Going Over: The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in North-West Europe

The processes involved in the transformation of society from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to Neolithic farmers were complex. They involved changes not only in subsistence but also in how people thought about themselves and their worlds, from their pasts to their animals. Two sets of protagonists have often been lined up in the long-running debates about these processes: on the one hand incoming farmers and on the other indigenous hunter-gatherers. Both have found advocates as the dominant force in the transitions to a new way of life. North-west Europe presents a very rich data set for this fundamental change, and research has both extended and deepened our knowledge of regional sequences, from the sixth to the fourth millennia bc. One of the most striking results is the evident diversity from northern Spain to southern Scandinavia. No one region is quite like another; hunter-gatherers and early farmers alike were also varied and the old labels of Mesolithic and Neolithic are increasingly inadequate to capture the diversity of human agency and belief. Surveys of the most recent evidence presented here also strongly suggest a diversity of transformations. Some cases of colonization on the one hand and indigenous adoption on the other can still be argued, but many situations now seem to involve complex fusions and mixtures. This wide-ranging set of papers offers an overview of this fundamental transition.

2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Sherman A. Jackson

Native born African-American Muslims and the Immigrant Muslimcommunity foxms two important groups within the American Muslimcommunity. Whereas the sociopolitical reality is objectively the samefor both groups, their subjective responses are quite different. Both arevulnerable to a “double Consciousness,” i.e., an independently subjectiveconsciousness, as well as seeing oneself through the eyes of theother, thus reducing one’s self-image to an object of other’s contempt.Between the confines of culture, politics, and law on the one hand andthe “Islam as a way of life” on the other, Muslims must express theircultural genius and consciously discover linkages within the diverseMuslim community to avoid the threat of double consciousness.


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Claire Warden

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.


2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Germán Kruszewski ◽  
Denis Paperno ◽  
Raffaella Bernardi ◽  
Marco Baroni

Logical negation is a challenge for distributional semantics, because predicates and their negations tend to occur in very similar contexts, and consequently their distributional vectors are very similar. Indeed, it is not even clear what properties a “negated” distributional vector should possess. However, when linguistic negation is considered in its actual discourse usage, it often performs a role that is quite different from straightforward logical negation. If someone states, in the middle of a conversation, that “This is not a dog,” the negation strongly suggests a restricted set of alternative predicates that might hold true of the object being talked about. In particular, other canids and middle-sized mammals are plausible alternatives, birds are less likely, skyscrapers and other large buildings virtually impossible. Conversational negation acts like a graded similarity function, of the sort that distributional semantics might be good at capturing. In this article, we introduce a large data set of alternative plausibility ratings for conversationally negated nominal predicates, and we show that simple similarity in distributional semantic space provides an excellent fit to subject data. On the one hand, this fills a gap in the literature on conversational negation, proposing distributional semantics as the right tool to make explicit predictions about potential alternatives of negated predicates. On the other hand, the results suggest that negation, when addressed from a broader pragmatic perspective, far from being a nuisance, is an ideal application domain for distributional semantic methods.


1914 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-73
Author(s):  
R. M. Deeley

In 1866 I communicated a paper to the Geological Society of London on the Pleistocene Succession in the Trent Basin. The boulderclays and outwash deposits of this district are of two distinct kinds, the one containing rocks from the west and north-west, and the other boulders etc., from the east or north-east of the district. In all cases, except where they have been ploughed up and re-arranged by the ice itself, the drifts containing westerly rocks only are the lowest, and the drifts with easterly rocks have been spread over them. We thus have two distinct ice-flows to deal with.


2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Helberg

Integrality of the psalms according to the relation between Psalm 1 (and 2) and the rest of the psalms The article explores views about the unity of the psalms and, as the author’s own approach, focuses especially on the need of the psalmist(s) not to be estranged. Simultaneously the place of trust in the psalms as well as that of the Torah/Law/Word of the Lord is scrutinised. The Torah requires on the one hand that one must distance oneself from an erroneous way of life, like disregarding God’s will and righteousness and on the other hand that one associates with a covenantal circle or community. The integrality of the psalms, like that of life, is rooted in the Torah of Yahweh, in close connection with the covenant.


1889 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Lapworth

Next to the metamorphic region of the Northern Highlands there is perhaps no area in Britain where the strata have been so contorted and convulsed as in the great Lower Palæozoic region of the Southern Uplands of Scotland, and it is only by the zonal method of stratigraphy that these complexities can ever be successfully unravelled. So far as the present results of the application of that method enable us to judge, it appears that, underlying all these stratigraphical complexities, there is, in reality, a broad tectonic structure of great simplicity. For, if we make exception, on the one hand, of the lowest strata (the Ballantrae or Arenig rocks), which, as we have seen, only rise to the surface within the limits of the Ballantrae district; and on the other hand of the highest formations (Wenlock-Ludlow), which merely skirt the Upland plateau upon its north-west and south-west flanks, we find that almost the whole of the Lower Palæozoic strata of the Uplands are naturally grouped in two grand lithological terranes, viz. (I.) a Lower Terrane (Moffat Terrane), including strata ranging from the Upper Llandeilo to the Upper Llandovery; and (II.) an Upper Terrane (Gala or Queensberry Terrane), embracing strata generally of Tarannon age.


KronoScope ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Adam

AbstractWe think of memories as being focused on the past. However, our ability to move freely in the temporal realm of past, present and future is far more complex and sophisticated than commonsense would suggest. In this paper I am concerned with our capacity to produce and extend ourselves into the far future, for example through nuclear power or the genetic modification of food, on the one hand, and our inability to know the potential, diverse and multiple outcomes of this technologically constituted futurity, on the other. I focus on this discrepancy in order to explore what conceptual tools are available to us to take account of long-term futures produced by the industrial way of life. And I identify some historical approaches to the future on the assumption that the past may well hold vital clues for today's dilemma, hence my proposal to engage in 'memory of futures'. I conclude by considering the potential of 'memory aids for the future' as a means to better encompass in contemporary concerns the long-term futures of our making.


1995 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eelco Rensink

Investigations into the upper palaeolithic settlement history of Europe have made significant advances over the past decades in several fields. As a result of the reappraisal of old collections and the excavation of ‘new’ sites, an extensive data set has become available which can be used to study aspects of the organization of palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The improvement of absolute and relative dating methods has provided the archaeologist with a more solid chronological framework. Additionally, innovations in archaeological theory and methodology have led to the exploration of new directions of inquiry. This paper focuses on a well-known example of these new directions: the study ofregionalsettlement-subsistence systems of palaeolithic groups, incorporating the systematic evaluation of archaeological data recovered from substantial areas. A growing number of archaeologists dealing with the upper palaeolithic record and active in various regions throughout Europe is currently engaged in this particular form of analysis (Audouze 1992; Hahn 1987; Julien 1987; Straus 1986; Weniger 1987, 1989).


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-50
Author(s):  
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

During the COVID-19 lockdown, as households were kept separate in a bid to contain the coronavirus, morally underpinned dynamics of fission and fusion occurred, privileging the ‘nuclear family’, which is taken here in two senses: the conventional social unit of a couple and their children, on the one hand, and the togetherness promoted by the nuclear industry in North West England, on the other. Whilst Sellafield’s Nuclear family fused with its host community in an outpouring of corporate kindness and volunteering, singles bereft of nuclear families were fissioned off from social life, which led to a corrective debate in the Netherlands. Drawing out analogies from a modest comparative perspective, I posit the nuclear family as a prism affording insights into the corporate, governmental and personal management of intimacy.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Schwarz

This chapter considers the ways that personhood is experienced, staged, and politicized in the weekly Sunday services of the Galiwin’ku Uniting Church. Central to the discussion are the tensions between a kin-based social order—vestige of the hunting-gathering way of life—and a bureaucratic order that emerged with mission station life and the requirements of the state, institutional church, and market society. I argue that the particular dynamics of the Sunday services, including the thematic content as well as the roles, statuses, sequences, and the relations that are involved, work on the one hand to facilitate individual ways of being and the centralization of authority, and on the other hand, to continue relational ways of being and the dispersal of authority. I examine how these oppositional tendencies are brought to life in the same ritual space and even find some degree of stability. The chapter concludes with some comparative comments on the Galiwin’ku material in relation to discussions of personhood in the “anthropology of Christianity.”


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