Stone Platform Research Articles

A Death and a Youth Club: Feuding in a Turkish Village

The primary aim of this paper is to describe two events which occurred during my second field trip to Turkey,' to offer some analysis of them, and to raise one or two general questions. The analysis requires also a description, which I have sought to make complete, if brief, of the patrilineal groups found in these villages. Folkhead, the village in which I lived on this trip, was fairly large about 1200 people, living in about 215 households. One afternoon in November, one of the wealthier villagers had invited me to drink coffee in his own guest room. Most of the middling and more prosperous households have a room, usually well away from the family part of the house and the women, which is specially reserved for the men of the household; it is generally known as oda, the ordinary Turkish word for room. Here the men sit and talk, and entertain their guests. As we finished drinking coffee, we heard a child crying grievously outside. We went out of the room on to the stone platform at the head of the outside staircase which leads up to it. A girl was running into the courtyard of the next house shouting out, Qocuk vurdular. Literally, this might mean They have struck a child, and I did not at once realize what she meant. Dead, dead, shouted the girl as she disappeared into her house. She had been telling us that a young man had been shot. The victim, head of a household and father of a young family, had recently returned from military service. He had been shot by a young neighbor, and had died within a few minutes, right outside the guest room of the current village headman.2 Women

Transportation Design Elements in American Architecture

WE ARE so accustomed to looking for the inspiration sources of modern architecture in earlier examples of similar buildings that it seldom occurs to us to search for origins in fields outside architecture proper. There is one which proves rewarding in the number of contributions that it has made, stemming from a development that has grown parallel with that of modern building. Reference is made to the influence of transportation design upon stationary structures. Boats, trains, and airplanes all have contributed much to the trend American building has taken. Features developed in vehicles out of imagination or need have been adapted in houses and other buildings in America more than anywhere else in large measure due to the perennial American love of travel. The American feels at home afloat, on rail, and in the air; and it is only to be expected that we find a reflection of these conveyances in his home. There is nothing new about a building being modeled after a vehicle. The Temple of the Sun at Konarak in Orissa on the northeast coast of India, constructed in the mid-thirteenth century and dedicated to Surya, the sun god, takes its form from the chariot of the Indian solar deity, who, like the Greek or Roman counterpart, Apollo, drives fiery steeds across the sky. More prosaically, the building resembles a huge ratha, or wheeled car of a type still pulled laboriously along in special Hindu religious processions today. A dozen wheels, each ten feet high, are carved on either side of the great stone platform on which a spreading pyramidal hall 100 feet in height stood before a tall tapering tower that soared 225 feet. This central group was surrounded by several smaller pavilions. Horses, straining at their

Excavations in Ithaca, V The Geometric and Later Finds from Aetos

The circumstances of the discovery of the vases and objects described below by Mr. Robertson were, briefly, as follows:—1931. In trial pits dug in 1931 (Figs. 2, 4, 6) the foundations of a rough wall (6) resting on virgin soil were found, to the north of which sub-Mycenaean and Protogeometric sherds associated with stones and calcined earth appeared. South of this wall appeared two layers of dark earth, of which the lower (8a) rested on virgin soil and was about 0·5 m. thick. The upper (8b) was only a few cm. thick, and was separated from the lower by a kind of stone platform, above which was a layer of more or less sterile earth (Fig. 6). Both the upper and the lower dark-earth layers were thickly packed with sherds, all post-Protogeometric. The lower layer continued below a wall (7) the foundations of which rested in it, and below a second wall (11) the foundations of which were sunk in the upper dark-earth layer.