Study on street children in four selected towns of Ethiopia

The child is the most precious asset and the focal point of development for any country. However, unless children are brought up in a stimulating and conducive environment getting the best possible care and protection, their physical, mental, emotional and social development is susceptible to permanent damage. Ethiopia, being one of the least developed countries of the world due to interrelated and complex socio-economic factors including man-made and natural calamities, a large portion of our population - especially children - are victimized by social evils like famine, disease, poverty, mass displacement, lack of education and family instability. Owing to the fact that children are the most vulnerable group among the whole society and also because they constitute half of the population it is evident that a considerable number of Ethiopian children are living under difficult circumstances. Therefore, as in a number of other third world countries there are many poor, displaced, unaccompanied and orphaned children in our country. A considerable proportion of these children work on the street with some even totally living on the street without any adult care and protection. These children are forced to the streets in their tight for survival. They supplement their parents meagre income or support themselves with the small incomes they earn doing menial jobs. In doing this, street children face the danger of getting into accidents and violence, they get exploited and abused, many are forced to drop out of school or never get the chance to be enroled at all and some drift into begging or petty crime. This study is undertaken mainly for updating the findings of previous studies, monitoring changing trends, examining new facts of the problem and getting a better understanding of the phenomenon in the country by covering at least some of the major centres where the problem is acute. Thus, the outcome of this research can be useful in the formation of the social welfare programme of the country. Finally, in recognition of the urgency of the problem and the limited resources available, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs expresses appreciation to all agencies engaged in the rehabilitation of street children and prevention of the problem. The Ministry also calls for more co-operation and support between concerned governmental and non-governmental organizations in their efforts for improving the situation of street children and in curbing the overwhelming nature of the problem.

Structural carpentry in medieval Ireland: continuity and change

The study of medieval carpentry is probably one of the most neglected aspects of archaeological research in Ireland. The principal difficulty is the nature of the evidence, in that timber, unless the conditions are right, rarely leaves a trace above ground. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that not a single medieval timber-framed building has survived in Ireland. Nevertheless, in recent years, in addition to the medieval roof of Dunsoghley, which up to quite recently was thought to be the only surviving roof structure in Ireland, a further eight medieval roof structures have been identified. Furthermore, an extensive corpus of early medieval mills, with evidence for advanced Roman carpentry techniques, has been excavated, while evidence for Viking houses, on what is probably the largest extant Viking settlement in Europe, have also been recovered. Although post and wattle structures dominate the archaeological record of the Viking period, nevertheless, it will be shown that the Roman tradition of carpentry, evidenced in the early medieval mills from the early seventh century, continued in use in the wider Gaelic community. And it is one of the pivotal points of this study, that with the takeover of Dublin by the Gaelic Irish in the late tenth century, this Roman carpentry tradition was gradually assimilated into the carpentry tradition of the Viking towns, which were now largely inhabited by a mixed population of Hiberno-Norse. Evidence for this Gaelic influence can be seen not only in the gradual replacement of the Viking post and wattle house by timber houses with load-bearing walls, but more importantly by the evidence for waterfront structures founded on baseplates with mortise and tenoned uprights on the pre-Norman waterfront in Cork. Furthermore, it will be shown, that the carpentry techniques used to build the Wood Quay revetments, shortly after the Anglo-Norman conquest in AD 1170, supports this contention.

Ironworking in late medieval Ireland, c. AD. 1200 to 1600

The landscape of late medieval Ireland, like most places in Europe, was characterized by intensified agricultural exploitation, the growth and founding of towns and cities and the construction of large stone edifices, such as castles and monasteries. None of these could have taken place without iron. Axes were needed for clearing woodland, ploughs for turning the soil, saws for wooden buildings and hammers and chisels for the stone ones, all of which could not realistically have been made from any other material. The many battles, waged with ever increasingly sophisticated weaponry, needed a steady supply of iron and steel. During the same period, the European iron industry itself underwent its most fundamental transformation since its inception; at the beginning of the period it was almost exclusively based on small furnaces producing solid blooms and by the turn of the seventeenth century it was largely based on liquid-iron production in blast-furnaces the size of a house. One of the great advantages of studying the archaeology of ironworking is that its main residue, slag, is often produced in copious amounts both during smelting and smithing, is virtually indestructible and has very little secondary use. This means that most sites where ironworking was carried out are readily recognizable as such by the occurrence of this slag. Moreover, visual examination can distinguish between various types of slag, which are often characteristic for the activity from which they derive. The ubiquity of ironworking in the period under study further means that we have large amounts of residues available for study, allowing us to distinguish patterns both inside assemblages and between sites. Disadvantages of the nature of the remains related to ironworking include the poor preservation of the installations used, especially the furnaces, which were often built out of clay and located above ground. Added to this are the many parameters contributing to the formation of the above-mentioned slag, making its composition difficult to connect to a certain technology or activity. Ironworking technology in late medieval Ireland has thus far not been studied in detail. Much of the archaeological literature on the subject is still tainted by the erroneous attribution of the main type of slag, bun-shaped cakes, to smelting activities. The large-scale infrastructure works of the first decade of the twenty-first century have led to an exponential increase in the amount of sites available for study. At the same time, much of the material related to metalworking recovered during these boom-years was subjected to specialist analysis. This has led to a near-complete overhaul of our knowledge of early ironworking in Ireland. Although many of these new insights are quickly seeping into the general literature, no concise overviews on the current understanding of the early Irish ironworking technology have been published to date. The above then presented a unique opportunity to apply these new insights to the extensive body of archaeological data we now possess. The resulting archaeological information was supplemented with, and compared to, that contained in the historical sources relating to Ireland for the same period. This added insights into aspects of the industry often difficult to grasp solely through the archaeological sources, such as the people involved and the trade in iron. Additionally, overviews on several other topics, such as a new distribution map of Irish iron ores and a first analysis of the information on iron smelting and smithing in late medieval western Europe, were compiled to allow this new knowledge on late medieval Irish ironworking to be put into a wider context. Contrary to current views, it appears that it is not smelting technology which differentiates Irish ironworking from the rest of Europe in the late medieval period, but its smithing technology and organisation. The Irish iron-smelting furnaces are generally of the slag-tapping variety, like their other European counterparts. Smithing, on the other hand, is carried out at ground-level until at least the sixteenth century in Ireland, whereas waist-level hearths become the norm further afield from the fourteenth century onwards. Ceramic tuyeres continue to be used as bellows protectors, whereas these are unknown elsewhere on the continent. Moreover, the lack of market centres at different times in late medieval Ireland, led to the appearance of isolated rural forges, a type of site unencountered in other European countries during that period. When these market centres are present, they appear to be the settings where bloom smithing is carried out. In summary, the research below not only offered us the opportunity to give late medieval ironworking the place it deserves in the broader knowledge of Ireland's past, but it also provided both a base for future research within the discipline, as well as a research model applicable to different time periods, geographical areas and, perhaps, different industries..