William Tilney, Walsingham biography and manuscript extract

from William Tilney's anthology

Land degradation and vegetation distribution in Chott El Beida wetland, Algeria

The aim of this study is to explore the environmental factors that determine plant Community distribution in northeast Algeria. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the vegetation-environment relationships for a study site in the Cholt El Beida wetland, a RAMSAR site in Setif, Algeria. Sixty vegetation plots were sampled and analysed using TWINSPAN and Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) in order to identify the principal vegetation communities and determine the environmental gradients associated with these. 127 species belonging to 41 families and 114 genera were recorded. Six of the recorded species were endemic representing 4.7% of the total species. The richest families were Compositae, Gramineae, Cruciferae and Chenopodiaceae. Therophytes and hemicryptophytes were the most frequent life forms. the Mediterranean floristic element is dominant and is represented by 39 species. The samples were classified into four main community types. The principal DCA axes represent gradients of soil salinity, moisture and anthropogenic pressure. The use of classification in combination with ordination techniques resulted in a good discrimination between plant communities and a greater understanding of controlling environmental factors. The methodology adopted can be employed for improving baseline information on plant community ecology and distribution in often critically endangered Mediterranean wetland areas. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Land degradation and vegetation distribution in Chott El Beida wetland, Algeria

The aim of this study is to explore the environmental factors that determine plant Community distribution in northeast Algeria. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the vegetation-environment relationships for a study site in the Cholt El Beida wetland, a RAMSAR site in Setif, Algeria. Sixty vegetation plots were sampled and analysed using TWINSPAN and Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) in order to identify the principal vegetation communities and determine the environmental gradients associated with these. 127 species belonging to 41 families and 114 genera were recorded. Six of the recorded species were endemic representing 4.7% of the total species. The richest families were Compositae, Gramineae, Cruciferae and Chenopodiaceae. Therophytes and hemicryptophytes were the most frequent life forms. the Mediterranean floristic element is dominant and is represented by 39 species. The samples were classified into four main community types. The principal DCA axes represent gradients of soil salinity, moisture and anthropogenic pressure. The use of classification in combination with ordination techniques resulted in a good discrimination between plant communities and a greater understanding of controlling environmental factors. The methodology adopted can be employed for improving baseline information on plant community ecology and distribution in often critically endangered Mediterranean wetland areas. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Temporality, cultural biography and seasonality: rethinking time in wetland archaeology

Wetland archaeology is uniquely well placed to investigate questions of chronology, temporality, life-cycles and seasonality. Beyond the usual archaeological approaches to time (eg seriation, typology and stratigraphy), most wetland archaeological investigations have access to a ready supply of samples (ie wood, peat and organic deposits) for absolute scientific dating, particularly radiocarbon and dendrochronology. Indeed, the success of dendrochronology in revealing dynamic sequences of site and regional occupation, use and abandonment are well known. Investigating wetland archaeological sites, environmental archaeologists have used the evidence of insects' plant remains, seeds and even testate amoeba to establish the season, or months, of a site's occupation. Soil micromorphologists have carried out innovative studies of settlement deposits to reconstruct the chronological sequences of processes and events leading to their formation. In brief, wetland archaeology has become adept at calibrating past times.

North Sea archaeologies: a maritime biography, 10,000 BC - AD 1500

North Sea Archaeologies traces the way people engaged with the North Sea from the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 BC, to the close of the Middle Ages, about AD 1500, drawing upon archaeological research from many countries, including the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, and France. It addresses topics which include the first interactions of people with the emerging North Sea, the origin and development of fishing, the creation of coastal landscapes, the importance of islands and archipelagos, the development of seafaring ships and their use by early seafarers and pirates, and the treatment of boats and ships at the end of their useful lives. The study offers a ‘maritime turn’ in Archaeology through the investigation of aspects of human behaviour that have been, to various extents, disregarded, overlooked, or ignored in archaeological studies of the land. The study concludes that the relationship between humans and the sea challenges the frequently invoked dichotomy between pre-modernity and modernity, since many ancient beliefs, superstitions, and practices linked to seafaring and engagement with the sea are still widespread in the modern era.

Life before ‘The New Biography’: Modernist biographical methods in the Hogarth Press ‘Books on Tolstoi’ 1920-24

In the early 1920s, before Virginia Woolf wrote her now well-known essays “The New Biography” and “The Art of Biography,” the Hogarth Press published four biographies of Tolstoy. Each of these English translations of Russian works takes a different approach to biographical composition, and as a group they offer multiple and contradictory perspectives on Tolstoy’s character and on the genre of biography in the early twentieth century. These works show that Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press took a multi-perspectival, modernist approach to publishing literary lives.

Technology, ritual and Anglo-Saxon agrarian production: the biography of a seventh-century century plough coulter from Lyminge, Kent

The discovery of an unusual early medieval plough coulter in a well-dated Anglo-Saxon settlement context in Kent suggests that continentally derived technology was in use in this powerful kingdom centuries before heavy ploughs were first depicted in Late Saxon manuscripts. The substantial investment required to manufacture the coulter, the significant damage and wear that it sustained during use and the circumstances of its ultimate ritual deposition are explored. Investigative conservation, high-resolution recording and metallographic analysis illuminate the form, function and use-life of the coulter. An examination of the deposition contexts of plough-irons in early medieval northern Europe sheds important new light on the ritual actions of plough symbolism in an age of religious hybridity and transformation.

Dissolved uranium, radium and radon evolution in the Continental Intercalaire aquifer, Algeria and Tunisia

Natural, dissolved U-238-series radionuclides (U, Ra-226, Rn-222) and activity ratios (A.R.s: U-234/U-238; Ra-228/Ra-226) in Continental Intercalaire (Cl) groundwaters and limited samples from the overlying Complexe Terminal (CT) aquifers of Algeria and Tunisia are discussed alongside core measurements for U/Th (and K) in the contexts of radiological water quality, geochemical controls in the aquifer, and water residence times. A redox barrier is characterised downgradient in the Algerian Cl for which a trend of increasing U-234/U-238 A.R.s with decreasing U-contents due to recoil-dominated U-234 solution under reducing conditions allows residence time modelling similar to 500 ka for the highest enhanced A.R. = 3.17. Geochemical modelling therefore identifies waters towards the centre of the Grand Erg Oriental basin as palaeowaters in line with reported C-14 and Cl-36 ages. A similar U-234/U-238 trend is evidenced in a few of the Tunisian CI waters. The paleoage status of these waters is affirmed by both noble gas recharge temperatures and simple modelling of dissolved, radiogenic He-4-contents both for sampled Algerian and Tunisian CI and CT waters. For the regions studied these waters therefore should be regarded as "fossil" waters and treated effectively as a non-renewable resource. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.