Methodological Problems in Economic Geography

The author uses the techniques of paleogeography and archeology to trace climatic fluctuations in inner Asia and the rise of nomadism in the 1st millennium B. C. replacing a settled mode of stock herding and agriculture. Previous papers in this series appeared in Soviet Geography, June 1964 and February 1966.     

THERA, SULPHUR, and CLIMATIC ANOMALIES

Summary: A major climatic 'event'is known from the 17th century BC, and some scientists and archaeologists have sought to associate it with the large Late Bronze Age eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean. Sulphur production is the key to the climatic impact of a volcanic eruption, and petrologic estimates of the sulphur production of the Thera eruption appeared to show that it was far too small to have caused the climatic event, and, in particular, the 17th century BC sulphuric acid spike in a Greenland ice-core. However, study of recent eruptions demonstrates that petrologic estimates can be very significant under-estimations, and so the Theran sulphur production may have been much greater than presently thought. Therefore Thera is again a candidate as the cause of the 17th century BC climatic disturbances, and, from current chronometric evidence, perhaps the best candidate. Further multi-parameter chronometric research could very soon enable possibilities and probabilities to become more definite.     

唐代气候变化与唐代历史兴衰

本文支持唐代是一个温暖湿润的时期。温暖湿润的气候使唐代农牧业界线北移,农耕区扩大;农业经济作物种植北线北移,复种指数提高,产出的多样性更明显;农作物单产量提高,粮食总产量也提高;水利建设成效显著。由于国力强盛,使南方地区的开发有了保证。气候的温暖湿润为唐代农业经济的发展创造了条件,农业经济的发展为社会经济的整体发展和繁荣奠定了基础。本文赞同８世纪中叶气候有一个由暖转冷过程的观点,认为８世纪中叶的气候转寒造成了中国北方游牧民族南下压力增大,北方游牧民族纷纷入主中国北方建立区域性王朝,安史之乱是这个南下进程开始的标志性事件。经过南宋１２世纪的再一次寒冷突变后,北方游牧民族则开始了入主中原建立大一统王朝的历史。     

The Traditional Arab House in the Eastern Mediterranean and its Adaptation to the Mediterranean Climate

This study examines the climate‐related methods of adaptation on which the traditional Arab house in the Eastern Mediterranean was based. We analysed nine old houses (from the 18th century to the early 20th century), built in the Arab vernacular tradition style, in three areas of Israel with different climatic conditions. Three houses in each area were chosen at random. Only nine were chosen because of the difficulty in finding houses whose state of preservation was in keeping with the aims of the research. For each house, climate‐related elements of the construction were documented. We found elements included at the design stage indicating climate consciousness, climate‐related elements due to building constraints, and building constraints in a cultural context with implications for the balance of climatic efficiency. The findings showed that climatic considerations were an integral part of the design while the principles crossed the boundaries of the three areas. Temperature, relative humidity, and heat intensity were measured, both inside and outside the house on selected days in each season. The research showed that the house moderates the impact of the outside temperature, inside the house in winter and mainly during the hot hours of the day in summer. Most of the climate‐related elements are still relevant. They can be used in regions with Mediterranean‐type climates (in the Mediterranean Basin, South Africa, central Chile, and southwestern Australia), especially when global warming and air pollution demand a substantial revolution of building design philosophies, strategies, technologies, and management methods.     

Chinese Porcelain in Medieval Europe

IN Faenza, lii (1966) I published the fragments of Chinese porcelain found at Lucera Castle and at the same time collected evidence for the occurrence of Chinese vessels elsewhere in Europe in the middle ages.¹ This paper contains a larger catalogue of finds and references, and attempts to assess the extent to which Chinese porcelain was available in Europe before the 16th century. It is divided into three parts: Introduction, Catalogue and short Discussion. An Appendix contains notes on Italian imitations of Chinese porcelain in the 15th and early 16th centuries.     

Climate as resource and challenge: international cooperation in the UNESCO Arid Zone Programme

ABSTRACT

Perceptions of climatic challenges have changed significantly during the twentieth century. In recent decades, the question of global climate change received more attention than regional climatic challenges and the problems of arid regions. Historians have shown that persistent misconceptions and a lack of understanding of arid zones rooted in misguided colonial ideologies were propagated by United Nations (UN) initiatives such as the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Arid Zone Programme. Alarmist narratives of progressive desertification proliferated and put the blame on destructive local practices such as deforestation and overgrazing. This article investigates UNESCO’s interests in natural resources (section 1) and takes a closer look at the development and scientific elements of the Arid Zone Programme (sections 2 and 3). It argues that the Arid Zone Programme offered an effective framework that helped develop and spread new interdisciplinary research approaches to improve knowledge about arid zones. The myth of progressing desertification and misguided colonial expertise characterized much of its political rhetoric, but not its scientific work, which reflected balanced and more critical appraisals of out-dated colonial expertise. In its conclusion, the article suggests that broader contexts need to be taken into account to understand a resurgence of alarmist narratives of desertification such as shifting interests in climatology from local climatic issues to the global atmospheric circulation and a neglect of the climatology of arid zones.     

Race,space and moral climatology: notes toward a genealogy

This paper is a contribution to the genealogy of the presupposition that climatic zones and their inhabitants may legitimately be portrayed in the vocabulary of moral judgement. Focusing on four different scholarly domains at different points in time—Enlightenment philosophy, early Victorian anthropology, late nineteenth century tropical medicine, and early twentieth century climatology—it discloses the extent to which intellectual exchange among a Western elite was concerned with the mobilization of «moral climatology» for racial purposes. The persistent and widespread inclination to use climate as the vehicle for moralistic construals of global space is thus demonstrated.     

The Nigerian oil palm industry

Some 10,000 years ago with the disappearance of the last Devensian ice, the climate of the British Isles began a slow but general warming. This continued until the middle of the fifteenth century when the Little Ice Age developed, ushering in several centuries of colder weather and violent fluctuations in weather associated with the expansion of the circumpolar vortex. Detailed information of the effect on Scotland's weather of this major climatic disturbance is rare but The Chronicle of Fife written in the seventeenth century by John Lamont does provide some remarkable insights.     

Cultural Response to Environmental Change in the Alpine Lacustrine Regions: The Displacement Model

Summary. Following an abrupt change in climatic conditions, the Middle Bronze Age northern Alpine lake‐dwellers were forced to abandon their settlements. As a result, the archaeological record shows a gap of occupation from the end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twelfth century BC. Where did those groups go during that period? Recent studies show that some Middle Bronze Age sites hitherto regarded as traditional dry‐land dwellings might represent constructions by former lacustrine people. Typological analyses of pottery assemblages and house structure remains found on these sites have made it possible to trace them back to an origin in the lacustrine tradition. The MBA lake‐dwelling occupational hiatus could finally be bridged and the process of cultural continuity reconstructed. The MBA lake‐dwellers certainly did not disappear; they just temporarily adapted to a drier environment until the lake shores became ‘safe’ again for re‐settlement.     

Excavations at Rockley Smithies,a water-powered bloomery of the 16th and 17th Centuries

Abstract

Between about 1500 and 1640 iron was smelted by the direct, bloomery, process on the lands of the Rockley family at (N.G.R.) SE/340023, to the south-west of Barnsley, Yorkshire, using charcoal and ore from the well-wooded outcrops of the Tankersley ironstone, adjacent to the site. Evidence for operation early in the 16th century was limited to accumulations of hearth-cinder and of debris from ore-roasting, minor structures and traces of a dam. About 1600 a major rebuilding involved the construction of a bloom-hearth and probably two stringhearths, with bellows powered by waterwheels, and an unpowered hammer. Minor rebuilding took place early in the 17th century, and archaeological and documentary evidence combine to place abandonment at about 1640. Demolition and stone-robbing could well have provided material for the blast-furnace built a short distance away in 1652. The bloomery site was abandoned to pasture and perhaps a cottage, and at some time early in the 19th century was occupied by two houses and a workshop for an adjacent colliery tramway. It was covered by a road embankment in 1966.

Evidence was found of techniques at a comparatively advanced bloomery, in operation at a time when English ironmasters were, however, increasingly favouring the use of the blast furnace.     

Excavations at the Medieval Village of Wythemail,Northamptonshire

EXCAVATION of a single enclosure revealed a sequence from early 13th-century timber buildings to structures with stone foundations, or completely stone-built, in the later 13th and 14th centuries. A two-roomed long-house was replaced by a more complex four-roomed long-house built on a different alignment. Also in the enclosure were a sequence of six outbuildings rebuilt in various positions. In the 13th century there were changes in property boundaries and in the 14th century a road was cut obliquely across the enclosure leading to fundamental changes in planning. Evidence for climatic deterioration was given by the increasing use of drains and of paved and cobbled surfaces in the early 14th century. Finds included metal objects, animal bones, local shelly pottery, and 12th- to 14th-century sherds from Lincolnshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.     

The Poor Law of old England: institutional innovation and demographic regimes

The striking improvement in life expectancy that took place in England between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century cannot be explained either by an increase in real wages or by better climatic conditions. The decrease in the risk of utter destitution or of death from famine that was evident on the eve of the Industrial Revolution stemmed, in part, from institutional changes in the old poor law, which began to take shape and become effective early in the seventeenth century.     

A vernacular way of “safeguarding” intangible heritage: the fall and rise of rituals in Gouliang Miao village

This paper documents a vernacular method of interpreting and safeguarding intangible heritage in an ethnic Miao village in China. Tracing the conflicting discourses of ritual in different stages of the past and the present, it shows how ritual practices were transformed by imperial Qing officials in the mid-nineteenth century, demonised and denounced as feudal superstition during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), exploited as cultural resources for ethnic tourism since the early twentieth century and involved in the evaluation system of intangible cultural heritage in the twenty-first century. Based on ethnographic materials collected in 2008 and 2009, this paper argues that it is the inherited vernacular narratives and ritual performances that are negotiating with the state’s constant effort of shaping the ritual through various discourses, constructing the meaning of inheritance and safeguarding the intangible heritage within the community.     

Infancy and childhood in the pre‐Columbian North American Southwest–first results of the palaeopathological investigation of the skeletons from the Grasshopper Pueblo,Arizona

Infant and child skeletons (n = 369) from the pre‐Columbian Grasshopper Pueblo site in east‐central Arizona (US) dating from the 14^th century AD were examined macroscopically and with low‐power microscopy. They were studied as a representative example of a typical Mogollon community with respect to frequencies of deficiency and inflammatory diseases. First results revealed very poor living conditions, which are characteristic for this time period in the North American Southwest because of lack of food due to climatic and political changes. Thus, non‐specific stress indicators were frequently observed. In the group of deficiency diseases, anaemia was found in more than 50% of individuals, and in the group of inflammatory diseases, meningeal irritations were diagnosed in more than 70%. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The quest for cod: Some causes of fishing conflicts in the north Atlantic

This article presents an historical overview of the role played by the North Atlantic cod fisheries in shaping the relations between two ecological zones: a fish‐surplus zone in the north and a fish‐deficient zone in the south. As production changed from a predominantly subsistence‐based economy to one of market orientation, fierce competition developed between national fleets and trading companies when the quest for cod increased due to demographic and climatic changes. The introduction of highly efficient technologies since the latter half of the 19th century has caused severe over‐exploitation in certain parts of the North Atlantic region and encouraged the fish‐producing states to nationalise cod resources by extending their borders extensively, thus generating inter‐state conflicts known as ?cod wars?.     

Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe: The origin and spread of social complexity in southern Africa

Stratified societies in southern Africa first developed in the Shashe–Limpopo Basin. As is well known, rank-based society at K2 developed into class distinction at Mapungubwe. The transfer of this new social organisation to Great Zimbabwe has received less attention. New research on rainmaking practices suggests that a Mapungubwe dynasty introduced class structures at Great Zimbabwe. Poor climatic conditions at the end of the 13th century undermined sacred leaders at Mapungubwe itself, and while vulnerable, the elite at Great Zimbabwe took over the important gold and ivory trade. Among other things, the new elite used the unique Zimbabwe birdstones to establish their legitimacy.     

Natron as a flux in the early vitreous materials industry: sources,beginnings and reasons for decline

Natron deposits, the best known of which being those at Wadi Natrun in Egypt, have been used as the flux in the production of vitreous materials from the early 4th millennium BC onwards. In the present paper, the history of the use of natron as a flux is traced from its beginnings in the glaze of Badarian steatite beads, through its use in glass production starting in the 1st millennium BC, until its apparent shortage during the 7th to 9th centuries AD, and its subsequent replacement by plant ash during the 9th century AD. Documentary evidence for possible natron sources in Egypt, including the Wadi Natrun, and around the eastern Mediterranean is summarised, and the results of recent fieldwork at the Wadi Natrun and at al-Barnuj in the Western Nile Delta are presented. The possible reasons for the apparent shortage of natron from 7th to 9th centuries AD and its subsequent replacement by plant ash as the flux used in glass production during the 9th century AD are then considered. These include the possibility that, because of the massive scale of glass production, the demand for natron exceeded its supply; the possible effect of climatic changes; and the potentially disruptive role of political events in the Wadi Natrun–Delta region.     

Life‐history theory,past human populations and climatic perturbations

A sensitivity and elasticity analysis is performed on historical life‐tables, that of Swedish females from 1751–1755 and 1966–1970, i.e. during and after the Little Ice Age. Coupled with life‐history theory, this approach supplies us with some ideas on how stature can be understood as a proxy for conditions during the intrauterine growth, important if we aspire to calibrate proposed climatic perturbations and their effect on past societies. Matrix population models represent a versatile tool that has been used extensively in conservation biology, ecology, primatology and evolutionary demography. As of yet, applications in bioarchaeology/human osteology have been restricted to population forecasting. The following paper introduces matrix population models and discusses their use in bioarchaeology. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New evidence for the antiquity of leprosy in early Britain

Examination of skeletons excavated in Dorset has probably produced the earliest example of leprosy known in northern Europe. The site, Poundbury Camp, Dorchester, was excavated under the direction of C. J. S. Green for the Dorchester Excavation Committee from 1966 to 1973. It is a Romano-British cemetery, apparently Christian, and the leprous bones are dated by their archaeological context to the middle of the fourth century AD.The specimen consists of the distal portions of right and left tibiae and fibulae, and the right and left feet. The right intermediate cuneiform is missing, but this may be a post-mortem loss. All parts of the skeleton above the mid-shaft of the tibiae and fibulae have been lost due to modern disturbance. It is therefore impossible to estimate the sex of the individual or its age, but the bones are certainly those of a mature adult.The following pathological changes were noted.     

PROBLEMS OF THE LEVEL OF THE CASPIAN AND THE STABILITY OF ITS SHORELINE

The first of two papers on the problem of forecasting the level of the Caspian Sea evaluates factors widely believed to have been responsible for its lowering during much of the present century (including tectonic movements, climatic cycles, human activity). It concludes that previous forecasts have been inaccurate because of the failure to adequately model the complexity of processes involved, specifically the internal mechanisms of “self-regulation” of water levels. Continuation of the recent slight rise in the Caspian's level is predicted at least into the early 1990s (translated by Andrew R. Bond).