Great Stone Research Articles

Mexican Art in Lund’s Museum of Sketches, Sweden

The Mexican collection at Lund’s Museum of Sketches in is an unusual and valuable collection both from a Mexican and from an international perspective: the collection was built by Gunnar Bråhammar in the late 1960s, and counts works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Juan O’Gorman but also Francisco Eppens, Rufino Tamayo, González Camarena, Raul Angiano, Leopoldo Méndez and Desiderio Xochitiotzin. The article discusses especially “the New Deal” by Rivera, “the Image of Mexico” at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City by Morado Chavez, and “El Pájaro Amarillo” by Goertiz, and the great stone mosaic at the Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico by O’Gorman.

Salt tectonics in the Cap Boujdour Area, Aaiun Basin, NW Africa

Seismic reflection data indicate the Moroccan salt basin extends to the Cap Boujdour area in the Aaiun Basin. Two salt diapir structures have been identified and several areas of collapsed strata indicate probable salt removal at the shelf edge. The presence of salt in this area correlates to the conjugate southern George's Bank Basin and the Baltimore Canyon area, and it is suggested that the salt extends southward from the known salt diapir province in the George's Bank Basin southward to the Great Stone Dome. The paucity of salt diapirs is attributed to the thick carbonate and anhydrite sequence, which was deposited soon after salt deposition that inhibited halokinesis. The presence of salt along this large segment of the Atlantic margin should increase its hydrocarbon potential with traps created around salt diapirs and provision of migration pathways from deep potential source rocks in the early Cretaceous and Jurassic strata to shallower levels.

El Greco’s Jesus

El Greco’s Jesus Richard Schiffman (bio) El Greco’s Jesus, lit theatrically from behind by a single shaft of sunlight pouring like water through a chink in the gathering storm, his thin, artistic fingers cradling the cross which rests as easy as balsa upon his willing shoulder, gazing here beyond the picture frame, beyond life itself, almost tender with transcendence. And in the dark pupils of those eyes two stars of light— all that we shall ever see of God—two small stars, the dim reflection in the flesh of the world he has already fled to. Two stars, but that’s enough, and more than enough, because it shows how God enters upon the slimmest thread of feeling—not much in the vastness of the night— but enough to refute the darkness, that’s the point. Enough to prove that the night is not all. [End Page 242] The tip of a diamond drill, invisible to the eye, bores through steel plate. The love that made the world, invisible to the world. But focus those slender rays within the soul and they will burn through everything even death. That is what El Greco’s Jesus knows. Once on a beach in San Francisco an urban shaman rocked a boulder back and forth—whispering to it as tenderly as Jesus stroked his cross— until the great stone hung like a ballerina striking an impossible pose, defying the law of gravity. How can so much rest upon so small a fulcrum? Like the weight of God poised tremulous upon the mind, and faith—that thinnest strand, absurd on the face of it, bearing that which is greater than the world. How is it possible for so much to rest upon so little? [End Page 243] But faith doesn’t need much. A sparrow perches upon a twig, a grassy stem. Faith too—poised upon the thinnest stalk of evidence— flies to the Shoreless Sky without denying the pain— that’s the point— without denying the weight of the world pressing like a boulder, without rejecting the bloody lumber of human cruelty, which Jesus bore throughout his short and stormy life. The very same Jesus who said: “My burden is light.” [End Page 244] Richard Schiffman Richard Schiffman is the author of two spiritual Biographies: “Mother of All,” and “Sri Ramakrishna, A Prophet For the New Age.” His poetry has appeared or is upcoming in Sojourners, Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Review, the Potomac Review and many other print and internet journals. Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Mutabor: Malcantone: (Canton Ticino, Switzerland)

Ascension Day, May 17th (A Catholic Encyclopedia declares, “The use of the word ‘ascension’ does not involve the belief that heaven is necessarily somewhere up in the sky.” But if not there, then where is it?): the bells of the Malcantone in their staggered tattoo, EDECDE, EDECDC, ring through the valley from the towers’ broken shales. Hilary is gathering elder-flower beside her parents on the shadowed path. I see her gold head and I hear her laugh, like a cuckoo in the hillside forest where the leaf-mould has been gouged into ruts by the tusks and hooves of the wild boar. Can light itself be said to laugh? And have you not ever watched light and shadow in their play and felt inside yourself that some mortal commodity was being lightly traded, as if by angels, ambiguous and tired, who lost their names in Paradise when they fell? —Out of which one resolves: it is Belfagor, a minor forest god. He will not harm us, his beard grotesques and garlands, flourishes carved as if in gold hammer-wood. And, earlier, Mark wants to show me a great column-stone he thinks of buying, so we travel to where it lies snugged in earth. A camion-grue, he says he’ll need for it, a truck with a crane, crane like the bird, so that this stone, rejected by the builders, might become the head of the corner, the crane a symbol of vigilance for the stone held always in its claw so that, should the bird ever sleep, the small clatter of the dropped stone will wake it. And so Mark will buy this great stone and raise it vertical, this sleeping weight the crane-truck (bird) will move, to shelter those on whom his love depends and who, through sleep and waking, depend on him for yet a little while, given life and time to gather elder out of innocence. Through the deep shade Hilary comes toward me, her face lit by white blossoms of elder-flower, and elder-syrup flavors the cool water Simone gives us, for we are thirsty at midday, and I remember Aeneas, who searched for the gold branch in the darkness of his own time, in such a deep shade. Now, forty days from Easter, the Paschal candle is extinguished; bell-music falls down from the birding towers with a disheveled and a jubilant clang. Belfagor steps into the forest clearing of our own stammering impulse to praise.

Stone Age Principles for Modern Forest Management

Abstract Forestland managers must deal with the complexity of balancing environmental sustainability with the economic demand for wood and alternate forestland uses. Decisions are not always easy, and looking to human history might provide a framework for dealing with modern forestland management issues. The Stone Age was a period when basic engineering skills were developed, animals were domesticated, and humans began establishing permanent settlements around agricultural crops. It was also a time when great stone structures like Stonehenge were built. By going back to the Stone Age, the roots of modern civilization, we might find some basic underlying principles that guided our ancestors, and they might be useful for modern management. I have called these five basic principles the Stone Age principles: (1) observe and learn from nature, (2) use the resources you have, (3) leverage skills and knowledge, (4) use teamwork, and (5) commit to the task.

The Road (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Reviews Cormac McCarthy. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006. 256 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $24.00 "Where men can't live godsfare no better. " Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy has established a literary oeuvre such that each new work is judged not only for the story it tells but in relation to the body of work that precedes it. His literary style is marked by two outstanding traits: first is the unique poetic lyricism of his language and second is his ability to tell the untold tale with a style whereby major aspects of plot development are revealed by their absence. In his books, especially in his earlier works, there are passages which are outstanding for their sheer lyrical beauty. These passages hit some neuroaesthetic circuit in the brain and create the same type of experience as standing in front of a work of art in a museum. He writes with unexpectedly imagistic prose that comes at you intense with literary creativity. This made him a writer's writer, for many years widely acclaimed by the literati but unrecognized by the public at large. After his fourth book he moved from East Tennessee to Texas and shifted the setting of his books to that terrain. He then produced Blood Meridian which, along with Suttree are masterworks in realizing his ability to write with deeply moving lyrical beauty. With The Road he maintains his reputation as a consummate literary artist. In The Road there are passages which return to the style epitomized in his earlier books. In the very first passage in the book he describes a dream saying, they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then 96 gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. This beastly specter haunts the entire novel and reappears at the end as death takes its inexorable toll. Leaving key elements of the story untold, makes unusual demands upon the reader who gradually figures out what has happened. These untold parts become evident because, in many cases, they are major events in the lives of the characters and dramatically shape the flow of the book. Yet they are never mentioned or described in the text. In The Road the major event that determines the whole course of the book is one of these untold tales. It is an apocalyptic event: the earth is shrouded with perpetual clouds; ash is raining down from the sky; the ground is covered with ash; all the trees and plants are dead; there is no electricity, no gasoline, no automobiles, no agriculture, no animals; the earth is cold, the cities are deserted, and the population is decimated. The only food is what has been canned or preserved and the pickings are getting very slim. Yet he never describes the event. Was it nuclear? Was it volcanic? Was it meteors? What happened? You don't know, and you never find out. You can determine bits and pieces, there are clues. Perhaps, if you are a scientist, you can deduce from the descriptions of the weather and the conditions of the devastated landscape what type of catastrophe has happened. Nor does he give the names or the ages of any of the characters. There are only two main characters, an old man and his son. The boy is still playing with toys; the conversation between them is at a certain level. You know he is speaking to a boy, maybe about eight years old, just from the way they talk. The old man is constantly scavenging; he is trying to...

Transracialized selves and the emergence of post‐white teacher identities

This article draws on two previous studies by the authors, both based on interviews with European‐American individuals, to document white experiences with multiculturalism, race, and cultural differences. We consider recent developments in research on whiteness and offer a perspective on racial identities defined as discursively enacted identifications that are rooted in racialized discourse communities. We provide profiles of two white women who draw upon assets developed, in our view, largely through their successful negotiation of relationships with racially and culturally different members of multicultural discourse communities. Next, we demonstrate a methodology based on the narrative analytic tools of Stanton Wortham (2001, Narratives in action: a strategy for research and analysis [New York, Teachers College Press]) that was used to explicate multiple ways in which both participants narrated their identities during interviews. Our analysis demonstrates how these women enacted what we call ‘transracialized’ selves, that is, ways of being white that transcend predictable performances of more typically racialized identities. We link transracialized identities to the notion of ‘post‐white’ identity. Finally, we close with comments about the implications of transracialized, post‐white identities for the field of multicultural teacher education. The future calls for each of us to become partners in the dance of diversity, a dance in which everyone shares the lead. And because we have been separated by race and ethnicity for so long, we may feel awkward at first with the new moves…. But with a little help from our friends in other cultures, even white folks can learn to dance, again, as we did among the great stone circles of ancient Europe. (Howard, 1993, p. 41)

Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer (review)

Reviewed by: Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer Stephen C. Behrendt (bio) Carole Simmons Oles . Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer. University of Arkansas Press. Whenever any author gets involved in a biographical project a unique and frequently intimate relationship inevitably develops between author and subject. They can become acquainted in wholly unanticipated ways, and when the end product is not a conventional biography but rather a creative literary or artistic project, the results can be as startling as they are satisfying. This is exactly the case with Carole Simmons Oles's remarkable new book, Waking Stone, which traces the life and career of the nineteenth-century Massachusetts sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who defied her culture's gender conventions and the art world's odds by leaving New England to study in Rome with the English sculptor John Gibson and eventually setting up a studio there in the 1850s. Her circle of Roman acquaintances included the Brownings (she slipped unobserved into a convent one night, wearing Robert's trousers), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James. In Rome she produced monumental sculptures, including figures of Medusa (1854), Oenone (1855), the Palmyran princess Zenobia in chains (1859), and the large, commissioned bronze of the Missourian Thomas Hart Benton that followed a competitive commission and was unveiled in St. Louis's Lafayette Park on May 27, 1868, as well as an extraordinarily popular small figure of Puck that was repeatedly copied during her lifetime. In Europe Hosmer became the center of a group of women artists and sculptors before she largely abandoned sculpture to pursue a project involving a perpetual-motion mechanism. Waking Stone will remind readers of Oles's earlier collection, Night Watches: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell (1985), which traced the life of that pioneering nineteenth-century American astronomer. But twenty years has deepened and made richer and more resonant the ties-the depth of experience and emotion-that the poet now discovers between herself and her subject in this new collection. The poems in Waking Stone are sometimes in Hosmer's voice, sometimes in Oles's, and sometimes in a sort of fused voice that seems to shift effortlessly and seamlessly between them. The personal and aesthetic interconnections are many, and they include both Hosmer's and Oles's own families, which Oles tells us is one reason why she undertook her project in the first place. Two poems, for instance, remember their supportive fathers. Harriet-whom Oles addresses familiarly throughout as Hatty-muses soon after her arrival in [End Page 196] Rome on her mother and siblings, dead of consumption, while she works on her early sculpture, Hesper: How lucky that Father thinks my art no hobbybut profession. Lucky am I in fathers.I will never say aloud what weighs on me:Mother, Helen, the babies Hiram and George.Beating my hands to beat out from stonelives indestructible, calm. Hesper.I wish my loved ones such awakenings:after each night, rising as morning stars.Star at her crown, moon beneath her breast,poppy capsules woven in her hair,my Hesper's eyes are half-closingto a music just beyond our power to hear. ("From Backyard Studio, to Rome, 1852") Carving the great stone block of her morning star woman, revealing like Michelangelo before her the full figure hidden in the massy block, Hatty does indeed wake the stone, shaping a figure whose life will endure, though frozen in rocky sleep. Her father, unusual among the American male establishment, sees her art honestly and her work professionally, and Hatty is both proud and grateful. No less so the poet, who sculpts with words, creating sharp and recognizable shapes from the raw mass of language, awakening them to a no less indestructible existence, as she does with her own father, whose memory is implicated with Hatty's: In my Rolodex, one relic remains:"Henry Reginald Simmons, representingArchitectural Sculptors and Carvers Association"the only business card my father ever carried,in a little plastic sleeve,his thick, tool-roughened fingersfumbling to slip one out.His masters mostly Italian-Girolani, Guarino-except for Donnely at the Corcoran Art Gallery . . .And Daddy the...

The Roman Steps to the Temple: An Examination of the Influence of Robert Southwell, SJ, upon George Herbert

The Roman Steps to the Temple:An Examination of the Influence of Robert Southwell, SJ, upon George Herbert Gary M. Bouchard (bio) While scholars have generally acknowledged the poetic influence of Robert Southwell, SJ, upon George Herbert, no one has yet presented a substantial consideration either of the specific nature of that influence or of its implications. I propose within the following article to at least begin to do so. First, I will explore briefly the complicated nature of Southwell's influence upon those who read and imitated his religious poetry in the wake of his dramatic public execution at Tyburn in 1595. Second, I will suggest several instances of similarity in the poetry of Southwell and Herbert. And finally, I will note some important differences between the poetry of the two men, helping us to understand, perhaps slightly better, the distinctiveness of Herbert's voice and his place in the history of the religious lyric. [End Page 131] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Robert Southwell, 1636, poet and Jesuit who was martyred in 1595. Anonymous, 17th century. Frontispiece from "S Peters complaint. And Saint Mary Magdalens funerall teares. With sundry other selected, and deuout poems. By RS of the Society of Jesus" (London, 1636). Location: British Library, London, Great Britain. Permission granted by HIP / Art Resource, New York. [End Page 132] Robert Southwell's Execution and Influence None of the decaying heads on the pikes at London's Great Stone Gate in the late winter of 1595 would have been as conspicuous as that of Robert Southwell's. Here, after all, was the head of a young Englishman who had for several years been regarded as public enemy number one of the realm, and who was, even now as his head rotted upon a pike, enjoying his first significant literary success. Elizabeth and her advisors would have preferred that this charismatic and eloquent young English Jesuit priest die quietly and unceremoniously during his prolonged imprisonment in the tower. They certainly did not need another Campion for recusant Catholics to adore. But Southwell—not only willing but desirous to be another Campion and weary of his nearly two-year imprisonment in the tower—appealed in a letter to his cousin Robert Cecil that he either be executed or brought to trial. The court accommodated by doing both. Though the finding of guilt by a puppet jury was a forgone conclusion, Southwell's trial was not without its drama. Inevitably the physically broken priest, without so much as a book or paper, was confronted by learned doctors of the Church of England, engaged in doctrinal debate, and urged to confess the errors of his ways. Southwell, by all accounts, defended himself brilliantly, though his most memorable line from the trial was his simple declaration to his torturer, Richard Topcliffe: "Thou art a bad man." If the condemned Jesuit moved some hearts during his trial, it was during his execution that he evoked the very kind of sympathetic attention that Elizabeth would have preferred to avoid. The crowd of course lined London's street to see Southwell's body being drawn to Tyburne, where, in his final public words, he managed to out-Campion Campion. His confession of himself as a Roman Catholic, a priest, a member of the Society of Jesus, and his accompanying declaration of love and loyalty to his Queen moved, not only many in the crowd, but apparently his executioner, who allowed the condemned man's body to hang for an unusually long [End Page 133] time upon the rope so that he would not experience consciously the quartering and disemboweling of his own body. This macabre act of kindness prompted one in the crowd to shout: "I see our hangman does not love the Queen!" Then there is the story that on the very night of Southwell's execution a copy of his verses were brought to Queen Elizabeth, who upon reading in his dedicatory poem the priest's impassioned appeal for poets to reform their talents to the service of God, silently shed tears of her own. Whether or not the sincerity of Southwell's words combined with the gruesomeness of his...

The “Heavenly Stone” (Kök Tash) of Samarqand: A Rebels' Narrative Transformed

Travellers to the fabled city of Samarqand will not miss the opportunity to visit the tomb of Tīmūr (Tamerlane), the famous conqueror of much of Central Eurasia in the fourteenth century. In the courtyard of the Gur-i Amir, Tīmūr's mausoleum, stands a stone of greyish marble, approximately ten feet long, four feet wide and two and a half feet high, decorated with arabesques. A relic of a glorious past, this stone, known as the Kök Tash, is reputed to have served as the great coronation stone for Central Asian rulers ever since it was used as Tīmūr's throne.

Great Stone Faces: Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Quest for American Authenticity

Abstract: In the century dividing the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘‘The Great Stone Face’’ from Gutzon Borglum’s completion of the pres­idential monument at Mt. Rushmore, the United States came of age as a world power. This essay discusses the strained relationship between Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt in order to highlight some of the tensions and contradictions that characterized this passage. Roosevelt’s inclusion in the monument at Mt. Rushmore both recalls Hawthorne’s story and symbolically corroborates some of James’s most serious reservations about the cultural fate of the nation.

Utilización del catéter "stone sweeper" en la patología litiásica del tracto urinario superior

The treatment of patients with a great burden of stones is very difficult and often requires complex treatments including different kinds of surgery, associated in some cases with ureteral stents. We present the case of a patient with complex renoureteral stone disease in whom we used the stone sweeper stent before SWL. The catheter is a 6.5 Fr radial expanding stent with small baskets, a special structure designed to extract small stones < 5mm. The placement and retrieval of bilateral stents were performed without complications, extracting several small stones inside the baskets. The Stone Sweeper stent may play an important role in the treatment of patients with great stone burden; by dilating the ureter and helping the passage of stones and capturing small residual fragments it may decrease the need of new treatments. Currently, more clinic and research tests with this stent are necessary to determine proper indications and associated complications.

Great Stone Faces: Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Quest for American Authenticity

Abstract: In the century dividing the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘‘The Great Stone Face’’ from Gutzon Borglum’s completion of the pres­idential monument at Mt. Rushmore, the United States came of age as a world power. This essay discusses the strained relationship between Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt in order to highlight some of the tensions and contradictions that characterized this passage. Roosevelt’s inclusion in the monument at Mt. Rushmore both recalls Hawthorne’s story and symbolically corroborates some of James’s most serious reservations about the cultural fate of the nation.

Clinging to One Spot: Hawthorne’s Native-Born Settlers

Old Man of;the Mountain, VVhite Mountains, New Hampshire. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-D4-11785. Clinging to One Spot: Ilawthorne's N ative-Born Settlers YAEL BEN-ZVI In 1853, having published numerous stories and three novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne reflected on the ];'oken, an annual magazine where his early tales were published. "It was a sort of hothouse ," he wrote, "where native flowers were made to bloom like exotics. "I Implying a supernatural transformation, Hawthorne presupposed that U.S. texts-and, by extension, their writers-were literally "native." In this imagery, the term "native " connotes the mundane, ordinary existence of unrealized potential. As in a Cinderella story, the Token brings to light the "exotic" essence ofhitherto unattractive "natives." Hawthorne's contrast may SeeI1Cl puzzling in the wake of colonial practices and discourses, whose exoticization of colonized indigenous people made "native" and "exotics" almost synonymous. Whereas today the primary connotation of "native" in the U. S. is "Native American," in Hawthorne's works "native" often pointed to white U.S. subjectivities, playing a key role in characters ' identities, motivations, and predicaments. This essay focuses on Hawthorne's persistent use of the term "native" as the property of whites in two of his largely neglected works, "The Great Stone Face" (1850) and The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), in order to analyze its broader implications for his work in general. 2 In "The Custom-House," his introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne discusses his relationship to Salem and tries to understand the "kindred between the human beESQ / V. 52 /lST-2ND QUARTERS I2006 17 YAEL BEN-ZVI ing and the locality," which has stemmed from the "long connection of the family with one spot." Struggling to define this "kindred," Hawthorne comes to understand it as an innate, inevitable, and undesirable condition of ~(not love, but instinct ." _,Associated with "mud," "dust," "chill," "curse," and "spell," this prolonged, instinctive attachment is "unhealthy," and Hawthorne attempts to break it by giving his children ~~other birthplaces" (GE, I:II-I2). While in "The Custom-House" Hawthorne invokes this relationship through the "oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler ... clings" to one "spot," in The Scarlet Letter proper the young settler Arthur Dimmesdale seems always-already bound by the ties elaborated in the preface , trapped by "the compass of yonder town," and incapable of leaving Boston even though Hester Prynne suggests Europe and "the wilderness" as two alternatives (GE, I:II, 197). Native status is thus represented as a heavy burden restricting one's choices and possibilities. In The House ofthe Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne further portrays the native status of New England settlers as a "curse" and naturalizes it as an inevitable inheritance that cannot be shaken off (see GE, 2:2I, 46, and elsewhere). In the much earlier tale "Young Goodman Brown" (1835), a native-horn settler whose "instincts" seern to promise a liberating sense of individualized "evil" gradually realizes that this evil has already been defined by his Salenl ancestors and contemporaries, with whom he shares ~(one m.ighty blood-spot"-and this understanding stains the rest of his life (GE, 10:83, 87). At the end of "My Kinsman, Major rV10lineux" (1832), by contrast, opportunities suddenly open up in Boston for Robin because he had an "other birthplace." Aligned as he is with the "native woods" of a frontier settlernent, Robin does not share the major's doom: the tale's anti-royalist stance refutes the significance of family ties and erects the importance ofspatial belonging instead (GE, II:222, 226). Hawthorne's insistence on this nativeness can be read as an attempt to secure native status exclusively for native -born settlers while marginalizing Native Americans-and discounting African Americans almost entirely.3 "The Great Stone Face" and The Life ofFranklin Pierce evidence Hawthorne's construction of native status in particularly tell18 CUNGING TO ONE SPOT ing ways. Written within two years of one another, both texts tell the story of a native-born, natural leader. The representations of place and spatial belonging in these works demonstrate Hawthorne's contribution to the transformation of the concept "native," which became central for nineteenth-century...

An automated approach to the analysis of the arrangement of post‐pits at Stanton Drew

AbstractAfter the surprising discovery of concentric arrangements of post‐pits within the megalithic stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset, it was decided to map their geometry using an automated approach. The algorithm developed relies on the use of correlation registration to allow the locations of pit anomalies to be identified automatically. Concentric circular arrangements of pits are then classified using a modified Hough transform, adapted to detect circular rather than linear patterns. Finally the co‐ordinates of the centres of all pits identified as lying on the same circle are extracted and fed to an algorithm that determines the parameters of the circle of best fit by the method of least squares. The result is an objective determination of the parameters of the nine concentric circles of pits within the Great stone circle and three circles within the south‐southwest stone circle, which it is hoped will help inform the interpretation of the monument. Although the computational procedures described represent a solution to the analysis of a possibly unique data set, it is hoped that elements of the method might provide ideas for techniques that can be generalized for other applications. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Divine Among in Islam: The Hajj or Pilgrimage to Mecca

Most everyone knows that every Muslim is expected to come to Mecca at least once during his or her lifetime. But apart from the aerial view of the great stone temple there, the Ka'aba, and its thro...

The contribution of 14C AMS dating to the Greater Angkor archaeological project

For well over five centuries, the Khmer kingdom ruled over a vast territory, including most of what is now known as Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Between the 9th and 14th century AD, the Khmer Kings developed the Angkor area into a remarkable administrative and religious centre for their society. According to new estimates by the Greater Angkor Project, the entire urban complex of the capital city covered about 1000 square km making it probably the largest archaeological site in the world. Great stone temples and some other monumental structures and earthworks are the only visible remains of this fascinating civilisation. Thankfully, there is a substantial on-going multinational effort to preserve and restore what is left and in 1992 UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation) declared Angkor a World Heritage Site. This paper presents two particular aspects of the Greater Angkor Project where radiocarbon dating by AMS specifically added to our knowledge of the history of this ancient capital city.

The contribution of 14C AMS dating to the Greater Angkor archaeological project

For well over five centuries, the Khmer kingdom ruled over a vast territory, including most of what is now known as Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Between the 9th and 14th century AD, the Khmer Kings developed the Angkor area into a remarkable administrative and religious centre for their society. According to new estimates by the Greater Angkor Project, the entire urban complex of the capital city covered about 1000 square km making it probably the largest archaeological site in the world. Great stone temples and some other monumental structures and earthworks are the only visible remains of this fascinating civilisation. Thankfully, there is a substantial on-going multinational effort to preserve and restore what is left and in 1992 UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation) declared Angkor a World Heritage Site. This paper presents two particular aspects of the Greater Angkor Project where radiocarbon dating by AMS specifically added to our knowledge of the history of this ancient capital city.

Pathways and Ceremonies: The Cursus Monuments of Britain and Ireland. By Alistair Barclay and Jan Harding. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland. By Clive Ruggles. Great Stone Circles. By Aubrey Burl.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPathways and Ceremonies: The Cursus Monuments of Britain and Ireland. By Alistair Barclay and Jan Harding. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland. By Clive Ruggles. Great Stone Circles. By Aubrey Burl.Karlene Jones-BleyKarlene Jones-Bley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 106, Number 1January 2002 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/507202 Copyright © 2002 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Druids, Patriarchs, and the Primordial Religion

In the light of the contemporary resurgence of Druidism, this article explores the heyday of the invention of Druidism in the West during the Romantic period. It demonstrates the way in which the construction of Druidism, as the heir of the Patriarchal tradition of the Old Testament and of Primordial religion, played a significant role in the construction of British self-identity from 1750-1850, in contrast to the marginal role which neo-Druidism plays in contemporary British self-understanding. The article explores the perceived connection between Druidism and the great stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury.