This study attempts to demonstrate symbolic whale bone patterning within 31 Thule winter houses along the southeast coast of Somerset Island, Northwest Territories, Canada. All visible architectural whale bone incorporated within the dwellings was mapped. Trends towards particular patterns of whale bone distribution were demonstrated using Spearman's Rank-order Correlation Coefficient. The potential symbolic nature of such patternings was determined within the context of north Alaskan ethnographic and oral historical sources. The extensive use of whale bone in some Thule entrances suggests that their builders sought to create a distinction between the entrance tunnel and main room, not unlike the Inupiat dwellings in 19th-century Tikigaq. The significance of this architectural phenomenon is rooted in the Inupiat, and to some extent Inuit, association between women, the house and the bowhead whale. It is also suggested that whaling status may be reflected in differential access to bowhead whale bone.

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Thule archaeological sites typically yield large quantities of well-preserved faunal remains. These remains represent a wealth of information on a wide range of activities related to Thule animal-based subsistence economies, but have only recently been subjected to the quantitative ecological analyses that have increasingly concerned archaeologists elsewhere. This thesis involves the development of a linear programming model of Thule resource scheduling, and an explicit test of its applicability. When compared to the results of a detailed zooarchaeological analysis of faunal material collected from a variety of seasonal site types on southeastern Somerset Island, the modelling procedure was found to offer moderately interesting insights not otherwise attainable.

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This study analyzes the expression of Maugham's ironic vision in his short stories set in the South Seas and Southeast Asia. Through point of view, setting, character, and plot, Maugham explores the dialectic of expectation outcome, hope-disappointment, and illusion-reality. In the exotic short stories, not only do Maugham's characters confront this dialectic, but readers do as well. Using irony as a heuristic, Maugham prods his readers into rethinking unexamined assumptions about human nature and about the often disillusioning repercussions of clinging to ideals or having unrealistic expectations of life.The narrative voice in Maugham's stories, whether that of the omniscient or the dramatized first-person narrator, draws attention to the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual, using irony to highlight characterization as people are shown to be something other than they might be or what they are. Further, the narrators also establish a context for irony by inviting readers to share their insights on characters and conflicts, thereby emphasizing their distance from the characters who speak and act in ignorance of the actual state of affairs.Relying upon the conventions of realism, which assumes that man may find his destiny shaped by his responses to an environment, and using that environment to achieve artistic ends, Maugham demonstrates that setting generates irony as it precipitates tension, conflict, and sudden revelations of character. In other instances, the irony grows from Maugham's explorations of his characters' expectations of the exotic settings, suggesting that the tropical paradises are places of nightmares, as well as dreams.The volatile combination of setting and character often erupts in shocking plot reversals that have become the hallmark of Maugham's narrative techniques. The ironies of plot surface as characters and the first-person narrators confront realities that have been hidden or that have been denied. In many cases, the characters and the narrators have allowed their ideals or expectations to mislead them or cloud their judgment. Other plot ironies occur with the frame stories, as the narrators connect the fictive world of the story to the factual world of the reader, thus juxtaposing the ironic dialectic of reality and fiction.Throughout the exotic short stories, the designs of Maugham's narrative technique suggest that irony effectively expresses his philosophic stance on the ambiguity of human motives and the futility of idealism. / Department of English

Article from presumably 'Tha Naturalist', published in 19?2. Abstract taken from fist paragraph: "An oak tree dating back to the 17th Century with a diameter of four metres (and a circumference of 12,66m) on Anglo American Farms’ historic Vergelegen Estate near Somerset West, is thought to be the oldest specimen in South Africa."