Mobility in the Mountains: Late Third and Second Millennia Alpine Societies' Engagements with the High-Altitude Zones in the Southern French Alps

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 88-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Walsh ◽  
Florence Mocci

The assessment of the important changes that occurred in late third and second millennia societies across Europe often emphasizes changes in technology and the emergence of associated objects and art forms, changes in burial rites, and developments in economic practices. Notions relating to the evolution of homo economicus dominate many of the discourses, and the evidence for increased long-distance trade / contact across Europe is used to bolster this assessment. These themes are underpinned by an obsession with ever-refined chrono-typological phases. In an attempt to present a more socially embedded perspective, this paper considers the changes that occurred in the uses of the high-altitude, sub-alpine, and alpine zones in the southern French Alps during the third and second millennia BC. From c. 2500 BC onwards, there was a fundamental change in the use of and engagement with this landscape. The first substantial stone-built pastoral structures at high altitude (2000 m and above), appear at this time. This departure in the use and structuring of the alpine space would have included concomitant changes in the nature of mobility, notions of territory, and memories associated with this area.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta Anthoons

This book describes and compares the British chariot burials with contemporary chariot burials in northern Gaul, and argues that new burial rites were introduced in East Yorkshire in the third century BC through long-distance elite networks, most probably of a religious or spiritual nature.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-229
Author(s):  
Ewa Dąbrowska

AbstractWhile many linguists view language as either a cognitive or a social phenomenon, it is clearly both: a language can live only in individual minds, but it is learned from examples of utterances produced by speakers engaged in communicative interaction. In other words, language is what (Keller 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London: Taylor & Francis) calls a “phenomenon of the third kind”, emerging from the interaction of a micro-level and a macro-level. Such a dual perspective helps us understand some otherwise puzzling phenomena, including “non-psychological” generalizations, or situations where a pattern which is arguably present in a language is not explicitly represented in most speakers’ minds. This paper discusses two very different examples of such generalizations, genitive marking on masculine nouns in Polish and some restrictions on questions with long-distance dependencies in English. It is argued that such situations are possible because speakers may represent “the same” knowledge at different levels of abstraction: while a few may have extracted an abstract generalization, others approximate their behaviour by relying on memorised exemplars or lexically specific patterns. Thus, a cognitively realistic usage-based construction grammar needs to distinguish between patterns in the usage of a particular speech community (a social phenomenon) and patterns in speakers’ minds (a cognitive phenomenon).


2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright

This study reconstructs the connected history of socio-economic and intellectual practices related to property in seventeenth-century Bengal. From the perspective of socio-economic practices, this study is concerned with the legal transfer of immovable property between individuals. From the perspective of intellectual practice, this study is concerned with how property was understood as an analytical category that stood in a particular relation to an individual. Their connected history is examined by analysing socio-economic practices exemplified in a number of documents detailing the sale and donation of land and then situating these practices within the scholarly analysis of property undertaken by authors within the discipline of nyāya—the Sanskrit discipline dealing primarily with ontology and epistemology. In the first section of the essay, I undertake a detailed examination of available land documents in order to highlight particular conceptions of property. In the second section of the essay, I draw out theoretical issues examined in nyāya texts that relate directly to the concepts expressed in the land documents. In the third and final section of the essay, I discuss the shared language and shared concepts between the documents and nyāya texts. This last section also addresses how the nyāya analysis of property facilitates a better understanding of claims in the documents and what nyāya authors may have been doing in writing about property.


Nature ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 135 (3409) ◽  
pp. 335-336
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Amy Kelly Hamlin

Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) is a term that was used by Nazi authorities to identify, censure, and confiscate art they considered inconsistent with their ideology. It was the cornerstone of an ambitious propaganda campaign that culminated in the exhibition Entartete Kunst, which took place in Munich in 1937. The majority of this so-called degenerate art was Avant-Garde in both form and subject. Abstract Art by German artists, including Max Beckmann, Max Eernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, was particularly vulnerable to Nazi attack; non-German artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were also singled out. As a polarizing concept, Entartete Kunst stems from an essentially anti-modernist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic position. It was designed to legitimize the art of the Third Reich, which was rooted in traditional art forms and characterized by an idealized naturalism that promoted heroic virtues and racial purity.


Author(s):  
Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira

Following the balloon's invention in 1783, the French greeted the technology with enthusiasm, speculating extensively about its potential scientific and practical applications. However, the lack of progress in navigating against the winds discredited ballooning, and in the following decades it became the domain of spectacular forms of entertainment and of swindlers trying to defraud public subscriptions. All of this changed after the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, during which balloons were used to breach the siege of Paris. This essay explores how the aeronautical community, led by the recently established Société Française de Navigation Aérienne, mobilized the memory of the war to transform the balloon into a symbol of a heroic republican science. Paramount in that process was the Zénith 's 1875 high-altitude ascent that killed two aeronauts—Joseph Crocé-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel. The tragedy reverberated beyond France's scientific community, and through popular acclaim the two aeronauts became the Third Republic's first scientific martyrs, anticipating the eventual apotheoses of figures like Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur. The ballooning revival in the last third of the century helped strengthen the association between France and aeronautics, thus setting the stage for the country to acquire a central position in the field by the early twentieth century.


Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertrand Bessagnet ◽  
Laurent Menut ◽  
Rémy Lapere ◽  
Florian Couvidat ◽  
Jean-Luc Jaffrezo ◽  
...  

Air pollution is of major concern throughout the world and the use of modeling tools to analyze and forecast the pollutant concentrations in complex orographic areas remains challenging. This work proposes an exhaustive framework to analyze the ability of models to simulate the air quality over the French Alps up to 1.2 km resolution over Grenoble and the Arve Valley. The on-line coupled suite of models CHIMERE-WRF is used in its recent version to analyze a 1 month episode in November–December 2013. As expected, an improved resolution increases the concentrations close to the emission areas and reduced the negative bias for Particulate Matter that is the usual weakness of air quality models. However, the nitrate concentrations seem overestimated with at the same time an overestimation of surface temperature in the morning by WRF. Different WRF settings found in the literature are tested to improve the results, particularly the ability of the meteorological model to simulate the strong thermal inversions in the morning. Wood burning is one of the main contributor of air pollution during the period ranging from 80 to 90% of the Organic Matter. The activation of the on-line coupling has a moderate impact on the background concentrations but surprisingly a change of Particulate Matter (PM) concentrations in the valley will affect more the meteorology nearby high altitude areas than in the valley. This phenomenon is the result of a chain of processes involving the radiative effects and the water vapor column gradients in complex orographic areas. At last, the model confirms that the surrounding glaciers are largely impacted by long range transport of desert dust. However, in wintertime some outbreaks of anthropogenic pollution from the valley when the synoptic situation changes can be advected up to the nearby high altitude areas, then deposited.


2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Pétrequin ◽  
Michel Errera ◽  
Anne-Marie Pétrequin ◽  
Pierre Allard

Two groups of quarries (Mont Viso and Mont Beigua, Italy) were the source of the Alpine axeheads that circulated throughout western Europe during the Neolithic. The quarries on Mont Viso (Oncino: Porco, Bulè and Milanese), discovered in 2003, have been radiocarbon-dated, and this has revealed that the exploitation of jadeites, omphacitites and eclogites at high altitude (2000–2400 m above sea level) seems to have reached its apogee in the centuries around 5000 BC. The products, in the form of small axe- and adze-heads, were distributed beyond the Alps from the beginning of the fifth millennium, a few being found as far away as the Paris Basin, 550 km from their source as the crow flies. However, it was not until the mid-fifth millennium BC that long axeheads from Mont Viso appeared in the hoards and monumental tombs of the Morbihan, 800 km from the quarries. Production continued until the beginning of the third millennium BC, but at this time the distribution of the products was less extensive, and the process of distribution operated in a different way: tools made from jadeite and eclogite are still found in the French Jura, but the extraction sites at the south-east foot of Mont Viso no longer seem to have been used. The variability in the geographical extent of the distribution at different times seems to be related to the social context of exploitation of the high-altitude quarries, which were only ever accessible for a few months each year.


2011 ◽  
Vol 128-129 ◽  
pp. 1386-1391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang Jun Pan ◽  
Ying Qing Guo

In this paper, an high altitude air-launched automatic underwater vehicles (AL-AUV) is designed based on the traditional torpedo-like AUV, REMUS. And an additional ex-range gliding wings unit is assembled on the top of AUV, which enable the AUV to be dropped at high altitude and gliding long distance to reach the signed investigating ocean field. The controllable surface on the wings also enhanced the controllability and flexibility of AUV gliding through the air and the ability against the influence of airflow interference. The AUV’s six DOF gliding model is established and a simulation system of AL-AUV is built with Matlab/Simulink. Analyzing the recorded simulation velocity and pitch characteristics of AL-AUV deployed at varying initial velocities and wing area, the optimized wing is selected.


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