An incident at Kilang: a further note on the death of lieutenant G.F. Phillips

In a recent article dealing with the Tangale Peak or Kilang, as it is called in the local Tangale language, Herrmann JUNGRAITHMAYR presents an account narrated by a Tangale elder about the attempted ascent of that characteristic mountain by a British colonial officer and his subsequent death.1 Kilang mountain is a basaltic cone approximately 1300 m high, about 8 km southwest of Kaltungo, one of the principal settlements of the Tangale people, in southern Bauchi State, northeastern Nigeria. During a research stay at the National Archives in Kaduna in November 1993 I was able to consult a file containing various documents relating to this incident in detail.2 In the following note I present an outline of the events based on the evidence in the colonial records. By doing this I not only intend to shed more light on a tragic event from the very early years of the colonial era. The picture of the circumstances emerging from the investigations of the colonial authorities may serve as a background to the narrative by the Tangale elder presented in JUNGRAITHMAYR's publication

The Cosmic Star-Formation History: The UV finds most

This is a summary of arguments in favor of observing high-redshift star formation in the UV as presented at the Ringberg meeting in September 2000. The most rapidly star-forming galaxies are very dusty, easier to detect at 850um than in the UV, but less rapidly star-forming galaxies are less obscured by dust and as a result the comparatively faint galaxies that hosted most high-redshift star formation are easiest to detect in the UV. The correlation of star-formation rate and dust obscuration implies that extremely luminous dusty galaxies are usually as bright in the UV as the less luminous dust-free galaxies, and that any UV survey at a given redshift 0<z<~3 deep enough to detect the majority of the UV luminosity density will detect the majority of IR-selected galaxies as well. Little star formation occurs in galaxies that are completely hidden from UV surveys. I review recent attempts to estimate star-formation rates for high-redshift galaxies from UV data alone. The strength of UV surveys is that they detect large numbers of high-redshift galaxies, even ones that are intrinsically very faint, in large and representative comoving volumes. The weakness is that star-formation rates are difficult to estimate for the detected galaxies. IR surveys complement them perfectly: star-formation rates can be estimated with reasonable confidence, but only small regions of the sky can be surveyed and only the most luminous sources can be detected. Multiwavelength cooperation, not conflict, will lead to future progress in this field.Comment: To be published in "Starburst Galaxies Near and Far", eds. D. Lutz and L. Tacconi, Springe

Natural environment and settlement in Chonge District, Eastern Muri Mountains, Northeastern Nigeria : an interdisciplinary case study

The craggy and hilly Muri Mountains, which are situated to the north of the Benue Lowlands, are an area with a complex pattern of settlement. This roughly 80 km long and 20 km wide mountainous area is inhabited by about 20 ethnic groups belonging to different language families. The present ethnic and linguistic situation is understood as the result of a complex series of migrations and adaptations to the natural environment. This paper will describe actual movements of settlements and consider certain conditions which may have been relevant in the decision to leave a settlement or choose a new one. The most important conditions will be the accessibility of arable land and/or pasture, accessibility of water, and conditions dependent on the historical and political context such as affording of security and possibility of defence. Therefore an interdisciplinary approach seems to be appropriate to evaluate the natural conditions for settlement and cultivation of the various places from a geographer´s point of view, to interrogate into the historical aspects and motifs of the settlement patterns and migrations with a thorough ethnological background, as well as to gain additional information from a linguistic analysis of toponymes and contact phenomena of the languages spoken in the area

Calibrating Galaxy Redshifts Using Absorption by the Surrounding Intergalactic Medium

Rest-frame UV spectral lines of star-forming galaxies are systematically offset from the galaxies' systemic redshifts, probably because of large-scale outflows. We calibrate galaxy redshifts measured from rest-frame UV lines by utilizing the fact that the mean HI Ly-alpha absorption profiles around the galaxies, as seen in spectra of background objects, must be symmetric with respect to the true galaxy redshifts if the galaxies are oriented randomly with respect to the lines of sight to the background objects. We use 15 QSOs at z~2.5-3 and more than 600 foreground galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts at z~1.9-2.5. All galaxies are within 2 Mpc proper from the lines of sight to the background QSOs. We find that LyA emission and ISM absorption redshifts require systematic shifts of v_LyA=-295(+35)(-35) km/s and v_ISM=145(+70)(-35) km/s. Assuming a Gaussian distribution, we put 1-sigma upper limits on possible random redshift offsets of <220 km/s for LyA and <420 km/s for ISM redshifts. For the small subset (<10%) of galaxies for which near-IR spectra have been obtained, we can compare our results to direct measurements based on nebular emission lines which we confirm to mark the systemic redshifts. While our v_ISM agrees with the direct measurements, our v_LyA is significantly smaller. However, when we apply our method to the near-IR subsample which is characterized by slightly different selection effects, the best-fit velocity offset comes into agreement with the direct measurement. This confirms the validity of our approach, and implies that no single number appropriately describes the whole population of galaxies, in line with the observation that the line offset depends on galaxy spectral morphology. This method provides accurate redshift calibrations and will enable studies of circumgalactic matter around galaxies for which rest-frame optical observations are not available.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA