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The Orontes valley is a heterogeneous area located at the border of the humid Mediterranean zone and the dry Syrian steppe: surrounded by mountains, it has narrow valleys, deep gorges, marshes, extensive fertile plains, and marked differences in climate. All these factors have greatly influenced settlement in the region throughout its history. Their effects were exacerbated by the chaotic political situation that characterized the valley during the Late Bronze Age, when, along the river, the Great Powers of the time found themselves in direct contact for the first time. The paper tries to analyze how the region's morphology and natural environment affected both the local settlements and areas of foreign influence.

"A sweeping history that tracks the development of trade and industry across the world, from Ancient Rome to today. From the development of international trade fairs in the twelfth century to the innovations made in China, India, and the Arab world, it turns out that historical economies were much more sophisticated that we might imagine, tied together by webs of credit and financial instruments much like our modern economy. Here, Philip Coggan takes us from the ancient mountains of North Wales through Grand Central station and the great civilizations of Mesopotamia to the factories of Malaysia, showing how changes in agriculture, finance, technology, work, and demographics have driven the progress of human civilization. It's the story of how trade became broader and deeper over thousands of years; how governments have influenced economies, for good or ill; and how societies have repeatedly tried to tame, and harness, finance. More shows how, at every step of our long journey, it was the connection between people that resulted in more trade, more specialization, more freedom, and ultimately, more prosperity."--

Mental health problems of middle and late life are the focus of this article. Among topics discussed are adjustment reactions to mid-life, late-life transitions, and stressful life events. Emerging mental health problems during this period are considered as a function of increased stress that is not mediated by social supports or effective strategies in coping. Sex differences in adjustive tasks during mid-life and the later years are presented. The impact of family dynamics on mental health is considered. Age-related differences in specific types of mental disorders, including organic problems, schizophrenia, and depression, are reviewed. Sexual problems, substance abuse, and psychosomatic problems are reviewed in the context of clinical problems during middle and late life. Diversity and individual differences in responses to the stresses of life transitions are emphasized while psychosocial strengths of older persons that promote mental health are portrayed.

ABSTRACTWater management and iron production were two socio‐technical practices deeply entrained with the politics of emerging social distinctions in northern Karnataka during the South Indian Iron Age (1200–300 BCE). In this article, we approach resources by building a theoretical convergence between "resource materialities" and "techno‐politics," which allows us to assess the historically specific constitution of certain materials as culturally valued resources while maintaining analytical attention on how assemblages of technical practices and active material properties shape social conditions. By differentially anticipating and responding to the social and material distributions of a range of dynamic matter (for example, granitic rock, iron ores, bloom, and metal, water, soils, and vegetation), Iron Age peoples transformed substances into resources and simultaneously produced a historically unique political sociology of resource relations. Our approach dissolves the processual distinction between natural resource and cultural product and directs attention to how substances become resources through ongoing historical articulations of humans and nonhumans in contexts oriented by cultural values. Contrasting the material properties and distributions of iron and water resource assemblages allows us to more fully understand the distinctiveness of different forms of techno‐politics and resource relations within the same cultural and historical context. [resource materialities, techno‐politics, resource assemblage, entrainment, South Indian Iron Age]

Ambiguous mother-figures dominate the fictional world of J.M Coetzee's novel Age of Iron. Sterility emerges as a central motif in the novel, corresponding to South Africa's apartheid history of racial hatred, discrimination, and violence. The struggling motherfigures are a product of the flawed times and emerge as symptomatic of social and cultural crisis. Elizabeth Curren, the novel's tortured first-person narrator, highlights the racially divided nation as socially, culturally, and morally impeded. Through her "stubborn will to give, to nourish," she engages in a struggle against the "scavengers of Cape Town": the "pitiless" heirs of a legacy of hate. Curren comes from a colonial history but seeks to decolonize her mind and voice as she writes a letter to her expatriate daughter, who, absent from the narrative, represents the need for change in values and historical perspective. Her strategic absence, significantly, communicates her incompatibility with the existing public and political discourse, thereby also suggesting an engagement with the future of ethics and aesthetics. While Elizabeth Curren's inscribed poetic plea for her daughter to return home self-reflexively acknowledges the constraints of a banal medium and provokes its lapses, there is also a need to realize what may as yet be un-semanticized. Elizabeth Curren aspires to redeem herself through the nurturing symbolism embodied in motherhood. Accordingly, and deploying Julia Kristeva's terminology, the essay argues for a return to a "maternal territory" where the semiotic process (an established communicative code of signs that determines our understanding of reality) is still in its intuitive and instinctual stage and allows Curren to transcend the constraints of her spoken medium. In Curren's case, the letter serves as a redrawn semantic map, possibly exceeding its established boundaries of signification and meaning.

International audience ; The brutal collapse of the Late Bronze Age western world-system around 1200 B.C. and of the Shang state in China at the end of the first millennium B.C. led to a period of political fragmentation and then to a new phase of integration in the two regions. The renewed growth of networks and states was furthered by crucial technological and institutional innovations (development of iron metallurgy, agricultural progress, diffusion of alphabets, organizing of provinces or satrapies, creation of stamped money.). Innovations were also ideological, with the appearance of universal religions in the crucial period of the 6th century B.C. In China, intense competition between emerging powers (Warring States) led to the ascendancy of the Qin state in the 3rd century B.C. The different empires which built up in Western Asia were clearly aimed at controlling spaces and peoples between the Mediterranean and the Persian gulf, also pushing towards Arabia and Egypt on one side, and towards the Indus and Central Asia on the other. It could be argued that the urban blossoming in Central Asia in the 7th and 6th centuries B. C. and the thrust of the Persian empire towards this region and the Indus valley marked the formation of a single system uniting the spheres of western Asia-Egypt-the Mediterranean and northern India. For the former, it is possible to distinguish phases of limited demise and of restructuring during the second part of the 9th century, during the second part of the 7th century, at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 4th century (the demise of Greece), and then a major phase of recession (for the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cores) and of restructuring between 200 and 50 B.C. Some of these recessions were partly initiated by climatic deteriorations - on a limited scale - around 800 and 200 B.C., which can be seen as part of a systemic logic. If we look at the trajectories of each region, we clearly see, first that not all of them followed the same rhythm, and secondly that some regions ...

The article deals with ceramic complex of the Early Iron Age settlement Allak 1. The authors have studied the design of corollas, ornaments, conducted technical and technological analysis and divided the complex into 2 groups. One of them relates to the Kamenskaya archaeological culture, the second to the group of ceramics of the second stage of the Novosibirsk version of the Kulaiskaya archaeological culture. The second group of ceramics is characterized by vessels with flat corollas cut inside, having small thickenings both on the outside and on the inside, decorated with elements of ornament not found on the ceramics of the Kamenskaya culture (the imprint of the corner of the spatula, etc.), making up ornamental compositions of several ornamental lines, which also have not been found on the Kamenskaya ceramics. Groups also differ by the source raw material. Finds of ceramics from the second group indicate the penetration of the Kulaiskaya culture population into the territory of the forest-steppe Altai. The obtained data supplemented the ideas about the initial settlement of the forest-steppe Altai by the Kulaiskaya culture tribes. Along with the migration wave of the population of the Sarovskii stage of the Kulaiskaya culture from the territory of the Tomsk Ob region, one can talk about quite intensive contacts with the population of the second stage of the Kulaiskaya culture of the Novosibirsk Ob region.

This is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examines the historical, political, and social significance of 9/11. This collection considers 9/11 as an event situated within the much larger historical context of late late-capitalism, a paradoxical time in which American and capitalist hegemony exist as pervasive and yet under precarious circumstances. Contributors to this collection examine the ways in which 9/11 both changed everything and, at the same time, nothing at all. They likewise examine the implications of 9/11 through a variety of different media and art forms including literature, film, television, and street art

Archaeological research on the Iron Age (1200–500 BC) Levant, a narrow strip of land bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert, has been balkanized into smaller culture historical zones structured by modern national borders and disciplinary schools. One consequence of this division has been an inability to articulate broader research themes that span the wider region. This article reviews scholarly debates over the past two decades and identifies shared research interests in issues such as ethnogenesis, the development of territorial polities, economic intensification, and divergent responses to imperial interventions. The broader contributions that Iron Age Levantine archaeology offers global archaeological inquiry become apparent when the evidence from different corners of the region is assembled.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Introduction -- 1 Cohorts, Inequality, and Social Change -- Inequality and Aging: Stratification over the Life Course -- Theories of Intracohort Heterogeneity and Inequality -- Economic Inequality Across Countries and Between Age-Groups -- Aging Cohorts and Economic Inequality -- Employment Institutions and Inequality in Old Age -- State Policies, Inequality, and Aging -- Conclusion -- 2 Pathways to Inequality: Intracohort Differentiation over the Life Course -- Aging and Social Theory: Linkages Between Work and Retirement -- Research on Linkages Across the Life Course -- An Overview of Income Sources -- Cohort Trends in Women's Lives and Intracohort Differentiation -- Implications for Intracohort Variation in the Life Course -- Poverty -- Conclusion -- 3 Asynchronous Lives: The Normal Life Course and Its Variations -- The Age Integration of Lives -- The Resilience of Gender Structure -- Family Pathways: The Breadwinner and Role-Sharing Models -- Asynchronous Lives -- Studies of Asynchronous Lives and Inequality -- Family-Work Pathways to Retirement -- Conclusion -- 4 Pathways to Retirement: The Timing of Retirement -- Earlier and More Universal Exit -- Institutional Structure and Segmentation of Work Exit -- Alternate Institutional Pathways Producing Early Exit -- The Intersection of Social Structure and Individual Trajectories -- Conclusion -- 5 Labor Markets and Occupational Welfare in the United States -- From Wage Inequality to Pension Inequality -- Employee Benefits as Decentralized Occupational Welfare -- Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution Pension Plans -- The Private-Public Linkages in Occupational Welfare -- Conclusion -- 6 U.S. Labor Force Participation Trends in Comparative Perspective -- Changing Patterns of Late-Life Labor Force Participation.

"In the United States, older populations exhibit the highest levels of economic inequality of all age groups. Across all advanced societies, the inequalities observed in older populations stem from structural and individual processes that differentiate the life courses of women and men and yield distinctive patterns of economic inequality in adulthood and old age." "Age and Inequality examines the structural and individual bases of inequality and aging in the United States, especially in recent decades." "Aging and retirement in the twenty-first century raise concerns regarding public welfare and market policies affecting labor exits and income support systems across countries over the next half century. Angela M. O'Rand and John C. Henretta consider the implications of the changing workplace and changing public policies for aging women and men."--Jacket