New regression equations for stature estimation for medieval Scandinavians

Estimating stature from skeletal remains in an archaeological context requires appropriate methods that take into account possible temporal and spatial changes in body proportions. New regression equations—both least squares (LSQ) and reduced major axis (RMA) equations—were thus developed for estimating living stature from the long bone lengths of medieval inhabitants (N = 60) of Westerhus, Sweden. The living stature of these skeletal specimens was determined by using the anatomical method. Findings in this study reveal that LSQ regression equations systematically overestimate statures of short individuals and underestimate those of tall individuals, whereas the RMA equations—both combined sexes and sex‐specific equation—provide more accurate stature estimations for individuals of very different statures. The combined sexes RMA‐equations should be used for cases in which the sex is unknown because they provide more accurate stature estimations than sex‐specific equation with a wrong sex determination. These new equations are more appropriate than generally used regression equations for estimating statures of the medieval period Scandinavians. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimating the Age and Sex of Caribou from Mandibular Measurements

Formulae for estimating the age and sex of caribou are derived from measurements taken from a control sample of caribou mandibles collected by the Canadian Wildlife Service. A robust linear relationship was found to exist between first molar crown height and age, while male and female mandibular measurements are statistically distinguishable on either side of a linear regression line. The application of these formulae to three 19th century archaeological assemblages from the western Canadian Arctic indicates their usefulness in estimating the age and sex of fossil populations, although some problems due to geographical variability remain. Tentative results indicate that traditional western Arctic Inuit were unable to exert strong control over the age and sex of the caribou they killed, perhaps because of the use of large-scale communal hunting techniques. This situation seems to have changed radically with the introduction of firearms in the 1870s.     

The Spatial Association of Demographic and Population Health Characteristics with COVID-19 Prevalence Across Districts in India

In less-developed countries, the lack of granular data limits the researcher's ability to study the spatial interaction of different factors on the COVID-19 pandemic. This study designs a novel database to examine the spatial effects of demographic and population health factors on COVID-19 prevalence across 640 districts in India. The goal is to provide a robust understanding of how spatial associations and the interconnections between places influence disease spread. In addition to the linear Ordinary Least Square regression model, three spatial regression models—Spatial Lag Model, Spatial Error Model, and Geographically Weighted Regression are employed to study and compare the variables explanatory power in shaping geographic variations in the COVID-19 prevalence. We found that the local GWR model is more robust and effective at predicting spatial relationships. The findings indicate that among the demographic factors, a high share of the population living in slums is positively associated with a higher incidence of COVID-19 across districts. The spatial variations in COVID-19 deaths were explained by obesity and high blood sugar, indicating a strong association between pre-existing health conditions and COVID-19 fatalities. The study brings forth the critical factors that expose the poor and vulnerable populations to severe public health risks and highlight the application of geographical analysis vis-a-vis spatial regression models to help explain those associations.     

How Noninstitutionalized Policy Innovation Is Justified: A Rhetorical Perspective

The premise of this article is that developing persuasive justification is fundamental to the construction and emergence of policy innovation. Nevertheless, given that policy innovation has been typically treated as given, existing public policy research on innovation says little about the process through which the rationales for innovative policies are established. A rhetorical approach is introduced as a new perspective to illustrate this process. In particular, I focus on the case of happiness indices, which is selected because it represents a noninstitutionalized idea which challenges the incumbent way of measuring social progress by GDP-related indicators. Rhetorical analysis is then applied to a body of documents advocating this ambitious innovation, through which I reveal five distinct types of legitimation strategies (i.e., logos, authorization, cosmology, scientization, and teleology). These rhetorical strategies are used in a supplementary manner to describe a policy idea—utopian in many people's eyes—as appropriate and desirable. The concluding discussion section highlights the wider implications of the empirical findings.     

The Novel-ty of Responsible Archaeological Site Reporting: How Writing Fictive Narrative Contributes to Ethical Archaeological Practice

Abstract

The writing conventions governing most contemporary archaeological site reports encourage depersonalized, scientistic narratives that fundamentally misrepresent the context and complexity of most excavations. This means that any invested stakeholder in the archaeological record — whether specialist or layperson — has no means of understanding the full and nuanced nature of the archaeological epistemological process that generates the data and interpretations described in these reports. I argue that fictive narrative has the potential to transcend many of these prevailing problems through its temporal flexibility, inherently pluralistic nature, dynamic contextualization, and essential reliance on creativity — all of which are tropes that also characterize the hermeneutic process of archaeological research.     

A challenge to the reigning theory of the just war

Troubled times often gives rise to great art that reflects those troubles. So too with political theory. The greatest work of twentieth century political theory, John Rawls's A theory of justice, was inspired in various respects by extreme social and economic inequality, racialized slavery and racial segregation in the United States. Arguably the most influential work of political theory since Rawls—Michael Walzer's Just and unjust wars—a sustained and historically informed reflection on the morality of interstate armed conflict—was written in the midst of the Vietnam War. It should be no surprise, then, that the bellicose period of the past 20 years should give rise to a robust new literature in political theory on the morality of armed conflict. It has been of uneven quality, and to some extent episodic, responding to particular challenges—the increased prevalence of asymmetric warfare and the permissibility of preventive or preemptive war—that have arisen as a result of specific events. In the past decade, however, a group of philosophers has begun to pose more fundamental questions about the reigning theory of the morality of armed conflict warfare—just war theory—as formulated by Walzer and others. Jeff McMahan's concise, inventive and tightly argued work Killing in war is without doubt the most important of these challenges to the reigning theory of the just war. This review article discusses McMahan's work, some of the critical attention it has received, and its potential implications for practice.     

Adapting methods to needs: studying fertility and nuptiality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Belgium

The authors describe and evaluate a series of historical demographic methods that fall between family reconstitution and aggregative methods and that were developed during a study of the demographic impact of early industrialization on the processes of fertility, nuptiality, and migration in Verviers, Belgium. The methods involve the use of truncated fertility histories for the first few years of marriage rather than complete fertility histories. The authors suggest that the methods proposed are an effective means of reducing the cost of accumulating data while increasing the number of cases studied.     

‘Ultramodern Contraception’ Re-Examined

The family planning literature considers behavioural family planning methods ‘ineffective’ because their users are not motivated to control their fertility. While this is true for the initial stages of fertility transition, studies report that urban, educated, and affluent women—propelled by a reaction against the medicalisation of the female body by Western technology—mainly use behavioural family planning methods. This elite group has the skill and knowledge to use such methods effectively. The term ‘ultramodern contraception’ has been coined to describe this phenomenon. This paper critically re-examines the ‘ultramodern contraception’ theory, and argues that it has certain limitations. Analysing three rounds of National Family Health Survey data for India, we argue that reliance on such methods may be a transient phase in the reproductive cycle of women, specifically before the desired gender parity of children is attained. Moreover, it may also be a manifestation of son preference.     

How Prophecy Became Literature

Prophecy—the transmission of divine messages to human recipients—is essentially an oral phenomenon. However, all knowledge of ancient prophecy is based on written sources. The Hebrew Bible forms a special case, since it includes the only extant collection of prophetic books, a genre otherwise unknown in the ancient Near East. The article investigates the process of the literarization of prophecy, proceeding from the late sociohistorical context of the biblical prophetic literature towards its hypothetical beginnings. It is argued that the literarization of prophecy required the support of the literate circles of any given community in both pre‐ and post‐exilic times.     

Duties to the Dead and the Conditions of Social Peace

This essay focuses on the purported duty—defended by Walter Benjamin but widely assumed in much political theory and practice—of the living to redeem the suffering of those who died as a consequence of oppression, exploitation, and political violence. I consider the cogency and ethical value of this duty from the perspective of a politics grounded in the equal life-value of human beings. For both metaphysical and ethical reasons I conclude that this duty does not obtain, first because the dead cannot experience redemption, and secondly because it is politically counterproductive: it personalizes a pathological form of political resistance which may easily incite further violence and thus perpetuate human suffering and oppression.     

Increasing returns to scale in the towns of early Tudor England

Abstract

Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny the presence of agglomeration effects and productivity gains to Early Modern English towns. This study evaluates the presence of increasing returns to scale (IRS) in aggregate urban economic outputs—the empirical signature of feedbacks between Smithian growth and agglomeration effects—among the towns of 16th century England. To do so, we test a model from settlement scaling theory against the 1524/5 Lay Subsidy returns. Analysis of these data indicates that Tudor towns exhibited IRS—a finding that is robust to alternative interpretations of the data. IRS holds even for the smallest towns in our sample, suggesting the absence of town size thresholds for the emergence of agglomeration effects. Spatial patterning of scaling residuals further suggests regional demand-side interactions with Smithian-agglomeration feedbacks. These findings suggest the presence of agglomeration effects and Smithian growth in pre-industrial English towns. This begs us to reconsider the economic performance of Early Modern English towns, and suggests that the qualitative economic dynamics of contemporary cities may be applicable to premodern settlements in general.     

Indirect phase height measurements of the lower ionosphere compared with rocket measurements of D-region electron density

A comparison between rocket-measured electron density profiles of the lower ionosphere and the results of ground-based indirect phase height measurements in the LF range, carried out near the Soviet rocket sounding station Volgograd over several years, confirms—to a first-order approximation—the height of the level of electron density which according to magnetoionic ray theory is necessary for reflection of the waves. In a second-order approximation, however, an additional phase path change has to be taken into account, which is caused by the ionization below the reflection level. This makes the observed phase height always slightly smaller than the real geometric height, on average by −1 km, but in extreme cases by up to −4 km, depending on the actual height gradient of electron density below the reflection level. Due to systematic diurnal and seasonal variations of this gradient, the amplitude of the diurnal variation of the observed phase height is found to be slightly larger than that of the real geometric height, whereas the reverse is true for the seasonal variation at constant solar zenith angle.     

Collapse,Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed

Collapse is a perennial topic among historical scholars, and a favorite source of lessons for our future. Collapse literature often reflects contemporary fears and aspirations. The four books discussed here mirror today's concern with anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate change, and for better or worse, influence a reading public far beyond the academy. Two books focus on an individual collapse—the Classic Maya—and two aspire to a broader treatment. They are unequally successful in their outcomes.     

Molar crown height: not always a reliable method for the evaluation of age-at-death

In this study, we tested the validity of molar crown height, which changes according to the degree of tooth wear, for the evaluation of age-at-death. The sample consisted of 372 first and second molars (lower and upper) from 157 individuals of known sex and age-at-death. For each molar, we measured the height of the two cusps most subjected to wear (protocone and hypocone for the upper M1 and M2; protoconid and hypoconid for the lower M1 and M2). The correlation between crown height and age-at-death was assessed by linear regression analysis. The resulting models were not very robust since a significant correlation was only found for a small part of the sample, at best (maxillary M1) around 35%. The result slightly improved when bucco-lingual diameter (BL diameter), ante-mortem tooth loss and dental caries were considered, mainly for the maxillary M2 for which the model using age-at-death and BL diameter as independent variables explained 47% of the sample (p < 0.001).     

Impression and replica methods for studying hypoplasia and perikymata on human tooth crown surfaces from archaeological sites

Perikymata and enamel hypoplasia can be studied most easily by light and scanning electron microscopy of replicas rather than of the original tooth crown surface. Delicate archaeological specimens require special handling. Selection of specimens and cleaning technique are some of the most important factors in producing good replicas, and this paper outlines procedures that have been developed over some years. Several widely available materials produce similarly detailed initial impressions of the crown surface, but an addition-type silicone dental impression material is recommended here because of its superior stability. The replica itself is cast in the mould of the original impression, and a slow-curing low-viscosity Araldite resin-hardener system is recommended. The paper outlines procedures for taking impressions from a variety of dental remains, together with methods for handling, examining and storing the replicas. The non-destructive techniques outlined here make it possible to take records of large numbers of crown surfaces in the field, or during a short museum visit, for later study in the laboratory. Many replicas can be produced from one original crown surface impression and the replicas are very robust—they can be mailed easily to other researchers for records or comparative studies. With continuing calls for reburial or repatriation of archaeological human remains, the production of a permanent record for future study is of considerable concern.     

Exploring Spatial Process Dynamics Using Irregular Cellular Automaton Models

Cellular automaton models have enjoyed popularity in recent years as easily constructed models of many complex spatial processes, particularly in the natural sciences, and more recently in geography also. Most such models adopt a regular lattice (often a grid) as the basis for the spatial relations of adjacency that govern evolution of the model. A number of variations on the cellular automaton formalism have been introduced in geography but the impact of such variations on the likely behavior of the models has not been explored. This paper proposes a method for beginning to explore these issues and suggests that this is a new approach to the investigation of the relationships between spatial structure and dynamics of spatial processes. A framework for this exploration is suggested, and details of the required methods and measures are provided. In particular, a measure of spatial pattern—spatial information—based on entropy concepts is introduced. Initial results from investigation along the proposed lines are reported, which suggest that a distinction can he made between spatially robust and fragile processes. Some implications of this result and the methodology presented are briefly discussed.     

Mechanisms of Control in Emergent Interorganizational Networks

The delegation of decision‐making capacity from one actor to another—known variously as authority or control—is a central phenomenon of organizational sociology. Despite its theoretical and practical significance, however, the dynamics of control within disrupted settings (such as disasters) remain poorly understood. Here, we shed light on this question by a reexamination of historical data on multiorganizational disaster response networks, using recently developed statistical methods for robust inference from error‐prone informant reports. Specifically, we test competing hypotheses about the relationship of control during the response process to the structure of interorganizational communication. We find that both the realized and normative response hierarchies are likely shaped by coordination among both nonadjacent alters and along indirect channels. Our results suggested that the communication structure of these networks is consistent with a control at a distance model of command. This article makes a substantial contribution to understanding the role of network structure in the emergence of control between organizations in disrupted settings. Additionally, our innovative approach to network inference will guide researchers in dealing with error‐prone data in their own research on policy networks.     

What it means to be a “true American”: Ethnonationalism and voting in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

A number of important factors predicted white people vote choice in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including voters' economic assessments, sexist attitudes, racial resentment, and status threat. In this paper, I establish that ethnonationalism—a set of beliefs concerning what it means to be a “true” American—was also a significant factor in the estimations of White Americans when casting their vote for president in 2016. Data from a nationally representative sample of White Americans show that ethnonationalism was a robust predictor of vote choice for Trump even after controlling for predictors known to shape vote choice, including economic assessments, sexist attitudes, racial resentment, status threat, and sociodemographic indicators. These results indicate that ethnonationalism, although correlated with some of these factors, operated primarily as an independent factor that shaped White vote choice. The findings have important implications concerning the electoral activation of White majorities concerned about the perceived threat that demographic change poses to American national identity.     

Towards a nuanced understanding of health‐supportive place using composite research methods

Chronic non‐communicable diseases comprise a major challenge for health in contemporary Australia and across the globe and, while various factors are at play, personal choices in behaviour and lifestyle are significant. The physical make‐up and ongoing management of the places where we live positively and negatively influences these lifestyle choices and subsequent health outcomes. However, responses—in research, policy, built environment design, construction, and management—frequently fail to recognise the intricacies of this people‐place‐behaviour nexus largely because those responses are highly focused and empirical. Rather, the health‐supportive environments needed to address the current chronic disease epidemic also require additional—networked, nuanced, and intuitive—understandings. Responding to that need, the study described in this paper took a comprehensive view of what constitutes a health‐supportive built environment. We detail the composite methods employed—built environment audits, interviews, and focus groups—all of which are available for use by others in similar situations. Then, using two case study examples, we reflect upon how our methodology revealed otherwise hidden aspects of the extent to which the study sites supported or hindered health‐supportive behaviours and responses. These results suggest intervention actions for policy makers and practitioners that will help them respond to the complex needs of communities in creating a health‐supportive environment.     

Two notaries and their records in England, 1282–1307

Evidence concerning notaries public in England before 1300 has been limited to indirect contemporary references, some scattered original public instruments, and several truncated copies and summaries of their documents (in episcopal registers, for instance). Even with inferences based upon the foregoing — and John of Bologna's guidebook for fledgling English notaries — since none of their notebooks, registers or rough drafts have survived, next to nothing is known about their practical documentary methodologies and daily routines (certainly in comparison with the continental notariate). However, during 1307 a papal commission sitting in London examined and recorded some of the papers and registers belonging to two notaries who had lived and worked in England from at least 1280 to about 1300: John de Beccles and Hildebrand of Siena. The record of that examination, Vatican MS. Cod. Lat. 4016, provides the earliest detailed look at the thirteenth-century notariate in England that has yet come to light.