scholarly journals Protection in Life and Death: Pendant Crosses from the Cemetery of Apollo Klarios at Sagalassos, Turkey

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-298
Author(s):  
Sam Cleymans ◽  
Peter Talloen

This article presents the different types of pendant crosses found in the burials of a Middle Byzantine graveyard at the Pisidian settlement of Sagalassos in south-western Turkey. The aim is to study both the chronology and function of these pectoral crosses. A variety of sources are used, ranging from stratigraphy and radiocarbon dates to contextual information and skeletal data. The crosses could be broadly dated to between the eleventh and thirteenth century AD, thus providing an indication of the lifespan of the cemetery. Moreover, the typological evolution, which was corroborated by parallels from other sites in the Byzantine Empire, allowed us to establish a horizontal stratigraphy for the graveyard. The pectoral crosses discussed here shed light on the funerary practices in this part of the Byzantine world. These generally proved to belong to very young children. They constitute a category of material culture that not only provides insights into the lives of the Byzantine population, especially in early childhood, but are also the material manifestation of the intersection between popular religion, magic, and funerary rites.

1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
John A Atkinson ◽  
Camilla Dickson ◽  
Jane Downes ◽  
Paul Robins ◽  
David Sanderson

Summary Two small burnt mounds were excavated as part of the programme to mitigate the impact of motorway construction in the Crawford area. The excavations followed a research strategy designed to address questions of date and function. This paper surveys the various competing theories about burnt mounds and how the archaeological evidence was evaluated against those theories. Both sites produced radiocarbon dates from the Bronze Age and evidence to suggest that they were cooking places. In addition, a short account is presented of two further burnt mounds discovered during the construction of the motorway in Annandale.


2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-169
Author(s):  
Paul R. J. Duffy ◽  
Olivia Lelong

Summary An archaeological excavation was carried out at Graham Street, Leith, Edinburgh by Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD) as part of the Historic Scotland Human Remains Call-off Contract following the discovery of human remains during machine excavation of a foundation trench for a new housing development. Excavation demonstrated that the burial was that of a young adult male who had been interred in a supine position with his head orientated towards the north. Radiocarbon dates obtained from a right tibia suggest the individual died between the 15th and 17th centuries AD. Little contextual information exists in documentary or cartographic sources to supplement this scant physical evidence. Accordingly, it is difficult to further refine the context of burial, although a possible link with a historically attested siege or a plague cannot be discounted.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Sarah Dunlop ◽  
Peter Ward

This article describes how a recently refined visual ethnographic research method, “narrated photography,” contributes to the study of religion. We argue that this qualitative research method is particularly useful for studies of lived religion and demonstrate this through examples drawn from a study the sacred among young Polish migrants to England. Narrated photography, which entails asking people to photograph what is personally significant to them and then to narrate the image, generates visual and textual material that mediates the subjective. Through using this method we discovered that family was considered to be sacred, both in terms of links to religious practice and a desire for a secure home which family relationships provide. Additionally, narrated photography has the potential to expand our conceptions of lived religion through the inclusion of visual material culture and the visual context of the research participants. In this case the data revealed that the Polish young people view structures within their landscape through a particularly Polish Catholic lens. These findings shed light on the religious tensions that migrants encounter in everyday life.


Author(s):  
Elena Lombardi

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.


Iraq ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 41-71
Author(s):  
Robert Carter ◽  
David Wengrow ◽  
Saber Ahmed Saber ◽  
Sami Jamil Hamarashi ◽  
Mary Shepperson ◽  
...  

The Shahrizor Prehistory Project has targeted prehistoric levels of the Late Ubaid and Late Chalcolithic 4 (LC4; Late Middle Uruk) periods at Gurga Chiya (Shahrizor, Kurdistan region of northern Iraq), along with the Halaf period at the adjacent site of Tepe Marani. Excavations at the latter have produced new dietary and environmental data for the sixth millennium B.C. in the region, while at Gurga Chiya part of a burned Late Ubaid tripartite house was excavated. This has yielded a promising archaeobotanical assemblage and established a benchmark ceramic assemblage for the Shahrizor Plain, which is closely comparable to material known from Tell Madhhur in the Hamrin valley. The related series of radiocarbon dates gives significant new insights into the divergent timing of the Late Ubaid and early LC in northern and southern Mesopotamia. In the following occupation horizon, a ceramic assemblage closely aligned to the southern Middle Uruk indicates convergence of material culture with central and southern Iraq as early as the LC4 period. Combined with data for the appearance of Early Uruk elements at sites in the adjacent Qara Dagh region, this hints at long-term co-development of material culture during the fourth millennium B.C. in southeastern Iraqi Kurdistan and central and southern Iraq, potentially questioning the model of expansion or colonialism from the south.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christina Torres-Rouff ◽  
Gonzalo Pimentel ◽  
William J. Pestle ◽  
Mariana Ugarte ◽  
Kelly J. Knudson

Camelid pastoralism, agriculture, sedentism, surplus production, increasing cultural complexity, and interregional interaction during northern Chile's Late Formative period (AD 100–400) are seen in the flow of goods and people over expanses of desert. Consolidating evidence of material culture from these interactions with a bioarchaeological dimension allows us to provide details about individual lives and patterns in the Late Formative more generally. Here, we integrate a variety of skeletal, chemical, and archaeological data to explore the life and death of a small child (Calate-3N.7). By taking a multiscalar approach, we present a narrative that considers not only the varied materiality that accompanies this child but also what the child's life experience was and how this reflects and shapes our understanding of the Late Formative period in northern Chile. This evidence hints at the profound mobility of their youth. The complex mortuary context reflects numerous interactions and long-distance relationships. Ultimately, the evidence speaks to deep social relations between two coastal groups, the Atacameños and Tarapaqueños. Considering this suite of data, we can see a child whose life was spent moving through desert routes and perhaps also glimpse the construction of intercultural identity in the Formative period.


Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Marinozzi

In the early 1980s a systematic investigation was begun by G. Fornaciari and his staff of a series of mummies from central and southern Italy, and in particular of important Renaissance remains. The study of a substantial number of artificial mummies has shed light on the human embalming techniques connected with the methods and procedures described by medical and non-medical authors in the early modern period. This has made it possible to reconstruct the history of the art of mummification, from the ‘clyster’ techniques to the partial or total evisceration of the corpse, to the intravascular injection of drying and preserving liquors. In addition to the bodies of Aragonese princes and members of the Neapolitan nobility, interred in the Basilica of San Domenico in Naples are the remains of important French personages dating to the modern age. Among the tombs arranged in two parallel rows to the right of the balcony are four sarcophagi containing the bodies of the wife and three children of Jean Antoine Michel Agar, who served as the Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Naples from 1809 to 1815. The type of wrapping used for the corpses of the children presents strong analogies to those of ancient Egyptian mummies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kun Chen ◽  
Yalei Zhang ◽  
Ling Qian ◽  
Peng Wang

AbstractRAS mutations (HRAS, NRAS, and KRAS) are among the most common oncogenes, and around 19% of patients with cancer harbor RAS mutations. Cells harboring RAS mutations tend to undergo malignant transformation and exhibit malignant phenotypes. The mutational status of RAS correlates with the clinicopathological features of patients, such as mucinous type and poor differentiation, as well as response to anti-EGFR therapies in certain types of human cancers. Although RAS protein had been considered as a potential target for tumors with RAS mutations, it was once referred to as a undruggable target due to the consecutive failure in the discovery of RAS protein inhibitors. However, recent studies on the structure, signaling, and function of RAS have shed light on the development of RAS-targeting drugs, especially with the approval of Lumakras (sotorasib, AMG510) in treatment of KRASG12C-mutant NSCLC patients. Therefore, here we fully review RAS mutations in human cancer and especially focus on emerging strategies that have been recently developed for RAS-targeting therapy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210
Author(s):  
Bartłomiej Lis ◽  
Trevor Van Damme

While handwashing is attested in the Bronze Age cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and appears in both Linear B records and Homeric epics, the custom has not been discussed with regard to the material culture of Mycenaean Greece. On analogy with Egyptian handwashing equipment, we explore the possibility that a conical bowl made of bronze and copied in clay was introduced in Greece early in the Late Bronze Age for this specific use. We integrate epigraphic, iconographic and formal analyses to support this claim, but in order to interrogate the quotidian function of ceramic lekanes, we present the results of use-wear analysis performed on 130 examples. As use-wear develops from repeated use over a long time, it is a good indicator of normative behaviour, particularly when large datasets are amassed and contrasted with other shapes. While not conclusive, our results allow us to rule out a function as tableware for food consumption, and in combination with all other analyses support the interpretation of lekanes as handwashing basins. We then trace the development of this custom from its initial adoption by elite groups to its spread among new social classes and venues after the collapse of the palace system: at home, as part of communal feasting and sacrifice or as an element of funerary rites. The widespread distribution of handwashing equipment after 1200 bc closely mirrors the situation in our earliest surviving Greek Iron Age texts and joins a growing body of evidence pointing to strong continuity in social practices between the Postpalatial period and the early Iron Age in Greece.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junhua Gong ◽  
Minghua Cong ◽  
Hao Wu ◽  
Menghao Wang ◽  
He Bai ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The capacity of the liver to restore its architecture and function assures good prognoses of patients who suffer serious hepatic injury or cancer resection. In our study, we found that the P53/miR-34a/SIRT1 positive feedback loop has a remarkable negative regulatory effect, which is related to the termination of liver regeneration. Here, we described how P53/miR-34a/SIRT1 positive feedback loop controls liver regeneration and its possible relationship with liver cancer.Method We performed partial hepatectomy (PH) in mice transfected with adenovirus (Ade) overexpressing P53 and adenovirus-associated virus (AAV) knock-downing miR-34a. LR was analyzed by liver weight/body weight, serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) levels and cell proliferation, and the related cellular signals were investigated. Bile acid (BA) levels during LR were analyzed by metabolomics of bile acids. Results We found that the P53/miR-34a/SIRT1 positive feedback loop was activated in the late phase of LR. Overexpression of P53 terminated LR early and enhanced P53/miR-34a/SIRT1 positive feedback loop expression and its proapoptotic effect. Mice from the Ade-P53 group showed smaller livers and higher levels of serum ALT and AST than control mice. While knock-down of miR-34a abolished P53/miR-34a/SIRT1 positive feedback loop during LR. Mice from anti-miR-34a group showed larger livers and lower levels of PCNA-positive cells than control mice. T-β-MCA increased gradually during LR and peaked at 7 days after PH. T-β-MCA inhibited cell proliferation and promoted cell apoptosis via facilitating the P53/miR-34a/SIRT1 positive feedback loop during LR by suppressing FXR/SHP. Conclusion The P53/miR-34a/SIRT1 positive feedback loop plays an important role in the termination of LR. Our findings shed light on the molecular and metabolic mechanisms of LR termination and provide a potential therapeutic alternative for treating P53-wild-type HCC patients.


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