilboa (1,698 feet) on the south; a broad, rather shallow, grassy valley descending from the last-named mass to lose itself in the plain.

1916 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. Bodkin ◽  
L. D. Cleare

British Guiana lies between the latitudes 0·41′ N. (source of the Essequebo River) and 8° 33′ 22″ N. (Punta Playa), has a depth from north to south of about 500 miles, a seaboard of about 270 miles trending in a south-easterly direction, and occupies in the north-east of South America an area approximately equal in extent to Great Britain. It is bounded on the north by the Atlantic Ocean, on the east by Surinam or Dutch Guiana, on the south and south-west by Brazil, and on the west by Venezuela.The Colony may be divided broadly into three belts. The northern one consists of a low-lying flat and swampy belt of marine alluvium—the coastal region. This rises gradually from the seaboard and extends inland for a distance varying from 5 to 49 miles. It is succeeded by a broader and slightly elevated tract of country of sandy and clayey soils. This belt is generally undulating, and is traversed in places by sand-dunes rising from 50 to 180 ft. above sea-level. The more elevated portion of the Colony lies to the southward of the above-mentioned regions. It rises gradually to the south-west, between the river valleys, which are in many parts swampy, and contains three principal mountain ranges, several irregularly distributed smaller ranges, and in the southern and eastern parts numerous isolated hills and mountains. The eastern portion is almost entirely forest-clad, but on the south-western side there is an extensive area of flat grass-clad savannah land elevated about 300 feet above sea-level.


Antiquity ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 58 (224) ◽  
pp. 171-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Todd

Hembury is chiefly noted as the site of a neolithic settlement and one of the finest hillforts of the Iron Age in the South-West (PL. XXIV & FIG. I ) . These prehistoric works lie at the southern tip of a long, narrow promontory extending southwards from the Greensand mass of the Blackdown Hills and overlooking the broad valleys of the Otter and the Culm. Beyond these to the west lies the Exe valley and further west still (and visible in clear weather) the Haldon ridge and the eastern tors of Dartmoor. Excavations by Miss D. M. Liddell (Liddell, 1930; 1931; 1932; 1935) between 1930 and 1935 revealed the significance of Hembury for the south-western Neolithic in particular, the material culture of the early neolithic settlement being plainly related to that of Windmill Hill. Miss Liddell's examination of the iron age fort was centred upon the two fine gates, on the western side and at the north-west angle. Little work was devoted to the interior except to trace the ditch of the neolithic causewayed enclosure and to explore the extreme southern tip of the promontory.


1954 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 267-291
Author(s):  
Elizabeth B. Wace

The Cyclopean Terrace Building lies to the north-west of the Lion Gate on the northern end of the Panagia Ridge and faces almost due west across the valley of the Kephissos and modern main road from Corinth to Argos. It lies just below the 200 m. contour line, and one terrace below the houses excavated in 1950–51 by Dr. Papadimitriou and Mr. Petsas to the east at the same end of the ridge. The area contains a complex of buildings, both successive and contemporary, and in view of the discovery of structures both to the south-west and, by the Greek Archaeological Service, to the north-east it is likely that this whole slope was covered by a portion of the outer town of Mycenae. This report will deal only with the structure to which the name Cyclopean Terrace Building was originally given, the so-called ‘North Megaron’, supported by the heavy main terrace wall.The excavation of this structure was begun in 1923. The main terrace wall was cleared and two L.H. IIIC burials discovered in the top of the fill in the south room. In 1950 it was decided to attempt to clear this building entirely in an endeavour to find out its date and purpose. The clearing was not, however, substantially completed until the close of the 1953 excavation season, and this report presents the available evidence for the date as determined by the pottery found beneath the building; the purpose is still a matter for study, though various tentative conclusions can be put forward.


1904 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 265-272
Author(s):  
P. W. Stuart-Menteath

On the rail to Biarritz the roots of the Pyrenees first appear at Dax, and are accompanied by those ophites and thermal springs which are special features of the entire chain. Vast deposits of salt, to whose first development I contributed, have added an important industry to the resources of this ancient capital of Aquœ Tarbelliœ, where the exact harness depicted on Roman medals is still characteristic of every cart. Beneath the existing ditch of the Roman fortifications rock-salt was accidentally discovered by a boring for mineral water, and the salt is now worked at three miles to the south-east, and is indicated by springs for a distance of seven miles. The deposit is known to be about 100 feet in thickness, but is of unknown depth beneath the existing borings.Along the entire outskirts of both sides of the Pyrenees similar salt deposits abound, and they are often similarly accompanied by igneous rocks.The salt formation of Dax is distinctly limited by the valley of the Adour, which here ceases to wander among the sands of the plain, and is suddenly and sharply diverted along a tectonic depression, running towards the Pyrenees in a south-west direction. Precisely parallel to this course, in the Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks of the Pyrenees, there runs, at a dozen miles to the north-west, the most remarkable example known of a tectonic valley sunk beneath the ocean. The Gouf de Capbreton, sinking with steep sides to over 3,000 feet beneath the even bottom of the Atlantic skirt, and affording evidence of igneous rocks in its surroundings and in the irregularities of its floor, is a perfect analogue of the neighbouring tectonic portion of the Adour.


1970 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 125-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Coles ◽  
F. Alan Hibbert ◽  
Colin F. Clements

The Somerset Levels are the largest area of low-lying ground in south-west England, covering an extensive region between the highlands of Exmoor, the Brendon Hills and the Quantock Hills to the west, and the Cotswold and Mendip Hills to the east (Pl. XXIII, inset). The Quantock Hills and the Mendip Hills directly border the Levels themselves, and reach heights of over 250 metres above sea level. The valley between extends to 27 metres below sea level, but is filled to approximately the height of the present sea by a blue-grey clay. The Levels are bisected by the limestone hills of the Poldens, and both parts have other smaller areas of limestone and sand projecting above the peat deposits that cap the blue-grey clay filling. In this paper we are concerned with the northern part of the Levels, an area at present drained by the River Brue.The flat, peat-covered floor of the Brue Valley is some six kilometres wide and is flanked on the north by the Wedmore Ridge, and on the south by the Polden Hills (Pl. XXIII). In the centre of the valley, surrounded by the peat, is a group of islands of higher ground, Meare, Westhay, and Burtle. These islands, which would always have provided relatively dry ground in the Levels, are linked together by Neolithic trackways of the third millennium B.C. Several of these trackways formed the basis of a paper in these Proceedings in 1968 (Coles and Hibbert, 1968), which continued the work of Godwin and others (Godwin, 1960; Dewar and Godwin, 1963).


1980 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
pp. 83-86
Author(s):  
A. B Armour-Brown ◽  
T Tukiainen ◽  
B Wallin

The SYDURAN project completed the airborne gamma-spectrometer and geochemical sampling survey over some 14 000 km2 of south-west Greenland from the fjord Sermiligarssuk in the north-west to Kap Farvel in the south and up the east coast as far as the southern shore of Lindenows Fjord. This covered all the Ketilidian structural zones and a small area of Archaean as classified by Allaart (1976) (fig. 29). Geological field work and prospecting of a more detailed nature was carried out in five areas where previous work indicated possibie uranium mineralisation.


1919 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Wilfrid Jackson ◽  
W. E. Alkins

During a visit to the limestone quarries at Caldon Low last September we had the good fortune to discover an interesting exposure of a quartzose conglomerate containing numerous fossils. The bed was exposed in a strong joint-face running approximately N.N.W. to S.S.E., at the northern extension of the quarry on the north-west flank of the Low, just beyond the mineral line of the North Staffordshire Railway. The altitude is about 900 feet O.D. The conglomerate apparently extended some little distance to the south-west before the opening of the quarry, as we ascertained that some 20 or 30 yards had been removed in gaining access to the limestone behind. It appears to extend for some distance round the flank of the Low towards the north-east.


1957 ◽  
Vol 3 (21) ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
E. H. Muller ◽  
H. W. Coulter

AbstractAn unusual opportunity for the study of glaciers in the process of development is afforded in Katmaicaldera in south-western Alaska. A violent eruption in 1912 destroyed the summit of glacier-clad Mount Katmai, creating a caldera 4 km. wide and 800 m. deep. Ice cliffs produced by beheading of the glaciers have since thinned and shrunk away from the rim of the caldera, except in the south-west. There, local reversal of direction of movement has resulted in an ice fall which descends part way down the crater wall. In the past thirty years two small glaciers have formed, near 1525 m. above sea level, within the caldera on large masses of slumped wall-rock below the north and south rims respectively. Elsewhere the sheer walls of the crater descend so steeply to the level of the caldera lake that permanent snowbanks cannot accumulate. The lake, which continues to rise at a rate of more than five meters per year, is at present the primary deterring factor in glacier development in the caldera.


Author(s):  
Graeme Barker

The principal focus of this chapter is the classic zone of early farming research from the 1960s onwards, the so-called ‘hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent’ in South-West Asia (Fig. 4.1). This region is normally defined as the arc of hill country to the west of the Syrian desert and to the north and east of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. The western side of the arc begins east of the Nile in the Sinai and the Gulf of Arabah on the southern border of Israel and Jordan; it continues northwards as the hill country on either side of the Jordan rift valley in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, western Jordan, and western Syria (the so-called ‘Levantine corridor’); and extends westwards to the Mediterranean littoral. The northern sector is formed by the Taurus mountains along the southern edge of the Anatolian plateau, which curve eastwards from the Mediterranean coast in northern Syria to form the present-day Syrian–Turkish border. The eastern sector consists of the Zagros mountains, running south-eastwards from eastern Turkey and north-west Iran to the Persian Gulf, forming the Iraq–Iran border for most of their length, and continuing in south-west Iran beyond the Persian Gulf towards the Straits of Hormuz. The region also embraces adjacent zones: the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the vast tracts of steppe and desert country separating them from the Levantine, Taurus, and Zagros upland systems; the Anatolian plateau to the north of the Taurus, within modern Turkey; and the Iranian plateau east of the Zagros, within modern Iran. The archaeological literature commonly uses the term Near East to describe the main region of interest, with the Levant for its western side (a term also used in this chapter), and South-West Asia for the eastern side, but the entire region is more correctly termed South-West Asia. The upland areas of the region mostly receive more than 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, which is the minimum required for growing cereals without irrigation. Rainfall decreases drastically moving out into the steppe and desert zones.


1862 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 560-563
Author(s):  
John Duns

In the introduction to this paper, the author pointed out the prominent physical features of the district in which the landslip occurred. At the point where the trap-ridge, which stretches in a south-west direction from Linlithgow to the neighbourhood of Airdrie, sendsone irregular fork to the north-west, and another to the south-west, a broad depression occurs. In this lies the Auchingray moss, the scene of the landslip. Here the parish of New Monkland, Lanarkshire, meets that of Slamannan, Stirlingshire, The following figure is a rough plan of the ground between the Slamannan Railway and Haldane's Moss Road. The area specially influenced by the landslip is enclosed by dotted lines.


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