How can historians of small spaces and cities focus on local events and issues and at the same time carry on conversations with peers in a disciplinar... [more]
Building on recent works that question a simplistic, White narrative of the history of academic oral history, this article focuses on the labors of Bl... [more]
Winch's The Idea of a Social Science is explicitly based on a conception of philosophy. This article outlines and criticizes this conception, and then explores the relevance of this for Winch's conception of social science. Winch identifies philosophy w
We have measured a suite of diagenetic parameters for several populations of archaeological bones buried in a number of northwest European sites since the last Ice Age. These are: the structural damage due to microbes; changes in bone micro-and macro-poro
Prehistoric (Bronze Age) settlement has been little explored int he Yemen. Here, we report on new research at the small, semi-urban site of Hammat al-Qa in the Dhamar region of Yemen.
The southwestern Chinese provinces and neighbouring upland areas in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam form a geographical region with an expanding Palaeolithic record. The area was a gateway for the dispersion of populations into East Asia and Island and
This paper analyses evidence for the practice of surgery, as opposed to its theory, in the Islamic Middle East at the end of the first millennium. The inclusion in formal Arabic medical treatises of complex or invasive surgical procedures is compared with
Historians have advanced various hypotheses regarding the spread of sharecropping in late medieval Italy and early modem France. The risk-sharing hypothesis argues that, in times of labor shortages following the Black Death, landlords used share contracts
Scholars, past and present, have belittled Byzantine medicine for its perceived static and derivative nature. Applied to the medicine of the centuries immediately before and after the year 1000, these criticisms, though apparently sustainable, fail to rec
During the Second World War, medical academics hoped to reform medical practice and education in Great Britain, increasing doctors' sensitivity to the social and environmental causes of ill health and orientating them towards prevention. At the start of
The language of self and nonself has had a prominent place in immunology. This paper examines Frank Macfarlane Burnet's introduction of the language of selfhood into the science. The distinction between self and nonself was an integral part of Burnet's
In 1792 a slave-ship arrived on the French Indian Ocean island of IIe de France (Mauritius) from South India, bringing with it smallpox. As the epidemic spread, a heated debate ensued over the practice of inoculation. The isalnd was in the threes of revol
Archaeological bones of varying preservation have been treated with 0,1M acetic acid in order to investigate the effect on structural and chemical alterations caused by diagenesis. Acetic acid is commonly used as a cleaning agent for removing diagenetic c
The paper begins with the medical practitioners of late Anglo-Saxon England, who were apparently both physicians and surgeons, describing the kinds of ailments they are evidenced as treating. The majority were monastic; whether there were also lay medics
Recently several anthropological and sociological studies have interpreted technologies as cultural choices that are determined as much by local perceptions and the social context as any material constraints or purely functional criteria. Using the exampl
Tin glazes contain SnO2 particles, with a diameter similar to the wavelength of visible light, which are responsible for glaze opacification. In this paper a theoretical model to explain the optical behaviour of these glazes is developed. This model is te
In recent years, a few papers have addressed the palaeogenetic analysis of cultural, historical and archaeological artefacts. We provide an overview of the individual published articles and then describe the results we had in the framework of a palaeogene