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This fine study fits into a long-established tradition of transatlantic scholarship. It is also the latest in a line of books discussing Irish nationalism in the US. While Lune looks at the Irish A...

Hornby Castle in the Lune valley was the centre of an estate covering manors in north Lancashire and bordering Westmorland and Yorkshire. This volume by Jennifer S. Holt, a well-known economic and ...

Previous work has presented evidence that the Circle-Octagon Earthworks at Newark Ohio contain numerous features that are aligned to the lunar standstills (extreme rise and set points of the Moon). A Monte Carlo study of randomly constructed octagons is presented to investigate the statistical significance of this evidence. The study investigates the sensitivity of the statistics to a variety of plausible assumptions about the design of the earthworks, the capabilities of the builders, and the type and precision of the astronomical alignments. The results of the quantitative study establish that the statistical significance of the evidence for deliberate astronomical alignment over the entire range of plausible assumptions is far too high to be dismissed. The study reveals that the hypothesis of deliberate astronomical alignment predicts the otherwise unexplained shape of both octagonal earthworks constructed by the Hopewell Culture. The analysis compares the Newark dataset to hypothetical dataset...

From their homeland around the intersection of modern Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, Caddos had a great impact throughout the heartland of Native North America. This impact, developed over a thousand years as the westernmost Mississippians, can best be considered from a broad comparative perspective, extending over space - from the Southwest to the Plains and Southeast - and over time - from the fires of temple mounds to the fireplaces in tipis during peyote meetings of the Native American Church, spread along the Caddo diplomatic network. As with famous examples from the Northwest Coast, Caddos once had complex class rankings. The history of Caddo religion, from ancient priests to the recent prophets known as yoko, recapitulates the collapse and rebirth of the great nations of North America, except that Caddos had the sure guidance of Moon (neesh) and his changing representations

Summary A detailed description of an as yet unrecorded astrolabe quadrant in a private collection is presented. A date between 1291 and 1310 is deduced from the calendrical data engraved on it. The characteristics of the newly recorded instrument have been compared with those of six other medieval astrolabe quadrants. The newly recorded instrument appears to present an early, if not the earliest, stage of development in the history of the astrolabe quadrant. In the comparison the newly recorded instrument is also distinguished by the red and black colours applied to differentiate between the superposed scales of the astrolabe quadrant. The names and the positions of the stars on the instruments were used to establish a connection between two of the instruments studied, those in Rouen and Oxford, and a manuscript tradition on the construction of the astrolabe quadrant, exemplified by MS Oxford Ashmole 1522. The data on three other astrolabe quadrants are shown to stem from star lists in treatises on astrol...

The actual calendars of Indo-European peoples do show intercalary additions to the lunar year but these take the form of intercalary months. Frazer was aware of this, saying that 'there are grounds for thinking that at a very early time the Aryan peoples sought to correct their lunar year, not by inserting twelve supplementary days every year, but by allowing .the annual deficiency to accumulate for several years and then supplying it by a whole intercalary month.' 2 He expressed his puzzlement over this in connection with the Celts of Gaul, commenting: 'Why they abandoned the simple and obvious expedient of annually intercalating twelve days, and adopted instead the more recondite system of intercalating a month of thirty days every two and a half years, is not plain.'3 The answer I have to offer is that the Indo-Europeans never did employ a twelve-day intercalary period but kept the months of the lunar year in line with the natural seasons by inserting intercalary months when required, and that the place of the twelve days in the calendar was not outside the lunar year but inside it. As I see it, the possibility of having a group of twelve days that stand in a functional relationship to the rest of the year arises when the month used in the calendar is not the synodic month of twenty-nine or thirty days but the shorter light month, the period of the moon's visibility. Ten years before Frazer published his remarks, W. H. Roscher had studied the matter of month length in connection with Greek weeks and festivals and had concluded that months of two different lengths-27-8 days and 29-30 days-were known in antiquity, but that the use of the short month of 27-8 days was the older.4 Frazer made no mention of this finding in his discussion of the twelve days, and yet the two ideas of the light month and a set of special days can be seen as complementary and I shall consider them together here. The longest period of the moon's visibility is twenty-eight days and the moon goes through its cycle from new moon, through full moon, to the last crescent of the waning moon in this time. As Plutarch expressed it, referring to the number twenty-eight: 'Such is the number of the moon's illuminations and in so many days does it revolve through its own cycle.'5 Between each pair of light months there is a gap which was called by the Romans the 'interlunium' or 'intermenstruum,' that is, the interval between the moons or the months.6 The treatment of this time of the dark of the moon