Of Rocks And Water

People are drawn to places where geology performs its miracles: ice-cold spring waters gushing from the rock, mysterious caves which act as conduits for ancestors and divinities traveling back and forth to the underworld, sacred bodies of water where communities make libations and offer sacrifices. This volume presents a series of archaeological landscapes from the Iranian highlands to the Anatolian Plateau, and from the Mediterranean borderlands to Mesoamerica. Contributors all have a deep interest in the making and the long-term history of unorthodox places of human interaction with the mineral world, specifically the landscapes of rocks and water. Working with rock reliefs, sacred springs and lakes, caves, cairns, ruins and other meaningful places, they draw attention to the need for a rigorous field methodology and theoretical framework for working with such special places. At a time when network models, urban-centered and macro-scale perspectives dominate discussions of ancient landscapes, this unusual volume takes us to remote, unmappable places of cultural practice, social imagination and political appropriation. It offers not only a diverse set of case studies approaching small meaningful places in their special geological grounding, but also suggests new methodologies and interpretive approaches to understand places and the processes of place-making.

When Joegodson Déralciné was still a small child, his parents left rural Haiti to resettle in the rapidly growing zones of Port-au-Prince. As his family entered the city in 1986, Duvalier and his dictatorship exited. Haitians, once terrorized under Duvalier’s reign, were liberated and emboldened to believe that they could take control of their lives. But how? Joining hundreds of thousands of other peasants trying to adjust to urban life, Joegodson and his family sought work and a means of survival. But all they found was low-waged assembly plant jobs of the sort to which the repressive Duvalier regime had opened Haiti’s doors—the combination of flexible capital and cheap labour too attractive to multinational manufacturers to be overlooked. With the death of his mother, Joegodson was placed in his uncle’s care, and so began a childhood of starvation, endless labour, and abuse. In honest, reflective prose, Joegodson—now a father himself— allows us to walk in the ditches of Cité Soleil, to hide from the macoutes under the bed, to feel the ache of an empty stomach. But, most importantly, he provides an account of life in Haiti from a perspective that is rarely heard. Free of sentimentality and hackneyed clichés, his narrative explores the spirituality of Vodou, Catholicism, and Protestantism, describes the harrowing day of the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath, and illustrates the inner workings of MINUSTAH. Written with Canadian historian Paul Jackson—Joegodson telling his story in Creole, Jackson translating, the two of them then reviewing and reworking—the memoir is a true collaboration, the struggle of two people from different lands and vastly different circumstances to arrive at a place of mutual understanding. In the process, they have given us an unforgettable account of a country determined to survive, and on its own terms.

The era of the American Revolution was one of violent and unpredictable social, economic, and political change, and the dislocations of the period were most severely felt in the South. Sylvia Frey contends that the military struggle there involved a triangle--two sets of white belligerents and approximately 400,000 slaves. She reveals the dialectical relationships between slave resistance and Britain's Southern Strategy and between slave resistance and the white independence movement among Southerners, and shows how how these relationships transformed religion, law, and the economy during the postwar years.

Funny, poignant, and deeply moving, The Line Tender is a story of nature's enduring mystery and a girl determined to find meaning and connection within it. Wherever the sharks led, Lucy Everhart's marine-biologist mother was sure to follow. In fact, she was on a boat far off the coast of Massachusetts, collecting shark data when she died suddenly. Lucy was seven. Since then Lucy and her father have kept their heads above water--thanks in large part to a few close friends and neighbors. But June of her twelfth summer brings more than the end of school and a heat wave to sleepy Rockport. On one steamy day, the tide brings a great white--and then another tragedy, cutting short a friendship everyone insists was "meaningful" but no one can tell Lucy what it all meant. To survive the fresh wave of grief, Lucy must grab the line that connects her depressed father, a stubborn fisherman, and a curious old widower to her mother's unfinished research on the Great White's return to Cape Cod. If Lucy can find a way to help this unlikely quartet follow the sharks her mother loved, she'll finally be able to look beyond what she's lost and toward what's left to be discovered. ★"Confidently voiced."—Kirkus Reviews, starred ★"Richly layered."—Publishers Weekly, starred ★"A hopeful path forward."—Booklist, starred ★"Life-affirming."—BCCB, starred ★"Big-hearted." —Bookpage, starred ★“Will appeal to just about everyone.” – SLC, starred ★"Exquisitely, beautifully real."—Shelf Awareness, starred

A symbiosis of a brief description of physical fundamentals of the rock properties (based on typical experimental results and relevant theories and models) with a guide for practical use of different theoretical concepts.

In Rock | Water | Life Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation. Green analyzes conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonizing science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management; and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

This illustrated introduction to geology offers young readers insights into everyday signs of our constantly changing environment. Fascinating subjects include rivers of ice, the rise of volcanoes, and the formation of precious stones.

The phase composition of pore water in three types of rock subjected to temperature below OC was explored by a variety of techniques. Freezing point depression was measured as a function of water content by differential thermal analysis, the results yielding relationships between unfrozen water content and temperature. In an effort to avoid the practical difficulties involved in differential thermal analysis, attempts were made to determine freezing characteristics indirectly by air penetration and mercury penetration techniques applied at ordinary room temperatures. Electrical conductivity measurements were made as a function of temperature down to -195C in an attempt to obtain information on characteristics of interfacial water films at low temperatures. Thermal strain was measured as a function of temperature in order to detect direct mechanical effects associated with phase changes, chiefly strain discontinuities brought about by volume changes in the pore water during rapid freezing and thawing. Finally, isothermal compressibility whether the rock underwent step changes in volumetric strain at pressures corresponding to those of the phase boundaries for ice polymorphs. (Author).