Cultural Repositories Research Articles

Erosion of archaeological sites: Quantifying the threat using optically stimulated luminescence and fallout isotopes

AbstractAlthough visible evidence shows that erosion has damaged many archaeological sites, especially when tilled, there has hitherto been scant attention to its quantitative assessment. Accordingly, the archaeology communities lack insight into whether long‐term threats to the stability and integrity of soils at these sites allow these cultural repositories to be preserved for future human generations. Of the techniques that are available to measure erosion rates, few have been tested on the timescales needed. We selected three archaeological sites with high expected erosion rates. We combined optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating with analyses of radioactive fallout isotope distributions to assess erosion patterns and rates. An age–depth representation of OSL single‐aliquot results was developed to determine past erosion, and to identify stable land surfaces on centennial to millennia timescales. Fall‐out isotopes of cesium (Cs) and plutonium (Pu) were suitable for shorter timescales: The 240Pu/239Pu ratios and a correlation between activities of 239+240Pu and 137Cs demonstrated the weapons testing fallout origin of these isotopes in the ~1952–1966 timeframe. Erosion rates in recent decades ranged from 2 to 6 mm/year on the studied sites. Our results indicate that erosion is not only tied to the past, but keeps on threatening archaeological sites.

Differential loss of components of traditional ecological knowledge following a primate extinction event.

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), an important component of the modern conservation toolkit, is being eroded in indigenous communities around the world. However, the dynamics of TEK loss in response to ecosystem change and disruption to social–ecological systems, and patterns of variation in vulnerability and resilience of different components of TEK, remain poorly understood. The Hainan gibbon (Nomascus hainanus), a culturally significant primate, was formerly distributed across Hainan Island, China, but became extinct across most of this range within living memory and is now restricted to a single landscape, Bawangling National Nature Reserve. Gibbon-specific TEK (including folktales, natural history information and methods of gibbon exploitation) is still present in indigenous communities across seven Hainanese landscapes, but statistically significant differences in TEK content exist between landscapes with different histories of gibbon persistence: respondents from Bawangling and most landscapes that have recently lost gibbons report more gibbon-related folktales compared with landscapes from which gibbons have been absent for several decades. Species-specific folktales might have been lost more rapidly compared with other components of TEK because older community members are typically the ‘cultural repositories’ of stories, whereas knowledge about practical interactions with biodiversity might be shared more widely with younger community members.

Digitizing the Textual Heritage of the Premodern Islamicate World: Principles and Plans

The varied textual traditions of the premodern Islamicate World represent an opportunity and a problem for the Digital Humanities (DH). The opportunity lies in the sheer extent of this textual heritage: if we combine the textual output of premodern Persian and Arabic authors (not to mention Turkish and other less well-represented Islamicate languages), this body of texts constitutes arguably the largest written repository of human culture. Analytical methods developed for other linguistic heritages can be repurposed to make use of this wealth of texts, and efforts are now underway to apply to them a series of computationally enhanced methods that derive from a variety of disciplines (e.g., corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, the social sciences, and statistics). The application of these forms of analysis to these large new corpora promises new insights on premodern Islamicate cultures and the improvement of existing digital tools and methodologies.

REPRESENTATION OF THE DICTIONARY IN THEORETICAL AND EDUCATIONAL LEXICOGRAPHY

The article is devoted to the main issues of studying modern lexicographic science, its theoretical and educational direction. The concept of lexicography, the main types of dictionaries of Russian and English are considered. The linguocentric and anthropocentric approaches to the study of science are analyzed. Distinctive features of educational lexicography are the consideration of methodological requirements, the specificity of the approach to the selection of material in dictionaries. In lexicographic practice, theoretical research is carried out in the study of ways to identify and semantize cultural information. The article is devoted to the main issues of studying contemporary lexicographic science; practical and theoretical approaches in considering the macrostructure of bilingual dictionaries. The basis of lexicographical design, planning and organization of vocabulary work is described. The relationship in the dictionary of linguistic and extralinguistic information is a significant issue for modern lexicography. Bilingual dictionaries are considered as a repository of culture on the one hand, and on the other - as bridges between different cultures, representing not only linguistic forms, but also cultural facts. The inclusion of the cultural component in the composition of the dictionary entry corresponds to the anthropocentric orientation of modern lexicographic science. The article considers the main types and specifics of bilingual dictionaries, their typological functions based on the classification of user skills.

Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present by Caroline Vout

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 195 (commonly temples and stoas) within the confines of sanctuaries, prior to its appearance on the Old Bouleuterion (198) requires some modification. The Doric order does appear on images of fountain houses on Black Figure vases (Hydria of the Priam Painter and the François vase) and the entrance to Peleus’ house on the François vase. Altogether, this volume is an admirable undertaking, which sets the standard for future syntheses of theory and methodology in Mediterranean archaeology during other time periods. As the first synthetic treatment with a unique approach to the subject matter it constitutes a valuable contribution to this area of study. University of New Brunswick Maria Papaioannou Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present. By Caroline Vout. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2018. Pp. 376, 80 colour and 132 b/w illustrations. Caroline Vout's latest work represents a refreshingly new approach to the discussion of classical Greek and Roman sculpture, using artworks to provide the insight that “comes from antiquities that carry their dirt with them” (3). She emphasises that only “if we can trace them back to where the ancients left them—better still, to where the ancients used them—can we appreciate what these artifacts meant and did—give them back their agency (sic)” (1). Vout divides her work into nine full chapters covering a multitude of objects, ranging from the antique to the modern. In her first chapter (“Setting the Agenda, or Putting the Art into Heritage”), she opens with the much discussed Tyrannicides, providing a fresh perspective on what could have been treated as an old chestnut by examining how their status and meaning changed over time. In this introductory chapter, Vout also clarifies some key terms, most saliently how “Art” and the ancient term ars correlate. “Context,” by which Vout means display contexts (12), is also highlighted, although it is not until Chapter Nine that the more traditional interpretation of this term is considered in detail. Chapter Two (“Finding the Classical in Hellenistic Greece”) begins with Nero’s theft of sculptures from Delphi. A comprehensive survey of Hellenistic art and its debt to classical precursors follows, ending with a section, entitled “Learning to Look” (39–42), which uses a discussion of the “Hellenistic gaze” to set the scene for the Romans’ utilisation of Greek themes, modified to their own tastes and palettes. Roman culture can be branded as indistinct from and overly reliant on the Greek, but Vout does not take this traditional approach in Chapter Three (“Making Greek Culture Roman Culture”). Instead she poses apt questions pertaining to the absorption of Greek visual culture. With an emphasis on imperial sculpture she concludes that Augustan classicism was inevitable and that Roman conquests could be configured into a Greek idiom. A short discussion of the impact of Greek painting on the Roman domestic environs allows space for a beautifully illustrated section on Roman mosaics and wall paintings. Chapter Four (“Roman Art, the Building Blocks of Empire”) opens up to a more grandiose vista, engaging with Rome and its shift “from repository of culture to tou Ellhnikoœ &Eynouw, t. 2 (Athens 1971) 196–200; W. Waal, “On the ‘Phoenician Letters’: The Case for an Early Transmission of the Greek Alphabet from an Archaeological, Epigraphic and Linguistic Perspective,” Aegean Studies 1 (2018) 83–125. 196 PHOENIX cultural exemplar” (71). One example is the Roman emphasis on collecting (75–80), in Vout’s phrasing, “like Caesar” (75). Appropriation of classical culture continues in pagan and Christian contexts, and Vout’s comments on Christianity’s need and use of pagan art to support and promote a new imperial narrative are astute. The following section on the Middle Ages is sadly brief, but does include an engaging equestrian statuette of a portly Charlemagne or Charles the Bald (91, fig. 4.15). Chapter Five (“Reviving Antiquity in Renaissance Italy”) examines the Renaissance view of classical art and its effect on Europe’s understanding of Greek and Roman culture up to the mid-eighteenth century. Vout considers “variations in practice, and evolving . . . attitudes to collecting, exhibition, and restoration” (97). There is a wealth of expertly managed material here, which Vout enriches...

The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Game ed. by Elisabeth Wesseling

Reviewed by: The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Gameed. by Elisabeth Wesseling Elizabeth Dillenburg The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Games. Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling. Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700-Present. Surrey, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016. 258 pp. Paper $54.95, Cloth $149.95. The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Gamesseeks to understand how the child-savage trope "turned into a foundational schema of Western cultural repositories of childhood" by exploring how images of childhood circulate, transform, and persist across space, media, and time (12). Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling, this collection of thirteen chapters includes work by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film, educational leadership and policy, cultural studies, creative arts, children's literature, media, and gender and diversity. The subjects within the volume—which range from novels and broadsheets to films and video games—reflect this disciplinary breadth. Through its in-depth analysis of the child-savage trope, the book deepens understandings of "the contradictory meanings that inhabit the construction of 'the child'" (15). The book is divided into three sections, organized chronologically. The first, and largest, section—"The Child-Savage in (Neo-)Colonial Discourse"—focuses on the circulation of the trope during the "heyday of imperialism." These chapters consider how the trope was employed to support European colonial projects and assert racial hierarchies, as in Vanessa Rutherford's chapter on how Irish educational discourse sought to highlight European superiority and Luke Springman's study of African Kulturfilmand its promise of redemption for Germans following World War I. The chapters also examine, however, how the child-savage trope could subvert colonial and racial rhetoric, a theme explored in Pascal Lefèvre's chapter on more positive representations of black people in broadsheets and silent films that sometimes even inverted the roles of black and white people, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer's examination of how Dutch children's magazines portrayed cruelties committed by Western colonizers, Ruth Murphy's analysis of the negotiation between the unstable ideology of the child and evolutionary progression in Kipling's Just So Stories, and Bettina [End Page 263]Kümmerling-Meibauer's study of the ways Negritude literature transgressed ethnocentric, Eurocentric views. The second section—"Domestic Savages"—explores how the child-savage trope was transformed during the interwar and postwar periods, focusing on children's media in Britain and the United States. This section, like the previous one, highlights the instability of the idea and how it both idealized and demonized children. While chapters in the first section focused on its racial implications, this section examines its class dimensions in more detail. Wesseling's chapter on the orphan figure in Oliver Twistand the comic strip Little Orphan Annieand Vanessa Joosen's analysis of the figure of the child killer in novels and tabloids demonstrate how the child-savage metaphor traveled across media and time. The other two chapters in this section reflect on the possibilities—but also the discomfort—created by and reflected in new media forms. Kate Lacey's chapter on the BBC's Children's Hourand Joshua Garrison's study of exploitation films in the 1930s and 1940s show how these productions reinforced notions that young people needed to be controlled and surveilled. Like the second section, the third part—"Postcolonial Playgrounds"—examines how the signifier of the child-savage has been imported into new media forms, in this case during the digital and electronic age. Johnathan Bignell's analysis of nostalgia and constructions of masculinity in Action Man toys, Lincoln Geraghty's chapter on commodification and fan culture surrounding the Transformers, and Isabel Hoving's study of the iterations of feral children figures in children's literature and video games demonstrate the persistence of colonial techniques of domination into the present day and also draw attention to the gendered implications of the child-savage metaphor. Chapters in this section continue to analyze themes that emerge throughout the book, including the subversive potential and inherent contradictions of the child-savage trope. Each of the chapters is insightful and interesting, and together they enrich understandings about this "root metaphor" of the child-savage as well as the construction of "the...

Rural Drag: Fashioning Rurality and Privilege

Abstract “Rural drag” is the appropriation, arrangement, and deployment of rural fashion, objects, practices, and aesthetics in order to assert membership in and support for white, settler heteropatriarchy. This rhetorical practice draws from a cultural repository of rural symbols and tropes called the “rural imaginary” to establish a rhetorical link between rural space and the privileges of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism.

El juego motor del marro: una indagación acerca de sus raíces pedagógicas

Desde muy antiguo el juego motor del marro ha permanecido en el depósito cultural de la civilización occidental. Sin embargo, las raíces antropológicas, sociológicas y pedagógicas de este juego han sido escasamente investigadas. A partir de la indagación cultural de sus orígenes nos adentramos en averiguar el por qué esta práctica físico-recreativa ha permanecido durante tantos siglos prácticamente inalterada. El estudio parte de un enfoque histórico-genealógico y fenomenológico interdisciplinar (antropología, sociología y pedagogía) sustentado por una variada revisión documental de fuentes primarias. Los resultados nos llevan a sostener que en la lógica interna del juego del marro subyacen los códigos socializantes de la pedagogía contemporánea, por lo que su duradera presencia viene a garantizar la teoría del «proceso de civilización» de Occidente. Esta interpretación contribuye también a valorar una comprensión fenomenológica en la historia de los juegos corporales y el rol que desempeñan en la sociedad.

Israel, Palestine, and the Language of Genocide

Israel, Palestine, and the Language of Genocide

Hope Chest

In this article I position the metaphor of the hope chest at the heart of a trilogy of fairy tale novels, The Complete Tales of Ketzia (2001), The Complete Tales of Merry (2006a) and The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold (2011), by Kate Bernheimer that explore traditions of American girlhood. Deploying psychoanalytic interpretative readings, I investigate the characterization of each of the three sisters. My use of the hope chest (as both a toy and a cultural repository) enables me to offer a fuller picture of the social transition depicted in these novels from childhood into womanhood, and is thus conflated with the idea of the child-woman—a hinge-like cultural figure whom Bernheimer represents metaphorically through boxes of accoutrements containing memories and prophecies. With reference to unpublished interviews with Bernheimer, I support my interpretative reading of her trilogy by invoking and explaining the relevance of literary theories related to caskets.

Francis Gingras, Profession médiéviste. (Profession.) Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014. Paper. Pp. 70. $9.95. ISBN: 978-2-7606-3341-4.

Francis Gingras, <i>Profession médiéviste</i>. (Profession.) Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014. Paper. Pp. 70. $9.95. ISBN: 978-2-7606-3341-4.

The Development Of Cultural Heritage Repository Based On Ontology

Malaysia is known for its traditional cultural heritage. This is reflected from a diverge range of practices and ways of life of its people. Nevertheless, the traditional cultural heritage has been gradually forgotten overtime. The information related to traditional cultural heritage can be obtained from various sources and locations but is inconsistent thus resulting in information seeking difficulties. A repository of cultural heritage was constructed to overcome the problem. The repository was built based on ontology which enable semantic knowledge representation and searching. The ontology consists of tangible objects that are listed as national heritage objects by the National Heritage Department (JWN). Additional information is also collected from various sources, including the National Library, the National Museum, the history books, articles and online references. Classes for each object was identified using middle-out approach. An information retrieval system prototype was constructed to test the effectiveness of information management and access. The evaluation of the prototype shows that the ontology has improved the information management and information searching of tangible heritage. This cultural heritage repository could be extended as a main hub of national cultural heritage management and access.

Bees, Barley, Bēowulf and Beyla

A primary aim of this study is its attempt to uncover a prehistoric layer of cereal grain (barley) mythology and ritual that may have backgrounded the Beowulf-poem. Toward this end, the poem and the mythological figures of Byggvir, Beyla, Scef ‘sheaf’ and Scyld ‘shield’ are interpreted in terms of a conceivable ritual context. Moreover, cereal deities, their ritualized veneration and the possible associations between them are referenced to the scourge of ergotism that once threatened much of Europe. The scope of Beowulf as not only an heroic epic but as also a cultural repository is thereby amplified.

Leveraging Digital Cultural Memories

The penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture and the emergence of digital cultural repositories and linked cultural data in particular are expected to enable new paths in humanities research and new approaches to cultural heritage. Success is contingent upon securing information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content. In this perspective, we review the use in the cultural heritage domain of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures.

The Emerging Role of Community Museums in Uganda: The Need for Capacity Building Among Managers

Community museums in Uganda are initiatives by individuals, families or groups who have collected artefacts, oral history, and other elements of the local culture. The museums have made an effort to link past and future through their collections, which are accessible to schools, researchers, local residents and foreign tourists. Community museums play an important role in preserving and presenting the diversity of Uganda's cultural heritage and provide spaces for appreciating different cultures; they are cultural repositories, some with well‐documented literature on culture and other socio‐anthropological aspects. They represent a strong will among individuals, families and communities to preserve and promote their cultures without external support. However, not much has been done to recognise their importance in the development of Uganda.Community museums are still perceived by Ugandans as representing a largely irrelevant past and their role is seen as quite peripheral to the current national and local priorities: as such, they are rarely given visibility and are poorly frequented. The government of Uganda is not sufficiently aware of their existence and does not support them. Tour operators give attention to animal tourism and ignore the human dimension, which is manifested in community museums. The capacity of museum caretakers to efficiently and professionally run community museums is still wanting: they lack a proper network and museum artefacts are not well documented, presented and preserved. Integrating modern computer technologies in museum management is still a major challenge.This paper aims to highlight the efforts and importance of community museums in Uganda and their efforts to raise their profile both locally and internationally.

Casting Characters in the Dark Ink of Melancholy: Figures of Dissent and Imprisonment in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Seventeenth-century English character-books were popular collections of short essays cataloguing the different types or “characters” of the city. These octavo or duodecimo pamphlets belonged neither to the field of theology nor to that of medical studies. They borrowed from a multitude of discourses, ranging from commonplace wisdom, the curriculum of the schools, anatomical treatises and the elaborate representations of the stage. In this essay, I show that as jumbled literary and cultural repositories, books of characters offer a particularly comprehensive insight into the variety of contemporary interpretations of melancholy. Authors of characters made use of the notion of melancholy to refer in turn to an extravagantly abnormal behaviour, an excessive show of religious devotion, an obsessive disease of the soul, an inspiring symptom of spiritual awareness, an evil possession of the body or a cause of unremitted despair. Such characterizations reinforced the commonplace satire of dissenters as melancholy men by tapping into established stereotypes of humoral imbalance and brainless folly. In this paper, I show that the numerous “characters” of real-life prisons and prisoners however give rise to another representation of melancholy. In such representations, melancholy is neither an ideological stigma nor a psychological prison of the soul. It is a positive manifestation of poetic inspiration which allows the prisoner to metaphorically escape the four walls of his prison.

Cultural revitalisation after catastrophe: the Qiang culture in A’er

The culture of the Qiang ethnic minority in Western China has been threatened by assimilation with the majority culture, and many Qiang no longer take part in traditional ceremonies or use their cultural skills and knowledge. The devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan killed a 10th of the Qiang population and destroyed monuments, houses and villages. The Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre (CHP), a citizen volunteer non-governmental organisation, launched a project to help a Qiang village named A’er preserve its intangible and tangible cultural heritage. This paper describes the damage that was done and the needs of the Qiang people in the remote village of A’er, which is generally considered one of the last major repositories of traditional Qiang culture. The A’er people, despite their desperate situation, were determined to save their cultural heritage. The CHP team, working with them, provided necessary instruments and methods for recording. The Qiang people of A’er village themselves decided what they would record and produced an introduction to the A’er Qiang culture named ‘The A’er Archive’ and an elementary conversation booklet over which A’er villagers explicitly maintained copyright.

Cultural resilience: The production of rural community heritage, digital archives and the role of volunteers

The following paper addresses a lacuna in the literature relating to the concept of resilience. To date, cultural activity in relation to resilient communities has been given little attention and this paper will highlight how the lens of community heritage activities and the ‘bottom-up’ role of volunteer labour can act as a catalyst for building more resilient communities in rural areas. This develops from rural areas that have strong place identities, formed through the reproduction of traditional cultural practices alongside contemporary influences. These identities are performed and constructed through a varied repertoire of knowledges, histories, and customs. Their on-going production can be central to community identity as they attempt to make visible their own accounts of history and place. Beyond this, community heritage organisations have also begun to have grounded ‘impacts’ that move away from heritage interests alone, often revitalising buildings and providing community services. This will be used to highlight how such cultural heritage activity builds collective resilience. A further trend (in the UK) has been for community heritage groups to digitise collections, due to the perceived transformational effect for community regeneration, the strengthening of community cohesion and the potential socio-economic benefits. In partnership with community heritage groups, the CURIOS (Cultural Repositories and Information Systems) project explores two case studies in rural Scotland asking how community activity, connectivity and digital archives can support interest in local heritage as well as help develop more resilient communities.

Femininities In The Discourse Of Khawateen Digest Of Pakistan

Khawateen Digest, an Urdu magazine, is one of the important repositories of feminine culture in Pakistan from many decades. This work attempts to explore Khawateen Digest for representation of women and provides a focus on the traditional and patriarchal female images. It endeavours to analyse issues of women as discussed in Khawateen Digest from the feminist perspective of Millet (1970) and Weedon (1987) who opine that women's social roles in patriarchal societies are defined by men. Moreover, at times, the use of language for secondary sex is not only exploitative but also sexually abusive in the respective magazine. The analysis centers on magazines as linguistic and semiotic constructs. The linguistic and semiotic content of the magazine has been encoded from a masculine and patriarchal perspective and the researcher has tried to decode it from feminist linguistic (Cameron 1998) perspective. Hence, this article is an effort to highlight the exploitative, demeaning, belittling, subjugating, subordinating, controlling and marginalizing representations of women through the analysis of linguistic and semiotic content of KHAWATEEN DIGEST.

The Geographies of Community History Digital Archives in Rural Scotland

The CURIOS (Cultural Repositories and Information Systems) project has been working with community heritage groups to co-produce sustainable solutions for the production of heritage archives in digital form. This process has produced an opportunity for fascinating geographical research into the ways in which community heritage groups produce history from their own perspective. This paper will therefore begin to open up these ongoing processes to consider, through case study examples, the ways in which the production of digital archives alters the geography of community heritage production. A number of community heritage groups have been converting their ‘analogue’ collections into ‘digital’ forms and the paper will argue how this significantly alters the positionality of the archive. This will be shown by detailing the ways in which the processes of collection and preservation, conducted by community volunteers, take place. The paper will then move to consider the ways in which this historical material, representative of place, is presented back to a wider audience. In doing this, it will discuss the rationales and processes involved in these practices and how this relates to broader themes of research within geography. Whether for historical research or for theoretical positioning, geographers have, on a number of levels, engaged with archives. Yet, the digital archive has seen little attention especially in terms of thinking through the ways in which digital mediums alter perceptions of space and place.