The earliest chapters in Antarctica's rather fragmentary record extend far back, perhaps as much as 3 billion years, into early Precambrian time.
But they are, by nature, a fragmentary record: the actors were loath to put their true feelings in writing then, nor were they eager to discuss them with reporters now.
Our goal is to address the major epistemological issue of building broad-scale, cross-regional generalizations on the basis of a fragmentary record.
As raw material for historical fiction, the life of Marlowe — or the fragmentary records of it that remain — could scarcely be bettered.
Sorting out who is buried where has been a painstaking process of matching fragmentary records from the Army, county governments, the cemeteries themselves and other sources.
A notable exception to this is the fragmentary records from Vindolanda, some of which give us a soldier's eye view of army life at a Roman fort between 90 and 120 AD.
Warfare techniques, life-styles, religious ideas, artistic styles, languages, etc., spread widely across the steppes, never erasing local variations completely but making a single whole of the entire region in a more intimate way than the fragmentary records left by civilized scribes reveal.
I have spent the last eight years tracking these songs, from the fragmentary records of the Antebellum South to the singing of "We Shall Overcome" at the funeral of every great African American freedom fighter for the last fifty years.
Kielan-Jaworowska and colleagues identified Argentodites as a multituberculate, a diverse fossil group from the northern continents (Laurasia) that is also known from a few questionable or fragmentary records from the southern continents (Gondwana).
On the eve of the Allies' occupation of Japan, special-service officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyed virtually all records, drawings, and photographs of or relating to the Yamato-class battleships, leaving only fragmentary records of the design characteristics and other technical matters.
It is tempting to relate the depiction of the story, with its "distinct and vivid tableaux, well suited to adaptation for performance" to medieval drama, often a source for iconography, but the fragmentary records mention no dramas on the life of St Agnes that are close in time or place to the origin of the cup.
