Internet Governance : exploring the development link

This paper seeks to explore the issues of Internet governance from a development perspective. The WSIS process and the report of the UN Working group on Internet Governance provide an initial framework within which to develop the issues. These issues not only concern the equitable distribution of Internet resources and the ways in which a secure and reliable function of the Internet can be achieved, but also include issues of multi-lingualism and local content as well as the institutional setting of Internet governance mechanisms and participation. The paper observers that realising the contribution of the Internet to development goals requires a shift in policy focus away from supply side initiatives in the telecommunications sector to more co-ordinated approaches

Nutritional quality and calorific value of Amazonian forest litter

A study on the nutritional quality of litter from an Amazon terra firme forest was carried out to supplement quantitative data on litter production previously published by KLINGE and RODRIGUES (1968). Analyses for the following constituents were carried out: cell-wall and non cell-wall fractions, crude protein, total mineral ash, polyphenols, and caloric values. Reasons are given for choosing these variables. Mineral ash and protein values were very low, whilst cell-wall fractions, which are a measure of the amount of undigestible material, were high, as were caloric values. Polyphenols were also relatively high. These factors together indicate that the litter is a very low grade forage. Amazon leaf litter has high caloric values compared with published figures from other tropical forests. The following hypothesis was offered to explain these high values: as mineral nutrients are severely limiting in this ecosystem, not all the products of photosynthesis can be channeled into plant growth. Large proportions of these photosynthetic products are therefore probably accumulated in the leaves as reduced high energy compounds such as waxes, resins etc. Available data do in fact indicate that primary production is relatively low. The low quality forage which the leaf litter offers may be a contributing factor to the low animal biomass of the Amazon forests

Internet Governance: exploring the development link

This paper seeks to explore the issues of Internet governance from a development perspective. The WSIS process and the report of the UN Working group on Internet Governance provide an initial framework within which to develop the issues. These issues not only concern the equitable distribution of Internet resources and the ways in which a secure and reliable function of the Internet can be achieved, but also include issues of multi-lingualism and local content as well as the institutional setting of Internet governance mechanisms and participation. The paper observers that realising the contribution of the Internet to development goals requires a shift in policy focus away from supply side initiatives in the telecommunications sector to more co-ordinated approaches.Internet governance; development; Internet resources; access

Death and memory on the Home Front: Second World War commemoration in the South Hams, Devon

This is the publisher's PDF of an article published in Cambridge archaeological journal© 2010. The definitive version is available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=CAJThis article discusses two World War II monuments - the Slapton Sands Evacuation Memorial and the Torcross Tank Memorial - as commemorations of events and as a method of defining the identities of local people

Beowulf and archaeology: Megaliths imagined and encountered in early medieval Europe

This is the author's version of a book chapter published in The lives of prehistoric monuments in Iron Age, Roman and medieval Europe by Oxford University Press, 2015.The dragon’s lair in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf has been widely interpreted to reflect engagement with Neolithic megalithic architecture. Embodying the poet’s sense of the past, the stone barrow (Old English: stānbeorh) of the dragon has been taken to reveal mythological and legendary attributions to megalithic monuments as the works of giants and haunts of dragons in the early medieval world. This chapter reconsiders this argument, showing how the dragon’s mound invoked a biography of successive pasts and significances as treasure hoard, monstrous dwelling, place of exile, theft, conflict and death. Only subsequently does the mound serve as the starting-point for the funeral of Beowulf involving his cremation ceremony and mound-raising nearby. The biography of the dragon’s barrow is a literary one, in which inherited prehistoric megaliths were counter-tombs, antithetical to contemporary stone architectures containing the bodies of kings, queens and the relics of saints.Sponsored by European Research Counci

‘Clumsy and Illogical’? Reconsidering the West Kirby Hogback

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in 'The Antiquaries Journal'. To access the final edited and published work see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquaries-journal/article/clumsy-and-illogical-reconsidering-the-west-kirby-hogback/9EAC7243CEEA71400D3E89CFF7423EF3This paper presents a fresh reading of a significant early medieval recumbent stone monument from West Kirby, Merseyside (formerly Cheshire). Rather than being a single-phased hogback, later subject to damage, it is argued that West Kirby 4 might have been carved in successive phases, possibly by different hands. It is suggested that the carvers had different abilities and/or adapted their work in response to the time pressures of a funeral or a shift in the location or function of the stone. While a single explanation for the character of the West Kirby monument remains elusive, the article proposes that, rather than ‘clumsy and illogical’, the stone was more likely a coherent but experimental, distinctive and asymmetrical, multi-phased and/or multi-authored creation. Through a review of the monument’s historiography and a detailed reappraisal of the details and parallels of its form, ornament and material composition, the paper reconsiders the commemorative significance of this recumbent stone monument for the locality, region and understanding of Viking Age sculpture across the British Isles. As a result, West Kirby’s importance as an ecclesiastical locale in the Viking Age is reappraised

Depicting the dead: Commemoration through cists, cairns and symbols in early medieval Britain

This is the publsher's PDF of an article published in Cambridge archaeological journal© 2007. The definitive version is available at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=CAJThis article argues that early medieval cairns and mounds served to commemorate concepts of gender and geneology. Excavations at Lundin Links in Fife are used as exemplar

Saxon obsequies: The early medieval archaeology of Richard Cornwallis Neville

Open access journalThis paper investigates the origins of British Anglo-Saxon archaeology by focusing on the work of one early Victorian archaeologist: Richard Cornwallis Neville. The seemingly descriptive and parochial nature of Neville’s archaeological pursuits, together with the attention he afforded to Romano-British remains, has impeded due recognition, and critical scrutiny, of his contributions to the development of early Medieval burial archaeology. Using his archaeological publications as source material, I will show how Neville’s interpretations of Saxon graves were a form of memory work, defining his personal, familial and martial identity in relation to the landscape and locality of his aristocratic home at Audley End, near Saffron Walden, Essex. Subsequently, I argue that Neville’s prehistoric and Romano-British discoveries reveal his repeated concern with the end of Roman Britain and its barbarian successors. Finally, embodied within Neville’s descriptions of early Medieval graves and their location we can identify a pervasive Anglo-Saxonism. Together these strands of argument combine to reveal how, for Neville, Saxon graves constituted a hitherto unwritten first chapter of English history that could be elucidated through material culture and landscape

Death, memory and material culture: Catalytic commemoration and the cremated dead

This is the author's version of a book chapter published in The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of death and burial by Oxford University Press, 2013

Memory through monuments: Movement and temporality in Skamby’s boat graves

This is the published version of the book chapter in Med hjärta och hjärna. En vänbok till professor Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh© 2014Boat inhumation graves were one among many ways by which waterborne craft were deployed in the mortuary arena in late first millennium AD Scandinavia: they might be represented on stone, burned, decommissioned or set adrift. Moreover, smaller craft and parts of craft might have been readily employed in inhumation and cremation practices far more than is revealed in the archaeological record. Further still, boats can be symbolised through boat-shaped stone-settings and their depiction on picture-stones (see Andrén 1993; Williams et al. 2010). Consequently there are strong grounds for seeing boat-inhumation as part of a diverse versatility in mortuary expression drawing upon water transportation as metaphor and medium. Yet within this diversity, I here contend that the high archaeological visibility of wealthy boat-inhumations was not an accident of archaeological preservation. Instead, I argue that boatinhumation was a strategic choice to exhibit and constitute a distinctive identity for the dead using a specific use of a maritime vessel in early medieval mortuary practice. Hence, as technologies of remembrance, boat-inhumations are the surviving archaeological traces of a distinctive chains of ritual acts by which the dead were selectively remembered and forgotten by survivors and interred unburned within a maritime craft (Williams 2001, 2006). Moreover, boatinhumation was a practice that rendered the grave persistent in the landscape as an ongoing place for memory work, prone to subsequent manipulations, whether sanctioned interventions by the survivors or plundering inspired by a range of motivations (e.g. Bill & Daly 2012)