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The article offers information on a special issue of Brontë Studies that focuses on the Brontës and material culture, inspired by the exhibition "Defying Expectations: Inside Charlotte Brontë's Wardrobe." It invites articles that explore various aspects of material culture related to the Brontës, including women as consumers, the Victorian home, archiving, representation of objects in literature, and items owned by the Brontës.

The concentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the ambient air from a massive open burning of joss paper was simultaneously measured at an open-burning site (OS) and a downwind site (DS) from 6 to 8 August 2006. A total of 16 major PAHs (particle-bound and gas-phase) concentrations were extracted by the Soxhlet analytical method and analyzed by gas chromatography. The dominant PAHs of the total mass of the organic compound at both the sampling sites were low-molecular-weight species. Further, the results showed that the start burning/end burning-dominant PAH concentration ratios at the OS and DS were 10 and 6.2, respectively. Diagnostic ratios were also used in this study to characterize and identify the PAH emission sources. The results suggest that the characterization of air pollutants emitted from open-burning joss paper lies between furnace-burning joss paper and wood combustion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Because of a long-standing bias toward examining human representation in Egyptian art, scholars have overlooked many details of how wild animals are rendered, at least until recently. Usually, the stylistic differences between animals and humans in ancient Egyptian art are emphasized to support the argument that animals and their environs encapsulate ancient Egyptian ideas of "chaos", while humans and their cultivated world encapsulate "order". A closer look at animal representations shows that the same artistic restraints were placed on both human and animal representation, such as with the use of the canon of proportions, strict register lines, and iconicity. This article examines predynastic and early dynastic material and surveys representations of desert animals from Egyptian tombs from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom to demonstrate that their artistic treatment is still rule-bound and conforms to a sense of visual order. This paper challenges some of the scholarly interpretations, which assert that dichotomous ideas of chaos and order were represented stylistically and iconographically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the images and patterns on ifa divination trays from Isale-Oyo, a quarter in Oyo town, southwestern Nigeria. It is based on data collected through interviews with divination tray owners and pictures of divination trays. The paper establishes that ifa divination trays from Isale-Oyo bear distinctive features when compared to other ifa trays in Yorubaland. In particular, divination trays from Isale-Oyo combine features found on Ijebu and Osogbo trays. The 'esu' figure continues to occupy the top central position on Oyo divination trays, while some Oyo trays carry no decorations on their borders. The paper also gives a detailed description of a divination session. Bibliogr., notes, sum. in English and Portuguese. [ASC Leiden abstract] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a detailed description of R. Hayyim Soloveitchik's commentary on the Talmudic discussions about the requirement for proper intention when making Jewish ritual objects, i.e., Sefer Torah, Mezuzah, etc., and a comparison to the academic commentary on that issue. It describes the relationship between the two genres of commentary, academic and rabbinic, and illustrates the differences and similarities between the commentaries of these two parallel interpretive communities. In this way, the paper sheds new light on the character of R. Hayyim as a Talmudic commentator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to investigate the white cloth in the contemporary urban Bulgarian wedding in anthropological perspective. The white cloth as a ritual item in the contemporary urban wedding ceremony is a simple white rectangular fabric, usually made of cotton, which looks like a path on which the newlyweds have to walk during the wedding celebration. Immediately after entering the restaurant in which the wedding party is held, they step on the cloth. At this point a number of symbolic actions are performed, involving ritual items and characters. Based on profound fieldwork materials gathered by the author, the paper discusses the fertility function of the cloth and its protective qualities regarding the methods of the functioning of the cloth as a ritual object in the sphere of symbolic thinking today. In this paper, this ritual object is interpreted also in a social context, in the sphere of ritual practises in contemporary and traditional weddings, as an item by means of which people consciously or unconsciously fix a boundary between the public and private spheres of their existence; on the other hand, it is analysed as an object that metaphorically expresses kinship links. The author argues that, as a result of the changed socio-cultural characteristics of the Bulgarian society today, the tradition of close kin relations, which is expressed through objects, gradually loses significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the changing symbolic potential of items in the Bulgarian contemporary urban wedding. Based on my fieldwork material regarding the wedding cake and other items, I investigate cultural change in modern Bulgarian society not only as a result of the one-way process of transference, adaptation and incorporation of mass produced commodities into Bulgarian culture but also as a process of cultural change and variation. In that sense, I investigate the alternation between global and local perspectives of the forms of material culture in which certain levels of meaning, inherent to objects, play a crucial role, as for example the social communication factor, kinship ties, cross-generational continuity, local ritual and symbolic systems, local food culture, and even the personal fate and private life of an object's owner. In this article I focus mainly on the wedding cake as a specific ritual item, functioning in the contemporary urban Bulgarian wedding, transmitted during the last decades from West European culture into the Bulgarian wedding tradition, and analyse the specific dialogue between 'global' items and local culture. furthermore, taking as my example the wedding cake and other ritual objects (the wedding chicken, the wedding bread, and the sponsor's stick) I question the concept of the globalisation, homogenisation and unification of forms of material culture in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Burials of pre-Christian Scandinavia in the Viking Age can be broadly divided into a number of basic categories, yet within these the range of individual expression in mortuary behaviour is immense. This paper proposes a model to explain such variation, focusing on the evident deliberation shown in the precise selection and placement of objects, and in the treatment of animals (and sometimes humans) killed as part of the funeral process. It is suggested that Viking-Age burials may have involved complex elements of mortuary theatre, ritual narratives literally enacted at the graveside, providing a poetic passage for the individual dead into a world of ancestral stories. A number of archaeological and literary case studies are discussed, including ship burials, emphasising the central importance of tales in the Norse world-view. The question is posed as to whether the material narratives of funerary rites could form one of the creative strands behind what we know today as Norse mythology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pichvnari necropolis on the Black Sea coast of Georgia lies in an area known in the late first millennium as ‘Colchis’, on part of the trade route leading to the Orient. The burials of the necropolis date to the late fifth centurybc and frequently contain grave goods, including extremely well-preserved polychrome glass beads and core-formed vessels. This paper presents a study of these vessels both stylistically and archaeologically and using SEM–WDS and LA–ICPMS. It reveals that the vessels have compositional differences that may point to multiple manufacturing sites. One of the vessels appears stylistically unique and may exhibit one of the earliest uses of manganese as a decolorizer. Major and minor element data for the vessels suggest that they may belong to the same ‘Levantine’ group as many Roman glass objects, suggesting that a source of sand on the coast of the Levant could have been used in their production. The beads clearly show glass with both natron- and plant ash-based flux with distinct rare earth compositions, showing multiple sites of production, some of which were probably either in the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material culture studies have begun to take new directions within the field of historical archaeology. Shoe buckles are the most familiar and readily identifiable type of buckle to archaeologists, but there are many other buckles worn as part of a person’s dress that may be identified on archaeological sites. Knee, garter, girdle, hat, stock, and spur buckles are regularly recovered. These buckles can be used as an aid to dating archaeological strata and features, and can be employed to understand the kinds of clothing worn by site inhabitants. This paper presents and interprets an assemblage of buckles of assorted types recovered from seven 18th-century domestic sites in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent excavations in the Iron Age necropolis of Tyre (al-Bass district) allow a substantial reconstruction of the Phoenician ritual of cremation burial. Among the faunal remains from Tyre al-Bass Tomb 8 are two talons from a species of owl. The talons had been charred and perhaps boiled before placement with the grave goods. This paper examines ancient Near Eastern and biblical cultural interpretations of the owl and suggests a range of possible explanations for the presence of owl remains in this Phoenician burial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an argument for the agency of objects, looking at the effects objects have on people. Groups of related objects, such as pots or metal ornaments, create stylistic universes which affect producers and users of new objects, bound by the canons of style. For an object to be socially powerful in a recognized manner, the form of the object lays down certain rules of use which influence the sensory and emotional impacts of the object. Formal properties of artifacts are influenced by the genealogy of the object class, including historical continuities and changes, and also its perceived source. The forms of objects, the historical trajectories of the class of objects and their perceived sources combine to have social effects on people, shaping people as socially effective entities. Britain’s incorporation into the Roman Empire between 150 BC and AD 200 provides an excellent case study through which to look at the changing corpora of objects, which had continuities and changes in form, a set of subtle attributions of sources and a complex range of social effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even more than other recent archaeological finds from East Asia, ancient Chinese manuscripts have ignited strong academic excitement. While much attention is focused on the philosophical interpretation of these texts, we are only beginning to explore their social circumstances and modes of production, to relate them to other tomb artifacts alongside which they were buried, and to explain their very physical appearance. According to a not uncommon view, texts with a reception history—e.g., the classics, but also a broad range of recently discovered technical writings that were handed down across generations—represent lineages of writings, with each manuscript being a copy of an earlier one. Yet on closer examination, graphic idiosyncrasies suggest the mutual independence of various written versions of the same text and thus a local, individual mode of textual production where scribes enjoyed considerable freedom in choosing particular characters to write the intended words. In their written form, texts with a transmission history—among them works of canonical status—do thus not seem fundamentally different from occasional writings without such a history. Compared to administrative writings, for which certain written blueprints existed, they were indeed less, not more, defined in their graphic form. This is not surprising if we consider that texts to be transmitted were also texts to be committed to memory; their modes of storage and communication of knowledge did not entirely depend on the writing system. One necessary step towards the discussion of such manuscripts, and ultimately to their function and nature, is the systematic linguistic analysis of their textual variants. The present paper outlines the methodological preliminaries towards such an analysis and suggests which scenarios of early Chinese manuscript production are plausible according to our present evidence, and which others are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to review early modern food processing and preparation, and the material culture of such operations, as constitutive of the practical, spatial and relational household in early modern England. The spatial and material construction of the kitchen between around 1650 and 1750 operated as a locus for quotidian but nevertheless informative interaction between potential and actual consumers, and objects of consumption. Kitchen goods encompassed fluid notions of necessity and novelty, offering households an interface with innovative technologies on a domestic scale. The combination of accumulated and introduced goods, which kitchen assemblages comprised, connected utensils to multiple conceptions of value-functional, moral, familial and sexual. Their representation and location have consequences for the re-evaluation of economy contemporarily and historiographically understood, and for readings of consumer practices as a conduit for securing not change, but domestic continuities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the incidence of deviant messages and images in one of the most widely used modes of interpersonal communication, i.e., birthday cards. The sample consists of 535 birthday cards randomly selected from fourteen retail outlets in a metropolitan (SMSA) area. Each outlet represented a geographically distinct high-traffic area varying in type of establishment (discount, drug, dime, department, grocery and card stores) and socioeconomic level of the community. Both the incidence and type of deviance, the characteristics of cards in which deviance is represented, and the characteristics of the sender/receiver population are discussed within the context of Goffman's concept of ceremonial activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceremonial architecture of late precontact (A.D. 600-1500) societies of Puerto Rico consists of stone-lined plazas and ball courts (bateys). Archaeologists use these structures to signify the onset of hierarchical "chiefly" polities and to interpret their regional organization. Problematically, little consideration is given to the costs of their physical construction and the associated organizational implications at local and regional scales. In this paper, we use data gathered through geoarchaeological field investigations to develop labor estimates for the plaza and bateys at the site of Tibes--one of the largest pre-columbian ceremonial centers in Puerto Rico. The estimates provide a basis for addressing how these features were constructed at the site and are considered within the broader organizational contexts of incipient polities in the island's south-centred region between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1200. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two caches of balancing rock features were recently uncovered during archaeological excavations at the Tule Creek site (CA-SNI-25) on San Nicolas Island, California. The features consist of groups of stacked rocks in association with cut red abalone (Haliotis rufescens) shell, ochre, and asphaltum. Feature 1 is made up of a serpentinite disc base and a basalt mid-section overlain by an inverted sandstone bowl. Feature 2 consists of a phallic sandstone pestle capped by a pecked pyramidal granitic top. Radiocarbon dates on associated marine shell suggest the cairns were buried during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A. D., before the arrival of European immigrants into the region [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Hogeye Clovis cache is comprised of 52 late-stage bifaces, finished points, and knife/cores cached in central Texas. Because these artifacts were all likely made and cached approximately 13,000 years ago by one or a handful of knappers belonging to a single band with a shared Clovis cultural template, Hogeye provides a rare opportunity to investigate Clovis lithic reduction signatures. This paper builds on previous analyses and presents new methods for quantifying Clovis biface production signatures, including serial flaking and the timing of last overshot flaking. The results show that the Hogeye cache bifaces technologically and morphologically differ from other regional Clovis biface reduction signatures. Additional data is needed to determine whether these differences reflect individual knapping preferences or regional cultural signatures. The methods used and developed here are not Clovis-specific and could be modified and combined with other analytical techniques to identify reduction signatures in biface assemblages from other times and places. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper deals with the general problem of the Formative Period and presents a proposal for subdivision based upon characterizations of material cultures and their distributions as interaction spheres and traditions. These reflect significant changes that may be related to changes in the mechanisms of language dispersal. It hypothesizes that a pre-protomochica was spoken in northern Perú; that multilingualism prevailed at the site of Chavín site; and that different languages existed in the north-central, central and south-central highlands, perhaps dominated by a pre-protoquechua. In other areas possible links between Formative Period styles and linguistics remain unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates that gender imbalance can explain certain problematic artifact assemblages. Typical warfare refugee populations include more women than men because more men than women are killed in conflicts. This paper proposes that predominantly female warfare refugees altered the material culture of the Grasshopper region of Arizona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This thesis is supported by the temporal congruity of multiple lines of evidence, including evidence outside of the region for the violent deaths of more men than women and evidence within the region for female-dominated burials, immigration, and gendered continuities and discontinuities in material culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lithuanian Historical Studies is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The high altitude peaks of the Andes were sacred to the Inca. High altitude sanctuaries were strung out along the Andes chain, with cerro El Plomo at the southernmost end of Inca territory, near present day Santiago, Chile. There, the frozen body of an Inca boy with numerous grave goods was discovered and purchased by the National Museum of Natural History, Santiago. In this paper we present the studies carried out in 1954, 1982 and 2003 by a multidisciplinary team aimed at examining the body, with particular reference to its conservation as well as the preservation of the clothing and grave goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The material culture of the Roman empire is characterized by a contrast between uniformity in certain artefacts and diversity in others, often expressed in the style of the artefacts or the context of their use. In the past, with 'Romanization' acting as the main theoretical framework, attention has focused on the observed similarities in Roman material culture. Much less work has been done on the ways in which material culture and social practice varied across the empire and on the possible reasons for this process. This paper sets out to explore regionality in Roman Britain, using nail-cleaners, small objects associated with grooming and self-representation as a case-study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of a long-standing bias toward examining human representation in Egyptian art, scholars have overlooked many details of how wild animals are rendered, at least until recently. Usually, the stylistic differences between animals and humans in ancient Egyptian art are emphasized to support the argument that animals and their environs encapsulate ancient Egyptian ideas of “chaos”, while humans and their cultivated world encapsulate “order”. A closer look at animal representations shows that the same artistic restraints were placed on both human and animal representation, such as with the use of the canon of proportions, strict register lines, and iconicity. This article examines predynastic and early dynastic material and surveys representations of desert animals from Egyptian tombs from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom to demonstrate that their artistic treatment is still rule-bound and conforms to a sense of visual order. This paper challenges some of the scholarly interpretations, which assert that dichotomous ideas of chaos and order were represented stylistically and iconographically.

Copyright of Revue d'études Autochtones is the property of Recherches Amerindiennes au Quebec and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents several abstracts including "The Role of Abraham in Targum Isaiah," by Alberdina Houtman, "Two New Incantation Bowls From Rome (Italy)," by Marco Moriggi, "The Relationship of the Peshitta Text of Seconf Samuel With the Peshitta Text of First Chronicles," by Craig Morrison, "Etymological Notes on North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic," by Hezy Mutzafi and "The Syro-Hexaplaric Headings of the Psalms in Manuscript 12t3," by Harry F. van Rooy.

Creation of deathscapes is integral to human place-making and the construction of our past, present, and future. As people practice mortuary rituals and related behaviours, space and time are conflated as they engage with spatial, temporal, and ideological aspects of the landscape, existing deathscapes, and ritual objects. Migration episodes offer an important spatio-temporal context for examining the construction of deathscape, and at the same time, insight into the new deathscape practices can help inform the migration event itself. Through the use of a case study with a well-documented migration event and mortuary program data from the North American midcontinent, we examine the intersections of time and space in the construction of deathscape among the post-migration Oneota tradition (ca. AD 1300–1400). In a contentious landscape dominated by Mississippian peoples, the newcomers created ties to their new location by actively creating and practising new traditions while maintaining important links to their own history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the discovery of a magic plate in a cemetery in the town of Yeruham in Negev, Israel. Topics discussed include the use of incantation plates by writing healers as a form of healing and protection, the rashomon surrounding the magic plate, and the Jewish adaptation of the practice of writing incantation plates. Also discussed are the history of use of magic bowls and plates in the Muslim world and rabbi Nissim Avisrur's image as a traditional healer in Yeruham.

Recently, Chinese newspapers have captured the attention of their readers with stories of criminals pillaging graves and murdering people to obtain corpses to sell for use in "ghost marriages" (yinhun, 阴婚). One sensationalistic report even claims that "150,000 yuan (US$22,000) won't even get you bones". When the state casts yinhun as a "culturally backward" superstition incongruent with national visions of modernity, how are we to understand the resurgence of this practice? By tracing the history of ghost marriages, we argue that yinhun corpses are simultaneously dead and alive. Adapting Gell's theory of the agency of art, we maintain that yinhun corpses may be traded as lifeless commodities, but they also possess powerful living agency that critically undergirds the social efficacy of the ghost-marriage ritual. Indeed, these cadavers perform a sort of macabre affective labour that soothes the anxieties of the living. As such, this article deepens our understanding of what we mean by "commodity". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]