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Polygyny involving high ranking men and women facilitated the mobilization of resources in food, wealth, and labor in Northwest Coast societies. Men were more involved with food procurement and women with food storage. Senior wives of polygynous chiefs supervised the labor of junior wives and slaves, and the creation and allocation of food stores. Greater freedom from mundane tasks gave elite women time to manufacture valuables such as textiles and baskets used in trade and potlatching. Chiefs depended on their wives' relatives for assistance in potlatching, trade, and defense. Polygyny created and reinforced alliances and increased the numerical strength of households and villages, providing economic and political advantages in an area of frequent warfare. Cross-cultural tests for relationships between women's subsistence contributions and polygyny have neglected consideration of food processing and food storage among foragers like Northwest Coast peoples. (Northwest Coast, polygyny, women's economic importance, marriage alliance) ********** Although the Pacific Northwest Coast is a region of cultural diversity, the earliest European accounts of the peoples there and later ethnographic descriptions reveal some recurring themes. These include a reliance on marine resources, especially salmon, extensive food storage, an emphasis on inherited rank and wealth accumulation, dramatic ceremonies and artistic traditions, potlatch feasts, warfare, slavery, and corporate kin group, as well as some individual and/or community ownership of resource harvesting areas (Suttles 1990; Richardson 1982). Two key resources, red cedar and salmon, "formed the environmental base upon which classic Northwest Coast culture was built" (Donald 2003:292); however, shellfish may have been more important in Northwest Coast diets than is usually recognized, particularly for women and those of lower status (see Moss 1993:643). Large, permanent, often multi-family plank houses were occupied during part of the year, while less formidable structures provided shelter at seasonally occupied resource-harvesting sites away from the main villages. While residential mobility was limited, considerable logistical mobility was associated with subsistence activities, trade, warfare, attendance at potlatches, and visiting. Despite a heavy reliance on marine and riverine resources, there was extensive harvesting and storage of land based flora and fauna for manufacturing, food, and medicines. Wood and plant fibers were "absolutely essential to the harvest, transport, processing, and storage of all the other subsistence resources" (Norton 1985:103). Although less widely discussed, polygynous marriage involving high ranking men and women was also common in this region until well into the nineteenth century. Despite the association of polygynous marriage with wealthy or high ranking people throughout the region (Donald 1997:25; Driver and Massey 1957:400; Jorgensen 1980:167-68, 453-54; Suttles 1990), and the voluminous literature on Northwest Coast societies, polygyny has not been a specific focus of ethnological attention. Yet it was arguably a critical aspect of resource management facilitating the mobilization of food resources, other forms of wealth, and labor. The period under discussion extends from roughly the 1770s until the 1860s, encompassing the inception and unfolding of the maritime and land-based fur trade. The boundaries of the Northwest Coast culture area have been variously drawn. Under consideration here are groups that extend from the Eyak, the most northerly of Northwest Coast peoples, to the Takelma, the most southerly (Suttles 1990). According to Jorgensen, the proportion of the married male population in polygynous unions "before contact with, and penetration by, Europeans" (2) (1980:1) was between 11 and 25 percent for many groups, and between 5 and 10 percent for the rest (Jorgensen 1980:453-54). The percentage of married women who were co-wives varied also. …

IN 2003, THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS published Bearing Witness, a volume of interviews that employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) conducted in the 1930s with people who had been slaves in Arkansas.1 The problem the book attempted to solve was that the 176 narratives had been difficult to locate and use, being scattered through forty volumes of interviews collected by George Rawick in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, That awkwardness was the result of the organization of the WPA collection-by the state in which an interview was conducted rather than by the state in which a narrator had lived as a slave.2 The goal in compiling and publishing Bearing Witness was simple: to identify and bring together all the WPA interviews that might shed light on Arkansas slavery.3 That turned out to be a more difficult task than originally envisioned. Where narrators had spent their years as slaves is not always clearly indicated. Moreover, sometimes a slave's experience occurred in several locations, and the narratives as finally written down by the interviewer are often ambiguous with regards to dates and places. In those cases, the narrative must be read carefully, and sometimes detective work is necessary. Given the factor of editorial fatigue, with more than two thousand ex-slave narratives to be examined, it was almost inevitable that some accounts of Arkansas slavery would be missed. The first indication that this had occurred came with the discovery of an excellent recent study of the WPA material by University of Arkansas at Little Rock historian Carl Moneyhon.4 In the course of his analysis, Moneyhon mentioned several texts from Rawick that were narratives of Arkansas slaves but that had been omitted from Bearing Witness. Other recent works on Arkansas slavery were scrutinized for evidence of narratives that might have been missed.5 Then the Rawick volumes themselves were re-examined in the hope of identifying any further omissions, with closer reading given to the Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas collections. The results were sobering. Ten more accounts of former Arkansas slaves were located, as well as others that mention experiences in post-emancipation Arkansas. Those ten additional narratives are offered here as an addition to the Arkansas slavery volume, in the hope that they bring the project to completion. These additional interviews will be included in subsequent editions of Bearing Witness to be published by the University of Arkansas Press. Ashley County Fortenberry, Judia6 Age: 75 712 Arch Street Little Rock, Arkansas Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor "I was born three miles west of Hamburg in Ashley County, Arkansas, in the year 1859, in the month of October. I don't know just what day of the month it was. "My mother was named Indiana Simms and my father was named Burrell Simms. My father's mother was named Ony Simms, and my mother's mother was named Maria Young. I don't know what the names of their parents was. "My mother's master was named Robert Tucker. My father's master was named Hartwell Simms. Their plantations were pretty close together, but don't know how my father and my mother got together. I guess they just happened to meet up with each other. The slaves from the two plantations were allowed to visit one another. After their marriage, the two continued to belong to different masters. Every Sunday, they would visit one another. My father used to come to visit his wife every Sunday and through the week at night. "My mother had ten children. Houses "I was born in a log house with one room. It was built with a stick and dirt chimney. It had plank floors. They didn't have nothin' much in the way of furniture-homemade beds, stools, tables. We had common pans and tin plates and tin cans to use for dishes. The cabin had one window and one door. Patrollers "I have heard my mother and father tell many a story of the pateroles. …

The novella Friihiing is an account-in the form of a countdown-of the last 39 seconds in the life of the pharmacologist Christian Rauch, who commits suicide with his lover Gucia in Spring, 2000. Gucia, a Polish prostitute, is the daughter of a victim: her mother was interned in the concentration camps Ravensbruck and Dachau. Christian is the son of a perpetrator, a former SS doctor who performed medical experiments in Dachau. The setting of the novella is a city of death which Christian enters as he begins to die. Here he must orient himself and recover the memory of his life. The novella-for which, on the whole, Goethe's definition still holds true, namely the "account of an unheard-of event"-struck me as the best possible form for the extreme story I wanted to tell. -TL :3 APPELL, HERR DOKTOR, APPELL! There is no longer any doubt about the place, there are only. The last and. The crucial doubts, as we stand here in the lightwaves of the days and years stand in the tide of time over the square of the man-eaters, which is extinct, frozen over, sealed, which could be filled up, dug out, covered with concrete, but never destroyed: this is how the man in our garden stood, Robert, here at this spot, APPELL, even the dead had to be brought out, the sick, the dying, the new dead every morning, APPELL, Robert, in front of the barracks in the avenue of white poplars whose branches pierce the sky like the skeletons of burned-out flames in the flicker of the timelightwave (suddenly the house, Gucia, something is still visible a. Struggle with your shadow. You have. Aimed. The revolver. At him.) today only the two of us are on the square, today, on this sunny day but in the flicker of time thousands stand with shaven heads, in striped pants, thin shirts stiff with filth, in a winter night, until dawn breaks and new frozen bodies are dragged up from the ground: APPELL: I cannot see them, Robert, I only guess at them: thousands upon thousands and so many of them trusting in the future: in us, Robert, but I could. Only live my life and dream of a stadium of final. Healing: of doctors with no touching. Maybe you still see a figure behind my back, the dark friend who takes. Me to these places where. No one can breathe now where. Must we begin, Robert? Still you say. Nothing, you do not move your lips, you are there and. Not there. With a single question we came to this place, alone, many years. Apart. Did you know, do you know the. Answer? Had you already learned it from the man in: our garden, back then. Without. Asking I. Believe: not, Robert, but you went in search, you. Spoke with the unextinguishable ones, only to me you said: nothing, I was only fourteen. When you threw yourself in front of the train but now it is time together we cross the square walk out onto it again from the entrance so easily open the gate which swings on its hinges at eye level the iron writing recedes R B E I T CHT FRE you walk in front of me, Robert, through the screaming emptiness of the present of this square in which all that can be seen is what we know: a summer day in the dispensary, Gucia (as if you had to know her, Robert, as if all three of us could soon speak together), on which dr. x. gazes out over a goldfish bowl at his side an orderly who murders for gold teeth and behind him the fever-stricken for whom he ordered the bell-glass with the mosquitoes bavarian malaria, Robert: was that what you found out Dr. X's visits to Dr. R.?: in the winter nights the naked people shackled to plank beds and doused with cold water: in tubs filled with ice water prisoners float screaming in pain: the limbs intentionally laid open and made to putrefy: those plunged from 15,000 meters filmed right on the ground in the altitude chamber in the last spasms of vivisection skull opened air embolism in the brain vessels: What do we know, Robert, but that Dr. X. had no parents and that we were halved grandchildren with a dead half and a living half almost happily orphaned but in the wrong generation. …

One day in August 1999, when I had nothing urgent to do on my own project, I went to visit the "Collection of H. B. Jassin," the national literary archives in Jakarta. A friend had recently mentioned Chairil Anwar, the poet, in an interesting way, so I went to see what is there, in the archives, of the man. The archives building is in "Ismail Marzuki Gardens," a complex of several cultural institutions, located not far from the city center. The taxi took me to the Gardens, passed the guard at the main gate, turned right, and stopped there. Arrows pointed to the archives, toward an area where there was no more asphalt, just a trace of a grassy path surrounding the big building in front of which the taxi stopped. Through the open doors and windows, in this building's otherwise empty halls, I saw pairs of, evidently cultural, officials playing Ping-Pong. The arrows led me further around the building, among and over heaps of trash-insect-buzzing and rat-lively, soft, and occasionally ankle-deep. At the end of the path, at the back of the Ping-Pong building, at a stinking pond, a man in a stark-white shirt and dark starch-ironed trousers was fishing. Crossing over an unsteady plank, across a pool of even more stinking sewage, I entered the archives.

Eight thousand years ago, when humans played only bit parts in the world ecosystem, trees covered two-fifths of the land. Since then, humans have grown in number while thinning and shaving the forests to cook, keep warm, grow crops, plank ships, frame houses, and make paper. Fires, saws, and axes have cleared about half of the original forestland, and some analysts warn that within decades, the remaining natural forests will disappear altogether. But forests matter. A good deal of the planet's biological diversity lives in forests (mostly in the tropics), and this diversity diminishes as trees fall. Healthy forests protect watersheds and generate clean drinking water; they remove carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere) from the air and thus help maintain the climate. Forests count?not just for their ecological and industrial services but also for the sake of order and beauty. Fortunately, the twentieth century witnessed the start of a "Great Restoration" of the world's forests. Efficient farmers and foresters are learning to spare forestland by growing more food and fiber in ever-smaller areas. Meanwhile, increased use of metals, plastics, and electricity has eased the need for timber. And recycling has cut the amount of virgin wood pulped into paper. Although the size and wealth of the human population has shot up, the area of farm and forestland

This article examines the discourses of educational decentralization in the South African context. It considers the shifting and contested definitions of the concept as it relates to three broad dimensions of the policy: administrative, political, and ideological. Further, it discusses understandings of educational decentralization as they are being evidenced in current policy development in South Africa. It also critically examines notions of educational decentralization embedded in recent legislation and the tensions and contradictions contained therein. Last, it highlights a particular manifestation of educational decentralization in the South African context: the tension between national and provincial educational competencies and decision making. INTRODUCTION Decentralization is currently the stated policy of most educational systems throughout the world and is the central plank of major international efforts aimed at restructuring education systems. The thrust toward decentralization is evident in the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) of England and Wales (Bash & Coulby, 1991; Bowe, Ball, & Gold, 1992). It is also evident in the "Tomorrow's Schools" report of the Australian government and in the changes effected as a result of that report (Gordon, 1992; Lauder & Wylie, 1990). It can be seen as well in the changes made to the Dutch educational system since 1982 (Sleegers & Wesselingh, 1993); in Brazilian education since the 1980s (dos Santos Filhos, 1993); and in current South African policy texts (Republic of South Africa Department of Education [RSADE], 1996). Additionally, educational decentralization is supported by international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Bloomer, 1991; Prawda, 1993). This article examines the discourses of decentralization in the South African educational context. It begins by reviewing the literature on educational decentralization and highlighting the shifting and contested definitions of the concept as it relates to three broad dimensions of the policy: administrative, political, and ideological. Section two discusses understandings of educational decentralization as they are being evidenced in current policy development in South Africa. This discussion extends the author's previous research on the topic before the 1996 elections (Sayed, 1995), with a specific focus on the impact of the South African Schools Act of 1996 (SASA).' The third section critically examines notions of educational decentralization embedded in the SASA legislation and the tensions and contradictions contained therein. The final section highlights a particular manifestation of educational decentralization in the South African context: the tension between national and provincial educational competencies and decision making. THE NOTION OF EDUCATIONAL DECENTRALIZATION The Administrative Dimension Most publicly justified claims for educational decentralization are based on the administrative dimension. Advocates focusing on structural issues related to a given educational system are principally concerned with the ways in which educational resources are distributed, managed, and utilized. The key questions in this regard are (a) how can education be most efficiently and effectively provided, and (b) what are the most responsive and flexible structures for meeting local and recipient needs (Prawda, 1993; Rodinelli, McCullought, & Johnson, 1987)? These questions point out that administrative decentralization has more to do with the implementation of educational policies and priorities than with their identification and development. Spatial and territorial redistribution of control over these aspects tells very little, however, about the power structures that exist in a particular educational system. In a decentralized system, control over key policy decisions may still be retained at the administrative center. …

though two ring sequences of 43 and 45 years were measured. However, samples submitted for radiocarbon dating at Cardiff have produced a date between 262 and 409, while a detailed analysis of the pottery from the overlying levels is now underway. Jennifer Hillam has also reported that all the samples were identified as oak (Quercus spp.), and that all the wall planks had been split or cut tangentially from the tree. The structure has some similarities to one recently published from Southwark,3 although the dimensions and the fine detail of the construction technique differ somewhat. The Southwark building, preserved by waterlogging, measured 4.75 by at least ii m, and used carpentry jointing throughout rather than iron spikes. Nonetheless, the plank floors laid over joists, albeit more closely spaced than in the Pumsaint example, and the plank walls with infilling behind them and uprights supporting them, suggest a structure of the same general type. The excavators suggest that the Southwark building may have been used as a warehouse providing cool storage for perishables such as wine and foodstuffs, possibly packed in barrels or amphorae and thus leaving no remains on the floor. Its construction has been provisionally dated to the early second century. This interpretation would be quite conceivable for the building at Pumsaint, although there are reasons for believing that its eventual date will turn out to be slightly later, reflecting the known chronology of the military sequence at the site. In an effort to clarify the function of the building, bulk environmental samples were taken from the deposits (534/543) immediately above and below the plank flooring, although the results are still awaited.

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the participation of African Americans in school politics in the urban South. Some notable incidents have been recounted, and patterns of inequality between Black and White schools have been documented, but the kinds of synthetic historical accounts of growth and change in the educational opportunities available to Black children that have recently been produced for several northern cities are still lacking for most southern cities (Homel, 1990). In an earlier article we presented such an account of Black school politics in Atlanta (GA), in which we identified a pattern of changes in the immediate goals and tactics adopted by African American leaders in their century-long effort to win better schools for their community (Plank & Turner, 1987). In the present article we contrast Black school politics in Atlanta with those in Memphis (TN) and show how the divergent political structures of the two cities produced very different sets of opportunities and constraints for African Americans in the two cities. As in Atlanta, Black leaders in Memphis adapted their goals and tactics to the changing political circumstances of their community; yet, because the political histories of the two cities are very different, the patterns of interaction between Black leaders and the public school system are proven to be dramatically different as well. The crucial difference between Black school politics in Atlanta and in Memphis involves the participation of African Americans in city politics. From the start, White politics in Atlanta were organized around Black exclusion. A Black Republican, William Finch, was elected to the Atlanta city council in 1871, but thereafter no Blacks held public office in that city until the 1960s. Divisions in the White electorate sometimes allowed Blacks to play a role in local elections in the years immediately following the Civil War, but the ensuing competition for Black votes was universally decried among Whites. The institution of a White primary in 1892 brought an effective end to Black political participation in Atlanta, and it was only on the rare occasions when meaningful citywide elections were held (e.g., mayoral recall, bond referenda) that Blacks enjoyed real power (Plank & Turner, 1987; Turner, 1990).

Dendrochronology Report117 Four samples were submitted. Their ring-sequences matched together to make a chronology of 266 years. Three samples from plank matched with high t-values which suggested that they were riven from the same tree; the other, a wedge, was probably a piece of re-used timber or from the centre of a long-lived tree. The planks had complete sapwood and the timber was felled in mid-summer A.D. I32 (t-value v London, 7.2).

All his life John Stink was a loner. No one knew what his name really was before it became John Stink, and local tribal history says that the name was given to at least one other man in the area. Effie later said that the first man to use the name was earlier called John Looks Pretty, or John Pretty Man. It all depended on how it was translated, and by whom. Towards the end of his life there seemed to be some confusion about his tribal status and his relationship with the people to whom he belonged. None of the tribes wanted to claim him at that point. But John Stink spoke the languages of that region. He belonged to one of the tribes, tribes that were definitely related. The tribes had been removed to Indian Territory in the latter part of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century most of the people had undergone a transformation that encompassed virtually every part of their lives, from the intangible spiritual side to their mirroring the appearance of their white neighbors as best they could. John Stink was the exception. He was always different. However, these differences weren't always within his control. After all, he was a sick man. As a child he must have been frail, because as a man he was never well, or "not right," as the people whispered. He was a short, thick man, not plump or heavy. He did not look sickly. It was a contradiction the people took very seriously. His legs were bowed, and he covered his feet in plain moccasins decorated on the fold with floral patterns, beaded in an assortment of colors. He also wore a dark vest with beaded green leaves, a curling vine, and red and blue berries winding in a border around his waist and neck. It was a simple design he paid an older woman to bead for him. These two adaptations in his apparel were the only differences in his whiteman's clothes that he made and insisted upon. When the moccasins and vest became worn, he quickly replaced them with identical ones. On special occasions he added wide, beaded armbands just above the elbows of his long, puffed shirtsleeves. He also had a large, black hat that pushed the top of his ears down. Around the hat was tacked a colorful beaded hatband. His long, thin braids that stopped short of his waist annoyed some of his tribesmen. They had closely cropped hair just like the whitemen. By any standard other than the tribes', John Stink would have been considered a wealthy man. He owned a few acres of land. It wasn't much, but it was enough for John Stink. He had built himself a house on that land, putting it together plank by plank with his own hands. He lived there all his life. The floor was dirt, but later John Stink told Effie that it didn't matter. He had no family. His old parents died when he reached middle age. He did not father children because no woman would have him and he did not marry. He did not have any living kin that he or anyone else knew of, and therefore he was considered a "poor" man. Besides the fact that he was a poor man, John Stink's other affliction was a mysterious sickness that plagued him since childhood. He had seizures that none of his people had ever seen in any other of their tribesmen. His first attack came upon him when he was no more than eight. It came with a viciousn'ess and ugliness that left John stunned. His playmates drew back from him in horror. It did not stop there but continued for the rest of his life. After that John Stink was always a loner. Effie first saw John Stink in the church house. He entered late and left early, before the preacher finished the sermon. The few people sitting in the stiff, wooden pews stirred uneasily when he came in and sat down. Effie didn't hear him enter at all. But when everyone shuffled around in the benches and looked to the back of the church, she did too. There sat John Stink, alone. He ignored the other disapproving faces and looked at Effie.

N ONE EDITION of Isaac Bashevis Singer's story "Gimpel the Fool," the concluding paragraph carries the line: "At the door of the hotel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away."' Lying on his "bed of straw," his shrouds in his sack, ready to greet his Maker at the door of the hotel, Gimpel, turned itinerant beggar-a shnorrer-awaits death. In the opening paragraph of the story, Gimpel tells us that he "was no weakling. If I slapped someone he'd see all the way to Cracow." It would seem that when he left his village of Frampol to go "into the world" and after having "wandered over the land," Gimpel ended up in Cracow, for where else, apart from cities such as Lublin or Warsaw, would one find a hotel? An inn would be remarkable enough. Inevitably the question arises: By what strange set of circumstances does it happen that a shnorrer ends his life in a hotel? Yet it is Gimpel himself who says: "... the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn't happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference can it make? Often I heard tales of which I said, 'Now this is a thing that cannot happen.' But before a year had elapsed I heard that it actually had come to pass somewhere."'2 We are left with a typical transformation in the alchemistry of Singer's universe: Gimpel leaves his world in order to enter the world and ends by returning to his station in the world he repudiated. Everything is possible. There are Jews everywhere, even shnorrers in hotels. The alternative, simpler explanation is not altogether free of Singerian demons: the typographical error which turned Gimpel's hovel into a hotel may have been generated by an imp, by the resentful or embittered typesetter carrying on a last skir

Let me begin with now, not instant now, 8 November 1985, slightly after one o'clock, but real-time now, Saturday, 26 October, 11:20 in the morning, now as I write. To fulfill my SCMLA office, I have abandoned my LSU office and sit, hunched up, shirt-sleeved, in my wife's office, at her desk, using her computer. I have run away from my LSU office, from the freshman papers that clutter my computer area, the texts I must prepare for Monday's classes, unanswered correspondence, the telephone, from public me. I have run away, too, from domestic me, the checkbooks to be balanced, my weekend household chores, my daughter's soccer game. And so I have arrived here, now, at the familiar, yet exotic psychic space where one reads, thinks, and writes. This space has always felt fetal to me: in the world, and in time, but not quite of either, necessary for life, but insufficient to it. Insufficient because I know that as I enter this space, shirt-sleeved, and try to describe it, I do so in order that, pin-striped, I can stand before you and speak what now I am writing. Lords and ladies, I offer you this double, this superimposed image of me as an emblem for what I want to celebrate. Immodestly, I sing of what is past, or passing, or to come. Eighteen years ago, at SCMLA, I read my first conference paper. The lectern at which I read had been resurfaced with a plank of brittle linoleum. I was so nervous that during the course of my talk I broke off a piece of that plank and, befuddled by embarrassment, stuck it in my pocket. Later one of my colleagues eased my embarrassment by observing that my action augered well for my future. At least, he remarked, I had not come away from my first public reading empty-handed. I certainly had not. From the moment that, two days before, my colleagues and I piled helter-skelter, chaired professors and instructors, into the several university cars provided for the trip to Houston, I began to profit from my first SCMLA convention. Table fellowship, departmental gossip, scholarly disagreements, hints about archival resources, serious talk about teaching, all displayed for me the significance of a community I previously had not rightly recognized. United by a common experience of solitary thought about language and by a shared recognition of the humanizing value of the products of such thought, this

A Plank Tank from Nantwich. Robina McNeil and A.F. Roberts write: In July 1985 Mr and Mrs Piggin of St Anne's Lane, Nantwich were digging foundations for a bungalow (SJ 648523) and uncovered a wooden structure. They collected the finds and contacted Archaeological Services, Liverpool University. On examination the structure was found to be a plank-built tank, or box, which was sunk into a tailor-made pit. The tank consisted of two courses of edge-set planks. Of the lower course the four interlocking radials, split slightly wedge-shaped, had identical dimensions (I.58m x o.32m x o.o4-o.o8 m), with a tenon at either end on one edge only. The planks interlocked with one tenon resting on the shoulder of the next plank, to form a square tank with internal measurements of i.44m (4ft 9ins). This method of construction needs no pegs or nails to tie the members together. The varying width of the planks meant that in some instances the tenon protruded for up to o.o4m beyond the outside edge of the tank. A square tapering stake and a large wooden chock were rammed against the exterior to prevent the sides of the container from collapsing outwards. This type of jointing is favoured in the construction of square or rectangular boxes, as for instance the Saxon well at Portchester Castle67 and Well IV at Colchester,6" which have similar bracing timbers, and was developed periodically in conjunction with saddle joints, in the top tiers of the Skeldergate Well, York.69 The higher planks rested directly on the base wall planks. The west plank and presumably its eastern counterpart had a tenon under which the north and south planks were held in positions. These upper planks appear to have been set in front of the base wall planks. This position is probably the result of slumping and the correct position is either directly above the lower planks or set behind them. The wood of the superstructure was less well preserved than the lower planks, so, although the timbers appear ill-fitting, they may originally have been more substantial and designed to repeat the jointing of the lower timbers. The tank has no floor. Immediately above the natural sand was a dense organic mat which has been identified as cess. The majority of the finds were found by the landowner whilst digging out the foundations. They came as far as it was possible to ascertain from the deposits immediately above the tank. A few more sherds were found later in the spoil heap. No finds were recovered from the tank or from its surrounding pit; except for two or three sherds of post-medieval pottery, the pottery was of Roman date and is discussed below.

sides, the plank measures 27"7 cm by 17.4 cm, and is 3*5 cm thick. The edges are bevelled on top and bottom, and the surviving section of seat-hole, when ext nded, has an estimated diameter of 19.-o cm. These dimensions compare well with surviving stone examples at Cuicul, Sabratha and Leptis Magna, and confirm the view that it forms the front section of a standard 'key-hole' pattern lavatory-seat-making it the first wooden example from Britain. Large public lavatories in Roman Britain appear to be confined to Coloniae and municipia where the numbers of population created a demand for public services, including sanitary facilities, to be maintained by economic growth and constant use. Examples of combined-system sewerage are to be found at Lincoln, Colchester and York, with latrines at Silchester, Verulamium and Wroxeter. In the lesser centres, small towns and villas, the need for sanitation remained, but economics of construction and maintenance favoured smaller or seperate systems, and drains are more often used either for surface water or to channel foul water into individual soak-aways. The lack of complex sewerage arrangements at Neatham, and the large number of pits, suggest that this find belongs to a simple domestic lavatory-either part stone (many of the examples at Ostia must have been provided with wooden seats, though their frequent absence may also result from later stonerobbing), or a cess-pit with seat supported by corner posts (as at Porchester). Its surprising thickness is essential if it is to be strong enough to support someone whilst retaining the accommodating slot in the front-a functional necessity omitted in many reconstructions.

CHARLES WILLSON PEALE'S EXHUMATION OF THE MASTODON OF 1806-08 IS ALready familiar to all students of American art. This painting of an early scientific excavation was one of the most elaborate produced in this country in the early 19th century, and still comprises one of the most arresting scenes in all of our art. In its own time it was practically unique. Historians like to observe that when American painting consisted chiefly of portraiture and a handful of landscapes and history pieces, here, mirabile dictu, was a genre painting,1 or, as Larkin puts it, a painting in the spirit of genre. 2 Everyone knows that an actual event is depicted and that Charles Willson Peale, always the realist, rendered certain details, such as the great wheel lifting water from the marl pit, the plank tool room in the middle ground and the army tent for sleeping in the background with remarkable fidelity. Yet, as Peale scholars are aware, the Exhumation, completed seven years after the digging itself, is a highly imaginative recreation. Of the many figures in the scene, only three had taken part in the digging on the upper New York farm of a certain John Masten during the summer of 1801: Peale himself, who holds up the drawing of a bone and gestures toward the pit, his eldest son Rembrandt who stands beside him and helps him hold the drawing, and John Masten, who in the foreground climbs out of the pit on a ladder. The Exhumation obviously became more and more elaborate. From a letter to Benjamin West of December 16, 1807, we learn that at one point that year the painting contained "upwards of fifty figures" at completion the next year there were seventy-five-of which eighteen were portraits

HISTORIANS HAVE TRADITIONALLY built the early modemrn English state on two educational planks. One was that of a so-called new learning, renaissance humanism, coming into England shortly before hops and reformation. The entry of this new learning has been pushed back into the fifteenth century, (X) and some have even been so discourteous as to cast aspersions upon its value. (2) Yet it continues to attract scholarly attention. The other plank of the old orthodoxy was that which held that the new education paved the way for the training and public service of the middle classes, and so made possible the rise of those famous new men of Tudor England. Though the middle classes, as is well known, have been rising since the first merchant married a landowner's daughter in Ur of the Chaldees, rarely has the progress been as rapid and as dramatic as in the merry days of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Or so the old story went. But now we hold that those educational milestones were but part of a larger "educational revolution." (3) And this revolution embraced more education for everyone, not just for the "new middle classes"; more literacy, more school foundations, more school attendance, more university participation, more training at the Inns of Court, more reading and writing, more books, more printers, more patronage of letters, more general culture. One specific feature, of great social as well as cultural interest, is of significance here. We now hold that the Tudor aristocrats, as well as their ever-rising and ubiquitous inferiors, were getting more education, and especially more university education. (4) Professor Stone has told us that by

THERE WAS FOR MANY YEARS a well-established generalization in American historical scholarship which assumed a direct relationship between the demands of workingmen for free public schools and the establishment of free public schools in certain eastern states in the early nineteenth century. Within the last decade the labor-education thesis has undergone some modification, so that more recent statements allow room for the role of the upper middle class in the building of free schools. (1) Evidently what had been a relatively well-accepted thesis underwent extensive revision within a decade. The focal period for the labor-education hypothesis is the Age of Jacksonian Democracy. The Jacksonian era presents a most promising point of departure, because the year 1829 marked the organization of the Workingmen's Party in New York City. Since the platform of the Workingmen's Party contained a strongly worded plank endorsing public education, the Workingmen seemed to fit ideally the needs of the advocates of the labor-education thesis. Yet there is a distinct possibility that some historians had built their case solely on the activities of a single short-lived political organization. The establishment of free public schools in one state, New York, was a long-term struggle not to be resolved until late in the nineteenth century and

Both the Democratic and the Republican Party in their 1948 presidential campaign platforms promised the enactment into Federal law of practically all the civil rights which Negro and white advocates have demanded in their programs. In 1947 The Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights was published and, in its "recommendations", presented to the juridical machinery of the nation probably as effective a program for civil rights as has ever been devised. When the Democratic Party's 1948 Convention insisted upon adopting their civil-rights plank, some Southern states separated themselves from the National body and formed in opposition the State's Rights Party. In spite of this the Democrats were elected and gained control of both houses of the 81st Congress. The 81st Congress passed no civil rights legislation, and it has been confidently predicted that its conservative successor will not even so much as "launch" a civil rights bill. All this should seem paradoxical if the nature of civil rights is not understood; indeed such an understanding is necessary if we are to estimate properly the effectiveness of civil-rights programs. THE NATURE OF CIVIL RIGHTS

The restoration of the Hedin altar in Rothenburg o.d.T., dated 1466, is described. The polychromed sculptures were cleaned and loose paint was fixed. Methods and materials used in the restoration of the paintings, the areas polychromed in various techniques and the brocade reliefs are mentioned. The altar was protected from direct sunlight. The construction of the shrine and the technique of carving are extensively discussed. Sculptures made from one piece of lime wood were hollowed out and closed with a plank. Traces of rough finishing are visible. Shrine and predella were polychromed after a preliminary assembly of the sculptures. The various techniques used in the undisfigured polychromy are described as they are observed with the unaided eye. It can be shown that the working methods were rational. The fabrication of relief brocades and the various patterns used are discussed in detail. The treatment of the various paintings on the wings, the predella and the reverse of the shrine is reported. ...

The word "statistics" has an unfortunate connotation in the popular mind. For most people it means long columns of meaningless figures, which can be interpreted to support any particular thesis which is being advocated. Nevertheless, the activities of all business are based on statistics, and much of our national policy is determined by them. Our tax program, our budget, our national defense, all are founded upon statistics, and the Marshall Plan, which is now the major plank in our foreign policy platform, depends upon how much assistance the nations of western Europe need and how much we can afford to furnish, both of which can be determined only from a statistical base.

by a single narrow plank, with no hand rail. Probably I could get across safely; but if not-well, a plunge bath would be very refreshing that warm day, but scarcely convenient. However, Mr. Roberts, the first officer, who was in charge of the day's outing, hearing of my dilemma, came and quickly running across the plank, gathered the fern-but was so badly stung by some nettle or insect that it necessitated a call on the ship's doctor, and for the rest of the cruise his bandaged hand was a constant reminder of his kindness and the sting which I had escaped. The fern was Dryopteris tetragona. (To be continued)