Dorset
Dorset is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth and Poole and Dorset. Covering an area of 2,653 square kilometres, Dorset borders Devon to the west, Somerset to the north-west, Wiltshire to the north-east, Hampshire to the east; the county town is Dorchester, in the south. After the reorganisation of local government in 1974 the county's border was extended eastward to incorporate the Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch. Around half of the population lives in the South East Dorset conurbation, while the rest of the county is rural with a low population density; the county has a long history of human settlement stretching back to the Neolithic era. The Romans conquered Dorset's indigenous Celtic tribe, during the early Middle Ages, the Saxons settled the area and made Dorset a shire in the 7th century; the first recorded Viking raid on the British Isles occurred in Dorset during the eighth century, the Black Death entered England at Melcombe Regis in 1348.
Dorset has seen much civil unrest: in the English Civil War, an uprising of vigilantes was crushed by Oliver Cromwell's forces in a pitched battle near Shaftesbury. During the Second World War, Dorset was involved in the preparations for the invasion of Normandy, the large harbours of Portland and Poole were two of the main embarkation points; the former was the sailing venue in the 2012 Summer Olympics, both have clubs or hire venues for sailing, Cornish pilot gig rowing, sea kayaking and powerboating. Dorset has a varied landscape featuring broad elevated chalk downs, steep limestone ridges and low-lying clay valleys. Over half the county is designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Three-quarters of its coastline is part of the Jurassic Coast Natural World Heritage Site due to its geological and palaeontologic significance, it features notable landforms such as Lulworth Cove, the Isle of Portland, Chesil Beach and Durdle Door. Agriculture was traditionally the major industry of Dorset but is now in decline and tourism has become important to the economy.
There are no motorways in Dorset but a network of A roads cross the county and two railway main lines connect to London. Dorset has ports at Poole and Portland, an international airport; the county has a variety of museums and festivals, is host to the Great Dorset Steam Fair, one of the biggest events of its kind in Europe. It is the birthplace of Thomas Hardy, who used the county as the principal setting of his novels, William Barnes, whose poetry celebrates the ancient Dorset dialect. Dorset derives its name from the county town of Dorchester; the Romans established the settlement in the 1st century and named it Durnovaria, a Latinised version of a Common Brittonic word meaning "place with fist-sized pebbles". The Saxons named the town Dornwaraceaster and Dornsæte came into use as the name for the inhabitants of the area from "Dorn"—a reduced form of Dornwaraceaster—and the Old English word "sæte" meaning people, it is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in AD 845 and in the 10th century the county's archaic name, "Dorseteschyre", was first recorded.
The first human visitors to Dorset were Mesolithic hunters, from around 8000 BC. The first permanent Neolithic settlers appeared around 3000 BC and were responsible for the creation of the Dorset Cursus, a 10.5-kilometre monument for ritual or ceremonial purposes. From 2800 BC onwards Bronze Age farmers cleared Dorset's woodlands for agricultural use and Dorset's high chalk hills provided a location for numerous round barrows. During the Iron Age, the British tribe known as the Durotriges established a series of hill forts across the county—most notably Maiden Castle, one of the largest in Europe; the Romans arrived in Dorset during their conquest of Britain in AD 43. Maiden Castle was captured by a Roman legion under the command of Vespasian, the Roman settlement of Durnovaria was established nearby. Bokerley Dyke, a large defensive ditch built by the county's post-Roman inhabitants near the border with modern-day Hampshire, delayed the advance of the Saxons into Dorset for 150 years. However, by the end of the 7th century Dorset had fallen under Saxon control and been incorporated into the Kingdom of Wessex.
The Saxons established a diocese at Sherborne and Dorset was made a shire—an administrative district of Wessex and predecessor to the English county system—with borders that have changed little since. In 789 the first recorded Viking attack on the British Isles took place in Dorset on the Portland coast, they continued to raid into the county for the next two centuries. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, feudal rule was established in Dorset and the bulk of the land was divided between the Crown and ecclesiastical institutions; the Normans consolidated their control over the area by constructing castles at Corfe and Dorchester in the early part of the 12th century. Over the next 200 years Dorset's population grew and additional land was enclosed for farming to provide the extra food required; the wool trade, the quarrying of Purbeck Marble and the busy ports of Weymouth, Melcombe Regis, Lyme Regis and Bridport brought prosperity to the county. However, Dorset was devastated by the bubonic plague in 1348 which arrived in Melcombe Regis on a ship from Gascony.
The disease, more known as the Black Death, created an epidemic that spread a
Scotland
Scotland is a country, part of the United Kingdom. Sharing a border with England to the southeast, Scotland is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, by the North Sea to the northeast and by the Irish Sea to the south. In addition to the mainland, situated on the northern third of the island of Great Britain, Scotland has over 790 islands, including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides; the Kingdom of Scotland emerged as an independent sovereign state in the Early Middle Ages and continued to exist until 1707. By inheritance in 1603, James VI, King of Scots, became King of England and King of Ireland, thus forming a personal union of the three kingdoms. Scotland subsequently entered into a political union with the Kingdom of England on 1 May 1707 to create the new Kingdom of Great Britain; the union created a new Parliament of Great Britain, which succeeded both the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England. In 1801, the Kingdom of Great Britain and Kingdom of Ireland enacted a political union to create a United Kingdom.
The majority of Ireland subsequently seceded from the UK in 1922. Within Scotland, the monarchy of the United Kingdom has continued to use a variety of styles and other royal symbols of statehood specific to the pre-union Kingdom of Scotland; the legal system within Scotland has remained separate from those of England and Wales and Northern Ireland. The continued existence of legal, educational and other institutions distinct from those in the remainder of the UK have all contributed to the continuation of Scottish culture and national identity since the 1707 union with England; the Scottish Parliament, a unicameral legislature comprising 129 members, was established in 1999 and has authority over those areas of domestic policy which have been devolved by the United Kingdom Parliament. The head of the Scottish Government, the executive of the devolved legislature, is the First Minister of Scotland. Scotland is represented in the UK House of Commons by 59 MPs and in the European Parliament by 6 MEPs.
Scotland is a member of the British–Irish Council, sends five members of the Scottish Parliament to the British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly. Scotland is divided into councils. Glasgow City is the largest subdivision in Scotland in terms of population, with Highland being the largest in terms of area. "Scotland" comes from the Latin name for the Gaels. From the ninth century, the meaning of Scotia shifted to designate Gaelic Scotland and by the eleventh century the name was being used to refer to the core territory of the Kingdom of Alba in what is now east-central Scotland; the use of the words Scots and Scotland to encompass most of what is now Scotland became common in the Late Middle Ages, as the Kingdom of Alba expanded and came to encompass various peoples of diverse origins. Repeated glaciations, which covered the entire land mass of modern Scotland, destroyed any traces of human habitation that may have existed before the Mesolithic period, it is believed the first post-glacial groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in Scotland around 12,800 years ago, as the ice sheet retreated after the last glaciation.
At the time, Scotland was covered in forests, had more bog-land, the main form of transport was by water. These settlers began building the first known permanent houses on Scottish soil around 9,500 years ago, the first villages around 6,000 years ago; the well-preserved village of Skara Brae on the mainland of Orkney dates from this period. Neolithic habitation and ritual sites are common and well preserved in the Northern Isles and Western Isles, where a lack of trees led to most structures being built of local stone. Evidence of sophisticated pre-Christian belief systems is demonstrated by sites such as the Callanish Stones on Lewis and the Maes Howe on Orkney, which were built in the third millennium BCE; the first written reference to Scotland was in 320 BC by Greek sailor Pytheas, who called the northern tip of Britain "Orcas", the source of the name of the Orkney islands. During the first millennium BCE, the society changed to a chiefdom model, as consolidation of settlement led to the concentration of wealth and underground stores of surplus food.
The first Roman incursion into Scotland occurred in 79 AD. After the Roman victory, Roman forts were set along the Gask Ridge close to the Highland line, but by three years after the battle, the Roman armies had withdrawn to the Southern Uplands; the Romans erected Hadrian's Wall in northern England and the Limes Britannicus became the northern border of the Roman Empire. The Roman influence on the southern part of the country was considerable, they introduced Christianity to Scotland. Beginning in the sixth century, the area, now Scotland was divided into three areas: Pictland, a patchwork of small lordships in central Scotland; these societies were based on the family unit and had sharp divisions in wealth, although the vast majority were poor and worked full-time in subsistence agriculture. The Picts kept slaves through the ninth century. Gaelic influence over Pictland and Northumbria was facilitated by the large number of Gaelic-speaking clerics working as missionaries. Operating in the sixth ce
Funnelbeaker culture
The Funnelbeaker culture, in short TRB or TBK was an archaeological culture in north-central Europe. It developed as a technological merger of local neolithic and mesolithic techno-complexes between the lower Elbe and middle Vistula rivers, introducing farming and husbandry as a major source of food to the pottery-using hunter-gatherers north of this line, it was preceded by Lengyel-influenced Stroke-ornamented ware culture groups/Late Lengyel and Baden-Boleráz in the southeast, Rössen groups in the southwest and the Ertebølle-Ellerbek groups in the north. The TRB techno-complex is divided into a northern group including modern northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, a western group in the Netherlands between the Zuiderzee and lower Elbe that originated in the Swifterbant culture, an eastern group centered on the Vistula catchment ranging from Oder to Bug, south-central groups around the middle and upper Elbe and Saale. In the southern and eastern groups, local sequences of variants emerged.
In the late 4th millennium BC, the Globular Amphora culture replaced most of the eastern and subsequently the southern TRB groups, reducing the TRB area to modern northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. The younger TRB in these areas was superseded by the Single Grave culture at about 2800 BC; the north-central European megaliths were built during the TRB era. The Funnelbeaker culture is named for its characteristic ceramics and amphorae with funnel-shaped tops, which were found in dolmen burials; the TRB ranges from the Elbe catchment in Germany and Bohemia with a western extension into the Netherlands, to southern Scandinavia in the north and to the Vistula catchment in today's Poland in the east. Variants of the Funnelbeaker culture in or near the Elbe catchment area include the Tiefstich pottery group in northern Germany as well as the cultures of the Baalberge group, the Salzmünde and Walternienburg and Bernburg whose centres were in Saxony-Anhalt. With the exception of some inland settlements such as Alvastra pile-dwelling, the settlements are located near those of the previous Ertebølle culture on the coast.
It was characterised by single-family daubed houses c. 12 m x 6 m. It was dominated by animal husbandry of sheep, cattle and goats, but there was hunting and fishing. One find assigned to the Funnelbeaker culture is the Bronocice pot from Poland, which shows the oldest known depiction of a wagon drawn by aurochs whose remains were found with the pot. Primitive wheat and barley was grown on small patches that were fast depleted, due to which the population moved small distances. There was mining and collection of flintstone, traded into regions lacking the stone, such as the Scandinavian hinterland; the culture used copper from Silesia daggers and axes. The houses were centered on a symbol of social cohesion. Burial practices were changed over time. Inhumation seems to have been the rule; the oldest graves consisted of wooden chambered cairns inside long barrows, but were made in the form of passage graves and dolmens. The structures were covered with a mound of earth and the entrance was blocked by a stone.
The Funnelbeaker culture marks the appearance of megalithic tombs at the coasts of the Baltic and of the North sea, an example of which are the Sieben Steinhäuser in northern Germany. The megalithic structures of Ireland and Portugal are somewhat older and have been connected to earlier archeological cultures of those areas. At graves, the people sacrificed ceramic vessels that contained food along with amber jewelry and flint-axes. Flint-axes and vessels were deposed in streams and lakes near the farmlands, all Sweden's 10,000 flint axes that have been found from this culture were sacrificed in water, they constructed large cult centres surrounded by pales and moats. The largest one is found at Sarup on Fyn, it is estimated to have taken 8000 workdays. Another cult centre at Stävie near Lund comprises 30,000 m2. In the context of the Kurgan hypothesis, the culture is seen as non-Indo-European, representing a culture of Neolithic origin, as opposed to the Indo-European-language-speaking peoples who intruded from the east.
Marija Gimbutas postulated that the political relationship between the aboriginal and intrusive cultures resulted in quick and smooth cultural morphosis into the Corded Ware culture. By contrast a number of other archaeologists in the past have proposed that the Corded Ware culture was a purely local development from Funnel Beaker, thus the question of continuity versus migration at the cusp of the cultural change was of interest to geneticists specialising in ancient DNA. A sample of Corded Ware people from Germany has been modelled as three-quarters Yamnaya, clear evidence of migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. Ancient DNA extracted from three individuals ascribed to a TRB horizon in Gökhem, were found to possess mtDNA haplogroups H, J, T, it has been suggested that the Funnelbeaker culture was the origin of the gene allowing adults of Northern European descent to digest lactose. It was claimed that in the area inhabited by this culture, prevalence of the gene is u
Tynwald Day
Tynwald Day is the National Day of the Isle of Man observed on 5 July. On this day, the Island's legislature, meets at St John's, instead of its usual meeting place in Douglas; the session is held in the Royal Chapel of St John the Baptist and in the open air on the adjacent Tynwald Hill. The meeting, the first recorded instance of which dates to 1417, is known as Midsummer Court, it is attended by members of the two branches of Tynwald: the House of Keys, the Legislative Council. The Lieutenant Governor, the representative of the Lord of Mann, presides except on the occasions when the Lord of Mann or another member of the British Royal Family is present. All bills that have received Royal Assent are promulgated on Tynwald Day. Other proceedings include the presentation of petitions and the swearing in of certain public officials. Since the first recorded Tynwald Day in 1417, Tynwald Day had traditionally been held on 24 June, the feast day of St John the Baptist and Midsummer's Day. In 1753, the Isle of Man legislated to replace the Julian Calendar with the Gregorian Calendar after Great Britain had done so in the previous year: making a difference of 11 days.
But the legislation retained the Julian Calendar for the purpose of determining Tynwald Day: it provided that "Midsummer Tynwald Court shall be holden and kept... upon or according to the same natural Days upon or according to which the same should have been so kept or holden... in case this Act had never been made." Hence Tynwald Day occurred on 24 June in the Julian Calendar, but on 5 July according to the Gregorian Calendar. It was not subsequently moved back to 7 July though the Gregorian Calendar is now 13 days ahead of the Julian Calendar as the Gregorian Calendar had no leap day in 1800 or 1900. If Tynwald Day occurs on a Saturday or Sunday, it is commemorated on the next Monday, as happened in 2008 and 2009. Midsummer Courts were sometimes presided over by the Lords of Mann, but more by his representatives, as the Lords of Mann were British aristocrats or monarchs who were not resident in the island. After the Duke of Atholl presided in 1736, over two centuries passed before a Lord of Mann participated in Tynwald Day ceremonies.
George VI presided in 1946. Another member of the Royal Family may preside, as HRH The Prince Edward did in 1986, HRH The Prince of Wales did in 2000; the Lieutenant Governor is preceded by the Sword-Bearer, who wears a scarlet uniform and bears the Sword of State. The Sword of State dates from the 15th century, may have been made for Sir John Stanley; the Sword, blunt for the sake of safety, displays the Manx triskelion. Members of the House of Keys and of the Legislative Council are in attendance; the Speaker of the House of Keys wears black robes with gold decorations. The President of Tynwald wears blue robes with silver decorations; the President's robes display the triskelion. The Isle of Man's highest judicial officers, the Deemsters, participate in the ceremony, wearing scarlet robes and long wigs. There are three Deemsters, including the First and Second Deemster, their office is of great antiquity, as is reflected by the curious phraseology of their ancient oath, during which they promise to "execute the laws of this isle justly … betwixt party and party, as indifferently as the herring's backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish."
Some individuals are invited to attend as Guests of Honour. Guests of Honour include representatives of the United Kingdom and of other nations including the Republic of Ireland and some Scandinavian countries. In recent years, Scotland and Northern Ireland have sent separate representatives, in addition to those for the United Kingdom. Notable guests in recent years have included: The Lord Waddington, The Lord Williams of Mostyn, Dr Rory O'Hanlon, Senator Liam T. Cosgrave, HM The King of Norway, The Lord Steel of Aikwood, The Rt Hon. Jack McConnell and the British Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer, Baron Falconer of Thoroton. Other participants include clergymen, leaders of local governments and several other officials, including all the State Officials of the Isle of Man. All participants wear bollan bane, otherwise known as mugwort. Detachments and bands from the Constabulary and the military take part in the ceremony, attended by members of the general public; the ceremony is coordinated by the Tynwald Ceremony Arrangements Committee.
The President of Tynwald is the ex officio chairman. A Tynwald Settings Enhancements Sub-Committee was constituted to improve Tynwald Day celebrations. Before Tynwald sits, the individual presiding inspects the Guard of honour and lays a wreath at the National War Memorial, inaugurated in 1923. A foreign head of state attending the ceremony may accompany the Lieutenant Governor, as HM The King of Norway did in 2002. At eleven o'clock, Tynwald convenes in the Chapel of St John the Baptist for a religious service. Thereafter, they proceed to the adjacent Tynwald Hill; the path is strewn with rushes.
Anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humans and human behavior and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans. Archaeology, which studies past human cultures through investigation of physical evidence, is thought of as a branch of anthropology in the United States and Canada, while in Europe, it is viewed as a discipline in its own right or grouped under other related disciplines, such as history; the abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history. Its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Otto Casmann, their New Latin anthropologia derived from the combining forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English via French Anthropologie, by the early 18th century. In 1647, the Bartholins, founders of the University of Copenhagen, defined l'anthropologie as follows: Anthropology, to say the science that treats of man, is divided ordinarily and with reason into Anatomy, which considers the body and the parts, Psychology, which speaks of the soul.
Sporadic use of the term for some of the subject matter occurred subsequently, such as the use by Étienne Serres in 1839 to describe the natural history, or paleontology, of man, based on comparative anatomy, the creation of a chair in anthropology and ethnography in 1850 at the National Museum of Natural History by Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau. Various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had been formed; the Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839. Its members were anti-slavery activists; when slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned. Meanwhile, the Ethnological Society of New York the American Ethnological Society, was founded on its model in 1842, as well as the Ethnological Society of London in 1843, a break-away group of the Aborigines' Protection Society; these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, pro-human-rights activists. They maintained international connections. Anthropology and many other current fields are the intellectual results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century.
Theorists in such diverse fields as anatomy and Ethnology, making feature-by-feature comparisons of their subject matters, were beginning to suspect that similarities between animals and folkways were the result of processes or laws unknown to them then. For them, the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect. Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s. There was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. Paul Broca in Paris was in the process of breaking away from the Société de biologie to form the first of the explicitly anthropological societies, the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, meeting for the first time in Paris in 1859; when he read Darwin, he became an immediate convert to Transformisme, as the French called evolutionism. His definition now became "the study of the human group, considered as a whole, in its details, in relation to the rest of nature".
Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech. He wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech, he discovered the speech center of the human brain, today called Broca's area after him. His interest was in Biological anthropology, but a German philosopher specializing in psychology, Theodor Waitz, took up the theme of general and social anthropology in his six-volume work, entitled Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859–1864; the title was soon translated as "The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples". The last two volumes were published posthumously. Waitz defined anthropology as "the science of the nature of man". By nature he meant matter animated by "the Divine breath". Following Broca's lead, Waitz points out that anthropology is a new field, which would gather material from other fields, but would differ from them in the use of comparative anatomy and psychology to differentiate man from "the animals nearest to him".
He stresses. The history of civilization, as well as ethnology, are to be brought into the comparison, it is to be presumed fundamentally that the species, man, is a unity, that "the same laws of thought are applicable to all men". Waitz was influential among the British ethnologists. In 1863 the explorer Richard Francis Burton and the speech therapist James Hunt broke away from the Ethnological Society of London to form the Anthropological Society of London, which henceforward would follow the path of the new anthropology rather than just ethnology, it was the 2nd society dedicated to general anthropology in existence. Representatives from the French Société were present. In his keynote address, printed in the first volume of its new publication, The Anthropological Review, Hunt stressed the work of Waitz, adopting his definitions as a standard. Among the first associates were the young Edward Burnett Tylor, inventor of cultural anthropology, his brother Alfred Tylor, a geologist. Edward had referred to himself as an ethnologist.
Similar organizations in
National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty
The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty known as the National Trust, is an independent charity and membership organisation for environmental and heritage conservation in England and Northern Ireland. It is the largest membership organisation in the United Kingdom; the trust describes itself as "a charity that works to preserve and protect historic places and spaces—for for everyone". The trust was founded in 1895 and given statutory powers, starting with the National Trust Act 1907; the trust tended to focus on English country houses, which still make up the largest part of its holdings, but it protects historic landscapes such as in the Lake District, historic urban properties, nature reserves. In Scotland, there is an independent National Trust for Scotland; the Trust has special powers to prevent land being sold off or mortgaged, although this can be over-ridden by Parliament. The National Trust has been the beneficiary of bequests, it owns over 350 heritage properties, which includes many historic houses and gardens, industrial monuments, social history sites.
Most of these are open to the public for a charge. Others are leased, on terms; the Trust is one of the largest landowners in the United Kingdom, owning over 247,000 hectares of land, including many characteristic sites of natural beauty, most of which are open to the public free of charge. The Trust, one of the largest UK charities financially, is funded by membership subscriptions, entrance fees and revenue from gift shops and restaurants within its properties, it has been accused of focusing too much on country estates, in recent years, the trust has sought to broaden its activities by acquiring historic properties such as former mills, early factories and the childhood homes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon. In 2015, the trust undertook a governance review to mark the 10th anniversary of the current governance structure; the review led to the downsizing of the limitation of tenure to two terms. The National Trust was incorporated in 1895 as an "association not for profit" under the Companies Acts 1862–90, in which the liability of its members was limited by guarantee.
It was incorporated by six separate Acts of Parliament: The National Trust Acts 1907, 1919, 1937, 1939, 1953, 1971. It is a charitable organisation registered under the Charities Act 2006, its formal purpose is: The trust was founded on 12 January 1895 by Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley, prompted in part by the earlier success of Charles Eliot and the Kyrle Society. In the early days, the trust was concerned with protecting open spaces and a variety of threatened buildings; the trust's first nature reserve was Wicken Fen, its first archaeological monument was White Barrow. The trust has been the beneficiary of numerous donations of money. From 1924 to 1931, the trust's chairman was John Bailey, of whom The Times said in 1931, "The strong position which the National Trust now occupies is due to him, it will never be known how many generous gifts of rural beauty and historic interest the nation owes, directly or indirectly, to his persuasive enthusiasm." At the same time, a group of anonymous philanthropists set up the Ferguson's Gang.
The focus on country houses and gardens, which now comprise the majority of its most visited properties, came about in the mid 20th century when the private owners of many of the properties were no longer able to afford to maintain them. Many were donated to the trust in lieu of death duties; the diarist James Lees-Milne is credited with playing a central role in the main phase of the trust's country house acquisition programme, though he was in fact an employee of the trust, was carrying through policies decided by its governing body. Sir Jack Boles, Director General of the Trust between 1975 and 1983, oversaw the acquisition of Wimpole Hall, Canons Ashby and Kingston Lacy; the last is a notable asset as it comprises an art collection, Corfe Castle, Studland Bay, Badbury Rings and a host of commercial and domestic buildings and land. One of the biggest crises in the trust's history erupted at the 1967 annual general meeting, when the leadership of the trust was accused of being out of touch and placing too much emphasis on conserving country houses.
In response, the council asked Sir Henry Benson to chair an advisory committee to review the structure of the trust. Following the publication of the Benson Report in 1968, much of the administration of the trust was devolved to the regions. In the 1990s, a dispute over whether deer hunting should be permitted on National Trust land caused bitter disputes within the organisation, was the subject of much debate at annual general meetings, but it did little to slow the growth in its membership numbers. In 2005, the trust moved to a new head office in Wiltshire; the building was constructed on an abandoned railway yard, is intended as a model of brownfield renewal. It is named Heelis, taken from the married name of children's author Beatrix Potter, a huge supporter of, donor to, the trust, which now owns the land she owned in Cumbria; the trust is an independent charity rather than a government institution. Historic England and
Cardium pottery
Cardium pottery or Cardial ware is a Neolithic decorative style that gets its name from the imprinting of the clay with the shell of the cockle, an edible marine mollusk known as Cardium edulis. These forms of pottery are in turn used to define the Neolithic culture which produced and spread them commonly called the "Cardial culture"; the alternative name impressed ware is given by some archaeologists to define this culture, because impressions can be with sharp objects other than cockle shell, such as a nail or comb. Impressed pottery is much more widespread than the Cardial. Impressed ware is found in the zone "covering Italy to the Ligurian coast" as distinct from the more western Cardial extending from Provence to western Portugal; the sequence in prehistoric Europe has traditionally been supposed to start with widespread Cardial ware, to develop other methods of impression locally, termed "epi-Cardial". However the widespread Cardial and Impressed pattern types overlap and are now considered more to be contemporary.
This pottery style gives its name to the main culture of the Mediterranean Neolithic: Cardium pottery culture or Cardial culture, or impressed ware culture, which extended from the Adriatic sea to the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and south to Morocco. The earliest impressed ware sites, dating to 6400 -- 6200 BC, are in Corfu. Settlements appear in Albania and Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic coast dating to between 6100 and 5900 BC; the earliest date in Italy comes from Coppa Nevigata on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy as early as 6000 cal B. C. During Su Carroppu culture in Sardinia in its early stages early examples of cardial pottery appear. Northward and westward all secure radiocarbon dates are identical to those for Iberia c. 5500 cal BC, which indicates a rapid spread of Cardial and related cultures: 2,000 km from the gulf of Genoa to the estuary of the Mondego in no more than 100–200 years. This suggests a seafaring expansion by planting colonies along the coast. Older Neolithic cultures existed at this time in eastern Greece and Crete having arrived from the Levant, but they appear distinct from the Cardial or impressed ware culture.
The ceramic tradition in the central Balkans remained distinct from that along the Adriatic coastline in both style and manufacturing techniques for 1,000 years from the 6th millennium BC. Early Neolithic impressed pottery is found in the Levant, certain parts of Anatolia, including Mezraa-Teleilat, in North Africa at Tunus-Redeyef, Tunisia. So the first Cardial settlers in the Adriatic may have come directly from the Levant. Of course it might well have come directly from North Africa, impressed pottery appears in Egypt. Along the East Mediterranean coast impressed ware has been found in North Syria and Lebanon. Cardial and Epicardial fossils that were analysed for ancient DNA were found to carry the rare mtDNA basal haplogroup N*. Byblos Prehistoric Iberia Prehistoric Italy Prehistory of Corsica Stone Age
