<p> The Temple-Palace-Hidden Reservoir complex at Tikal, Guatemala provides insights into human adaptation to fluctuations in water resource availability for almost three thousand years. This thesis examines the question of why the ancient Maya city-state of Tikal was abandoned. Two hypotheses associated with Tikal's reservoir system address possible reasons for abandonment of Tikal. Both hypotheses address a Late Holocene drought, which would have led to insufficient recharge in anthropogenic and natural water features of Tikal. A multi-proxy investigation of solid sediment cores extracted from these features will be used to evaluate the hypotheses. </p><p> Evidence of a Late Holocene drought at Tikal comes from environmental, paleoclimatic, and paleoenvironmental proxies. A review of the history and geography of the Maya Area is provided to determine, in part, if the reservoirs at Tikal remained undisturbed since the Classic Maya abandonment and a geographic visualization of past monumental architecture within the relevant Temple-Palace-Hidden Reservoir system drainage basin is presented to establish the possible sources of anthropogenic, volcanogenic, and non-volcanic reservoir sediments. Reservoir sediments are dated to using ceramic chronology and AMS radiocarbon dating. </p><p> An integration of environmental proxies including magnetic susceptibility, sediment sort, Munsell color, and particle size analysis are used to illustrate varying shifts from cold and dry to warm and wet climatic periods. At least one of the cold and dry climatic period, possibly occurring during the Terminal Classic (A.D. 800 - 925) at Tikal, was both AMS radiocarbon dated and relatively dated from reservoir sediments.</p>

Time and structure; expectation and construction; landscape and architecture; history and myth. The foundation is a joint which carries extraordinary potential to speak of the cultures that built it. This text tells stories about three cultures whose identities are interwoven with their foundation-building. Tracing a path among the distinct ways in which they found, it values the foundation as a marker between anticipating and making in the architectural process; an ambiguous joint between land and building; an invisible structure of the surfaces we touch; and an indicator of an attitude towards time. The narrative begins in Rome and concludes in the James Bay Lowlands of Northern Canada. Both indigenous cultures represent extremes in notions of ???foundation???: Rome???s tufa block substructures have borne buildings stratified over millennia; while the subarctic Omushkego Cree have traditionally had no permanent foundations, their building traces perceived in subtle differences of soil composition. A third base in the Netherlands is both a fulcrum and foil, as the nation???s diverse local and large-scale strategies negotiate heavy and light building traditions, and offer another distinct set of considerations in preparing ground. The aim of this book is two-fold. Firstly, it is to restore the foundation to the purview of the architect. Groundwork is more than a technical puzzle: it is also a deeply imaginative act. Secondly, this text seeks to understand why cultures found the way they do, and to give consideration to the unique inheritances offered by diverse foundation-building traditions.

The implication of belief, that association between the veridical ghost tale and the fictional ghost tale—an association resulting from the onslaught of reason and science, and consequently spiritual doubt—remains largely responsible for the fictional ghost tale’s critical demise. A rise in the spiritualist movement produces a specific literature that coincides with the rise in interest in its fictional counterpart. Both the veridical ghost tale and the fictional ghost tale reach their heights in popularity at precisely the same time; not coincidental, but well planned by talented writers who viewed the preoccupation with ghosts as a platform from which a variety of contemporary issues could be candidly dealt. The Victorian literary ghost figure simultaneously, and ingeniously, fills a spiritual void, satisfies a consumer need for entertainment, and provides an opportunity for cultural commentary. The voice of the Victorian ghost, and the subsequent understanding of its haunted are of distinct cultural significance.

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The implication of belief, that association between the veridical ghost tale and the fictional ghost tale—an association resulting from the onslaught of reason and science, and consequently spiritual doubt—remains largely responsible for the fictional ghost tale’s critical demise. A rise in the spiritualist movement produces a specific literature that coincides with the rise in interest in its fictional counterpart. Both the veridical ghost tale and the fictional ghost tale reach their heights in popularity at precisely the same time; not coincidental, but well planned by talented writers who viewed the preoccupation with ghosts as a platform from which a variety of contemporary issues could be candidly dealt. The Victorian literary ghost figure simultaneously, and ingeniously, fills a spiritual void, satisfies a consumer need for entertainment, and provides an opportunity for cultural commentary. The voice of the Victorian ghost, and the subsequent understanding of its haunted are of distinct cultural significance.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Francisco with the University of California, Berkeley, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-02, Section: A, page: 0611. Adviser: Vincanne Adams.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2211. Advisers: Anya P. Royce; Eduardo Brondizio. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 21, 2007)."

This thesis will re-evaluate the Chartist movement through research into day-to-day practice in four areas: sociability, material networks, gender and political subjectivity. It will demonstrate that Chartism's activism and the everyday lives of its members were indistinct. In the early years of the movement and the years preceding it, activism and political thought engaged with the quotidian to successfully build a movement that was not only relevant to but an integral part of people's everyday lives. This thesis will analyse how this interaction was not limited to Chartist activists politicising everyday grievances, but also how day-to-day practices and relationships contributed to the infrastructure, intellectual culture and political programme of the movement. This thesis will make original contributions to a number of debates. It challenges the dominant view of Chartism as first and foremost a political movement distinct from its social conditions. It will be argued that this dichotomy between the political and the social cannot be sustained, and it will be shown that activists were most successful when they drew from and were part of society. It will criticise the related trend in studies of Chartism and Radicalism to focus on political identity, meaning and forms of communication. It will argue that these topics are valuable, but need to be seen within a wider existential framework and integrated with an approach that sees cultural activity as one part of a range of activities. As such, it will illustrate the ways that cultural practices are bound with social relationships. Following this, it will make the case for practice to be looked at not just in symbolic or ritualistic terms but also in terms of day-to-day activities that were crucial for the development and maintenance of political movements. It will be argued that prosaic, mundane and day-to-day activities are integral aspects of social movements and as such are worthwhile areas of research. Finally, it will add to our understanding of Chartism by providing biographical information on Henry Vincent, an under-researched figure, and the south west and west of England, under-researched regions. This thesis is organised into two parts. The first will follow the work of activists in developing Chartism in the south west of England from the end of the Swing Riots until the Chartist Convention of 1839. Here it will be argued that Chartism relied upon a close and intensive interaction between activists and the communities they were politicising, with the result being that the movement was coloured by the politics, intellectual culture and practices of those communities. The second section will look at how the private lives and social networks of individual activists were integral to their political ideas, rhetoric and capacity to work as activists. Correspondence, documents produced by the state, the radical press and the internal records of the Chartist movement all shed light on the way everyday life and political thought and action merged.

This study examines the critical prose written by William Butler Yeats in the period 1896-1903, and identifies the evolution within it of a mode of literary history. I concentrate on Ideas of Good and Evil, and on the selected edition Poems of Spenser. The introduction examines notions of golden ages and of original fracture, and the insertion of these tropes into a variety of literary histories. I consider some of the aims and problems of literary history as a genre, and the peculiar solutions offered by Yeats's approaches. I give particular attention to Yeats's alternation between two views of poetry: as evading time, and as forming the significant history of nations. The first chapter examines those essays in Ideas of Good and Evil written earliest. I consider the essays on Blake first, because Blake was the most significant influence on the writing of Yeats's idiosyncratic literary histories. I proceed to the essays on Shelley, on a new age of imaginative community, and on magic. The second chapter demonstrates how Yeats's ideals and ideas became modified in more practical considerations of audience, poetic rhythm and theatrical convention, and I identify the new kinds of literary history in the essays on Morris and Shakespeare, which are concerned with fracture, limitation and the loss of unmediated access to timeless imaginative resources. The third chapter briefly examines Yeats's very early imitations of Edmund Spenser, and then considers the uses of literary history in Yeats's edition of Spenser. The final chapter identifies Yeats's later returns to Spenser, and shows how the earlier modes of literary history governed subsequent adaptations. My conclusion summarises the advantages and limitations of Yeatsian literary history, and place my study into the context of Yeats's whole career, comparing these literary histories with A Vision

This thesis investigates the changing cinematic representations of a particular figure in horror culture: the Zombie. Current critical perspectives on the figure of the Zombie have yet to establish literary and cultural antecedents to the cinematic portrayal of the Zombie, preferring to position it as a mere product of American horror films of the 1930s. This study critiques this standpoint, arguing that global uses of the Zombie in differing media indicate a symbolic figure attuned to changing cultural contexts. The thesis therefore combines cultural and historical analysis with close textual readings of visual and written sources, paying close attention to the changing contexts of global film production and distribution. In order to present the cinematic Zombie as a product of historical, geographical and cultural shifts in horror film production, the thesis begins by critiquing existing accounts of Zombie film, drawing attention to the notion of generic canons of film as determined by both popular and academic film critics and draws attention to the fractured nature of genre as a method of positioning and critiquing film texts. In this, an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the methods of cultural-historical and psycho-analytical critiques of horror film, is appraised and then applied to the texts under discussion. The first chapter positions a working thematic and visual deconstruction of the Zombie as an embodiment of the abject, positioning it as a result of changing cultural discussions in fiction on the nature of death and burial. This establishes a thematic framework to apply throughout the following chapters, noting alterations to representations. The second chapter offers a historicised account of appearances of the fictional Zombie before American cinematic productions of the 1930s, critiquing claims that this is the only original production context for the Zombie. The third chapter charts the changing production contexts of American Zombie film until the mid 1960s, to introduce the critiques of authorial importance placed upon the works of George A. Romero, which are discussed in Chapter 4. This critique in turn questions established notions of generic canon and international influence, which are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. These chapters question the idea of American filmic product dominance in national contexts, charting the discussions of the Zombie body found in differing national cinemas. It is shown that dialogues of representation can be both nationally specific and meant for global audiences, brought about by the changing production and exhibition markets of the 1970s onwards. This in turn challenges the idea that the American model is the dominant representation in the contemporary Zombie film, discussed in Chapter 7. The thesis therefore charts three separate areas for discussion, that of historical, cultural and production contexts that can be held accountable for changing cinematic representations. Particular attention is placed on the thematic and visual use of the Zombie within differing media and firmly position cinematic representations as indicative of wider changes in popular media and their intended audiences. The thesis therefore offers a detailed historical and cultural taxonomy of Zombie film, furthering previous studies, but also presents a more detailed exploration of cultural contexts than previous critics have attempted.