Invasion, Sacrifice, Brutality

Brutality or Benevolence in Plantation Archaeology

Archaeologists working on plantation sites have typically ignored the role that violence played in the lives of enslaved African-Americans. By drawing together examples from archaeological publications in which violence has been mentioned, the commentary illustrates not only both the types and scale of violence endured by African-Americans, but also how archaeologists have effectively sanitized...

Ritual, Masks, and Sacrifice

INTRODUCTION Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face. The mask makes the disengagement from ordinary time and the connection to the ancient and repetitive, which is the heart of ritual, psychologically acceptable. Together, ritual and mask facilitate the apprehension of identity and its connections with pa...

The sacrifice precision method

Sometimes problems are only hard when the numerical quantities are arbitrary, complicated large integers. When these numerical quantities are limited to being small integers, the problems become efficiently solvable. (One way to formalize this is to consider these quantities as being specified in unary, and ask if the problem becomes polynomial-time solveable.) This is called being “hard in the...

What Will You Sacrifice?

A New Tool for Measuring the Brutality of War

Earlier this year, Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, delivered the 2008 International Health Lecture for the Academy of Medical Sciences in London, a lecture entitled “A factbased world view”. Rosling co-founded the Gapminder project (http://www. gapminder.org/): animated software that makes a multitude of quantitative datasets visible and mean...