Sites, sacredness, and stories: Interactions of archaeology and contemporary Paganism

Folklore has, until very recently, been at the fringes of archaeological research. Post-processual archaeology has promoted plurality in interpretation, however, and archaeology more widely is required to make itself relevant to contemporary society; so, contemporary folkloric practices vis-à-vis archaeological remains are once again receiving attention. In this paper we examine contemporary Pagan understandings of and engagements with ‘sacred sites’ in England. Specifically, we explore how Pagan meanings are inscribed and constituted, how they draw on 'traditional' understandings of sites and landscapes, and instances in which they challenge or reify the 'preservation ethic' of heritage management. From active interactions with sites, such as votive offerings and instances of fire and graffiti damage, to unconventional (contrasted with academic) interpretations of sites involving wights and spirit beings, Neolithic shamans, or goddesses, there are diverse areas of contest. We argue archaeology must not reject Pagan and other folklores as 'fringe', but, in an era of community archaeology, transparency and collaboration, respond to them, preferably dialogically.</p

Sacred, secular, or sacrilegious? prehistoric sites, pagans and the Sacred Sites project in Britain

This paper explores issues and tensions developing within today's Britain around prehistoric 'sacred sites' and their appropriation by a wide range of interested or concerned groups. In examining and theorising competing constructions of 'sacredness' and its inscription today, we will draw on examples from well-known and less well-know British prehistoric places, to illustrate how claims and appropriations emerge from spiritual and political processes, and to question how places are themselves agents in the demarcation of their own sacredness. We focus on contemporary pagans as ‘new-indigenes’ and their engagements with the past and performances of spirituality on the stage of the heritage of Britain, as examined in our ‘Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights Project’ (www.sacredsites.or.uk), now in its fifth year. From the deposition of votive offerings at West Kennet long barrow and long-running disputes over access to Stonehenge as a ‘sacred site’, to the display of ritual paraphernalia derived from archaeological contexts (a Thor’s hammer pendant, for instance), pagans perform their worldviews and engage with heritage in diverse ways. Pagan re-enchantment of the past not only re-places heritage, myth, artefacts, ‘cultures’ in/out of time, highlighting (im)permanence as a linking theme in our analysis, but also disrupts the fixed and unchanging ‘past’ imposed onto heritage by much heritage discourse – challenging the permanent to yield, bend and accommodate.</p

Sacred sites, contested rites/rights: contemporary pagan engagements with the past

Our Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project (www.sacredsites.org.uk) examines physical, spiritual and interpretative engagements of today’s Pagans with sacred sites, theorises ‘sacredness’, and explores the implications of pagan engagements with sites for heritage management and archaeology more generally, in terms of ‘preservation ethic’ vis a vis active engagement. In this paper, we explore ways in which ‘sacred sites’ --- both the term and the sites --- are negotiated by different interest groups, foregrounding our locations, as an archaeologist/art historian (Wallis) and anthropologist (Blain), and active pagan engagers with sites. Examples of pagan actions at such sites, including at Avebury and Stonehenge, demonstrate not only that their engagements with sacred sites are diverse and that identities --- such as that of ‘new indigenes’ --- arising therefrom are complex, but also that heritage management has not entirely neglected the issues: in addition to managed open access solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, a climate of inclusivity and multivocality has resulted in fruitful negotiations at the Rollright Stones.</p

A correspondence between a class of monoids and self-similar group actions II

The first author showed in a previous paper that there is a correspondence between self-similar group actions and a class of left cancellative monoids called left Rees monoids. These monoids can be constructed either directly from the action using Zappa-Sz\'ep products, a construction that ultimately goes back to Perrot, or as left cancellative tensor monoids from the covering bimodule, utilizing a construction due to Nekrashevych, In this paper, we generalize the tensor monoid construction to arbitrary bimodules. We call the monoids that arise in this way Levi monoids and show that they are precisely the equidivisible monoids equipped with length functions. Left Rees monoids are then just the left cancellative Levi monoids. We single out the class of irreducible Levi monoids and prove that they are determined by an isomorphism between two divisors of its group of units. The irreducible Rees monoids are thereby shown to be determined by a partial automorphism of their group of units; this result turns out to be signficant since it connects irreducible Rees monoids directly with HNN extensions. In fact, the universal group of an irreducible Rees monoid is an HNN extension of the group of units by a single stable letter and every such HNN extension arises in this way.Comment: Some very minor corrections made and the dedication adde

Flow in nests of tubes

Imperial Users onl

Equilibrium Impotence: Why the States and Not the American National Government Financed Economic Development in the Antebellum Era

Why did states dominate investments in economic development in early America? Between 1787 and 1860, the national government%u2019s $54 million on promoting transportation infrastructure while the states spent$450 million. Using models of legislative choice, we show that Congress could not finance projects that provided benefits to a minority of districts while spreading the taxes over all. Although states faced the same political problems, they used benefit taxation schemes -- for example, by assessing property taxes on the basis of the expected increase in value due to an infrastructure investment. The U.S. Constitution prohibited the federal government from using benefit taxation. Moreover, the federal government%u2019s expenditures were concentrated in collections small projects -- such as lighthouses and rivers and harbors -- that spent money in all districts. Federal inaction was the result of the equilibrium political forces in Congress, and hence an equilibrium impotence.

Design of experiment for the optimisation of deep reactive ion etching of silicon inserts for micro-fabrication

The following paper describes a design of experiments investigation of the deep reactive of pillar structures on a silicon wafer. The etched wafers would subsequently be used as masters for the fabrication of nickel mould inserts for microinjection moulding. Undercuts occur when the pillar base has a smaller cross-section than the apex of the pillar. They therefore affect tolerances of the subsequent nickel mould, its strength and its de-mouldability from the silicon form. The response measured in these experiments was the degree of undercut of micro-scale (10 μm x 10 μm x 40 μm, 5 μm x 5 μm x 40 μm and 2 μm x 2 μm x 40 μm) The literature suggests that gas pressure, platen power, gas flow rate, phase switching times and mask size can all affect the degree of undercut. After examination of this literature, and of manufacturers guidelines, three parameters were selected for experimental testing: platen power, C 4F 8 gas flow rate during the passivation phase and switching times. Switching times was found to be the only statistically significant parameter for both 10x10 μm and 5x5 μm pillars. The 2x2 μm pillars were not successfully replicated and could therefore not undergo statistical evaluation

Sparse image reconstruction on the sphere: analysis and synthesis

We develop techniques to solve ill-posed inverse problems on the sphere by sparse regularisation, exploiting sparsity in both axisymmetric and directional scale-discretised wavelet space. Denoising, inpainting, and deconvolution problems, and combinations thereof, are considered as examples. Inverse problems are solved in both the analysis and synthesis settings, with a number of different sampling schemes. The most effective approach is that with the most restricted solution-space, which depends on the interplay between the adopted sampling scheme, the selection of the analysis/synthesis problem, and any weighting of the l1 norm appearing in the regularisation problem. More efficient sampling schemes on the sphere improve reconstruction fidelity by restricting the solution-space and also by improving sparsity in wavelet space. We apply the technique to denoise Planck 353 GHz observations, improving the ability to extract the structure of Galactic dust emission, which is important for studying Galactic magnetism.Comment: 11 pages, 6 Figure

Cooling and recombination processes in cometary plasma

The ion electron plasma in comets is examined for cooling processes which result from its interactions with the neutral coma. A cometary coma model is formulated that is composed predominantly of H2O and its decomposition products where electrons are cooled in a variety of processes at rates varying with energy. It is shown that solar plasma plus accumulated cometary ions and electrons is affected very strongly as it flows into the coma. The electrons are rapidly cooled and all but some 10% of the ions undergo charge exchange. Photodissociation of H2O is assumed where ion electron recombination is the dominant loss process