Chapter Six: The Arcuate Polygonal-Block Wall at Eleon

The dominant archaeological feature visible at Eleon is a Late Archaic polygonal- block wall that extends 85 m southward from the excavated site along the eastern edge of the plateau, constructed from finely fitted panels of local grey limestone averaging 2 tons in weight. The wall is arcuate for most of its length and finished on each end with an angular bastion. Every part has lost at least one course, and the wall is completely leveled or buried for most of its length, but was originally at least four courses high, standing 4.5 m above its base. The north end of the wall underwent a low-quality ancient reconstruction. The techniques used to shape and shift the stone are considered, and the wall is compared with other stonework at the site. Further study will allow more thorough analysis of the wall’s archaeological context and its relationship with other Archaic and Classical constructions.

“Jethro, Who Saved Taunton”: An African Man's Captivity Narrative during King Philip's War

This article examines the experiences of Jethro, an enslaved African man who was captured by the Narragansetts during King Philip's War. While captive, Jethro used his bilingualism to gather information about the Narragansett's war plans and then escaped and relayed them to the English. Jethro was granted freedom for this wartime service and went on to purchase property in the North End of Boston. He was representative of the charter generation of enslaved persons who showed that attitudes about race in seventeenth-century Massachusetts were still being formed. This essay further demonstrates how Jethro's story was appropriated by colonial writers at the time for their own unique purposes. Analyzing Jethro's story provides an opportunity to foreground Africanness in American captivity narratives.

How much does the host matter to the parasitoid? Distribution of Eurytoma (Hymenoptera, Chalcidoidea) species amongst two locally co-occurring gall-inducing hosts in the genus Diplolepis (Hymenoptera, Cynipidae)

Gall wasps in the cynipid genus Diplolepis Geoffroy (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) attack various species of native and introduced roses in Canada. Although gall forms are diverse, gall wasps are parasitised by highly concordant complexes of parasitoids and inquilines. Many species of gall wasps attack the same host plants and develop over the same periods in the season, suggesting that opportunistic parasitoids may be exploiting a range of hosts rather than specialising. We sampled larvae of Eurytoma Illiger (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) from galls of D. variabilis (Bassett) and D. rosaefolii (Cockerell), gall inducers that develop fairly synchronously late in the growing season on leaves of Rosa woodsii Lindl. (Rosaceae) in the Okanagan Valley of central British Columbia, Canada. Galls were sampled at five different sites along a gradient from the north end of the valley to the Canada–United States border, a distance of 100 km. We extracted DNA, then amplified and sequenced the cytochrome b segment for each Eurytoma larva. We identified two well-supported clades that were differentiated by neither sampling location nor host. Instead, at least two species of Eurytoma, E. imminuta Bugbee and E. longavena Bugbee, exist at these localities, and both exploit at least two of the Diplolepis hosts found at these sites.

Performing Masculinity and the Crisis of Transclass Man in August Wilson’s Drama

Feminist critics have identified the social constructedness of masculinity and have explored how male characters often find themselves caught up in a ceaseless quest to propagate and live up to an acceptable image of manliness. These critics have also explored how the effort to live up to the dictates of this social construct has often come at great cost to male protagonists. In this paper, we argue that August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone present the reader with a coterie of male characters who face the dual crisis of living up to a performed masculinity and the pitfalls that come with it, and what Mazrui has referred to as the phenomenon of “transclass man.” Mazrui uses the term transclass man to refer to characters whose socio-economic and socio-cultural experience displays a fluid degree of transitionality. We argue that the phenomenon of transclass man works together with the challenges of performed masculinity to create characters who, in an effort to adjust to and fit in with a new and patriarchal urban social milieu in America’s newly industrialised north, end up destroying themselves or failing to realise other possibilities that may be available to them. Using these two plays as illustrative examples, we further argue that staged masculinity and the crisis of transclass man in August Wilson’s plays create male protagonists who break ranks with the social values of a collectively shared destiny to pursue an individualistic personal trajectory, which only exacerbates their loss of social identity and a true sense of who they are.