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The origins of Venice have been of great interest to Venetians and to scholars more generally for centuries. Long shrouded in myth and legend due to the dearth of pre-ninth-century AD evidence, recent archaeological research is now illuminating how the famous city built on water began. Using high-resolution AMS dating of peach stones (pits) from below the Basilica of San Marco, the authors provide the first evidence for human activity at what is now the location of Piazza San Marco. Dating to between AD 650 and 770, this activity included canal in-filling and ground consolidation intended to create an area that was to become the city's civic centre in the early ninth century. Keywords: Venice, Piazza San Marco, Basilica of San Marco, AMS dating, Introduction The question of how Venice, the city built on water, began is one of great interest to both the Venetian and the scholar. Over the centuries, writers have spent [...]

Governments across the world have been slow in reacting to meeting the needs of disabled people during the pandemic. This has exposed existing inequalities in social policies, as well as new support barriers. Debates over social care have focused on Covid-19's impact on those living in residential care. Little is known about the experiences of disabled people who rely on daily support in their homes. This article reports on a year-long study examining the experiences of disabled people during the pandemic in England and Scotland. It focuses on the crisis in social care and offers evidence of how lives have been disrupted. For many, this resulted in a sudden loss of services, delayed assessments and break down of routines and communities. Findings underline the weakness of social care in its wider relationship with the NHS and show how the social care crisis has challenged the goal of independent living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The date of the volcanic eruption of Santorini that caused extensive damage to Minoan Crete has been controversial since the 1980s. Some have placed the event in the late seventeenth century BC. Others have made the case for a younger date of around 1500 BC. A recent contribution to that controversy has been the dating of an olive tree branch preserved within the volcanic ash fall on Santorini. In this debate feature Paolo Cherubini and colleagues argue that the olive tree dating (which supports the older chronology) is unreliable on a number of grounds. There follows a response from the authors of that dating, and comments from other specialists, with a closing reply from Cherubini and his team. Keywords: Santorini, Thera, Minoan eruption, radiocarbon dating, tree-rings, Introduction The massive eruption of the volcano beneath the island of Thera (Santorini) in the middle of the Aegean Sea provides a fundamental datum point in the history of the [...]

Both dendrochronology and radiocarbon (14C) dating have their roots back in the early to mid-1900s. Although they were independently developed, they began to intertwine in the 1950s when the founder of dendrochronology, A. E. Douglass, provided dated wood samples for Willard Libby to test his emerging 14C methods. Since this early connection, absolutely dated tree-rings have been key to calibration of the Holocene portion of the 14C timescale. In turn, 14C dating of non-calendar-dated tree-rings has served to place those samples more precisely in time, advance development of long tree-ring chronologies, and bring higher resolution to earlier portions of the 14C calibration curve. Together these methods continue to shape and improve chronological frameworks across the globe, answering questions in archaeology, history, paleoclimatology, geochronology, and ocean, atmosphere, and solar sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Qualitative fit testing is a popular method of ensuring the fit of sealing face masks such as N95 and FFP3 masks. Increased demand due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to shortages in testing equipment and has forced many institutions to abandon fit testing. Three key materials are required for qualitative fit testing: the test solution, nebulizer, and testing hood. Accessible alternatives to the testing solution have been studied. This exploratory qualitative study evaluates alternatives to the nebulizer and hoods for performing qualitative fit testing. Methods: Four devices were trialed to replace the test kit nebulizer. Two enclosures were tested for their ability to replace the test hood. Three researchers evaluated promising replacements under multiple mask fit conditions to assess functionality and accuracy. Results: The aroma diffuser and smaller enclosures allowed participants to perform qualitative fit tests quickly and with high accuracy. Conclusions: Aroma diffusers show significant promise in their ability to allow individuals to quickly, easily, and inexpensively perform qualitative fit testing. Our findings indicate that aroma diffusers and homemade testing hoods may allow for qualitative fit testing when conventional apparatus is unavailable. Additional research is needed to evaluate the safety and reliability of these devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors report on radiocarbon data derived from carefully selected organic material from Late Minoan IA and IB contexts. The results suggest that the accepted chronology of the period should be revised by 100 years and that the eruption of Thera/Santorini most likely occurred c. 1650-1620 BC. Key-words: radiocarbon, Late Bronze Age, Thera, Late Minoan, chronology, Introduction Marked controversy surrounds the dates for both the beginning of the Aegean Late Bronze Age and the associated eruption of the Thera (Santorini) volcano (e.g. Hardy & Renfrew 1990; [...]

Early researchers of radiocarbon levels in Southern Hemisphere tree rings identified a variable North-South hemispheric offset, necessitating construction of a separate radiocarbon calibration curve for the South. We present here SHCal20, a revised calibration curve from 0–55,000 cal BP, based upon SHCal13 and fortified by the addition of 14 new tree-ring data sets in the 2140–0, 3520–3453, 3608–3590 and 13,140–11,375 cal BP time intervals. We detail the statistical approaches used for curve construction and present recommendations for the use of the Northern Hemisphere curve (IntCal20), the Southern Hemisphere curve (SHCal20) and suggest where application of an equal mixture of the curves might be more appropriate. Using our Bayesian spline with errors-in-variables methodology, and based upon a comparison of Southern Hemisphere tree-ring data compared with contemporaneous Northern Hemisphere data, we estimate the mean Southern Hemisphere offset to be 36 ± 27 14C yrs older. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018 Pearson et al. published a new sequence of annual radiocarbon (14C) data derived from oak (Quercus sp.) trees from Northern Ireland and bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) from North America across the period 1700–1500 BC. The study indicated that the more highly resolved shape of an annually based calibration dataset could improve the accuracy of 14C calibration during this period. This finding had implications for the controversial dating of the eruption of Thera in the Eastern Mediterranean. To test for interlaboratory variation and improve the robustness of the annual dataset for calibration purposes, we have generated a replicate sequence from the same Irish oaks at ETH Zürich. These data are compatible with the Irish oak 14C dataset previously produced at the University of Arizona and are used (along with additional data) to examine inter-tree and interlaboratory variation in multiyear annual 14C time-series. The results raise questions about regional 14C offsets at different scales and demonstrate the potential of annually resolved 14C for refining subdecadal and larger scale features for calibration, solar reconstruction, and multiproxy synchronization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annually resolved tree-ring samples of the time period 1625–1510 BCE were analyzed from the German oak tree-ring chronology. Blocks of the same tree rings were previously used to generate IntCal calibration data. The new dataset shows an offset to the calibration data IntCal13 of 24 years and resembles annual data for the same time period derived from tree-ring records in other growth locations. A subset of samples of the period 1625–1585 BCE was additionally measured in three other laboratories (ETH, AAR, AA) for quality control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A total of 272 oak (Quercus sp.) samples have been collected from large subfossil trees dredged from sediment deposited by the Sava and various tributary rivers in the Zagreb region of northwestern Croatia, and in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Measurement series of tree-ring widths from these samples produced 12 groups, totaling 3456 years of floating tree-ring chronologies spread through the last ca. 8000 years. This work represents the first step in creating a new, high-resolution resource for dating and paleoenvironmental reconstruction in the Balkan region and potentially a means to bridge between the floating tree-ring chronologies of the wider Mediterranean region and the continuous long chronologies from central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implemented as part of the 2005 amendments to the Disability Equality Act, the Disability Equality Duty (DED) placed new and important demands on public sector bodies. All such organisations are required to develop policies and working practices which actively promote the equality of disabled people as employees, consumers or visitors. The promotion of equality has to be proactive as opposed to reactive and must be mainstreamed into the normal day-to-day activities of organisational working practices. Whilst the DED follows on from the framework of previous anti-discrimination legislation set in place over the last 15 years, it represents a significant change in equality legislation and demands that public sector bodies instigate fundamental changes in their approach towards disability. This article reports on the initial stages of the implementation process of the DED across a range of public sector organisations in England, focussing in particular on how this policy has impacted on mainstreaming. Discussion shows that although organisations show awareness of mainstreaming and its implications for disability equality, there is limited evidence to suggest that the public sector has fully embraced this agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Direct payments have been heralded by the disability movement as an important means to achieving independent living and hence greater social justice for disabled people through enhanced recognition as well as financial redistribution. Drawing on data from the ESRC funded project Disabled People and Direct Payments: A UK Comparative Perspective, this paper presents an analysis of policy and official statistics on use of direct payments across the UK. It is argued that the potential of direct payments has only partly been realised as a result of very low and uneven uptake within and between different parts of the UK. This is accounted for in part by resistance from some Labour-controlled local authorities, which regard direct payments as a threat to public sector jobs. In addition, access to direct payments has been uneven across impairment groups. However, from a very low base there has been a rapid expansion in the use of direct payments over the past three years. The extent to which direct payments are able to facilitate the ultimate goal of independent living for disabled people requires careful monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented which discusses various papers within the issue including carbon-14 and isotopic composition of hackberry endocarps at the Neolithic site in central Turkey, study of Hellenistic and Early Roman kilns in Greece, and review of dendroclimatic research across North Africa.