This thesis explore the wide and complex definition of the space named as house in an indigenous community, the Nahuas, located in the Zongolica Mountain Range, Mexico. It will draw on ethnographic research to show how Nahuas relate to the corporeal world (objects and environment) and, through processes of struggle and negotiation, use them to produce this physical space, called house. In doing so, it will uncover a different historical narrative. By examining the "house", and the materials used to produce it, as a space that is lived and built (the house) but also perceived, dreamt and remembered (a home), this thesis highlights interconnections between the study of the physical world (materiality) and the study of social processes (social structure and social relations). For, it is through the rhythms of the Nahua's everyday life including material acts of remembrance and spatial practices of memory, that these physical spaces (their houses) can be better understood. Throughout this thesis I will argue that Nahua delimitation and definition of their houses is continuously changing. This because Nahuas modify their space though their traditions (even those spaces that haven't been explored such as caves and other ones, are modified through their tales and beliefs). These living traditions transfer meaning and orientate both the objects and the environment. Therefore, their objects and the environment (Materiality) is built upon cultural patterns and values that are constantly being modified. Regardless of any processes of subordination, dominance or interrelationship between other groups, Nahuas materiality do not disappear, because it is fluid and dynamic, these becomes modified or reinterpreted. Nahuas Materiality permeates through memory, imagination, traditions, as I will explore through this thesis. Therefore, rather than beginning with a define idea of what a house is -size, architecture, social structure-, this thesis addresses them as complex physical spaces that encapsulates history, religion folklore and knowledge, both materially, spatially and through the oral traditions and storytelling of the communities that produce them, and in turn produced through them. This continuous movement that builds these space-places allow us to uncover the fluid rhythms that built these places. Therefore, this thesis will present the houses as complex spaces that are fluid, rather than walls and intimate spaces, houses are presented as built spaces in constant change with a never clear present; rather, there is an experience based on the past and the projection to the future. By presenting the materiality of the houses that connects people with their environment (to which Nahuas had to adapt) an agentic and meaningful space was built, one that includes the memory of adaptation that construct their Nahua-ness when producing their home Tocha (as they name it), and the projection of this Nahua-ness into the future. Houses then remain in the memory of the Elders and become agents in the construction and consolidation of subjectivities through the knowledge and the rhythms of repetition that constitue their everyday life.

This thesis presents a novel approach to reduce the complexity and overload of information in Cultural Heritage (CH) on the Web through the use of a Tangible User Interface (TUI). It discusses how the Web and its technologies such as the Semantic Web have changed the interoperability and reach that knowledge, data and information can have. These technologies have allowed to link knowledge across CH organisations and helped to reduce uncertainty about the information used to create it. Nevertheless, it is cumbersome for a vast majority of online users to find relevant content, due to the overload of information available and the complexity of its nature. This research argues that this is because two main factors. The first factor is the dependency of Graphical User Interfaces on the Web that hinder complex exploration and technologic engagement for general users. The second factor identifies a requirement for CH organisations to become part of an Online Cultural Heritage ecosystem engaged through an interactive system on the Web. As a result, CH organisations do not have a meaningful system for their users to explore their content. This research addresses these problems by [1] developing an understanding on how CH knowledge is integrated across different organisations and different ways in which users engage and manipulate it and, [2] exploring how a TUI can facilitate the production of complex queries that enables the user to engage with the conceptual and technical information used to describe the knowledge about OCH collections. Chapter One presents an outline of the research problem, aims and objectives. It discusses the new challenges that CH organisation face when engaging with their users on the Web. Chapter Two presents a literature review of the current state of CH organisations, their information and knowledge and how they relate on the Web. Chapter Three argues that on the Web, CH organisations are conceptually and contextually integrated into a single entity that can be called Online Cultural Heritage (OCH). CH studies do not to consider that on the Web, visitors are no longer limited to a particular type of CH organisation (e.g. library, museum), nor to a particular collection held by that organisation. In addition, this chapter gives a brief introduction to Europeana as example of how information is shared across organisations on the Web, as it will be used as main case study later on. After describing the roles that data and information have on the production of knowledge, Chapter Three continues by presenting a literature review that highlights how users transform data into knowledge and their different needs of information when approaching information sources. It further identifies how users engage with Europeana’s information and the interfaces used to do it. Therefore, Chapter Four addresses the relevance that user interfaces have on accessing information, data or knowledge on the Web and particularly OCH. It explains how TUIs can boost performance by providing the required thought structure through physical activities and the use of constructivism as theoretical approach. It introduces interaction design principles (such as Token and Constraint (TAC) and OnObject) where physical affordances are used to convey information to users, thus reducing the complexity of an interactive system. Chapter Five presents the research framework general plan. It introduces the a-priori and aposteriori phases of the research, where the first one focuses on understanding users’ behaviours when querying Europeana and OCH, and Chapter Six will fully discuss Europeana as a case study. The research framework is fully described in Chapter 7 for the a priori section present the a-priori phase as a user centred design experiment where participants express their query behaviours. The test users included people with particular knowledge about cultural heritage objects (e.g. historians, archaeologists) analysing how they convert data into knowledge according to their different levels of need of information. The evaluated results are further used to contextualise the role of the interactive prototype to be designed. Such design process is presented in the following Chapter Eight. This chapter presents the integrated interaction design methodology adapted for the development of the TUI prototype. It presents the evaluation results for both experiments. It concentrates in Usability and UX evaluations to understand the engagement that users have with OCH information through the TUI. Such methods identify emotions and sense of helplessness related to the interactive process. It integrates a usability test to reveal users’ procedural task results that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the system, which alter users’ engagement with the information. Chapter Nine concludes by reviewing the results obtained and highlighting the challenges posed, benefits that the Web and its particular technologies offer to CH organisations, and the need for the adoption of interactive systems such as these, that eases question making processes and allow users to explore complex datasets in a meaningful way, while it also describes future work that can be carried out.

The early dispersals of hominins have been a major focus of Palaeolithic research in the last 50 years. In this dissertation I have applied a formal modelling technique, simulation, to a selection of archaeological research topics concerning hominin dispersals in order to test the suitability of this tool for formal theory development and hypothesis testing. Therefore, the aims of this research are twofold. The archaeological aim is to improve our understanding of hominin dispersals in the Pleistocene, whilst the methodological contribution was achieved by employing a relatively unknown and underused (in archaeology) computational tool. An overview of the existing data pertinent to the topic of Pleistocene hominin dispersals demonstrated that the current methodology used for researching hominin dispersals, that is data analysis paired with conceptual modelling, is unlikely to solve many of the existing research questions highlighting the need to assess a wider range of scientific tools in order to progress. To that end, two case studies were developed using a specific simulation technique: agent-based modelling. The first case study was used to evaluate if, and under what conditions, the early ‘Out of Africa’ dispersal could lead to a specific demographic pattern reflected in a disparity between two regions with different stone tool traditions known as the Movius line. The model comprises a dynamic environmental reconstruction of Old World vegetation in the timeframe 2.5-0.25 Ma, coupled with standard biological models of population growth and dispersal. It is demonstrated that, under a wide sweep of both environmental and behavioural parameter values, the demographic consequence of dispersal is not a gradual attenuation of the population size away from the point of origin but a pattern of ecologically driven local variation in population density. The second case study looks at the relationships between climate change, migration and the evolution of behavioural plasticity or versatility among hominins. The agent-based model investigates the dynamics between individuals with different adaptations (including ‘versatilist’ individuals) within a non-homogenous population. The results show that dispersal accelerates the evolution of versatilism in the population, therefore promoting a more flexible range of adaptations. In addition, a set of scenarios was tested in which a dispersal wave crosses an environmental barrier. The results do not support the common intuition that such barriers shape the composition of hominin populations. The methodology presented here opens a new route to understanding large-scale spatiotemporal patterns in the archaeological record as well as to testing many of the previously proposed factors affecting early hominins’ lives. It has the potential to provide new insights into a number of ongoing debates, in particular on the relationship between different processes involved in shaping the past such as demographics and cultural complexity. This study also highlights the potential of simulation studies for testing complex conceptual models and the importance of building reference frameworks based on known proxies in order to achieve more rigorous model development in Palaeolithic archaeology and beyond.

This thesis illuminates two underexplored facets of Plato’s notion of right measure in the Statesman: the cognitive role of imagery and the correct leadership of minds for individuals and political communities. The central chapters of this thesis argue that the cognitive function of images is grounded on their well-articulated combination. The first and last chapters serve to frame this study of imagery within the main subject of the dialogue, namely the correct guidance of human minds. This study is thus divided in five chapters that explore the different facets of right measure in different contexts. The first chapter examines the structure of the Statesman as representing a disrupted dialectical process aimed at discovering the right measure of philosophical judgments. The second chapter studies the notions of paradeigmata and eikones as images to be artfully combined in a cohesive, measured whole. The third chapter accounts for the value of mythical paidia as productive of a clash of images that corrects excesses and invites to seek for measured judgments. The fourth chapter examines Plato’s usage of contrasting images of divine steering and cosmic balance to represent an expert communication of inner harmony. Finally, the last chapter returns to the Statesman as a whole, examining how Plato represents education and educational leadership as communication of a well-composed balance to the mind and to the political community. This project illuminates a frequently overlooked of Plato’s philosophy: its nuanced and flexible attention to the guidance of human minds in need of psychological and political equilibrium.

This thesis reconstructs the Attic and Republican fragments of lost Thyestes tragedies, in order to track the development of the revenge theme through the tragic tradition. Here I reconstruct Sophocles' and Euripides' Thyestean plays by analogy with each tragedian's extant corpus by comparing extracts that resemble the fragments in language and content. To develop an understanding of Thyestes' myth in Attic tragedy, I consider references to Thyestes and his ancestors in the tragedies featuring his descendants, providing points of contrast with Seneca's extant Thyestes. When reconstructing the Republican fragments of Ennius' Thyestes and Accius' Atreus, I consider the quotation context of the fragment, be it in Cicero, the grammarians or later scholia, in order to examine the themes in the surviving lines and their reception. This allows me to explore how the use of Thyestes' myth in the political texts of the Roman Republic shaped Ennius' Thyestes, Accius' Atreus and, in turn, Seneca's Imperial Thyestes. Though I contextualise these fragments in the trend of Thyestes tragedies written by minor Roman tragedians, often politicians, the few fragments of these tragedies and the political careers of the tragedians prevent me from reconstructing them here, since they are not indicative of changing presentations of revenge in tragedy more broadly. Similarly, I have not included sections on the fourth-century Greek fragments of Thyestes tragedies here, given that little in the surviving fragments pertains to the revenge theme. Though my complete monograph would include these 'minor' tragedians, for the purposes of the comparative methodology set out in this thesis I have included the best known playwrights of Thyestes tragedies. This has allowed me to incorporate fragmenta incerta, fragments from mythically relevant tragedies and a discussion of the texts in which the fragments are quoted to provide a more detailed understanding of Thyestes' myth before Seneca. Ultimately, by reconstructing Atreus' motives, supernatural influences and the presentation of Thyestes' feast in Sophocles', Euripides' Ennius' and Accius' works, this thesis argues that Seneca's Thyestes is not a uniquely violent revenge play.

No description available.

The focus of this inquiry is the representation of women in Athenian legal texts and the relationship between gender and responsibility at Athens, centring on forensic oratory and including a discussion of the wider Athenian cultural discourse on gender and politics with a primary emphasis on the analogous public institution of tragedy. My objective is to map the disjunction between imputations of agency and responsibility to women in forensic texts and the actual legal capacities of Athenian women. My interpretative strategy aims to qualify previous positivist or gender-blind approaches to the study of 'women's history' and 'law' and is predicated on a double premise: firstly, that there existed at Athens a gendered analogy between citizenship and access to privileged fora for public speech; secondly, that in a legal discourse over which citizens exercised a narrative monopoly the women represented there are a fictive product of the rhetorical imperatives of litigants. Implicit in this hypothesis is the notion that the assignation of 'real' status to these female characters is radically problematic; my contention is that the appeal to female agency in legal narrative draws on fictional and stereotypical models which are informed by and collaborate in the construction of a standard and normative ideology about woman rather than, or at least as much as, an historical, institutional reality. Chapter I investigates the evidence for the presence of women in court. Chapter II examines women prosecuted, focussing on categories of criminal behaviour and of women accused (primary texts: Antiphon I, [Demosthenes] 59). Chapter III considers women said to prosecute in inheritance cases; it includes a discussion of women's property rights and the relationship between financial and legal responsibility. Chapter IV analyses the commonplace literary topos, standard in 'law' as elsewhere, which defines female agency as seduction, centring on the 'Solonic' law.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.