Violent Destruction Research Articles

Monedas del litoral marítimo. Un tesoro Emiral compuesto por monedas de plata procedente de un asentamiento portuario del Cerro da Vila (Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal)

El Cerro da Vila se fundó como asentamiento romano de producción y puerto (“aglomeración secundaria”) al final de la época republicana. Con el tiempo, se convirtió en un pequeño asentamiento costero (“aldeia do mar”), con una actividad basada en gran medida en la explotación de los recursos marítimos, aunque es poco probable que su explotación excediera el nivel de subsistencia. El abandono del asentamiento fue probablemente resultado de un ataque violento y destrucción a finales del siglo XI / comienzos del siglo XII. Un tesoro de 239 monedas de plata y fragmentos fue descubierto en el fondo de un silo de almacenamiento de época islámica, excavado en el suelo en una zona del antiguo emplazamiento romano, donde los restos de edificios y la estratigrafía confirman la actividad de asentamiento en los periodos visigodo e islámico. la cronología de la última moneda encontrada data de 270/883-4, pero el tesoro podría haber sido enterrado algunos años después. Es probable que el tesoro represente una pequeña muestra aleatoria de la circulación de monedas en Garb al-Andalus. la mayoría de las monedas están fragmentadas. Como es típico de este período, un gran número de las monedas están cortadas y ranuradas; y algunas de éstas están conectadas con pequeñas piezas de plata. Con la excepción de dos denarios carolingios, todas las monedas identificables proceden de Córdoba, lo que demuestra un estricto control de la circulación de monedas en al-Andalus. El tesoro pertenece a una zona del sur y el sudoeste de al-Andalus en la que se han encontrado tesoros similares que fueron enterrados en los años 260, 270, 870 y 880. Este artículo discute la composición de las monedas. Estas pertenecen al período de la sublevación del terrateniente muwallad ‘Umar Ibn Ḥafṣūn entre los años 267/880-1 y 303/915-6, contra el Emirato de Córdoba.

GPU Acceleration of Adaptive Local Kriging Applied to Retrieving Slant-Range Surface Motion Maps

Differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) is an effective technique to measure the surface displacement caused by strong earthquakes. However, in the area with respect to the most significant deformation along the fault zone, the coherence between pre- and post-earthquake SAR images is completely lost because of the earthquake-induced violent and chaotic destruction on the land surface and consequently, no surface displacement data can be measured. In our previous work, an adaptive local kriging (ALK) was proposed to solve this problem. However, according to the spatial distribution of the reference points for the interpolation procedure of ALK, using moving window with different sizes through all the pixels in the image is time consuming. Thus, a high-performance computing (HPC) is needed. As a result, a parallel image interpolation approach, referred as the graphics processing unit (GPU) based ALK method, to retrieving slant-range surface motion maps derived by DInSAR is proposed in this study. The proposed GPU-ALK makes use of the parallelism of the original ALK architectures to retrieve the loss of data through the fault zone. In this paper, an HPC GPU-ALK is proposed to speed up the interpolation. It makes use of the performance profiling to analyze the serial version of ALK and perform a parallel GPU computation for reducing the computation time efficiently. By employing one NVIDIA TITAN GPU, the proposed GPU-ALK achieves a speedup of 104.32× compared to its CPU counterpart.

A tale of two statues: Contemporary conflict reporting constraints and the Battle of Baghdad

Although television conflict reporting has usually been limited by risks to journalists’ safety, the death throes of Baathist Iraq in April 2003 provided viewers with a unique opportunity to vicariously witness the fall of a large modern city. Yet if the iconic moment of the Second Gulf War came when Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square was toppled, then it was at the expense of another image event which unfolded earlier a short distance away. Because the US military’s violent destruction of the equestrian statue close to the ‘Hands of Victory’ monument better encapsulates the conflict than the sterile bloodless ‘cakewalk’ description it’s usually labelled with. This article shows how the tale of these two statues is also in some ways the tale of two Fox News correspondents, and how an alienation from military service conditions and methods can leave reporters and their audiences with no sense of what the participants on their screens endured in order to reach Baghdad; or what they had also inflicted upon others. In retrospect, the circumstances which allowed one Fox reporter to provide the world with what might have been its first taste of live, unedited combat footage seem more like an accidental success than the result of systemic best practices. Especially when this network and even its most credible host remain committed to ensuring a particular partisan perspective dominates all their broadcasts.

Writing out of Ruins

Abstract This hybrid autobiographical/critical paper takes its cue from Yvonne Owuor’s paper in this volume, “Reading our Ruins: A Rough Sketch.” In her piece, Owuor combines a meditation on ruins—as physical, human, social and political—with the perspective of an autopsy, or “seeing for oneself”. In my paper I try to “see for myself” and in myself what it means to consider the ruins of District Six and the responses, individual and institutional, to its violent destruction. More specifically, I try to account for a recent oral history project completed by the District Six Museum which resulted in the writing of a food story and cookbook, District Six Huis Kombuis Tafel: Food and Memory Stories Cookbook (2016). My paper intersperses this critical account with italicised fragments of my own memoir (a work in progress) on District Six, apartheid’s psychic violence, home and food, that relate directly or tangentially to the critical segments. The memoir fragments provide a parallel tale of inner life that at times relates to and supplements the critical discourse, but also at times casts it into doubt.

Classificazione della ceramica e analisi dei contesti all’inizio dell’età del Bronzo: la capanna F del villaggio di Filo Braccio (Filicudi, Isole Eolie)

Classificazione della ceramica e analisi dei contesti all’inizio dell’età del Bronzo: la capanna F del villaggio di Filo Braccio (Filicudi, Isole Eolie)

Precipitation of dichloromethane as low-chlorine carbon nanoparticles from water by femtosecond laser pulses

Abstract We report on the transformation of dichloromethane to low-chlorine carbon nanoparticles by the exposure of aqueous dichloromethane solution and/or dichloromethane/water biphasic solution to femtosecond laser pulses. The pH of either solution immediately decreased due to the reduction of dichloromethane by hydrated electrons. The time evolution of transmittance revealed that particle formation was suppressed when the initial pH was low because protons scavenge hydrated electrons. The size and morphology of nanoparticles was independent of the initial pH and the reaction solution used. The analysis of the elemental composition of carbon particles showed that the Cl/C atomic ratio was, independent on the initial pH values, greatly reduced to 0.06. We propose that the violent destruction of dichloromethane and elimination of chlorine atoms not only as Cl − but also Cl 2 excludes chlorine atoms from the carbon network construction processes toward the formation of carbon nanoparticles.

Metalworking at Megiddo during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages

Metalworking at Megiddo during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages

Introduction: Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

Intimacy and Emotions Across the European Empires

Intimacy and Emotions Across the European Empires Ellen Boucher (bio) Pernille Ipsen. Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 288pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8122-4673-5 (cl); ISBN 0-8122-2395-0 (pb). Adele Perry. Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiii + 310 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-1070-3761-1 (cl). Emmanuelle Saada. Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xv + 357 pp. ISBN 0-2267-3307-6 (cl); 0-2267-3308-4 (pb). Two decades ago, the historian and anthropologist Ann Stoler revolutionized the study of empire by highlighting the centrality of intimacy to the construction, management, and contestation of imperial power. Her work began from the proposition that the “domains of the intimate”—sex, childrearing, relations with servants, cultivation of sentiments, and so on—were crucial sites in which colonial administrators and settler families produced and enforced class and racial categories and hierarchies. This argument has inspired scholars to look beyond the more traditional depictions of imperial power as coherent, metropole-based, and manifested mainly through overt violence, instead exploring how the organization of private lives across different colonial spaces served to construct the figures of both colonizer and colonized as well as to create and maintain the cultural distinctions that allegedly justified European governance of “uncivilized” peoples. Stoler’s work claimed that within empires, the personal was not just political, it was the framework upon which the entire edifice of colonial rule depended.1 These arguments have been particularly influential among postcolonial scholars, feminists, and women’s historians, for they reaffirm what these theorists long have stressed: that the groups most often marginalized in the classic accounts of empire—indigenous and mixed-race people, servants, wives, mothers, and children—are worthy objects of study and consequential historical actors in their own right. Each of the three works under review begins from this premise, and, in different ways, they illustrate how the study of colonial intimacies and colonial families can rework, nuance, and [End Page 161] sometimes transform the accepted narratives of European imperialism, nationhood, race, and identity. Read together, they also suggest how scholars might expand the study of intimacy through the insights and methodologies emerging from the newer field of the history of emotions. Focused on Danish fort towns on the Gold Coast of West Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pernille Ipsen’s richly imagined first book, Daughters of the Trade, follows five generations of marriages between Danish slave traders and local African (or Euro-African) women. These unions were known as “cassare” or “keeping house” a term that demonstrates the deeply practical function that interracial marriage served in the uncertain and violent context of the slave trade. For Danish men struggling to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, a place where “heaven was high and Europe far away,” as a local saying went, the practice could mean the difference between life and death (24). Ga-speaking wives nursed their husbands through illness, cooked for them, raised their children, and, most importantly, represented their interests within the African community. As Ipsen points out, the reason we know anything at all about these marriages is because cassare as an institution was central to the expanding trade in slaves, providing a mechanism for both the Danish and African communities to forge mutually beneficial alliances. Local Danish officials recognized the significance of the marriages by refusing to enforce a company-ordered ban on sexual relations with African women, by frequently cassaring themselves and by working with chaplains to sanction the unions. By concentrating on what both sides had to gain from cassare, Ipsen’s work revises the standard vision of the trade, which scholars commonly present as a story of violent destruction with clear victims and perpetrators. She does not discount the horrors that slavery wrought, yet she does seek to humanize slave traders, both European and African. In so doing, she calls attention to the opportunities that the trade opened up for certain groups of Africans, including most prominently the elite...

Conflictos y destrucciones en la Celtiberia Citerior entre los siglos III y I a. C.: el yacimiento de «El Calvario», en Gotor, Zaragoza

En el yacimiento celtibérico «El Calvario», en la localidad zaragozana de Gotor, se han podido identificar hasta tres destrucciones violentas en un lapso de tiempo relativamente breve entre finales del siglo III a. C. y el primer cuarto del siglo I a. C. A las dos primeras siguió la reconstrucción total y la remodelación de las estructuras. La tercera abocó al abandono definitivo del asentamiento. Este yacimiento aragonés nos habla de una vida convulsa y violenta en esta zona de la Celtiberia entre el siglo III y el I a. C. El grado de arrasamiento de las estructuras, junto con la aparición de varias monedas, nos aproximará al contexto histórico de dichas destrucciones. Del mismo modo podremos comprobar los problemas que plantea el repertorio cerámico celtibérico para poder fijar márgenes cronológicos entre finales del siglo IV y el I a. C. «El Calvario» se encuentra a 11,5 km de la ciudad celtibérica de Aratis, y con seguridad se localiza dentro de su esfera de control político y económico, en un área en la que la metalurgia fue sin duda la actividad más relevante, llegando a ordenar, vertebrar y dar sentido a la ocupación celtibérica de toda la actual comarca del Río Aranda.

Temperance, Interpretation, and “the bodie of this death”: Pauline Allegory inThe Faerie Queene, Book II

AbstractThis essay reinterprets the “dark conceit” of Mortdant, Amavia, and Ruddymane near the beginning of Spenser's Legend of Temperance. The argument examines the counterpoint between Paul's lament for “the body of this death” in Romans and the death scene of Dido in the Aeneid. The essay reads key episodes of Book II as a sustained allegory of misrecognition, according to which Guyon persists in trying to do combat with forces in his own flesh as if they were opponents to be confronted by force of arms. The recognition implicitly demanded by this allegory of misrecognition is shadowed in Arthur's interpretation of Maleger as an Antaeus‐figure, and then triumphantly repudiated in Guyon's violent destruction of the Bower. [D.L.M.]

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H. Cline. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014. xx, 237 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). The end of the Late Bronze Age, around the turn of the twelfth century BCE, was a civilizational collapse similar to the much better known fall of the Roman Empire seventeen centuries later. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean, great empires such as the Hittites in Turkey, the Mycenaeans in mainland Greece--the supposed protagonists of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, written centuries later--and even the ancient and venerable Egyptians were shaken to the core, faced with invasions, unrest, and in many places the violent destruction of palaces and cities. In the aftermath of these upheavals, which were concentrated in a relatively short span of time, by nearly every measure civilization declined, not to re-emerge in most regions for centuries. The causes of this collapse have been among the enduring mysteries of ancient history and archaeology, a complicated detective story for which Eric Cline deftly serves as guide. Cline--a noted archaeologist and professor at George Washington University--presents for educated general readers a survey of the evidence and scholarship concerning the end of the Late Bronze Age. He also engagingly establishes the historical and geographical context of the collapse, complete with a motley and compelling cast of characters. The hard date in the title of the book is taken from the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses Ill's account of a battle against a group he called the Sea Peoples in 1177. For decades, the Sea Peoples, a poorly understood conglomeration of various migratory groups, were blamed for the destruction wreaked across the eastern Mediterranean. Cline immediately establishes several clear parallels between Ramses' world and our own, and then suggests that the Sea Peoples have been unfairly blamed for a complicated and interconnected group of destabilizing factors of which they might have been more victim than cause. Given that the manuscript was completed in 2013, before the full emergence of the current refugee and migrant crisis facing Europe, Cline's thoughts cautioning against blaming a single group for complex problems seems remarkably prescient. Cline makes a convincing case for the relevance of ancient history to the modern world. Before offering a full discussion of the twelfth century BCE, Cline first goes back several hundred years to the fifteenth, at which point a complex international system began to emerge, complete with trade, gift-exchange, and even intermarriage. …

The Fate of Temples in Noricum and Pannonia

The abandonment and destruction of temples in late antiquity has become the subject of widespread discussion in recent years. However, the provinces of the Danubian frontier have been left largely understudied in this respect. This article seeks to add new data and observations to this debate by determining several points regarding the temples of Noricum and Pannonia, including when a decline in their construction becomes evident, how sources of temple benefaction alter over time, and how these changes relate to building work undertaken across the civic sphere. It also looks at the abandonment of temples, focusing particularly on when they became common sources of spolia for other building projects, what evidence there is for the violent closure of temples, and who might have been responsible for this. I argue that there is an evident decline in the construction and restoration of temples from the early third century onward, while temple building materials became increasingly used as spolia from the Tetrarchic period onward. I also show that the violent destruction of temples in the fourth century was uncommon, and, in instances where it did occur, the identity of the perpetrators is open to interpretation.

Remembering the Indonesian Peasants’ Front and Plantation Workers’ Union (1945–1966)

The absence of a strong national peasant and agricultural workers’ movement in Indonesia can be traced back to the violent destruction of the Indonesian Peasants’ Front (BTI) and Plantation Workers’ Union (SARBUPRI) in 1965–1966. This contribution reflects on their role in building a progressive movement of peasants and workers in the face of continual attempts to squash them by the Indonesian state and military. How did the cadres learn about the situation and problems in rural areas, and what were their priorities in working with the peasants? Unpublished reports from the last round of the BTI's local-level ‘participatory action research’ conducted in 1965 provide some answers to these questions.

Book Review: Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture

Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture. By R. W. L. Moberly. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2013. xiv + 333 pp. $34.99 (cloth).It is no small undertaking capture the theological richness and diversity of the Hebrew Bible in a single volume. In his most recent publication, R. W. L. Moberly meets this challenge with his own distinct style and understated flair. His book is neither a thematic overview of the entire Old Testament, nor a historical-critical examination of the Israelite religion. Rather it is a collection of eight essays on selected texts that explore issues of hermeneutics and imaginative interpretive possibilities within a Christian frame of reference. Moberly's intention is for these passages be representative of Israel's Scriptures and [to] allow many of its characteristic and leading concerns (p. 1). Given that each essay reworks a study (or studies) previously published by Moberly, the reader might wonder whether these eight topics are truly representative, or simply subjects of personal interest the author. Similarly, one might question Moberly's omissions, such as creation or land theology-important subjects, not least on account of contemporary interest in ecological hermeneutics. Nevertheless, many important and at times controversial themes do emerge through the course of the work, enough make for an engaging reading experience from beginning end.Rather than Genesis 1, Moberly's starting place is Deuteronomy 6:4-9- the Shema-a passage whose foundational and focal nature can readily be demonstrated (p. 7). And indeed, a strong case follows that the issue of allegiance one God is a central Hebrew Bible concern. Moberly's wider aim is set before the Christian interpreter the task that has been taken up in rabbinic interpretations through the ages, namely, to realize in an appropriate way something of what the text envisages in other than that in which Deuteronomy originated (p. 25). This question of how texts will be embodied (and have been embodied in history) in life contexts is addressed in every essay in this collection. For instance, in his chapter A Chosen People, Moberly takes the most objectionable implication of election-namely, herem, a concept often construed as violent destruction of the non-elect-and turns it into an applicable concept: herein is a metaphor for undivided allegiance God, and a useful concept for Christians looking cast off all that hinders faithful living. Whether this particular appropriation of Moberlys is a daring success or a crass blunder may depend on the predisposition of the reader. But whatever one makes of his conclusions, one can appreciate that Moberly is not shy present his opinions on difficult subjects. …

Acerca de unos retazos de tejido de lino procedentes del vicus romano de Puente Castro (León, España) = Fragments of linen fabric from the Roman military vicus of Puente Castro (León, Spain)

One of the most important news in the archaeology of the Roman Leon is the identification of a new military vicus 2.5 km far from the camp of legio VII gemina. The vicus of Puente Castro has similar characteristics to that located in the northern borders of the Roman Empire. The road from the camp towards the southeast is the backbone of the vicus. This is dated from the mid first century AD until the central decades of third century AD, when it suffers a violent destruction. We present here four Roman linen fragments found in the vicus of Puente Castro, belonging to a moneybag. It has been preserved precisely by the metal salts in contact with the coin hoard. The analysis of one of the fragments confirm the use of flax and hemp in the fabrication of this textile. The date of the coins allow us to maintain in the mid third Century AD the chronology of the textile fragments. Linens make up a small proportion of the textile corpus in Hispania. This find increases this reduced archaeological evidence of Roman textiles.

The New Swedish Cyprus Expedition 2014. Excavations at Hala Sultan Tekke. Preliminary results

The initial aim of the project—the search for the oldest city of Hala Sultan Tekke—continued in 2014. Geophysical methods were used, which led to the discovery of new city quarters, and a broadening of the research objectives, to include revealing the total extent of the city. The GPR survey indicated a huge stone compound of at least 50 m × 40 m to the west of a probable street. Excavations continued in Area 6 West, where in 2013 a domestic and industrial compound was excavated as part of a hitherto unknown city quarter. The 2014 field work exposed stone-built structures and rich find contexts with locally made and imported pottery, numerous tools and several items of gold and silver jewellery. The violent destruction of the most recent layer of occupation, Stratum 1, which had been observed during previous seasons, was once again confirmed. Another georadar and magnetic survey west of the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke indicated numerous circular anomalies. Five of these were excavated and turned out to be four wells and an offering pit. One of the wells was reused for human burials. Another well contained the skeleton of an equid, a complete bull figurine and a cylinder seal of haematite.

On the mechanism of a BLEVE occurrence due to fire engulfment of tanks with overheated liquids

The BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion) effect that involves the formation of a fireball occurs at the engulfment by fire of a tank with a highly flammable liquid or a liquid gas. Heating of the tank causes elevation of the liquid phase temperature and pressure inside the tank. A partial rupture of the dry tank walls is possible, with the formation of a rarefaction wave propagating into the liquid phase. An evaporation wave moves after the rarefaction wave and cause a rapid increase of pressure, exceeding the initial pressure before depressurization. Rapid violent destruction of the tank occurs. The mechanism of a BLEVE initiation is considered using Van der Waals isotherms. The following criterion for the possibility of a BLEVE was formulated. If the final state is located on an unstable part of the Van der Waals isotherm, a BLEVE takes place. Limiting values of the temperatures for overheating of certain highly flammable liquids and liquid gases (propane, n-butane, n-pentane, isopentane) were calculated using the proposed method, and were found to be in good agreement with experimental data available in the literature.

Religious Violence and Hagiography in Late Antiquity

Sanctity is in many ways a social construct, and hence the profile of saints and the practices that qualify them as such change with the passing of time. The destruction of temples and idols as a way to signal sanctity is a good example of this. The subject came to form part of hagiography in the late fourth century, reached its peak in the Theodosian period, and fell off in the sixth century when Christianization was believed to be complete. Hagiography made iconoclasm one of the most extraordinary expressions of divine power, adding it to the saint’s repertoire of miracles and ascetic virtues. The aim of this article is to study the origins and early development of this motif, which legitimated — and subtly encouraged — the use of violence in the conversion process. It is within apologetic and polemical contexts that the episodes of the violent destruction of late antique paganism have to be assessed.

The Hasanlu (Iran) Gold Bowl in context: all that glitters…

The discovery of a crushed golden bowl in the remains of the Iron Age citadel of Hasanlu in 1958 attracted considerable media attention at the time. The circumstances of its loss have long remained unclear, but were clearly associated with the violent destruction of the site in c. 800 BC. Detailed review of the find context and the skeletons found nearby now suggests that the bowl was being looted during the sack of the citadel by Urartian soldiers from an upper room where weapons, armour and fine metal vessels were stored. The enemy soldiers carrying off the Gold Bowl died in the attempt when the upper floors of the building collapsed, plunging them to their deaths.