Jet and amber

This is the first volume charting the CAU’s on-going Barleycroft Farm/Over investigations, which now encompasses almost twenty years of fieldwork across both banks of the River Great Ouse at its junction with the Fen. Amongst the project’s main directives is the status of a major river in prehistory – when a communication corridor and when a divide? Accordingly, a key component throughout has been the documentation of the lower Ouse’s complex palaeoenvironmental history, and a delta-like wet landscape dotted with mid-stream islands has been mapped. This book is specifically concerned with the length of The Over Narrows, whose naming alludes to an extraordinary series of mid-channel ‘river race’ ridges. With their excavation generating vast artefact sets and unique palaeo-economic data, these ridges saw intense settlement sequences, ranging from Mesolithic camps, Grooved Ware, Beaker and Collared Urn pit clusters (plus field plots) to Middle Bronze fieldsystems and their attendant settlements, a massive Late Bronze Age midden complex and, finally, an Iron Age shrine. The latter involved extensive human bone or body-part deposition and bird sacrifice. Four upstanding turf barrows and two accompanying waterlogged pond barrows feature among the main excavations reported here. With more than 40 cremations (including in situ pyres), the resultant detailing of Early Bronze Age mortuary practices and the insights into the period’s monument construction are ground-breaking. This is an important book, for the scale of The Narrows’ excavations and palaeoenvironmental studies, its comprehensive dating programmes and, particularly, the innovative methodologies and analyses undertaken. Indeed, a commitment to experiment has lain at the project’s core

Social workers writing for publication: The story of a practice and academic partnership

This paper outlines the processes, outcomes and lessons learnt from a collaborative writing project undertaken as a partnership between academics at the Open University and eleven social work practitioners from a variety of social work settings across the UK. This partnership successfully co-produced a book of social work stories using a critical best practice approach (Cooper, Gordon and Rixon, 2015a), which describes and analyses the realities of everyday social work practice. In a context where there still appear to be many barriers to the involvement of practising social workers in research and writing, we conclude that the project's collaborative process facilitated the sharing of practitioner experience and expertise with the wider world. Drawing on lessons learned during the writing of the book, a number of practical ways of building on this initiative to support the development of practitioner writing are proposed

Near-death experience: Out-of-body and out-of-brain?

During the last decades, several clinical cases have been reported where patients described profound subjective experiences when near-death, a phenomenon called "near-death experience" (NDE). Recurring features in the accounts involving bright lights and tunnels have sometimes been interpreted as evidence of a new life after death; however the origin of such experiences is largely unknown, and both biological and psychological interpretations have been suggested. The study of NDEs represents one of the most important topics of cognitive neuroscience. In the present paper the current state of knowledge has been reviewed, with particular regard to the main features of NDE, scientific explanations and the theoretical debate surrounding this phenomenon