Abstract The proliferation of fortification in north-western Europe during Late Antiquity marks an important shift from the first to early third centuries. The fortified cities and military installations were joined by new fortified towns and rural and hilltop defences. While these defences have been extensively studied, there has been little engagement with this transformation at a statistical level. This article provides an overview of defence in the region using data collected across northeastern Gaul and the provinces of Germania Secunda and Germania Prima . It will highlight biases, distributions and key variations in the dataset and demonstrate regional variations in defence on a large scale.
ETHNOLINGUISTIC SITUATION IN THE PREHISTORIC NORTH-EAST EUROPE Summary The hitherto known facts allow to state that in the period between the disintegration of Indo-European community and the expansion of Mongolian-Turkic peoples four groups of languages: Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Finno-Ugrian and Iranian, connected with one another, existed in the North-East Europe. With the exception of Germanic-Iranian, the existence of contacts between all the remaining groups is assumed, where only the Baltic-Iranian contacts have not been proved to this day. As to Baltic-Slavic connections, apart from similarities resulting from common heritage, they are very late and they go beyond the epoch which comes into question. No certain Baltic borrowings in common Slavic and vice versa no Slavic borrowings in common Baltic have as yet been stated. There are only Polish loan-words in Old Prussian as well as East Slavic and Polish terms in Lithuanian and Latvian. Moreover, some local Baltic influences in the neighbouring Slavic languages have been found. The prehistoric Baltic-Germanic contacts were rather scarce and late and, as it seems, mainly Scandinavian languages were the direct source of Germanic borrowings in Baltic (in the case of Old Prussian it was also Gothic). The Baltic-Finno-Ugrian contacts embraced West Finnic and Volga Finnic languages only, but they were close and prolonged. The Baltic loan-words in West Finnic are numerous (about two hundred), whereas to the unquestionable borrowings in Volga Finnic belong only five words in Mordvian. The Finno-Ugrian borrowings in Baltic are less frequent (about forty words). Most of them come from West Finnic and here also a few words of Iranian and Germanic origin occur. Some of them are known in Slavic languages which allow us to state that they may have dated back to Balto-Slavic epoch.
Ornis Svecica, Daniel Bengtsson, T. Fransson
et al.
A recent increase of wintering Blackcaps in Scandinavia is suspected to derive from migration from central Europe. We used ringing recoveries to determine their origin. Because Blackcaps breeding in Scandinavia have longer wings than more southern Blackcaps, we also analysed wing length data from seven Nordic bird observatories to see whether there was an influx of short-winged, probably continental Blackcaps. The results showed that Scandinavia is now a part of the Blackcap’s regular wintering range. As many as 17% of Blackcaps ringed in Sweden and found again during the same autumn were recovered north of an E–W axis. This is an outstandingly high figure compared to 0–7% in some other species. A strong significant difference in dates of ringing was discovered between “long-winged” (>73 mm) and “short-winged” (<74 mm) Blackcaps. An influx of short-winged Blackcaps started in late September and this was more pronounced in Norway than in Sweden and Finland. It is probably these birds, not Scandinavian breeders forestalling migration, that are observed at bird tables during the winter.
ABSTRACT This empirical study relates the extratropical storminess in the Northern Hemisphere to the large-scale flow using gamma regression models. Time series of storminess are derived using the monthly mean variance of highpass filtered sea-level pressure from the 6-hourly NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data for the 54 extended winters (Oct-Mar) between 1950–2003. Five teleconnection patterns were found to be statistically significant factors at the 5% level for storminess in the Euro-Atlantic region: the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the East Atlantic pattern, the Scandinavian pattern, the East-Atlantic/Western-Russia pattern and the Polar/Eurasian pattern. In the North Pacific the dominant factor is found to be the Pacific North American (PNA) pattern. It is also shown that the relationship between teleconnection patterns and storminess to a large extent is accounted for by a basic relation between storminess and the local mean SLP but with a few notable exceptions. In particular the East Atlantic pattern is identified as an important non-local factor for storminess over the Labrador Sea and the PNA pattern as an important non-local factor for storminess north of the Aleutian low.