Bullet impacts and built heritage damage 1640–1939

© 2018, The Author(s). Conflict damage to heritage has been thrust into the global spotlight during recent conflict in the Middle East. While the use of social media has heightened and enhanced public awareness of this ‘cultural terrorism’, the occurrence of this type of vandalism is not new. In fact, as this study demonstrates, evidence of the active targeting of sites, as well as collateral damage when heritage is caught in crossfire, is widely visible around Europe and further afield. Using a variety of case studies ranging from the 1640s to the 1930s, we illustrate and quantify the changing impact of ballistics on heritage buildings as weaponry and ammunition have increased in both energy and energy density potential. In the first instance, this study highlights the increasing threats to heritage in conflict areas. Second, it argues for the pressing need to quantify and map damage to the stonework in order to respond to these challenges

Ancient DNA evidence for the ecological globalization of cod fishing in medieval and post-medieval Europe

Horizon 2020(H2020)FISHARC-IF 658022Bioarchaeolog

Historical Demographic Processes Dominate Genetic Variation in Ancient Atlantic Cod Mitogenomes

Ancient DNA (aDNA) approaches have been successfully used to infer the long-term impacts of climate change, domestication, and human exploitation in a range of terrestrial species. Nonetheless, studies investigating such impacts using aDNA in marine species are rare. Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), is an economically important species that has experienced dramatic census population declines during the last century. Here, we investigated 48 ancient mitogenomes from historical specimens obtained from a range of archeological excavations in northern Europe dated up to 6,500 BCE. We compare these mitogenomes to those of 496 modern conspecifics sampled across the North Atlantic Ocean and adjacent seas. Our results confirm earlier observations of high levels of mitogenomic variation and a lack of mutation-drift equilibrium—suggestive of population expansion. Furthermore, our temporal comparison yields no evidence of measurable mitogenomic changes through time. Instead, our results indicate that mitogenomic variation in Atlantic cod reflects past demographic processes driven by major historical events (such as oscillations in sea level) and subsequent gene flow rather than contemporary fluctuations in stock abundance. Our results indicate that historical and contemporaneous anthropogenic pressures such as commercial fisheries have had little impact on mitogenomic diversity in a wide-spread marine species with high gene flow such as Atlantic cod. These observations do not contradict evidence that overfishing has had negative consequences for the abundance of Atlantic cod and the importance of genetic variation in implementing conservation strategies. Instead, these observations imply that any measures toward the demographic recovery of Atlantic cod in the eastern Atlantic, will not be constrained by recent loss of historical mitogenomic variation.</jats:p

Sexualization: A state of injury

I shall contend that avowedly feminist media and policy discussions of “sexualization” in the UK have risked inadvertently problematizing not sexism but propriety. As a result, these discourses on sexualization have contributed to what Wendy Brown has called a “state of injury”: a situation in which representations of wound or threat are mobilized within identity politics on behalf of a dominated group in society, and this strategy backfires by supporting social and state institutions in regulating and normalizing precisely this very group. Rather than challenging the sexist division of unmarried women into pure and impure, innocent children and whores, I shall show, using the Papadopoulos Review, that feminist discourses on “sexualization” have risked tacitly affirming this division, situating the sexuality and desires of young women as deviations from their true essence. Moreover, a further unintended consequence has been to provide support to a neo-liberal political agenda in the UK, which contrasts the innocence that should be the property of unsexualized girls with the self-reliance that should characterize adult citizens and can only be hindered by welfare state protections

Ideal and unsullied: purity, subjectivity and social power

There has been a good deal of empirical social scientific research that has addressed the theme of purity and has indicated its social importance. However, few theoretical resources are available to scholars that explicitly attempt to analyse purity, in addition to Mary Douglas's structural-functionalist model. This model has many insights, but is not well adapted to considering issues of subjectivity or social power in contemporary Western societies. This article will attempt to take some steps towards filling this gap. It will be claimed that, through the way they appeal to an imputed essence and origin, purity discourses are often complicit in the consecration and occlusion of relations of power and processes of subjectivation. The argument will focus in particular on the operation of purity discourses in the discursive construction and practical negotiation of female adolescence