Gründung und Gestalt der historischen Bibliotheken im heutigen Freistaat Sachsen liegen fast ausnahmslos im Dunkel der Geschichte. Umso erfreulicher ist es, wenn – wie jüngst mit dem Beitrag von Tom Graber, Christoph Mackert und Martina Schattkowsky in der letzten Ausgabe von BIS geschehen – von Forschungsergebnissen berichtet werden kann, die unser Bild von der deutschen Bibliothekslandschaft in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit erhellen (Tom Graber, Christoph Mackert, Martina Schattkowsky: Die Klosterbibliothek von Altzelle, in: BIS 2 (2009) 2, S. 124 – 126). Die Autoren hatten am Beispiel der Bibliothek des Klosters Altzelle die Auswirkungen des Humanismus auf das Büchereiwesen um 1500 im mitteldeutschen Raum dargelegt. Sie berichteten, wie Abt Martin von Lochau, offenbar vom humanistischen Bildungsideal geleitet, die Gründung einer der gelehrten Welt zugänglichen, als „bibliotheca publica“ bezeichneten Büchersammlung forcierte.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Uppsala, 1981. / Includes quotations in Greek. Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 130-134).

Elemental analysis of pottery sherds provided insights on the ceramic production in the Huancabamba Valley (northern highland-Peru) and the way in which the Incas administrate the provinces. The pottery sherds from six archaeological sites selected for elemental analysis indicated the use of similar clay sources in the manufacture of pottery. The production of ceramic vessels took place at the local level without the strict control of the Inca state. The Incas built administrative structures in the Huancabamba Valley in order to maintain control of their road system, which connected the north area of Peru to Ecuador. The ceramic assemblage recovered from Inca sites does not illustrate typical Inca pottery style or decoration from the heartland. The administrative centers built by the Incas throughout the Empire provided the means to support state activities such as pottery production of local wares. In addition, ethno-historic evidence suggests that during the Inca period coastal communities were relocated to highland settlements in order to serve as officers in state facilities, or to maintain the Inca road system. These coastal communities continue producing pottery following the traditional techniques from their homeland.

Student engagement is a multifaceted construct gaining increased interest within the fields of psychology and education. Current literature suggests that student engagement is linked to important student outcomes including academic achievement, psychopathology, and mental wellness; however, there is a dearth of studies that have examined all components of student engagement simultaneously as they relate to the aforementioned outcomes. Additionally, past literature has found support for a decreasing trend in student engagement across the school years, but less attention has been paid to student engagement in the high school years. Among high school students, a particular subgroup has been virtually ignored: high-achieving students enrolled in college-level curricula such as International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP). Research questions answered in the current study pertain to: (a) differences in the components of student engagement among IB and AP students, (b) differences in the components of student engagement of IB and AP students across grade level, (c) the extent to which student engagement relates to academic achievement, and (d) the extent to which student engagement relates to mental health. To answer these questions, self-report surveys and school records data from 727 IB and AP high school students were analyzed. Several main effects for program type and grade level were found among the various dimensions of engagement, as well as two interactions between program type and grade level. Regarding predictive relationships, results indicate that the linear combination of all seven indicators of student engagement accounted for 19.56% of the variance in students' academic achievement, 17.47% of the variance in students' life satisfaction, and 6.17% of the variance in students' anxiety. Implications for school psychologists and future directions are discussed.

Preterm birth continues to be an important public health concern globally. Born only 3 to 6 weeks premature, findings increasingly demonstrate that the late preterm population (34-36 weeks gestational age) is not exempt from long-term risk, as the last few weeks of gestation are important for both physical and cognitive development. This study examined whether late preterm birth was associated with poorer health, development and educational outcomes in the early childhood period, after controlling for a range of medical and social factors. / February 2016

The effectiveness of CO₂ injection in the subsurface for storage and EOR are controlled by reservoir quality variation. This study determines the depositional processes and diagenetic alterations affecting reservoir quality of the Lower Tuscaloosa Formation at Cranfield Field. It also determines the origin, time and processes of the grain-coating chlorite and its impacts on reservoir quality. Moreover, by integrating depositional and diagenetic characteristics and by linking them to sequence stratigraphy, the distribution of reservoir quality, could be predicted within a sequence stratigraphic framework. The studied sandstones are composed of medium to coarse-grained, moderately sorted litharenite to sublitharenite with composition of Q76.1F0.4L23.5. Depositional environment of this formation in the Mississippi Interior Salt Basin is interpreted as incised-valley fluvial fill systems. The cross sections and maps at the field show trend of the sandy intervals within channels with a NW-SE paleocurrent direction. During burial of the sandstones, different digenetic alterations including compaction, dissolution, replacement and cementation by chlorite, quartz, carbonate, kaolinite, titanium oxides, pyrite and iron-oxide modified the porosity and permeability. Among these, formation of chlorite coats plays the most important role in reservoir quality. The well-formed, thick and continuous chlorite coatings in the coarser grain sandstones inhibited formation of quartz overgrowth, resulted in high porosity and permeability after deep burial; whereas the finer grain sandstones with the poorly-formed, thin and discontinuous chlorite coatings have been cemented by quartz. The optimum amount of chlorite to prevent formation of quartz overgrowths is 6% of rock volume. The chlorite coats are composed of two layers including the inner chlorite layer formed by transformation of the Fe-rich clay precursors (odinite) through mixed-layer clays (serpentine-chlorite) during early eodiagenesis and the outer layer formed by direct precipitation from pore waters through dissolution of ferromagnesian rock fragments during late eodiagenesis to early mesodiagenesis. In the context of the reservoir quality prediction within sequence stratigraphic framework, the late LST and early TST are suitable for deposition of chlorite precursor clays, which by progressive burial during diagenesis could be transformed to chlorite, and thus results in preserving original porosity and permeability in deep burial. / text

This dissertation project focuses on three study areas in the middle Tanana Valley (mTV) to provide records of local terrestrial ecological contexts and environmental changes in lowland settings that dated to the Late Glacial and early Holocene (16,000 to 6,000 cal. years ago) in interior Alaska and Eastern Beringia. The archaeological record of the mTV provides a rich history of hunter-gatherer land use dating over 14,000 years old. This project is part of two larger projects focused on prehistoric human ecology and foraging behavior in Eastern Beringia: the Quartz Lake-Shaw Creek Flats Multidisciplinary and Upward Sun River Site Projects. The study areas are spread out across a 4,000 km2 area in the mTV and contain the presence of archaeological sites that have records of well-developed stratification of sediments and soils and preserved macrofossils. Two of the study areas are dune fields: the Little Delta Dunes (including the Upward Sun River Site) and Rosa-Keystone Dunes Fields; the third area is Quartz Lake, one of the largest lakes within the region. As a whole they provide important information to understand the evolution of regional landscapes, paleoecological systems, and paleoenvironmental conditions dating back to 25,000 years ago, over 10,000 years prior to the currently accepted earliest human occupation of the region. Late Glacial and early Holocene landscapes of the mTV were ones of moderate stability and landscape disturbance with high rates of loess and aeolian sand deposition, and the presence of early-to-middle successional vegetation communities (herbs and forbs, shrubs, and deciduous trees) that fostered the presence of diverse mammalian faunal communities that no longer coexist in the region. As the middle Holocene approached, landscapes became increasingly stable with the expansion of the boreal forest and aeolian deposition drastically decreased throughout the mTV. The disturbances that fostered the highly productive early-to-middle successional vegetative communities in the Late Glacial and early Holocene became progressively partitioned in the middle Holocene and primarily relegated to active floodplains. These local ecological contexts can be used to assess changes in Late Glacial and Holocene faunal diversity and in human ecology and foraging behavior in interior Alaska and Eastern Beringia.

In the tenets of Western political science, “limited government” is usually seen as the touchstone of modern constitutionalism. Yet significant issues can arise when one applies this framework to East Asia. By studying the origin of constitutionalism in China and Japan, my dissertation reexamines the idea that “limited government” is the core of modern constitutionalism. I argue that constitutionalism, as it was introduced in Meiji Japan and late Qing China, focused on strengthening the government rather than limiting it. Many might feel this affirms the popular belief in an inherent affinity for authoritarianism in the Chinese mind, but this dissertation disagrees, finding such a conclusion to be unfairly reductive, and dangerous to achieving a true cross-cultural understanding. It argues instead that Chinese constitutionalism’s desire to strengthen the state was not the manifestation of a cultural predisposition toward authoritarianism, but was instead consciously adopted and constructed in response to the chaotic realities of late 19th and early 20th century China. By studying the constitutional thought of Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, the early English constitutionalists, Locke, Montesquieu, the American founding fathers, and others, I shine light on a dilemma that was as critical to late Qing China constitutionalism as it was to Aristotle’s ancient Greece, Machiavelli’s Renaissance Florence, and Lincoln’s splitting 19th century America: to achieve the delicate balance between a strong state and the limiting principles of a Republic. My argument calls for a reevaluation not only of Chinese constitutional thought, but also of current liberal constitutional theory, which tends to define the goal of constitutionalism simply as the limiting of governmental power. My research shows that the essential goal of constitutionalism, whether it takes place in the East or the West, in the present or the past, is not to move closer to one pole of authoritarianism or the other of limited government, but to strike an ideal balance between the two, depending on the specific context of a state’s time and place in history. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Every father is the son of a mother. While this would appear to be a commonplace, studies of patrimonialism as a political system in the ancient Near East have rarely considered its implications. Royal women, as objects of exchange and as agents of political action, played a central role in negotiations between Late Bronze Age states and in dynastic struggles within these states. The relative positions of royal men were shaped by their relationships to royal women. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

When considering early Byzantine pilgrimage tokens, questions of touch and tactility arise almost instantly. Tokens lack cords or mountings, and so touch is implicit in such objects. Even gazing at them was a form of touching for the pilgrim. Hagiographies tell of pilgrims crowding to holy sites with the express intent to access sanctity through touch. Touch then, whether visual or manual, mediated the desire for connection between a pilgrim, a site, and a body. This requires an examination of a token’s touch as well as a pilgrim’s. In my thesis, I focus on a surviving token of the stylite saint Symeon the Younger, housed in the Menil Collection. This particular token bears iconography associated with physically and spiritually transformative events. Images of veneration, baptism, and healing appear together on the token’s obverse, while a human handprint on its reverse demands a multifaceted discussion of the implications of touching this object. I propose that in a pilgrim’s interaction with this token both object and viewer had agency. The token encapsulates a comprehensive pilgrimage experience. As a contact relic, the token makes present the saint’s body. Representation of baptism and the token’s backwards inscription enact sphragis – a figurative and literal stamping that pilgrims frequently described. I call attention to the experiential, memorial, and physical impressions made on the lives of early Byzantine pilgrims through the simultaneous touching of both viewer and object. / text