Opportunities and constraints for intensive agriculture in the Hawaiian archipelago prior to European contact

Intensive agricultural systems interact strongly and reciprocally with features of the lands they occupy, and with features of the societies that they support. We modeled the distribution of two forms of pre-European contact intensive agriculture – irrigated pondfields and rain-fed dryland systems – across the Hawaiian archipelago using a GIS approach based on climate, hydrology, topography, substrate age, and soil fertility. Model results closely match the archaeological evidence in defined locations. On a broader scale, we calculate that the youngest island, Hawai'i, could have supported 572 km² of intensive agriculture, 97% as rain-fed dryland field systems, while Kaua'i, the oldest island, could have supported 58 km², all as irrigated wetland systems. Irrigated systems have higher, more reliable yields and lower labor requirements than rain-fed dryland systems, so the total potential yield from Kaua'i (49k metric tons) was almost half that of Hawai'i (97k metric tons), although Kaua'i systems required only 0.05 of the agricultural labor (8400 workers, versus 165,000 on Hawai'i) to produce the crops. We conclude that environmental constraints to intensive agriculture across the archipelago created asymmetric production efficiencies, and therefore varying potentials for agricultural surplus. The implications both for the emergence of complex sociopolitical formations and for anthropogenic transformation of Hawaiian ecosystems are substantial.     

The Soviet Union and Mosaddeq: A Research Note

Although it is generally accepted that the Soviet Union did not play a significant role in the events leading to the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, little has been written about how the Soviets perceived the Iranian leader and the movement he inspired. This article argues that Soviet leaders generally saw Mosaddeq as weak and ill-disposed towards the Soviet Union. The Soviet failure to secure an oil concession in Iran in 1946 and general conservatism about anti-colonial movements during the late Stalin period conditioned their assessment of Mosaddeq's premiership. After Soviet policy towards the Third World changed in the mid-1950s, Mosaddeq's movement was reinterpreted as a genuine “struggle of national liberation.”     

Lev Gumilev: The Ideologist of the Soviet Empire

Summary

Russian intellectuals like to appeal to examples of foreign history. Lev Gumilev's views on history are a good example. Gumilev was one of the most well-known representatives of Eurasianism, which was in turn one of the most interesting intellectual constructs in Russian historiography. Gumilev believed that Russia was born not from Kievan Rus—the view of the majority of Russian historians of his time—but from the empire of the Mongols. While Gumilev saw Europe as a hostile entity to Russia/Eurasia, this was not the case with the neo-Eurasianists of the Yeltsin era. This article examines Gumilev's Eurasianism and its influence on modern Russian national identity.     

朗道团队与苏联核计划

苏联核计划档案材料解密之后,朗道团队参与苏联核计划的秘密也随之浮出水面。朗道这位物理学界泰斗带领自己的团队解决了多项科研难题,在苏联核计划实施的各个阶段发挥着不可替代的作用。利用朗道创建的公式,苏联成功分离了氘和铀-235,为核武器研发提供了裂变材料,其后朗道公式在苏联核武器研制中得到广泛使用。朗道团队创建和发展了核反应堆理论,推动了苏联工业核反应堆的建立。朗道团队完成了冲击波和爆炸波研究,提出通过爆炸压缩核装药达到超临界状态的想法和原子弹内爆原理。在朗道的领导下,其团队完成了原子弹爆炸有效因数和释能的计算工作,并在氢弹的研发工作中做出了杰出贡献。