• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• 2021-2021close
• Open Access close
• GB close
• CN close

The chapter presents the outcomes from a project funded by Historic England to collate and analyse scientific dates for field systems in England. The project identified 393 scientific dates from more than 120 excavated field systems. The analysis provides a constructive critique of fieldscape chronologies and recommends methodological improvements and directions for future research. The results indicate that bounded fields appeared in the English landscape during the first quarter of the second millennium BC, and that subsequent enclosure was an ongoing, geographically discontinuous process. The active apportionment of land and maintenance of field systems was possibly interrupted during c. 1000–600 BC, as a hiatus was observed in the project’s data. Post-Roman and medieval field systems are rarely targeted for scientific dating, with the consequence that the continuity of field systems from the Roman period into later landscapes remains ill-defined. There are major biases in the current dataset of scientific dates. The project has illustrated the requirement for standardised reporting of scientific dates in grey literature reports, publications, and data archives. Geographical biases within the data occur due to regional concentrations in the application of development-led archaeology, and the impacts of regional priorities and research agendas. Future legislative protection, research frameworks and fieldwork strategies should prioritise understanding the long chronologies of field systems and rebalance our current attention towards periodised perspectives.

The thesis is conceived as a contribution to the quantification of the monetary expansion that occurred in Britain c.1150-c.1200. The increased money supply facilitated developments in commerce and was connected with increasing population and urbanisation. Changes in the monetary system and the source of bullion are examined. This thesis draws upon a range of previously unpublished numismatic material that is collated and catalogued for the first time,and which is subjected to analytical techniques. It is known that monetary expansion occurrence large scale in the thirteenth century and iris here suggested that the increase began on comparatively modest scale in England during the Cross and Cross lets coinage (1158-1180) and in Scotland during the Crescents coinage (c.1170-1195). The English coinage is considered through primary evidence of a die-study of the Northampton mint and the content of the Gayton hoard (1998-9) in conjunction and comparison with other published information. The Scottish coinage is subjected to comprehensive investigation by die-study to provide the first analysis of the structure and internal chronology of the coinage, which is prerequisite to understanding the extent of the monetary expansion. The thesis provides the first investigation of the alloy of late twelfth-century coins using Electron Probe Microanalysis (ELMA). The data demonstrates that alloy content varied by region and that the contribution of bullion from the ‘mine of Carlisle’ had only a peripheral influence on monetary expansion. EPMA data is compared with evidence from the Dialogus de Scaccario. Metallurgical analysis indicates that monetary expansion occurred in Scotland in the late twelfth century when coinage, functioning as a standardised means of exchange,became more useful than wealth stored in stocks of bullion; it was not specifically caused by a local argentiferous discovery. Trace elements in the alloy of Scottish coins indicate that some bullion utilised for coinage had been in Scotland since the Viking Age, and had originated from Samanid Central Asia.

AbstractResearch summaryWe apply insights from research in social psychology and labor economics to the domain of entrepreneurial finance and investigate how founder chief executive officers' (founder CEOs') facial attractiveness influences firm valuation. Leveraging the novel context of initial coin offerings (ICOs), we document a pronounced founder CEO beauty premium, with a positive relationship between founder CEO attractiveness and firm valuation. We find only very limited evidence of stereotype‐based evaluations, through the association of founder CEO attractiveness with latent traits such as competence, intelligence, likeability, or trustworthiness. Rather, attractiveness seems to bear economic value per se, especially in a context in which investors base their decisions on a limited information set. Indeed, attractiveness has a sustainable effect on post‐ICO performance.Managerial summaryICOs allow ventures to collect funding from investors using blockchain technology. We leverage this novel funding context, in which information on the ventures and their future prospects is scarce, to empirically investigate whether the founder CEOs' physical attractiveness is associated with increased funding (i.e., amount raised) and post‐funding performance (i.e., buy‐and‐hold returns). We find that ventures with more attractive founder CEOs outperform ventures with less attractive CEOs in both dimensions. For ICO investors, this suggests that ICOs of firms with more attractive founder CEOs are more appealing investment targets. Our findings are also interesting for startups seeking external finance in uncertain contexts, such as ICOs. If startups can appoint attractive leaders, they may have better access to growth capital.

In an earlier study, Lawson’s fragile rural church hypothesis was tested among participants in the Coronavirus, Church & You Survey conducted during the first lockdown from May 2020. The data demonstrated that a third of rural clergy and nearly a quarter of rural laity endorsed the thesis, a higher proportion than in non-rural areas. New data from the Covid-19 & Church-21 Survey conducted during the third lockdown from January 2021 demonstrate that both rural clergy and rural laity have grown more pessimistic regarding the future of the rural church. The proportion of rural clergy who consider that as a consequence of the pandemic key lay people will step down and be difficult to replace has increased from 29% to 49%. Among rural laity, the proportion has increased from 22% to 32%.\ud \ud

Prisoner reported drug and contraband searches in adult men’s prisons in England and Wales represented almost a quarter of reported and recorded ‘sexual assaults’ from 2004 to 2014. These searches are more likely to involve multiple perpetrators and weapon use than other types of sexual assaults and are most frequently carried out in the relative privacy of a cell. The research presented here is based on an analysis of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (formerly the National Offender Management Service) Incident Recording System data, providing insights into the proportion of recorded sexual assaults which are related to drug searches. This analysis enables a distinction to be made between prisoner-on-prisoner drug and contraband searches and other sexual assaults. Analysis shows that prisoner-on-prisoner searches are frequent, often pre-meditated, brutal and appear to be an accepted aspect of everyday prison life.

AbstractFood is often one of the most distinctive expressions of social, religious, cultural or ethnic groups. However, the archaeological identification of specific religious dietary practices, including the Jewish tradition of keeping kosher, associated with ritual food practices and taboos, is very rare. This is arguably one of the oldest known diets across the world and, for an observant Jew, maintaining dietary laws (known as Kashruth) is a fundamental part of everyday life. Recent excavations in the early medieval Oxford Jewish quarter yielded a remarkable assemblage of animal bones, marked by a complete absence of pig specimens and a dominance of kosher (permitted) birds, domestic fowl and goose. To our knowledge, this is the first identification of a Jewish dietary signature in British zooarchaeology, which contrasted markedly with the previous Saxon phase where pig bones were present in quantity and bird bones were barely seen. Lipid residue analysis of pottery from St Aldates showed that vessels from the possible Jewish houses were solely used to process ruminant carcass products, with an avoidance of pig product processing, correlating well with the faunal data. In contrast, lipid analysis of pottery from comparative assemblages from the previous Saxon phase at the site and a contemporaneous site in the city, The Queen’s College, shows that the majority of these vessels appear to have been used to process mixtures of both ruminant and non-ruminant (pig) products. Here, the combination of organic residue analysis, site excavation and animal and fish bone evidence was consistent with the presence of Jewish houses in eleventh- and twelfth-century St Aldates, Oxford, hitherto only suspected through documentary information. This is the first identification of specific religious dietary practices using lipid residue analysis, verifying that, at least 800 years ago, medieval Jewish Oxford communities practised dietary laws known as Kashruth.

The case of Félida X and her ‘doubled personality’ served in the last quarter of the 19th century as a proving ground for a distinctively French form of psychology that bore the stamp of physiology, including the comparative term normal state. Debates around Félida’s case provided the occasion for reflection about how that term and its opposites could take their places in the emerging discursive field of psychopathology. This article centres its analysis on Eugène Azam’s 1876–77 study of Félida, and the ways his framing of the case was adopted or critiqued by subsequent researchers. Azam initially deployed the label normal state in a routine manner, in contrast to his use of condition seconde to designate Félida’s other state; this pairing served, I argue, to anchor the scientific legitimacy of Félida’s extraordinary psychological manifestations. Unpacking the conceptual associations of Azam’s use of normal state, we find it marked as qualitatively distinct, temporally fixed, and most of all individualized; this without becoming normative. It was only through responses to and criticism of Azam’s study that there emerged a more generalized sense of normality against which pathological (hysteric) subjects’ comportment could be contrasted. Félida’s case itself constitutes a highly individualized reconfiguration of the concept of a normal state, while the subsequent framing of doubled mental states provides a valuable vantage point from which to consider the articulations between the language of emerging French psychology and its evolving subjects of enquiry.

AbstractThis paper surveys of the chemical composition of the copper alloy coinage in China from the Qin Dynasty to the end of the Yuan Dynasty (221 BCE–1368 CE). It shows a dramatic change in the alloying practice used to cast these coins from the Qin unification (after 221 BCE), compared to that practiced in the pre-Qin. There are a number of shifts in the quality of the coinage from dynasty to dynasty, such as the obvious debasement of the Southern Song coinage (1127–1279 CE) when compared to that of the previous Northern Song dynasty (960–1127 CE). Particular attention is paid to the low levels of zinc in the coinage over the period. Although not as obvious as the switch to brass coinage in the Ming, certain periods do show occasional values of zinc up to 2–4%, which we suggest could reflect the sporadic input of recycled brass (Cu–Zn alloy) into the raw material melt. There were several major suppressions of Buddhism during this period, when Buddhist brass statuary was recycled into the coinage, providing a plausible mechanism for the injection of small quantities of zinc into the coinage alloy. A diachronic study of the amounts of iron in the metal, taken to indicate changes to the manufacturing process of copper, also show changes over time. The median levels of iron jump from the Qin (221–206 BCE) to the Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE), possibly reflecting the adoption of slagging processes in the production of the copper, followed by a gradual decline to the Northern Song (960–1127 CE), and a rapid increase during the Southern Song (1127–1279 CE). Finally, a study of changes in the content of silver over time reveals differences in the sources of lead, or changes in lead and silver extraction technologies, over the period.