Burials of martial character in the British Iron Age

The significance of the decision to bury an individual with martial objects during the British Iron Age cannot be overstated. It is a rare subset of funerary practice, conferred upon select individuals. This article examines martial burials, firstly summarising past research, then presenting an overview of martial object classes, and their treatments in funerary practice. There is a particular focus on the Arras Culture of East Yorkshire, which dominates the data due to the highly unusual, almost unique, ritual in which spears appear to have been thrown at the corpse as part of the funeral. The analysis presented here highlights the importance of non-offensive martial objects, and demonstrates that there is much greater diversity in Iron Age martial burial practice than previously recognised

In search of the spear people : spearheads in context in Iron Age eastern Yorkshire and beyond

Spearheads have long been an understudied class of object for the Iron Age, and for the British Iron Age in particular. No satisfactory typology has yet been published and this thesis addresses that lacuna through the creation of a new typology of spearheads for Iron Age Britain. The typology is a significant step-forward in the study of Iron Age weaponry, and forms a useful tool which facilitates not only the study of martial practices but also contextual studies of this important class of object. The typology has been designed with the end-user in mind and offers guidelines for practical application. The data collection conducted for this thesis forms the largest dataset of Iron Age spearheads for Britain which has been conducted to date. This data is made freely available as an online resource to facilitate future research. To this end, the typology has been designed as an open system which can accommodate the addition of new types, should they come to be identified.Spearheads did not exist in a cultural vacuum and this work applies the typology in a number of contextual analyses. The Arras Culture of Iron Age East Yorkshire featured an unparalleled burial rite involving spears, known as the ‘speared corpse’ ritual. This practice serves as and entre-point for an examination of Iron Age spearheads in Britain, placing them in their broader martial, social and cosmological contexts. The contextual analyses explore the archaeological contexts from which spearheads have been recovered, examining the types of spear selected for inclusion in structured deposition and martial burials inter-regionally and through time. Consideration is given to the decision-making processes underlying the inclusion of spearheads in votive deposits as well as the specific placement of martial objects in Iron Age burials. The thesis also examines the role which spearheads and other martial objects played in the construction of martial identities in the British Iron Age. The research undertaken represents the most detailed study of Iron Age spearheads conducted for Britain to date, and demonstrates the importance of the spear within the cultures and cosmologies of the Iron Age peoples of Britain

A typological assessment of Iron Age weapons in South Italy

Typologies, especially of spearheads, have been decried as inadequate by the archaeological community. They have prevented the synthetic study of ancient weapons and obscured cultural contacts, changes in form and distribution, and changes in fighting style. This thesis presents new typologies of spearheads and swords which are not based on aesthetics or the need to communicate a large amount of material succinctly in the limited space of a site report. Rather, these typologies attempt to perceive the functional characteristics of these weapon classes. The thesis surveys a range of sites in Daunia, Basilicata and Southern Campania applying these new typologies to large suites of weapons. From this assessment a number of conclusions have flowed regarding cultural contacts between indigenous Southern Italic groups and with immigrating groups of Villanovan and Greek origin. The assessment reveals the variety of weapon forms in use and tracks changes over time. These changes expose cultural transformations and alterations in fighting styles. The tracking of paraphernalia often associated with weapons in modern scholarship has also revealed some nuances in patterns of association with weapons which were not previously apparent

A century of Armistice Day: memorialisation in the wake of the First World War

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In the wake of the First World War a set of commemorative traditions were invented that were met with a huge public response and were repeated in every subsequent November. These apparently unchanging traditions were reported in the media each year in ways that reflected the, then, present circumstances. This article explores the ideas of continuity and relevance as a means to chart the changing nature of public debate about the commemoration of war in Britain. It will consider three broad periods: inter-war, the Second World War and post-war decades, and the 1980s to the centenary years. It will argue that the commemorations were fiercely relevant in the inter-war period, but in the wake of the Second World War the commemorations spoke far less directly to the experiences and emotional legacy of that later war. Attendance and newspaper reporting of the event diminished significantly in this period. However, from the 1980s and particularly the late 1990s renewed interest and relevance became apparent. The sustained period of warfare from 2001 onwards added further to this

The seasonal and spatial variability of small-scale turbulence at the Iberian margin

Turbulence measurements were made off the northwest coast of Spain in January and August 1998. In winter the water column was vertically mixed to about 100 to 150 m, due to the combined effects of the vertical convection of warm northward-moving water and wind stress. A highly dissipative surface boundary layer was present at all times to a depth (of about 20 m) that correlated well with the local wind and wave amplitude. Below this layer dissipation levels decreased from about 10-7 m2 s-3 at a rate that was commensurate with 'law of the wall' boundary theory. Near the coast local brackish surface stratification served to depress mixing below the pycnocline. In summer, when the water column was thermally stratified, average dissipation levels were typically an order of magnitude smaller than in winter, even though the wind stress in the ocean was of similar magnitude. Bursts of enhanced mixing were occasionally observed in an internal wave field on the shelf. Dissipation levels were higher on the northern side of an upwelling filament (up to 10-7 m2 s-3) than in other parts of the ocean. Although eddy viscosity levels on the shelf and in the ocean were almost identical (about 8 cm2 s-1), eddy diffusion on the shelf (0.37 cm2 s-1) was about three times larger than in the ocean. This may indicate a higher frequency of mixing events on the shelf. The summer data were used to determine a mixing length (of about 0.3 ± 0.05 m) using an algorithm that mimicked the way that turbulence closure models compute dissipation from vertical shear and buoyancy over grid scales of several meters. The correlation between dissipation and the gradient Richardson number was poor and it is suggested that at the scales of the observations, and of some models, buoyancy is just as likely to act as a source of mixing as it is to act as a sink

Subglacial-discharge plumes drive widespread subsurface warming in northwest Greenland’s fjords

This work was supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (Grants NE/W00531X/1 and NE/T011920/1).Greenland’s glacial fjords modulate the exchange between the ice sheet and ocean. Subglacial-discharge-driven plumes adjacent to glaciers may exert an important influence on fjord water properties, submarine glacier melting and the export of glacially-modified waters to the shelf. Here we use a numerical plume model in conjunction with observations from proximal to 14 glaciers in northwest Greenland to assess the impact of these plumes on near-glacier water properties. We find that in late summer, waters emanating from glacial plumes often make up > 50 % of the fjord water composition at intermediate depths. These plume waters are comprised largely of upwelled Atlantic Water, warming the near-glacier water profile and likely increasing submarine melting. Our findings demonstrate the key role played by plumes in driving water modification in Greenland’s fjords, and the potential for simple models to capture these impacts across a range of settings.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Vertical heat flux and lateral mass transport in nonlinear internal waves

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 37 (2010): L08601, doi:10.1029/2010GL042715.Comprehensive observations of velocity, density, and turbulent dissipation permit quantification of the nonlinear internal wave (NLIW) contribution to vertical heat flux and lateral mass transport over New Jersey's shelf. The effect of NLIWs on the shelf heat budget was significant. On average, heat flux in NLIWs was 10 times larger than background at the pycnocline depth. NLIWs were present at midshelf <10% of the time, yet we estimate that they contributed roughly one−half the heat flux across the pycnocline during the observation period, which was characterized by weak to moderate winds. Lateral transport distances due to the leading 3 waves in NLIW packets were typically inline equation(100 m) but ranged several kilometers. The month-averaged daily onshore transport (per unit alongshelf dimension) by NLIWs is estimated as 0.3 m2s−1. This is comparable to a weak downwelling wind, but sustained over an entire month.This work was funded by the Office of Naval Research