Publicising Petrie: Financing fieldwork in British Mandate Palestine (1926-1938)

The cost of archaeological fieldwork has always been high, even for someone as notoriously parsimonious as Flinders Petrie. Money was constantly needed to finance his excavations, bring objects back to England and organize publication of the results. Over the course of his career Petrie developed a range of fundraising strategies, including setting up the British School of Archaeology in Egypt to coordinate efforts. Moving his base of operations to British Mandate Palestine brought a whole new series of challenges, not the least being how to generate public interest in this new endeavour. This paper will explore the various methods by which funds were generated to support Petrie’s research, including use of newspaper and radio coverage, public lectures and exhibitions, merchandising and appeals to the generosity of individual patrons. It will also consider how the purposes of fundraising developed over time, and ways in which we can measure the success of the tactics used

Dairygold Homes of good Food: Recipes from Famous Irish Country Houses

Published by The O\u27Brien Press, 20 Victoria Road, Rathgar, Dublin 6 and Dairygold Food products, Mitchelstown, Cork in 1992. Concept and editorial development by U.S.C.C. Ireland. Design by Renaissance, photographs by John Searle, typeset at The O\u27Brien Press, printed by Colour Books, Dublin, food consultant Alix Gardner and editorial advisor John Colclough. Recipes and menus from the TV series where Bibi Baskin takes you inside six Irish country houses famous for their cuisine.https://arrow.tudublin.ie/irckbooks/1068/thumbnail.jp

Re-writing the Script: Decoding the Textual Experience in the Bronze Age Levant

Writing in its many forms was an important part of the political, economic and cultural landscape of the Levant during the Second Millennium BC. Diverse scripts were used to record both local and foreign languages, and included Egyptian hieroglyphics, cursive hieroglyphics, hieratic, cuneiform, alphabetic cuneiform, Proto-Canaanite, Hittite hieroglyphs and linear Aegean scripts. While the corpus is not large, it is significant and hints at the range of writing practices and knowledge available. This paper will review the evidence for Middle and Late Bronze Age writing from a primarily archaeological perspective, showing how a study of object function, materiality and contexts of use can inform on broader questions of textual availability, awareness and execution. Texts played a variety of roles within the communities they served. Texts could act as educational tools; to exert political authority, impress and intimidate; to enhance objects used in funerary or ritual settings, and to mark personal ownership. Across these roles, we can also evaluate more broadly how writing technique, material and script converge, and what the choices that were being made in this respect can tell us about how writing was being organised and managed. This leads to the conclusion that, despite strong script diversity in the region, most forms of script appear to have been used in discrete environments with little overlap between them. Many uses were confined to a professional setting, with scribes operating within local and imposed administrative networks as representatives of the status quo. Beyond this, writing was generally restricted to elite consumers and so had limited impact on society as a whole. The exception lay in more visible forms of writing, such as publically erected stelae, and in special classes of object such as amulets and amuletic objects, such as the scarab, which could be privately owned by a wider group of people. Accessibility, however, did not necessarily equate with understanding, and for the majority, the significance of a text may well have lain in its visual qualities and associations rather than in the actual words recorded. Ultimately it was the more personal and unofficial applications of writing that proved to be the most robust, and it was these that survived to bridge the gap between the end of the Late Bronze Age, and the emergence of a whole new set of polities and writing practices in the Iron II period

Transport of malic acid in the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe: evidence for a proton-dicarboxylate symport

The transport system for malic acid present in Schizosaccharomyces pombe cells, growing in batch culture on several corbon sources, has been studied. It was found that the diarboxylic acid carrier of S. pombe is a proton-dicarboxylate symporter that allows transport and accumulation as a function of pH with the following kinetic parameters at pH 5·0: Vmax = 0·01 nmol of total malic acids 1 mg (dry weight) of cells, 1and Km = 0·1mM total malic acid uptake (pH 5·0) was accompanied by disappearance of extracellular protons, the uptake rates of which followed Michaelis-Menten kinetics as a function of the acid concentration. The Km values, calculated as the concentrations either of anions or of undissociated acid, at various extracellular pH values, pointed to the monoanionic form as the transported species. Furthermore, accumulated free acid suffered rapid efflux after the addition of the portonophore carbonyl cyanid m-chlorophenyl hydrazone. These results suggested that the transport system was a dicarboxylateproton symporter. Growth of cells in a medium with glucose (up to 14%, w/v) and malic acid (1·5%, w/v) also resulted in proton-dicarboxylate activity, suggesting that the system, besides being constitutive, was still active at high glucose concentrations. The following dicarboxylic acids acted as competitive inhibitors of malic acid transport at pH 5·0: D- malic acid, succinic acid, fumaric acid oxaloacetic acid, -Ketoglutaric acid, maleic acid, maleic and malonic acid. In addition all of these dicarboxylic acids induced proton movements that followed MichaelisMenten kinetics. It was concluded that the malic negatively charged form (probably the monoanionic form) was transported by a proton-symport mechanism and that the carrier appeared to be a common dicarboxylat transport sysmem. The undissociated acid entered the cells slowly by simple diffusion.(undefined

Determinate or indeterminate growth? Revisiting the growth strategy of sea turtles

This is the author's accepted manuscript.The final version is available from Inter Research via the DOI in this record.Traditionally, growth can be either determinate, ceasing during the natural lifespan of individuals, or indeterminate, persisting throughout life. Although indeterminate growth is a widely accepted strategy and believed to be ubiquitous among long-lived species, it may not be as common as previously thought. Sea turtles are believed to be indeterminate growers despite the paucity of long-term studies into post-maturity growth. In this study, we provide the first temporal analysis of post-maturity growth rates in wild living sea turtles, using 26 yr of data on individual measurements of females nesting in Cyprus. We used generalised additive/linear mixed models to incorporate multiple growth measurements for each female and model post-maturity growth over time. We found post-maturity growth to persist in green Chelonia mydas and loggerhead Caretta caretta turtles, with growth decreasing for approximately 14 yr before plateauing around zero for a further decade solely in green turtles. We also found growth to be independent of size at sexual maturity in both species. Additionally, although annual growth and compound annual growth rates were higher in green turtles than in loggerhead turtles, this difference was not statistically significant. While indeterminate growth is believed to be a key life-history trait of ectothermic vertebrates, here, we provide evidence of determinate growth in green and loggerhead turtles and suggest that determinate growth is a life-history trait shared by cheloniid species. Our results highlight the need for long-term studies to refine life-history models and further our understanding of ageing and longevity of wild sea turtles for conservation and management.Fieldwork was supported by the British Associate of Tortoise Keepers, British Chelonia Group, British High Commission in Cyprus, British Residents Society, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Darwin Initiative, Erwin Warth Foundation, Friends of SPOT, Glasgow Uni versity Court, Kuzey Kıbrıs Turkcell, MEDASSET UK, and Natural Environment Research Council

Defining conservation units with enhanced molecular tools to reveal fine scale structuring among Mediterranean green turtle rookeries

This is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordData accessibility: the data associated with this article is avaiable in the Dryad Digital Repository: https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.7db01Understanding the connectivity among populations is a key research priority for species of conservation concern. Genetic tools are widely used for this purpose, but the results can be limited by the resolution of the genetic markers in relation to the species and geographic scale. Here, we investigated natal philopatry in green turtles (Chelonia mydas) from four rookeries within close geographic proximity (~200 km) on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. We genotyped hypervariable mtSTRs, a mtDNA control region sequence (CR) and 13 microsatellite loci to genetically characterise 479 green turtles using markers with different modes of inheritance. We demonstrated matrilineal stock structure for the first time among Mediterranean green turtle rookeries. This result contradicts previous regional assessments and supports a growing body of evidence that green turtles exhibit a more precise level of natal site fidelity than has commonly been recognised. The microsatellites detected weak male philopatry with significant stock structure among three of the six pairwise comparisons. The absence of Atlantic CR haplotypes and mtSTRs amongst these robust sample sizes reaffirms the reproductive isolation of Mediterranean green turtles and supports their status as a subpopulation. A power analysis effectively demonstrated that the mtDNA genetic markers previously employed to evaluate regional stock identity were confounded by an insufficient resolution considering the recent colonisation of this region. These findings improve the regional understanding of stock connectivity and illustrate the importance of using suitable genetic markers to define appropriate units for management and conservation.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spai

Shelf life: Neritic habitat use of a turtle population highly threatened by fisheries

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordAim: It is difficult to mitigate threats to marine vertebrates until their habitat use is understood. We report on a decade of satellite tracking loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) from an important nesting site to determine priority habitats for their protection in a region where they are known to be heavily impacted by fisheries. Location: Cyprus, Eastern Mediterranean. Method: We tracked 27 adult female loggerheads between 2001 and 2012 from North Cyprus nesting beaches. To eliminate potential biases, we included females nesting on all coasts of our study area, at different periods of the nesting season and from a range of size classes. Results: Foraging sites were distributed over the continental shelf of Cyprus, the Levant and North Africa, up to a maximum distance of 2100 km from nesting sites. Foraging sites were clustered in (1) near-shore waters of Cyprus and Syria, (2) offshore waters of Egypt and (3) offshore and near-shore regions of Libya and Tunisia. The North Cyprus and west Egypt/east Libyan coasts are important areas for loggerhead turtles during migration. Movement patterns within foraging sites strongly suggest benthic feeding in discrete areas. Early nesters visited other rookeries in Turkey, Syria and Israel where they likely laid further clutches. Tracking suggests minimum annual mortality of 11%, comparable to other fishery-impacted loggerhead populations. Main conclusions: This work further highlights the importance of neritic habitats of Libya and Tunisia as areas likely used by loggerhead turtles from many of the Mediterranean rookeries and where the threat of fisheries bycatch is high. Our tracking data also suggest that anthropogenic mortalities may have occurred in North Cyprus, Syria and Egypt; all within near-shore marine areas where small-scale fisheries operate. Protection of this species across many geopolitical units is a major challenge and documenting their distribution is an important first step.Peoples Trust for Endangered SpeciesBritish Chelonia GroupUnited States Agency for International DevelopmentBP EgyptApacheNatural Environment Research Council (NERC)Erwin Warth FoundationKuzey Kıbrıs TurkcellEktam KıbrısSEATURTLE.orgMEDASSETDarwin InitiativeBritish High Commission in CyprusBritish Residents Society of North CyprusMarine Turtle Conservation ProjectMarine Turtle Research GroupSociety for the Protection of Turtles in North Cyprus (SPOT)North Cyprus Department of Environmental Protectio

The importance of passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags for measuring life-history traits of sea turtles

This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Capture-mark-recapture studies rely on the identification of individuals through time, using markers or tags, which are assumed to be retained. This assumption, however, may be violated, having implications for population models. In sea turtles, individual identification is typically based on external flipper tags, which can be combined with internal passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags. Despite the extensive use of flipper tags, few studies have modelled tag loss using continuous functions. Using a 26-year dataset for sympatrically nesting green (Chelonia mydas) and loggerhead (Caretta caretta) turtles, this study aims to assess how PIT tag use increases the accuracy of estimates of life-history traits. The addition of PIT tags improved female identification: between 2000 and 2017, 53% of green turtles and 29% of loggerhead turtles were identified from PIT tags alone. We found flipper and PIT tag losses were best described by decreasing logistic curves with lower asymptotes. Excluding PIT tags from our dataset led to underestimation of flipper tag loss, reproductive periodicity, reproductive longevity and annual survival, and overestimation of female abundance and recruitment for both species. This shows the importance of PIT tags in improving the accuracy of estimates of life-history traits. Thus, estimates where tag loss has not been corrected for should be interpreted with caution and could bias IUCN Red List assessments. As such, long-term population monitoring programmes should aim to estimate tag loss and assess the impact of loss on life-history estimates, to provide robust estimates without which population models and stock assessments cannot be derived accuratel

Detecting green shoots of recovery: The importance of long-term individual-based monitoring of marine turtles

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordPopulation monitoring is an essential part of evaluating the effectiveness of management interventions for conservation. Coastal breeding aggregations of marine vertebrate species that come ashore to pup or nest provide an opportunistic window of observation into otherwise widely dispersed populations. Green turtle (Chelonia mydas) nesting on the north and west coasts of northern Cyprus has been monitored consistently and exhaustively since 1993, with an intensive saturation tagging programme running at one key site for the same duration. This historically depleted nesting population is showing signs of recovery, possibly in response to nest protection approaching two decades, with increasing nest numbers and rising levels of recruitment. Strong correlation between year-to-year magnitude of nesting and the proportion of new breeders in the nesting cohort implies that recruitment of new individuals to the breeding population is an important driver of this recovery trend. Recent changes in fishing activities may be impacting the local juvenile neritic stage, however, which may hinder this potential recovery. Individuals returning to breed after two years laid fewer clutches than those returning after three or four years, demonstrating a trade-off between remigration interval and breeding output. Average clutch frequencies have remained stable around a median of three clutches a year per female despite the demographic shift towards new nesters, which typically lay fewer clutches in their first season. We show that where local fecundity has been adequately assessed, the use of average clutch frequencies can be a reliable method for deriving nester abundance from nest counts. Index sites where individual-based monitoring is possible will be important in monitoring long-term climate driven changes in reproductive rates.European Social Fun

Spatial ecology of loggerhead turtles: Insights from stable isotope markers and satellite telemetry

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordAim Using a combination of satellite telemetry and stable isotope analysis (SIA), our aim was to identify foraging grounds of loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) at important rookeries in the Mediterranean, examine foraging ground fidelity, and across 25 years determine the proportion of nesting females recruiting from each foraging region to a major rookery in Cyprus. Location Mediterranean Sea. Methods Between 1993 and 2018, we investigated the spatial ecology of loggerhead turtles from rookeries in Cyprus and Greece using satellite telemetry (n = 55 adults) and SIA of three elements (n = 296). Results Satellite telemetry from both rookeries revealed the main foraging areas as the Adriatic region (Cyprus: 4% of individuals, Greece: 55%), Tunisian Plateau (Cyprus: 16%, Greece: 40%) and the eastern Mediterranean (Cyprus: 80%, Greece: 5%). Combining satellite telemetry and SIA allowed 64% of all nesting females to be assigned to; the Adriatic region (Cyprus: 2%, Greece: 38.5%), Tunisian Plateau (Cyprus: 47%, Greece: 38.5%) and the eastern Mediterranean (Cyprus: 51%, Greece: 23%), which are markedly different to proportions obtained using satellite telemetry. The proportion of the Cyprus nesting cohort using each foraging region did not change significantly, with the exception that individuals foraging in the Adriatic region are only present in the Cyprus nesting population from 2012. Repeat satellite tracking (n = 3) and temporal consistency in isotope ratios (n = 36) of Cyprus females, strongly suggest foraging ground fidelity over multiple decades. Main conclusions This study demonstrates the advantages of combining satellite telemetry and SIA to investigate spatial ecology at a population level. The importance of the Tunisian Plateau for foraging is demonstrated. This study indicates that females generally show high fidelity to foraging grounds and shows a potential recent shift to foraging in the Adriatic region for Cyprus females, while the importance of other regions persists across decades, thus providing baselines to develop and assess conservation strategies.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC