UCL-China Research Festival - Audio

Opening of Festival by President and Provost Malcolm Grant

As signatory of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), China supports the 2010 Biodiversity Target to achieve a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss by the year 2010. This very ambitious goal must be seen against the background of a huge knowledge gap prevailing particularly with regard to patterns of insect diversity in space and time.

Our collaborative research is trying to be instrumental in addressing the aforementioned knowledge gap by investigating how different agricultural activities affect species richness in a number of different habitats which are characterized by very different intensities of agricultural management. The research is conducted at the Agricultural Research Station of the China Agricultural University in Quzhou county, an area heavily utilized for agricultural production with only very small remnants of semi-natural habitats remaining.

In this setting, the diversity of beetles and plants is compared between semi-natural woodland habitats, orchards which are managed at intermediate intensity, lawn, intensively managed fields of winter wheat/summer maize and cotton monocultures. Species richness of plants peaks at the habitats which are managed extensively, with similar levels of diversity being recorded in woodland and orchards. Diversity of carabid beetle communities is lowest at cotton monocultures followed by lawns, but shows equally high values in woodlands, orchards and intensively managed wheat/maize fields.

An investigation of changes in species composition between different habitats reveals that cotton and wheat/maize fields harbour similar beetle assemblages. These are nonetheless distinctly different from assemblages encountered in orchard and woodland areas. This leads to the conclusion that a further intensification of agricultural practices, but especially the ongoing transformation of orchards and wheat/maize fields into cotton monocultures which can be observed in large sections of the study area, has the potential to severely decrease the overall species pool of both carabid beetles and plant species. On the other hand, the high degree of similarity in the species composition of ground beetles and plant species in orchards and semi-natural woodland hints at the possibility that the promotion of orchards in the Quzhou district might be a highly feasible approach in preserving a significant proportion of the local species pool.

Recent decades have seen the emergence of sign linguistics as a sub-discipline of linguistic research, accumulating a body of knowledge that has enlightened linguists about the complex grammatical properties of sign language. Researchers have also begun to show how sign language is acquired as a first language by deaf children who can then use this resource to develop spoken and written language for education and social communication in the hearing majority community. These findings have demonstrated that deaf children have the capacity to become bilingual in signed and spoken language, and that hearing children also benefit from early exposure to sign language. As a result of this change of linguistic orientation towards sign language researchers have begun to explore the concepts of Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment, involving deaf and hearing participants, teachers and learners in partnership with each other in an educational process that can promote children’ linguistic, cognitive and social development.

It is within this context that The Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies (CSLDS) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong launched a 7-year research programme in 2006 to explore an alternative model of deaf education that sets out to resolve the long-standing problem of low literacy skills and educational attainment among deaf children in HK. This research programme seeks to merge theoretical language acquisition models and applied linguistic research, with a particular focus on creating a model of deaf education that mediates between two languages and two cultures, providing bilingual linguistic resources which are accessible to both deaf and hearing children.

An important part of the research agenda is to investigate the impact of Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment on the language development of deaf and hearing children in pre-school and primary education. The research has been jointly designed by researchers from the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at UCL. It adopts a longitudinal approach to the evaluation process, profiling the grammatical development of signed and spoken language in the deaf and hearing children enrolled in this programme. At the end of the first year of implementation in 2006, children’s sign language development was documented using a picture story retelling task, spoken language vocabulary development was assessed by means of a word-picture matching task, and speech production and perception were evaluated using assessment batteries originally designed for Cantonese speech perception and production in hearing children. In this presentation, we will present results of some of our preliminary investigation and discuss some projected outcomes.

Around half of the world’s population lives under the influence of the Asian monsoons. The sustainability of water resources, which is intimately tied up with future monsoon variability, is a critically-important issue in northwest China where development is taking place at the margins of agricultural productivity and towards the fringe of the landward penetration of summer monsoon rainfall. Understanding the likely future behaviour of the Asian monsoons is therefore critical for the people of northwest China. Knowledge of past variations in the monsoons is important for our understanding of the monsoon system as a whole and for how it might respond to changing global conditions in the future. However, climatological records only extend back around 50 years or so in northwest China, much too short a time span to allow the full range of natural variability in the monsoons to be assessed. An alternative approach is to use so-called natural archives of climate variability, which include tree rings, ice cores and various sediment records such as those deposited in lakes and the oceans. In this paper, we describe ongoing collaborative work on lake sediments in northwest China being undertaken in University College London and Lanzhou University. Despite its relative dryness, northwest China contains a surprising number of lakes. Many of these are hydrologically closed (i.e. they receive water only from rainfall and lose water only by evaporation) and therefore respond sensitively to changes in effective precipitation, defined as the balance of precipitation to evaporation. Lake sediments are one of the most important sources of evidence for environmental change in dryland areas. Changes in lake level and water chemistry, which are responses to variations in precipitation, runoff and evaporation, are recorded in the stratigraphy, sedimentology, geochemistry and palaeontology of the sediments. Variations in local and regional vegetation may also be reflected in pollen records. Our research has focused on lakes along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau and between sand dunes in the deserts of Inner Mongolia, which record climate variability over the past millennium. This period is a particularly important, since there appear to have been large changes in the intensity of monsoon circulation during this time, possibly associated with the major climatic intervals know as the Medieval Warm Period (~AD 1000 – 1300) and Little Ice Age (~AD 1350 – 1900), during which times the monsoon may have strengthened and weakened, respectively. However, evidence from natural archives indicates that the observed changes in climate have been highly variable across the vast region of Northwest China, making the accumulation of more data from additional sites a priority task for the future.

Recent decades have seen the emergence of sign linguistics as a sub-discipline of linguistic research, accumulating a body of knowledge that has enlightened linguists about the complex grammatical properties of sign language. Researchers have also begun to show how sign language is acquired as a first language by deaf children who can then use this resource to develop spoken and written language for education and social communication in the hearing majority community. These findings have demonstrated that deaf children have the capacity to become bilingual in signed and spoken language, and that hearing children also benefit from early exposure to sign language. As a result of this change of linguistic orientation towards sign language researchers have begun to explore the concepts of Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment, involving deaf and hearing participants, teachers and learners in partnership with each other in an educational process that can promote children’ linguistic, cognitive and social development.

It is within this context that The Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies (CSLDS) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong launched a 7-year research programme in 2006 to explore an alternative model of deaf education that sets out to resolve the long-standing problem of low literacy skills and educational attainment among deaf children in HK. This research programme seeks to merge theoretical language acquisition models and applied linguistic research, with a particular focus on creating a model of deaf education that mediates between two languages and two cultures, providing bilingual linguistic resources which are accessible to both deaf and hearing children.

An important part of the research agenda is to investigate the impact of Sign Bilingualism and Co-enrolment on the language development of deaf and hearing children in pre-school and primary education. The research has been jointly designed by researchers from the Centre for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at UCL. It adopts a longitudinal approach to the evaluation process, profiling the grammatical development of signed and spoken language in the deaf and hearing children enrolled in this programme. At the end of the first year of implementation in 2006, children’s sign language development was documented using a picture story retelling task, spoken language vocabulary development was assessed by means of a word-picture matching task, and speech production and perception were evaluated using assessment batteries originally designed for Cantonese speech perception and production in hearing children. In this presentation, we will present results of some of our preliminary investigation and discuss some projected outcomes.

Introduction: Previous functional imaging studies comparing Chinese and English reading have reported that a left middle frontal region is more activated by Chinese reading and the left superior temporal cortex is more activated by English reading (Tan et al. 2001; 2003). We investigated this finding and its interpretation by conducting a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of reading in China and England using monolingual adolescents who spoke Mandarin or English respectively. Our paradigm compared activation for semantic decision on written stimuli (words or characters) as well as on pictures of objects so that we could determine whether or not the previously reported effects were specific to written stimuli.

Methods: The paradigm involved 4 different stimulus conditions: semantic decisions on (1) written object names and (2) pictures of objects; and perceptual decisions on (3) pictures of meaningless non-objects and (4) meaningless Greek/Korean letters. Written stimuli were presented in the known language (i.e. characters in Chinese and words in English). The pictures were identical in the Chinese and English versions of the study. In each condition, three stimuli were presented, one above (the target) and two below (the choices). Using the right hand, participants were instructed to indicate with a left or right button press whether the target matched the left or right choice. For example, when the stimuli were “anchor” (target), “ship” and “truck”(choices), participants made a left button press to indicate that “anchor” is more closely associated with a “ship” than “truck”. Stimulus presentation parameters were identical for perceptual decisions but here the task was to indicate whether the left or right choice was perceptually identical to the target above.

Data were acquired from the whole brain using 1.5T MRI scanners at Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL and Institute of Linguistics at XuZhou Normal University. Participants were 13 English adolescents (age 13-16) and 10 Chinese adolescents (age 13-16) with no history of reading impairment. Data analysis was carried out with SPM5 software package and effects of interest were based on correct responses only.

Results and Conclusions Behaviourally, performance and response times did not differ across groups. In reading, consistent with previous findings, Chinese subjects showed significantly more activation in the left middle frontal region while English subjects showed significantly more activation in the left posterior superior temporal cortex. However, we also observed significantly greater left middle frontal activation in the Chinese group during semantic decisions on pictures. Therefore, the effect in the left middle frontal region is not specific to reading. Next, we explored inter-subject variability within each group. This led to the observation that differences between the Chinese and English groups were driven by a subgroup of English subjects. This suggests that the differences observed here at the group level were more likely to be due to individual differences in education or other cognitive skills than to writing system or ethnicity alone.

This presentation will present a range of collaborative research into the history and culture of Chinese medicine that has been undertaken in the last five years at the Wellcome Trust Centre for History of Medicine, UCL. Most of my personal research involves the translation, analysis and access to medical manuscripts that date from the 2nd to 11th C. CE. To this end I work with archaeologists, palaeographers, philologists, and medical historians all over China. Apart from books and article some of the fruits of one Wellcome Trust sponsored collaboration with the Academy of Chinese medicine can be seen online at the International Dunhuang Project site at the British Library. That project spawned a number joint ventures concerned with the transmission of medical knowledge and practice, particularly along the Silk Roads. More recently the first draft of a collection of Chinese medical illustrations is online in the Wellcome Images collection. These ca 1300 images dating from 2nd C. BCE to 20th C. come complete with catalogue details and descriptions of content.

While these projects are mostly concerned with historical text and illustration they have contemporary relevance. Practitioners of traditional medicines in the modern have a different relationship to their history when compared with doctors of so-called modern medicine. They often, for example, call on the antiquity of their heritage as one form of legitimacy. Yet despite the overwhelming quantity of primary sources that history is poorly understood. As Secretary General of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine I established an academic journal dedicated to giving academics and practitioners a platform for the expression of their views, privileging the free exchange of knowledge over involvement in any particular commercial interest or therapeutic regime. Now in its third year we publish many articles by Chinese authors.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of my research I work with a lively set of Phd and researchers whose research necessitates having a good understanding of many scripts and languages including Chinese, Tibetan, Arabic, Sanskrit etc and who are philologists, historians and anthropologists and film makers. Our output includes books, articles, and film. We have also recently run an outreach and arts project that engaged Asians living in London in the exploration of the everyday practice of Asian medicine in the home.

A complete revision to dating of early agriculture in the Lower Yangzte region of China is now underway as new methods for archaeobotanical analyses are being applied to trace the gradual evolution of domesticated rice from its wild ancestors, and the gradual shift from hunting-and-gathering to a reliance on cultivation. Since its discovery in the 1970s the Neolithic culture of Hemudu has been synonymous of developed rice agriculture in the Lower Yangzte valley. However, at the time it was excavated, systematic archaeobotanocal investigations were not carried out. Reassessment of published data has drawn into question whether this rice was fully domesticated, suggesting instead that domestication was a process that might have taken process that took 1000-2000 years or more during which people were manipoulating environments and planting rice. In this new hypothesis rice domesticated was only completed ca. 4000 BC in this region. This hypothesis has been tested, and largely supported by new archaeobotanical work at the nearby site of Tian Luo Shan (Early 5th Millennium BC), focused in particular on 1,126 preserved rice spikelet base remains. These data indicate that rice was perhaps 1/3 to nearly halfway through the domestication process in a population genetic sense. The broader assemblage suggests that rice cultivation was part of an economy focused on specialized nut collection with a focus on acorns and water chestnuts. We can now reconsturct aspects of collection patterns from,oak woodlands and from marshland environments, which was supplemented by the use/cultivation of rice in the marshes. The rather limited range of 32 species (with >28,000 specimens) suggests that these were specialized collectors rather than broad-spectrum foragers-- a contrast with early farmers from elsewhere, Southwest Asia for example. And find contexts on site indicate the extensive storage of nuts (and probably rice), indicating delayed return hunter-gatherers. In addition, fruit finds include wild peaces and seeds of persimmon (Diospyros). While the evidence for the process of rice cultivation can be seen to parallel Near Eastern evidence for the slow rise to dominance of domesticated cereal forms, the Chinese evidence for focused nut-collectors also suggests an important difference.

In 2006 Peter Ucko and Wang Tao visited more than ten universities in mainland China, in order to meet staff and students in each Department of Archaeology. We interviewed staff and students to find out about their experiences, expectations and ideas regarding the nature and practice of archaeology. In addition, interviews were held with the several directors of provincial institutes of archaeology.

The interviews consisted of semi-structured questioning, and free discussion was encouraged. One set of questions concerned what is now often referred to in Britain as ‘Public Archaeology’ and included all areas of contact between the public and the presentation of the past, (e.g. archaeological sites, museum displays, particular legislation, both formal and informal education). For most Chinese archaeologists – whether staff or students – the practice of archaeology is seen as an expert activity to be carried out solely by experts. Furthermore, students are considered to be still learning research competence in addition to ‘field’ techniques, which include not only practical techniques such as surveying and field walking, but also typologising (ceramic or lacquer vessels, and metal vessels). The group discussions revealed that Chinese archaeologists, on the whole, are either unaware of this aspect of current western archaeological theory and practice or, at the least, do not appear to recognise such an area of investigation. However, a few aspects of what we had described as ‘Public Archaeology’ were taught within specialist courses, in particular legislation and conservation, and/or museology.

Despite such apparent disinterest from academic archaeology in China, this was not always the case in practice, as exercised by the provincial, non-university institutes. There are a number of cases of what we would qualify as ‘Public Archaeology’ in the context of the management of archaeological sites. In this short presentation I will discuss the barriers which would have to be overcome if ‘Public Archaeology’ is to become acceptable within the current Chinese framework and structure of archaeological inquiry and practice.

Copper underpins the technology and economy of most societies of the last four thousand years, and ancient China is no exception. It relies heavily on copper for the production of bronze objects, such as weapons, tools and vessels, but also for its coinage and other monetary instruments. The artistic expression preserved in highly decorated and intricately cast bronze objects is rightly admired, and has attracted much scientific and art historical attention. Little, however, is known about the primary production and geological origin of the copper used to manufacture these objects.

A long-term collaboration between the two institutes involved concerns the identification and reconstruction of past copper smelting activity. The long-term aim is to identify and understand the technological advances within a given region and period, and how much of that technology is a reflection of geological constrains, and how much is due to human ingenuity and problem-solving. An important aspect is the identification of cultural difference between different societies and regions, sine these may shed light on the transmission routes and mechanisms of early technology across Central and Eastern Asia.

The paper will look at two case studies of copper smelting technology in Xinjiang, to illustrate the wide range of variables to be considered in this seemingly simple process. The earlier smelting activity is based on the processing of chalcopyrite, a copper-iron sulphide ore, and resulted in the production of a particular type of thin, platy slag fragments. These dark, almost black plattenschlacken are well-known from several Bronze Age to medieval copper smelting sites in Europe and indicate a well-controlled use of ore selection and potentially added fluxes, in order to produce a low-viscosity and low-melting slag. They are fayalitic, often with magnetite inclusions and act as the main outlet for the iron initially present in the chalcopyrite ore.

In contrast, the later glassy slags are based on the processing of a predominantly pure copper sulphide ore, such as chalcosin, are much more colourful and chemically much richer in calcium than iron oxide. They resemble typical blast furnace slags in their appearance and composition. This is underlined by the presence of high amounts of metallic copper alloyed to the copper prills preserved in the slag, indicating strongly reducing conditions. The resulting copper metal would have required a further refining step to make it useable, and the use of a blast furnace indicates availability of a strong, probably mechanically-operated wind supply.

In the long term, we expect to see pattern emerging, relating different technologies to different ore types and cultural traditions, potentially revealing knowledge transmission paths and hubs of independent developments of metallurgy.