The Times They Were a-Changing: Cultural Encounters, Social Transformations and Technological Change in Iron Age Hand-made Pottery from Mallorca (Spain)

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Albero Santacreu
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Times

A Feast of Beltain? ReXections on the Rich Danebury Harvests

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Present Author ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Plant Remains ◽  
Original Argument ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Times ◽  
Interesting Direction

Twenty-five years after embarking on what was to become one of the major Iron Age excavations of the twentieth century, Barry Cunliffe was also reflecting on the endless cycle from Beltain, through Lughnasadh, to Samhain and Imbolc, and back to Beltain (Cunliffe 1995). While the journey to which Cuchulainn aspired was across the bosom of his bride to be, Cunliffe’s journey took him to a deeper understanding of the culmination of European Prehistory. The campaign he so impressively led at Danebury hillfort formed a critical leg of that journey; it remains a keystone to everyone’s understanding of Iron Age society. He was not alone among his research group in reflecting upon that annual cycle of seasons and feasts, which is preserved in various subsequent Celtic and Gaelic accounts; the principal archaeobotanist and archaeozoologist on the Danebury Environs Project incorporated them into their resumé of seasonal economic activities (Campbell and Hamilton 2000). Cunliffe had previously inferred, on the basis of an analysis he conducted with Poole (1995) of different patterns of erosion and infilling in the thousands of pits within the hillfort of Danebury, that Beltain and Samhain were the times of their ritual opening and infilling. These same pits provided the present author with one of the richest archaeobotanical data-sets I have had the opportunity to examine, and formed a cornerstone of my arguments about Iron Age agricultural production (Jones 1981, 1984a and b, 1985, 1991, 1995, 1996). The discussion and critique those analyses have generated are at least as valuable as the original publications themselves, and the most recent of them draws the debate in an interesting direction. In a meticulous and critical study, Van der Veen and Jones (2006) question a number of aspects of my original argument, and shift the emphasis from my own, which was upon relations of production, to a new emphasis upon relations of consumption. Whereas I had connected the plant remains within the pits to the toil of farmers, they speculated upon the celebrations of the feast.

Nobility

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Shovlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Times ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Recruits

Historians of the Ancien Régime long viewed the nobility as a holdover from a feudal age, an antiquated breed condemned to a slow, and ultimately terminal, decline. Nobles were regarded as the casualties of secular political and social transformations: the rise of the absolutist state, which stripped them of political power; and economic transformations, which increased the relative wealth of non-nobles, and empowered them to challenge the nobility's supremacy. Since the 1960s, however, revisionist scholarship has almost entirely jettisoned this view. The nobility is now widely seen as a social group that participated massively in the processes of modernization that transformed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Through its economic role and values, its service to the monarchical state, its openness to new recruits, and its engagement in the public sphere, the nobility moved with the times.

Commercial Forms and Legal Norms in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1007-1052 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Institutions ◽  
The Times

Scholars agree that medieval Jewish legal writers responded to “the needs of the times” in making their legal rulings, carefully choosing the legal sources and precedents upon which they relied, rereading or even rejecting those sources in light of their quotidian reality. Particularly in the Geonic Period, as Talmudic norms encountered a geographically expansive community experiencing radical social transformations in the engagement with Islam, as well as rapid economic development concomitant with the rise of the ʿAbbāsids, which urbanized and transformed the economic life of the Jewish community, classical sources of Jewish law faced new pressures. Geonic leaders responded to these pressures by making recourse to the traditional institutions of taqqana (Hebrew, “legislative enactment”) and minhag (Hebrew, “custom”). Therefore, it is widely accepted that the vicissitudes of daily life influenced both the responsa of the Geonim and their contributions to the expanding codificatory literature. On the other hand, the potential influence of Jewish legal norms upon daily life remains an unsettled area in the study of the history of the premodern Jewish community. A paucity of documentary or archaeological evidence complicates this problem, and edited literary texts of various genres remain themselves among the most important witnesses to Jewish life in the period.

scholarly journals Connective Tissue: Embracing Fluidity and Subverting Boundaries in European Iron Age and Roman Provincial Images

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 351
Author(s):  
Miranda Aldhouse-Green
Keyword(s):  
Connective Tissue ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Animal Species ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
The Times

There is a mounting body of evidence for somatic exchange in burial practices within later British prehistory. The title of the present paper was sparked by a recent article in The Times (Tuesday 1 September 2020), which contained a description of human bone curation and body mingling clearly present in certain Bronze Age funerary depositional rituals. The practice of mixing up bodies has been identified at several broadly coeval sites, a prime example being Cladh Hallan in the Scottish Hebrides, where body parts from different individuals were deliberately mingled, not just somatically but also chronologically. This paper’s arguments rest upon the premise that somatic boundary crossing is reflected in Iron Age and later art, especially in the blending of human and animal imagery and of one animal species with another. Such themes are endemic in La Tène decorative metalwork and in western Roman provincial sacred imagery. It is possible, indeed likely, that such fluidity is associated with deliberate subversion of nature and with the presentation of ‘shamanism’ in its broadest sense. Breaking ‘natural’ rules and orders introduces edge blurring between material and spiritual worlds, representing, perhaps, the ability of certain individuals (shamans) to break free from human-scapes and to wander within the realms of the divine.

Cyber-Systemics, Systemic Governance and Disruption of the Criminal Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Walker-Munro
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Theoretical Examination ◽  
Policy Failure ◽  
Regulatory Systems ◽  
Disruptive Change ◽  
The Times ◽  
Systemic Governance ◽  
New Framework

Criminal law regulators face difficulties in adapting to technological change. They must often operate in environments of significant uncertainty, with changing policy aims and legislative provisions that fail to ‘move with the times’. Rather than engaging with robust, let alone radical theoretical examination of their actions and structure, regulatory organisations struggle to enforce laws in communities affected by technological or systemic change, often leading to claims of overcriminalisation, inadequacy, regulatory overreach or inconsistency. This article suggests that dealing with disruptive criminality solely through legal instruments is a policy failure. Instead, a radical new framework is proposed, embedded in cybernetics (a transdiscplinary approach to exploring regulatory systems). Such a framework — systemic governance — offers a substantially altered way of managing regulatory relationships that resists disruptive change and challenges regulators to find new ways of engaging with the population they seek to influence.

scholarly journals “A greisse shishke has arrived”: Jewish Humor as a Key to Understanding Social Change in A. Mryi’s Novel “Samson Samasuy’s Notes”

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Marharyta Fabrykant ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Social Experiments ◽  
The Social ◽  
Jewish Humor ◽  
The Times

The paper is dedicated to the representations of Jewish humor as a space of developing an understanding of the social experiments of the social change of the 1920s as depicted in a satirical novel “Samson Samasuy’s Notes” written by a Belarusian writer A. Mryi in 1929. The novel’s main character, an ambitious civil servant, simultaneously naïve and unscrupulous, struggles to grasp the ever elusive spirit of the times and discerns its clearest shile also the most painful manifestations in the humor expressed by his Jewish neighbors as a reaction to his endeavors. The novel shows how the Jewish humor is intuitively understood by Jews and Slavs alike, even to those who are being laughed at and who are otherwise immune to any kind of critique directed at them. In this regard, the Jewish humor appears simultaneously a mode of mutual understanding between the Jewish and Slavic parts of the population and shared understanding of the social transformation, because it unmasks the often invalid claims of novelty in the agents of the local implementations of the social experiments of the 1920s. At the same time, this understanding gives limited yet quite reliable ways of checking the consequences of these experiments and recreating, even beyond the façade of the radical social transformations, of the former unity of collective and individual identity.

The Central Mediterranean and the Aegean

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin Foxhall
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Mediterranean Region ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Central Mediterranean ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Material Interaction

The early Iron Age in the Aegean has traditionally been perceived as a period of decline, in contrast to the splendour of the palatial societies of the later Bronze Age, and concomitantly is often presented as a ‘Dark Age’—a time of regionalism and isolation. Recent investigations across the Mediterranean region are, however, revealing a different and far more complex picture. A considerable amount of human and material interaction occurred between eastern and western Mediterranean societies in the period 1100–500 BC, and people, objects, and ideas were not travelling only in one direction. Links between so-called ‘Mediterranean’ and other European societies are also undergoing substantial re-evaluation. Adopting a regional approach, this chapter explores the developments which transformed Iron Age societies in the Aegean and central Mediterranean, and also examines how regional trajectories interlinked and converged through cross-cultural encounters, resulting in substantial material (including technological), social and political innovations.

Etruria between the Iron Age and Orientalizing Period and the Adoption of Alphabetic Writing

2021 ◽  
pp. 293-319
Author(s):  
Enrico Benelli ◽  
Alessandro Naso
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Peer Groups ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Alphabetic Writing

This chapter combines a cultural approach (Naso) with a philological (Benelli) one to examine the emergence of Etruscan alphabetic writing in the eighth century BC. Naso outlines changes in settlement patterns and major social transformations in Etruria in this period, largely to be connected with maritime trade and openness to the broader Mediterranean world. Benelli focuses on the mechanism through which the new idea was taken up. He notes that epigraphy is by no means a necessary and immediate consequence of the adoption of writing skills. The oldest Etruscan inscriptions provide evidence of a system of gift exchange amongst the newly forming aristocracy which was strongly tied up with ritualized friendship between kinship groups and peer groups. It is within this milieu that alphabetic writing was articulated and disseminated. All forms of Etruscan letters can be traced back to Euboean prototypes, with the possible exception of the so-called san.

scholarly journals On being informational: intertwining the communication and self-production flows

Kybernetes ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 846-864 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel del Moral ◽  
Jorge Navarro ◽  
Pedro C. Marijuán
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The World ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Times ◽  
Definition Of Information ◽  
Self Production

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advocate a change of perspective in the development of information science. At stake is whether this science will be able to make sense of both the astounding new practices in the world of knowledge and the even more astounding social transformations that revolve around information technologies. Tentatively a new way of thinking could be articulated along the guidelines herein discussed. An initial and important aspect concerns the definition of information itself. Rather than continuing with the endless discussions on what is information, it will be proposed, first, that information is indefinable per se; and second, that a consensus notion(s) might be established on how information should be handled in the core fields – or at least in the analysis of some prototypical “informational entities”. Design/methodology/approach – The research strategy proposed, naturalistic and empirically oriented, is based on the intertwining of self-production and communication flows as fundamental characteristics of informational entities – about “being in the world” in the informational way. Living cells, organisms (nervous systems), individuals, enterprises-markets, and societies would manifest these characteristics. In all of these existential realms, it is the collective action of communicating, self-producing agents or entities (“informational” ones, for short), connected in multiple, flexible ways, what makes possible the unfathomable complexity and adaptability emerging at all functional scales. Findings – Along this new perspective, meaning, knowledge, and intelligence may be approached rather consistently. The new conceptualizations may also be linked with the information revolution and the extraordinary expansion of knowledge in the times; a parallel with the knowledge-fundamentals of biological complexity will be suggested. Originality/value – Among the many problems to tackle for a renewed information science, a relevant matter concerns the way to organize the dialogue among so many different disciplinary perspectives dealing with information: it becomes an open question, indeed.

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