It has long been claimed that the coaxial stone boundaries of Céide Fields, County Mayo, are a phenomenon of the Irish Early Neolithic — analogous to later prehistoric ‘Celtic’ fields in all but age. This study argues that the age disparity is an artefact of the research methods, and that the age of the main Céide Fields complex has been overestimated by as much as two-and-a-half millennia.

Turkish constitutions have generally sought to limit the executive branch’s emergency powers by codifying and subjecting them to judicial and parliamentary supervision. In practice, however, ever since the single-party regime of the interwar years, cabinets have wielded wide powers to suspend rights and exercise discretion concerning both security issues and property and finance regimes. The result has been a legal system that, barred from explicitly embracing executive prerogative as a matter of principle, has instead dispersed “exceptional” powers throughout the fabric of the statutes, temporary laws, regulations, and decrees with which the state articulates its authority. The task of maintaining a semblance of normality and coherence within this scattered and contradictory system has been left to legal theoreticians. This article examines how three such theoreticians—the law professors Sıddık Sami Onar, Ali Fuad Başgil, and Ragıp Sarıca—responded to the cabinet’s recourse to emergency powers during the troubled 1930s and 1940s. Instead of defending rule-of-law principles, I argue, these formative figures integrated prerogative into the sphere of ordinary legality, thereby transforming exceptional powers into a normal mode of governance.

The chroniclers and poets of the later Middle Ages credited Edward III with many successes, among which the production of a large family rated highly. The king had a total of twelve children, of whom no fewer than nine—five sons and four daughters—survived to maturity (fig. 1). Historians have not always been enthusiastic about the generous provisions made for this large family. Edward's very fecundity, viewed by fourteenth-century writers as a sure sign of God's grace, has been seen as a political liability because it exhausted resources, created a political imbalance between the crown and the younger branches of the royal family, and led ultimately to the deposition of Richard II and the Wars of the Roses.

It is possible, however, to view Edward III's family arrangements in a different and rather more favorable light. Since the loss of many of their overseas territories in the thirteenth century, the Plantagenet kings had come to regard their remaining possessions as an inalienable patrimony to be handed on intact from father to eldest son. Unless younger children were able to create titles for themselves in foreign lands, kings had no option but to reward their sons with English earldoms. This was not a policy guaranteed to benefit the crown: the bitter quarrels between Edward II and his cousin Thomas of Lancaster showed very clearly the dangers that might arise when cadet branches of the Plantagenet dynasty became bound up with the English aristocracy.

This article explores the discursive reasons behind the paradoxes in Turkey’s foreign policy since the onset of the Syria crisis. By looking at representation of Turkey’s Syria policy in two prominent pro-government newspapers, Star and Yeni Şafak, the authors highlight the significance of the February 2012 episode, after which Ankara experienced deep discursive dilemmas for three reasons: the uncertain portrayal of the dyadic context, the ambiguous framing of third-party roles, and ambivalent agenda building. Despite the shadow of imminent civil war, Turkey’s foreign policy elite refrained from framing the real risks arising within Syria. Idealistic-normative calls appealed to massacre rhetoric in order to legitimize humanitarian intervention. However, the geopolitical framing of third-party roles did not assist in the building of diplomatic ground for international intervention. Quite the contrary, it led to the shaping of public opinion toward realistic-utilitarian interference. Swinging between intervention and interference, Ankara pushed itself toward a liminal position. Even though the Turkish government’s rhetorical ambivalence helped to sway anti-war domestic public opinion, it did not help to control the spiraling of Syria into civil war. That is to say, the ambivalent agenda building in the critical February 2012 episode perpetuated paradoxes in Turkey’s Syria policy and left lingering implications for the transformation of the Syrian crisis in the years to come.

This article seeks to shed light on the musical activities sponsored in Lisbon by women of high society, and specifically on the organization of the concerts produced by the Countess of Proença-a-Velha (1864–1944) in Lisbon at the turn of the ninteenth and the twentieth centuries. Between 1899 and 1903, the Countess held nine musical soirées and matinées at her home, and organized the first season of the Sociedade Artística de Concertos de Canto (Artistic Singing Concerts Society), which she founded. She also composed and premiered about 30 vocal works with piano accompaniment. Although both the number of events and her catalogue are small in size, they form an important window on turn-of-the-century Portuguese culture. Her decisions to focus on the repertoire of lyrical music and feature performances mainly by women was in stark contrast to the deeply masculine nature of the musical organizations active in Lisbon during the period. This article also explores the ideological dimension of her activities. An examination of the vocal pieces performed at the countess’ concerts shows that she intentionally explored four interrelated concepts of music: modern music, religious music, early music and Portuguese music. Some of her songs took part in the construction of what she considered to be a Portuguese national music inspired by Portuguese national poetry. The programmes the countess devised presented both a social and political dimension, proposing an elitist model for female socialization based upon the idea of the utility of cultural involvement and vindicating the role of tradition and, in particular, national tradition.

In this article we present an experimental approach focused on bipolar core technology. The main goal is to define the major constraints and parameters faced when identifying the bipolar component of the Early Pleistocene site of Vallparadís (Spain). For these experiments we have used the same varieties of raw materials and blanks as those documented in the archaeological record. The methodological framework applied in the study of the experimental sample is largely based on the most diagnostic parameters recurrently cited in bipolar-related literature: double striking platforms and opposite battering damage. This information has been encoded by grouping blanks, cores and detached elements in morphotechnical types. The results suggest that the reduction process is conditioned by the morphology and fracture consistency of the knapped nodules. Although blank morphology does not categorically determine the final shape of the cores and flakes, there is a clear correlation between them. The most diagnostic parameter for identifying bipolar objects in statistical terms is the presence of opposite battering damage. However, there are many non-diagnostic pieces generated throughout the bipolar knapping process. Hence we consider it pertinent to analyse the archaeological assemblage of Vallparadís according to alternative methodological approaches (e.g. morphotechnical types).

In this paper, we tackle the twin issues of obligatoriness of semantic arguments and variation in their expression through a study of Estonian constructions denoting need. The variation under investigation consists in the choice of case-marking, between adessive and allative case, as well as the option to omit the oblique argument. We extracted and coded ‘need’-constructions from spoken and written corpora and used non-parametric classification methods for analysis. We found high rates of oblique experiencer omission in these constructions (nearly 60% across corpora). The most important predictors of overt expression of the experiencer in our models were participant-internal modality and the presence of nominal complements, meaning that both semantic and syntactic factors are relevant. The choice between two overt cases is affected by person, complement type, and referential distance. Topical experiencer arguments do not show the subject-like tendency to be omitted more often, but they are more likely to be marked with adessive case, suggesting that adessive is more grammaticalised as a structural, non-nominative, argument-marking case than the more semantic allative case. Our findings show that oblique, semantic arguments may be frequently omitted, and both semantic and syntactic factors may affect variation in case-marking.

Mega-Sporting Events (MSEs) like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup inspire humanity and have the potential to promote human rights, including through job creation and urban regeneration. Yet for over a decade MSEs have been linked to a pattern of human rights abuses that reads like a panoply of Business and Human Rights themes. The very legitimacy and social license of MSEs is increasingly on the line. Yet we may have reached a tipping point. In the past year the Commonwealth Games Federation, FIFA, and the International Olympic Committee have begun to instigate human rights reforms. A new multi-stakeholder coalition, chaired by Mary Robinson and facilitated by IHRB, meanwhile is pursuing innovative collaborate solutions to the human rights issues at stake. Supported by international agencies, governments, sports bodies, sponsors and broadcasters, and civil society, this coalition seeks to promote learning and accountability in a sector for whom business and human rights is new territory.