Journal articles on the topic 'West Musgrave'

During the past five years, the Onshore Energy Security Program, funded by the Australian Government and conducted by Geoscience Australia, in conjunction with state and territory geological surveys, has acquired deep seismic reflection data across several frontier sedimentary basins to stimulate petroleum exploration in onshore Australia. This extended abstract presents data from two seismic lines collected in Western Australia in 2011. The 487 km long Yilgarn-Officer-Musgrave (YOM) seismic line crossed the western Officer Basin in Western Australia, and the 259 km long, Southern Carnarvon Seismic line crossed the Byro Sub-basin of the Southern Carnarvon Basin. The YOM survey imaged the Neoproterozoic to Devonian western Officer Basin, one of Australia's underexplored sedimentary basins with hydrocarbon potential. The survey data will also provide geoscientific knowledge on the architecture of Australia's crust and the relationship between the eastern Yilgarn Craton and the Musgrave Province. The Southern Carnarvon survey imaged the onshore section of the Ordovician to Permian Carnarvon Basin, which offshore is one of Australia's premier petroleum-producing provinces. The Byro Sub-basin is an underexplored depocentre with the potential for both hydrocarbon and geothermal energy. Where the seismic traverse crossed the Byro Sub-basin it imaged two relatively thick half graben, on west dipping bounding faults. Structural and sequence stratigraphic interpretations of the two seismic lines are presented in this extended abstract.

A granite that yields a U–Pb zircon age of 602 ± 10 Ma is associated with mafic and silicic volcanic rocks and metamorphic equivalents near Deer Lake in western Newfoundland. The granitic rocks are named the Round Pond granite, and the combined granite–volcanic suite is assigned to the Hughes Lake complex. All of the rocks are contained in the Hughes Lake structural slice that occurs above other allochthonous rocks and the autochthonous Cambrian–Ordovician carbonate sequence of western Newfoundland.The Round Pond granite is cut by metadiabase dykes. Mafic volcanic rocks, interpreted as coeval with the dykes, occur along the southeast side of the granite. A thick sequence of arkosic metagreywackes and psammitic to pelitic schists of the Mount Musgrave Group occurs stratigraphically above the mafic volcanic rocks. Regional correlations imply that the Mount Musgrave Group is of late Precambrian – Early Cambrian age, thus setting an upper stratigraphic limit to the age of the Hughes Lake complex.Perthitic and granophyric textures and the chemistry of the Round Pond granite are typical of anorogenic high-level hypersolvus intrusions. Nearby pink silicic volcanic rocks are probably consanguineous with the granite and together with the mafic volcanics form a bimodal suite.Bimodal volcanic suites and related mafic dykes and granitic intrusions imply rift tectonic settings. Occurrences along the west flank of the Appalachian Orogen are equated with the initiation of an ancient continental margin and the opening of an Iapetus Ocean. The 602 ± 10 Ma age of the Round Pond granite dates the rifting in western Newfoundland. Older isotopic ages on similar rocks in the southern Appalachians of the United States suggest a diachronous Precambrian rifting and Iapetus opening that propagated northward, much like the Mesozoic opening of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The Neoproterozoic to Late Paleozoic-aged Amadeus Basin is a large (~170 000 km2) east–west-trending basin, bounded to the south by the Musgrave Province and to the north by the Arunta Block of the Northern Territory. Commercial oil and gas production is established in the northern part of the basin but the southern part is still a frontier exploration area. Vintage and new seismic reflection data have been used with well data along the south-eastern Amadeus Basin to construct a new structural and depositional model. Three major phases of deformation controlling deposition have been identified. The first phase is characterised by a SW–NE trending structural fabric and is thought to be older than the deposition of the first sediments identified above basement (Heavitree and Bitter Springs formations). The second phase corresponds to the Petermann Orogeny (580–540 Ma) and trends in a NW–SE orientation. The third phase is the Alice Springs Orogeny (450–300 Ma) and is oriented W–E to WNW–ESE in this part of the basin. This tectono-stratigraphic model involving three distinct phases of deformation potentially explains several critical observations: the lack of Heavitree reservoir at Mt Kitty-1, limited salt movements before the Petermann Orogeny (~300 Ma after its deposition) and salt-involved structures that can be either capped by the Petermann Unconformity and overlying Cambrian to Devonian sediments, or can reach the present day surface. Finally, this model, along with availability of good quality seismic data, opens new perspectives for the hydrocarbon exploration of the Amadeus Basin. Each of the tectonic phases impacts the primary petroleum system and underpins play-based exploration.

The Papua New Guinea (PNG) species of the water beetle genus Hydraena Kugelann, 1794, are revised, based on the study of 7,411 databased specimens. The two previously named species are redescribed, and 130 new species are described. The species are placed in 32 species groups. High resolution digital images of all primary types are presented (online version in color), scanning electron micrographs of representative species are given, and geographic distributions are mapped. Male genitalia, representative female terminal abdominal segments and representative spermathecae are illustrated. Papua New Guinea Hydraena species are typically found in sandy/gravelly stream margins, often in association with streamside litter; some species are primarily pond or swamp dwelling, and a few species are usually found in the hygropetric splash zone on stream boulders or on rocks at the margins of waterfalls. The geographic distributions of PNG Hydraena are compared with the Areas of Freshwater Endemism recently proposed by Polhemus and Allen (2007), and found to substantially support those areas. Only one species, H. impercepta Zwick, 1977 is known to be found in both Australia and Papua New Guinea. The probable Australian origins of the PNG hydraenid genera Gymnochthebius and Limnebius are discussed. The origins of just a few species of PNG Hydraena appear to clearly be Australia, and of comparatively recent origin, whereas the origins of the remainder remain problematic because of lack of knowledge of the Hydraena fauna in Papua Province, Indonesia, and islands large and small to the west of New Guinea. No endemic genera of Hydraenidae are currently known for New Guinea, whereas 98% of the known species are endemic. New species of Hydraena are: H. acumena (Eastern Highlands Province: Koma River, tributary of Fio River), H. adelbertensis (Madang Province: Adelbert Mts., below Keki), H. akameku (Madang Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. altapapua (Southern Highlands Province: Sopulkul, 30–35 km NE Mendi), H. ambra (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. ambripes (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Budemu), H. ambroides (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. apertista (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Lower Naho Valley, Hinggia), H. apexa (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. aquila (Madang Province: Simbai area), H. aulaarta (Western Highlands Province: Kundum), H. austrobesa (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. bacchusi (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. balkei (Eastern Highlands Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. bicarinova (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. bifunda (Morobe Province: c. 7 mi. Lae–Bulolo road), H. biundulata (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. brahman (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 4.5 km N Brahman), H. bubulla (Madang Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. buloba (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. buquintana (Western Highlands Province: Mt. Hagen town area), H. carinocisiva (Eastern Highlands Province: Aiyura), H. carmellita (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. cavifrons (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 4.5 km N Brahman), H. cheesmanae (Central Province: Kokoda), H. clarinis (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. colorata (Morobe Province: 5 miles W of Lae, Buins Creek), H. confluenta (Eastern Highlands Province: Umg. [=environs of] Kainantu, Onerunka), H. copulata (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. cunicula (Madang Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. decepta (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. diadema (Eastern Highlands Province: Purosa Valley, nr. Okapa), H. dudgeoni (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. einsteini (Central Province: Port Moresby–Brown River road), H. essentia (Eastern Highlands Province: Sepik River Basin, stream beside milestone labelled G-99), H. exhalista (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. fasciata (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. fascinata (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, nr. Moro), H. fasciolata (Madang Province: Madang, Ohu Village), H. fasciopaca (Madang Province: Keki, Adelbert Mts.), H. fenestella (Morobe Province: Lae-Bulolo road), H. foliobba (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. formosopala (East Sepik Province: Prince Alexander Mts., Wewak), H. funda (Central Province: Moitaka, 7 miles N of Port Moresby), H. fundacta (Madang Province: Adelbert Mts., Sewan–Keki), H. fundapta (Central Province: Port Moresby–Brown River road), H. fundarca (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. fundextra (Morobe Province: Markham Valley, Gusap), H. galea (Eastern Highlands Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range, 700 m), H. herzogestella (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Bundun), H. hornabrooki (East Sepik Province: Sepik, main river), H. huonica (Madang Province: Kewensa, Finisterre Range, Yupna, Huon Peninsula), H. ibalimi (Sandaun Province: Mianmin), H. idema (Eastern Highlands Province: Umg. [=environs of] Onerunka, Ramu River), H. impala (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. incisiva (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. incista (Western Highlands Province: Simbai, Kairong River), H. infoveola (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. inhalista (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. inplacopaca (Eastern Highlands Province: Waisa, nr. Okapa), H. insandalia (Eastern Highlands Province: Headwaters of Fio River, 0.5 km downstream of river crossing on Herowana/Oke Lookout path, ca. 4.5 km N of Herowana airstrip), H. intensa (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. johncoltranei (National Capital District, Varirata NP), H. jubilata (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Budemu), H. koje (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. koma (Eastern Highlands Province: Koma River, tributary of Fio River, 100 m downstream of rattan bridge crossing, ca. 3.8 km S by E of Herowana airstrip), H. labropaca (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. lassulipes (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. limbobesa (Gulf Province: Marawaka, near Ande), H. maculopala (Madang Province: Madang, Ohu Village), H. manulea (Morobe Province: Lae, Buins Creek), H. manuloides (Central Province: Port Moresby–Brown River road), H. marawaka (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. mercuriala (Sandaun Province: May River), H. mianminica (Sandaun Province:May River), H. nanocolorata (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. nanopala (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. nitidimenta (Eastern Highlands Province: Koma River, tributary of Fio River, at rattan bridge crossing, ca. 2.6 km N by W of Herowana airstrip), H. okapa (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. ollopa (Western Highlands Province: Kundum), H. otiarca (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau, Snake River), H. owenobesa (Morobe Province: ca. 10 km S Garaina Saureri), H. pacificica (Morobe Province: Huon Pen., Kwapsanek), H. pala (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road, Gurakor Creek), H. palamita (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. paxillipes (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road, Patep Creek), H. pectenata (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. pegopyga (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 3 km N Brahman), H. penultimata (Sandaun Province: May River), H. perpunctata (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. pertransversa (Eastern Highlands Province: Clear stream, summit of Kassem Pass at forest level), H. phainops (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road, Patep Creek), H. photogenica (Eastern Highlands Province: Goroka, Mt. Gahavisuka), H. picula (Eastern Highlands Province: Goroka, Daulo Pass), H. pilulambra (Eastern Highlands Province: Clear stream, summit of Kassem Pass at forest level), H. pluralticola (Morobe Province: c. 7 miles Lae–Bulolo road), H. processa (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. quadriplumipes (Madang Province: Aiome area), H. quintana (Morobe Province: Markham Valley, Lae–Kainantu road, Erap R), H. ramuensis (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 6 km N Brahman), H. ramuquintana (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 6 km N Brahman), H. receptiva (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. remulipes (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. reticulobesa (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Moro), H. sagatai (Sandaun Province: Abau River), H. saluta (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. sepikramuensis (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, Sare River, 4 km N Brahman), H. sexarcuata (Eastern Highlands Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. sexsuprema (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. spinobesa (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Budemu), H. striolata (Oro Province: Northern District, Tanbugal Afore village), H. supersexa (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. supina (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. tarsotricha (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau, Snake River), H. tetana (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. thola (Central Province: Port Moresby– Brown River road), H. tholasoris (Morobe Province: Markham Valley, Gusap, c. 90 miles NW of Lae), H. thumbelina (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. thumbelipes (Sandaun Province: Mianmin), H. tibiopaca (Morobe Province: ridge between Aseki–Menyamya), H. torosopala (Madang Province: Keki, Adelbert Mts.), H. torricellica (Morobe Province: Torricelli Mts., village below Sibilanga Stn.), H. transvallis (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. trichotarsa (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. tricosipes (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. tritropis (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. tritutela (Morobe Province: ca. 10 km S Garaina Saureri), H. ulna (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. variopaca (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. velvetina (Eastern Highlands Province: Purosa Valley, nr. Okapa).

Clinicians working in acute medicine will be familiar with change. The speciality and the environment we work in has changed continually over the past 15 years – I often reflect that no two years have been the same since I started working in the field back in 1999. Change is important, in order to achieve best practice, but sustaining such improvements can be an enormous challenge. The regular turnover of medical staff, local management restructuring and the constantly shifting National goal posts often conspire against us. It is easy for ‘changefatigue’ to set in. Submissions to this journal often describe local audits and service improvement projects which have raised standards: a low baseline may result in a statistically significant improvement from a relatively small intervention – often an education programme or poster campaign to raise awareness of the problem. However, what happens next is far more important: can the improvement be sustained when the key driver behind the project – the enthusiast – moves on, after their 4 month block of acute medicine comes to an end? One year on, we are often back where we started. Two articles in this edition appear to have achieved the Holy Grail of sustainability. In the paper by Joanne Botten from Musgrove Park, door to antibiotic time was improved for patients with neutopaenic sepsis by introducing a system whereby the antibiotics could be administered without waiting for a prescription to be written. The combination of a neutropaenic sepsis alert card and a patient-specific direction empowered the nurses and patients to ensure administration within an hour of arrival in over 90% of cases, a figure which has been sustained for over a year. Sustainable change is often facilitated by modifications in paperwork, but crucially the project’s success was not reliant on a single individual. The value of engaging with the wider team is also shown in Gary Misselbook’s paper describing sustained improvement in the layout and utility of an AMU procedure room. The authors describe how repeated attempts by different registrars had failed to achieve more than temporary reorganisation; the change was only sustained when nursing, infection control and administrative staff became involved in the process. The multiprofessional nature of the AMU is one of its greatest assets – we would all do well to remember this when instigating change. On a similar note, observant readers may have noticed some changes to the editorial board of this journal – I am delighted to welcome Dr Tim Cooksley, acute physician from Manchester and Dr Prabath Nanayakkara from the VUMC in the Netherlands. Tim came through the acute medicine training programme in the North West and his role in the acute oncology service at the Christie Hospital as well as his active involvement in the SAMBA project over recent years brings an important perspective to the editorial team. Prabath has been heavily involved with the development of acute medicine in the Netherlands and co-hosted the successful SAMSTERDAM meeting in 2014. His international perspective will be welcome as we attempt to extend the reach of Acute Medicine to our European neighbours over the coming years. I am very grateful to Nik Patel, Mark Jackson and Ashwin Pinto for their help and support during the past decade and wish them well for the future.

Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neologism, the result of a contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. In accordance with David Holmgren and Richard Telford definition quoted above, we intend permaculture as a design process based on a set of ethical and design principles. Rather than describing the history of permaculture, we choose two moments as paradigmatic of its evolution in relation to counterculture.The first moment is permaculture’s beginnings steeped in the same late 1960s turbulence that saw some people pursue an alternative lifestyle in Northern NSW and a rural idyll in Tasmania (Grayson and Payne). Ideas of a return to the land circulating in this first moment coalesced around the publication in 1978 of the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, which functioned as “a disruptive technology, an idea that threatened to disrupt business as usual, to change the way we thought and did things”, as Russ Grayson writes in his contextual history of permaculture. The second moment is best exemplified by the definitions of permaculture as “a holistic system of design … most often applied to basic human needs such as water, food and shelter … also used to design more abstract systems such as community and economic structures” (Milkwood) and as “also a world wide network and movement of individuals and groups working in both rich and poor countries on all continents” (Holmgren).We argue that the shift in understanding of permaculture from the “back to the land movement” (Grayson) as a more wholesome alternative to consumer society to the contemporary conceptualisation of permaculture as an assemblage and global network of practices, is representative of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture from the 1970s to the present. While counterculture was a useful way to understand the agency of subcultures (i.e. by countering mainstream culture and society) contemporary forms of globalised capitalism demand different models and vocabularies within which the idea of “counter” as clear cut alternative becomes an awkward fit.On the contrary we see the emergence of a repertoire of practices aimed at small-scale, localised solutions connected in transnational networks (Pink 105). These practices operate contrapuntally, a concept we borrow from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), to define how divergent practices play off each other while remaining at the edge, but still in a relation of interdependence with a dominant paradigm. In Said’s terms “contrapuntal reading” reveals what is left at the periphery of a mainstream narrative, but is at the same time instrumental to the development of events in the narrative itself. To illustrate this concept Said makes the case of novels where colonial plantations at the edge of the Empire make possible a certain lifestyle in England, but don’t appear in the narrative of that lifestyle itself (66-67).In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage.Background: Counterculture and Assemblage We do not have the scope in this article to engage with contested definitions of counterculture in the Australian context, or their relation to contraculture or subculture. There is an emerging literature (Stickells, Robinson) touched on elsewhere in this issue. In this paper we view counterculture as social movements that “undermine societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead a city organised on the basis of values such as action, local cultures, and decentred, participatory democracy” (Castells 19-20). Our focus on cities demonstrates the ways counterculture has shifted away from oppositional protest and towards ways of living sustainably in an increasingly urbanised world.Permaculture resonates with Castells’s definition and with other forms of protest, or what Musgrove calls “the dialectics of utopia” (16), a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) that characterised ‘counterculture’ in the 1970s. McKay offers a similar view when he says such acts of counterculture are capable of “both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance” (27). But as a design practice, permaculture goes beyond the spectacle of protest.In this sense permaculture can be understood as an everyday act of resistance: “The design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives” (Markussen 38). We view permaculture design as a form of design activism that is embedded in everyday life. It is a process that aims to reorient a practice not by disrupting it but by becoming part of it.Guy Julier cites permaculture, along with the appropriate technology movement and community architecture, as one of many examples of radical thinking in design that emerged in the 1970s (225). This alignment of permaculture as a design practice that is connected to counterculture in an assemblage, but not entirely defined by it, is important in understanding the endurance of permaculture as a form of activism.In refuting the common and generalized narrative of failure that is used to describe the sixties (and can be extended to the seventies), Julie Stephens raises the many ways that the dominant ethos of the time was “revolutionised by the radicalism of the period, but in ways that bore little resemblance to the announced intentions of activists and participants themselves” (121). Further, she argues that the “extraordinary and paradoxical aspects of the anti-disciplinary protest of the period were that while it worked to collapse the division between opposition and complicity and problematised received understandings of the political, at the same time it reaffirmed its commitment to political involvement as an emancipatory, collective endeavour” (126).Many foresaw the political challenge of counterculture. From the belly of the beast, in 1975, Craig McGregor wrote that countercultures are “a crucial part of conventional society; and eventually they will be judged on how successful they transform it” (43). In arguing that permaculture is an assemblage and global network of practices, we contribute to a description of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture that was identified by McGregor at the time and Stephens retrospectively, and we open up possibilities for reexamining an important moment in the history of Australian protest movements.Permaculture: Historical Context Together with practical manuals and theoretical texts permaculture has produced its foundation myths, centred around two father figures, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The pair, we read in accounts on the history of permaculture, met in the 1970s in Hobart at the University of Tasmania, where Mollison, after a polymath career, was a senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology, and Holmgren a student. Together they wrote the first article on permaculture in 1976 for the Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine (Grayson and Payne), which together with the dissemination of ideas via radio, captured the social imagination of the time. Two years later Holmgren and Mollison published the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (Mollison and Holmgren).These texts and Mollison’s talks articulated ideas and desires and most importantly proposed solutions about living on the land, and led to the creation of the first ecovillage in Australia, Max Lindegger’s Crystal Waters in South East Queensland, the first permaculture magazine (titled Permaculture), and the beginning of the permaculture network (Grayson and Payne). In 1979 Mollison taught the first permaculture course, and published the second book. Grayson and Payne stress how permaculture media practices, such as the radio interview mentioned above and publications like Permaculture Magazine and Permaculture International Journal were key factors in the spreading of the design system and building a global network.The ideas developed around the concept of permaculture were shaped by, and in turned contributed to shape, the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s that captured the discontent with both capitalism and the Cold War, and that coalesced in “alternative lifestyles groups” (Metcalf). In 1973, for instance, the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin was not only a countercultural landmark, but also the site of emergence of alternative experiments in living that found their embodiment in experimental housing design (Stickells). The same interest in technological innovation mixed with rural skills animated one of permaculture’s precursors, the “back to the land movement” and its attempt “to blend rural traditionalism and technological and ideological modernity” (Grayson).This character of remix remains one of the characteristics of permaculture. Unlike movements based mostly on escape from the mainstream, permaculture offered a repertoire, and a system of adaptable solutions to live both in the country and the city. Like many aspects of the “alternative lifestyle” counterculture, permaculture was and is intensely biopolitical in the sense that it is concerned with the management of life itself “from below”: one’s own, people’s life and life on planet earth more generally. This understanding of biopolitics as power of life rather than over life is translated in permaculture into malleable design processes across a range of diversified practices. These are at the basis of the endurance of permaculture beyond the experiments in alternative lifestyles.In distinguishing it from sustainability (a contested concept among permaculture practitioners, some of whom prefer the notion of “planning for abundance”), Barry sees permaculture as:locally based and robustly contextualized implementations of sustainability, based on the notion that there is no ‘one size fits all’ model of sustainability. Permaculture, though rightly wary of more mainstream, reformist, and ‘business as usual’ accounts of sustainability can be viewed as a particular localized, and resilience-based conceptualization of sustainable living and the creation of ‘sustainable communities’. (83)The adaptability of permaculture to diverse solutions is stressed by Molly Scott-Cato, who, following David Holmgren, defines it as follows: “Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions” (176).Permaculture Practice as Assemblage Scott Cato’s definition of permaculture helps us to understand both its conceptual framework as it is set out in permaculture manuals and textbooks, and the way it operates in practice at an individual, local, regional, national and global level, as an assemblage. Using the idea of assemblage, as defined by Jane Bennett, we are able to understand permaculture as part of an “ad hoc grouping”, a “collectivity” made up of many types of actors, humans, non humans, nature and culture, whose “coherence co-exists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it” (445-6). Put slightly differently, permaculture is part of “living” assemblage whose existence is not dependent on or governed by a “central power”. Nor can it be influenced by any single entity or member (445-6). Rather, permaculture is a “complex, gigantic whole” that is “made up variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements” (447).In considering permaculture as an assemblage that includes countercultural elements, we specifically adhere to John Law’s description of Actor Network Theory as an approach that relies on an empirical foundation rather than a theoretical one in order to “tell stories about ‘how’ relationships assemble or don’t” (141). The hybrid nature of permaculture design involving both human and non human stakeholders and their social and material dependencies can be understood as an “assembly” or “thing,” where everything not only plays its part relationally but where “matters of fact” are combined with “matters of concern” (Latour, "Critique"). As Barry explains, permaculture is a “holistic and systems-based approach to understanding and designing human-nature relations” (82). Permaculture principles are based on the enactment of interconnections, continuous feedback and reshuffling among plants, humans, animals, chemistry, social life, things, energy, built and natural environment, and tools.Bruno Latour calls this kind of relationality a “sphere” or a “network” that comprises of many interconnected nodes (Latour, "Actor-Network" 31). The connections between the nodes are not arbitrary, they are based on “associations” that dissolve the “micro-macro distinctions” of near and far, emphasizing the “global entity” of networks (361-381). Not everything is globalised but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone. In the context of permaculture, we argue that despite being highly connected through a network of digital and analogue platforms, the movement remains localised. In other words, permaculture is both local and global articulating global matters of concern such as food production, renewable energy sources, and ecological wellbeing in deeply localised variants.These address how the matters of concerns engendered by global networks in specific places interact with local elements. A community based permaculture practice in a desert area, for instance, will engage with storing renewable energy, or growing food crops and maintaining a stable ecology using the same twelve design principles and ethics as an educational business doing rooftop permaculture in a major urban centre. The localised applications, however, will result in a very different permaculture assemblage of animals, plants, technologies, people, affects, discourses, pedagogies, media, images, and resources.Similarly, if we consider permaculture as a network of interconnected nodes on a larger scale, such as in the case of national organisations, we can see how each node provides a counterpoint that models ecological best practices with respect to ingrained everyday ways of doing things, corporate and conventional agriculture, and so on. This adaptability and ability to effect practices has meant that permaculture’s sphere of influence has grown to include public institutions, such as city councils, public and private spaces, and schools.A short description of some of the nodes in the evolving permaculture assemblage in Sydney, where we live, is an example of the way permaculture has advanced from its alternative lifestyle beginnings to become part of the repertoire of contemporary activism. These practices, in turn, make room for accepted ways of doing things to move in new directions. In this assemblage each constellation operates within well established sites: local councils, public spaces, community groups, and businesses, while changing the conventional way these sites operate.The permaculture assemblage in Sydney includes individuals and communities in local groups coordinated in a city-wide network, Permaculture Sydney, connected to similar regional networks along the NSW seaboard; local government initiatives, such as in Randwick, Sydney, and Pittwater and policies like Sustainable City Living; community gardens like the inner city food forest at Angel Street or the hybrid public open park and educational space at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden; private permaculture gardens; experiments in grassroot urban permaculture and in urban agriculture; gardening, education and landscape business specialising in permaculture design, like Milkwood and Sydney Organic Gardens; loose groups of permaculturalists gathering around projects, such as Permablitz Sydney; media personalities and programs, as in the case of the hugely successful garden show Gardening Australia hosted by Costa Georgiadis; germane organisations dedicated to food sovereignty or seed saving, the Transition Towns movement; farmers’ markets and food coops; and multifarious private/public sustainability initiatives.Permaculture is a set of practices that, in themselves are not inherently “against” anything, yet empower people to form their own lifestyles and communities. After all, permaculture is a design system, a way to analyse space, and body of knowledge based on set principles and ethics. The identification of permaculture as a form of activism, or indeed as countercultural, is externally imposed, and therefore contingent on the ways conventional forms of housing and food production are understood as being in opposition.As we have shown elsewhere (2014) thinking through design practices as assemblages can describe hybrid forms of participation based on relationships to broader political movements, disciplines and organisations.Use Edges and Value the Marginal The eleventh permaculture design principle calls for an appreciation of the marginal and the edge: “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system” (permacultureprinciples.com). In other words the edge is understood as the site where things come together generating new possible paths and interactions. In this paper we have taken this metaphor to think through the relations between permaculture and counterculture. We argued that permaculture emerged from the countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s and intersected with other fringe alternative lifestyle experiments. In its contemporary form the “counter” value needs to be understood as counterpoint rather than as a position of pure oppositionality to the mainstream.The edge in permaculture is not a boundary on the periphery of a design, but a site of interconnection, hybridity and exchange, that produces adaptable and different possibilities. Similarly permaculture shares with forms of contemporary activism “flexible action repertoires” (Mayer 203) able to interconnect and traverse diverse contexts, including mainstream institutions. Permaculture deploys an action repertoire that integrates not segregates and that is aimed at inviting a shift in everyday practices and at doing things differently: differently from the mainstream and from the way global capital operates, without claiming to be in a position outside global capital flows. In brief, the assemblages of practices, ideas, and people generated by permaculture, like the ones described in this paper, as a counterpoint bring together discordant elements on equal terms.ReferencesBarry, John. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Bennett, Jane. “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout.” Public Culture 17.3 (2005): 445-65.Castells, Manuel. “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication, Networks, and Global Governance.” ANNALS, AAPSS 616 (2008): 78-93.Crosby, Alexandra, Jacqueline Lorber-Kasunic, and Ilaria Vanni. “Mapping Hybrid Design Participation in Sydney.” Proceedings of the Arte-Polis 5th International Conference – Reflections on Creativity: Public Engagement and the Making of Place. Bandung, 2014.Grayson, Russ, and Steve Payne. “Tasmanian Roots.” New Internationalist 402 (2007): 10–11.Grayson, Russ. “The Permaculture Papers 2: The Dawn.” PacificEdge 2010. 6 Oct. 2014 ‹http://pacific-edge.info/2010/10/the-permaculture-papers-2-the-dawn›.Holmgren, David. “About Permaculture.” Holmgren Design, Permaculture Vision and Innovation. 2014.Julier, Guy. “From Design Culture to Design Activism.” Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 215-236.Law, John. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 2009. 141-158. Latour, Bruno. “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications plus More than a Few Complications.” Philosophia, 25.3 (1996): 47-64.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48. 6 Dec. 2014 ‹http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/089.html›.Levin, Simon A. The Princeton Guide to Ecology. Princeton: Princeton UP. 2009Lockyer, Joshua, and James R. Veteto, eds. Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages. Vol. 17. Berghahn Books, 2013.Madge, Pauline. “Ecological Design: A New Critique.” Design Issues 13.2 (1997): 44-54.Mayer, Margit. “Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.1 (2006): 202–206.Markussen, Thomas. “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design between Art and Politics.” Design Issues 29.1 (2013): 38-50.McGregor, Craig. “What Counter-Culture?” Meanjin Quarterly 34.1 (1975).McGregor, Craig. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Meanjin Quarterly 30.2 (1971): 176-179.McKay, G. “DiY Culture: Notes Toward an Intro.” In G. McKay, ed., DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain, London: Verso, 1988. 1-53.Metcalf, William J. “A Classification of Alternative Lifestyle Groups.” Journal of Sociology 20.66 (1984): 66–80.Milkwood. “Frequently Asked Questions.” 30 Sep. 2014. 6 Dec. 2014 ‹http://www.milkwoodpermaculture.com.au/permaculture/faqs›.Mollison, Bill, and David Holmgren. Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements. Melbourne: Transworld Publishers, 1978.Musgrove, F. Ecstasy and Holiness: Counter Culture and the Open Society. London: Methuen and Co., 1974.permacultureprinciples.com. 25 Nov. 2014.Pink, Sarah. Situating Everyday Life. London: Sage, 2012.Robinson, Shirleene. “1960s Counter-Culture in Australia: the Search for Personal Freedom.” In The 1960s in Australia: People, Power and Politics, eds. Shirleene Robinson and Julie Ustinoff. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.Scott-Cato. Molly. Environment and Economy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Stephens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.Stickells, Lee. “‘And Everywhere Those Strange Polygonal Igloos’: Framing a History of Australian Countercultural Architecture.” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 30: Open. Vol. 2. Eds. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach. Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2013. 555-568.

IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. 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