The Regional Economic Impact of an Earthquake: Direct and Indirect Effects of Electricity Lifeline Disruptions

This paper develops a methodology to estimate the regional economic impacts of electricity lifeline disruptions caused by a catastrophic earthquake. The methodology is based on specially designed input-output and linear programming models. A simulation of a major earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone near Memphis, Tennessee, indicates the potential production loss over the recovery period could amount to as much as 7 percent of gross regional product. Reallocation of scarce electricity across sectors could reduce the impacts substantially. Additionally, an improved restoration pattern of electricity transmission substations across subareas could reduce losses even more.     

Uranium and Vanadium Concentrations as a Trace Element Method for Identifying Diagenetically Altered Bone in the Inorganic Phase

Archaeologists have generally avoided analyzing inorganic isotopes in bone because of its high porosity, large crystalline lattice spacing, and small crystallite size, making it particularly susceptible to diagenetic alteration. Because the inorganic isotopes are left unstudied, we lose a significant portion of information pertaining to an individual’s life history, such as migration, health, and ranging behavior. Tooth enamel, which does not have the same susceptibility to diagenesis as bone, can be used to extract this information but this means that taxa lacking teeth, such as birds, some species of fish, and some reptiles, are excluded. Here, we present a method that can be used to identify diagenetic alternation in bone. This is done by focusing on abnormal concentrations of vanadium and uranium. Neither element is readily bio-precipitated into hydroxyapatite due to ionic radius, vibrational frequency, atomic mass, and ionic charge. This makes them an ideal marker for diagenetically altered bone. Vanadium occurs in very low concentrations in modern bone, while archaeological bone shows clear evidence of normal, non-diagenetically altered values alongside high concentrations of vanadium in diagenetically altered bone. Uranium also is a measure of diagenetic alteration, as modern bone has concentrations below detectable limits (0.017 ppb), while some archaeological bone contains uranium above detectable limits. The biogeochemistry of these elements in soil and bone are discussed with implications for enamel studies.     

Landscapes of Urbanization and De-Urbanization: A Large-Scale Approach to Investigating the Indus Civilization’s Settlement Distributions in Northwest India

Survey data play a fundamental role in studies of social complexity. Integrating the results from multiple projects into large-scale analyses encourages the reconsideration of existing interpretations. This approach is essential to understanding changes in the Indus Civilization’s settlement distributions (ca. 2600–1600 b.c.), which shift from numerous small-scale settlements and a small number of larger urban centers to a de-nucleated pattern of settlement. This paper examines the interpretation that northwest India’s settlement density increased as Indus cities declined by developing an integrated site location database and using this pilot database to conduct large-scale geographical information systems (GIS) analyses. It finds that settlement density in northwestern India may have increased in particular areas after ca. 1900 b.c., and that the resulting landscape of de-urbanization may have emerged at the expense of other processes. Investigating the Indus Civilization’s landscapes has the potential to reveal broader dynamics of social complexity across extensive and varied environments.     

Book reviews

Small Firms, Technical Services and Inter‐firm Cooperation. Frank Pyke, Geneva, International Institute for Labor Studies, 1994, 126 pp, 20 Swiss francs, ISBN 92 9014 527 7

Uneven Regional Change in Britain. Alan Townsend, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, £9.95 ($19.95) pb, ISBN 0 521 40870 9.

European Fort Cities in Transition. B. S. Hoyle and D. A. Pinder (Eds), London, Belhaven Press, 1992, 207 pp, £35.00 hb, ISBN 1 85293 170 1.

Introducing Town Planning. Clara Greed, Harlow, Longman, 1993, 283 pp, £12.99 pb, ISBN 0 582 09107 1.

Contemporary Transport Trends. Michael Asteris and Peter Green (Eds), Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 290 pp, £35.00 hb, ISBN 1 85628 2848.

The Rise of Regional Europe. Christopher Harvie, London, Routledge, 1994, 92 pp, £6.99 pb, ISBN 0 4150 9523 9.     

Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross‐scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.     

Skeletal element abundances in archaeofaunal assemblages: economic utility,sample size,and assessment of carcass transport strategies

Economic utility indices provide a means of interpreting butchery and transport decisions reflected in the relative abundance of skeletal elements. Because of destructive taphonomic processes, interpreting skeletal element abundances in terms of carcass transport strategies requires that faunal analysts consider only those elements which accurately reflect their original abundances following human discard. In this study we use resampling techniques to examine the impact of sample size on correlations between high-survival skeletal element frequencies and economic utility in four simulated population assemblages reflecting distinct carcass transport strategies. Correlations alone do not accurately reflect the true relationship between bone abundance and economic utility as particular transport strategies have a tendency to generate high frequencies of Type II errors as sample size decreases. We show that the Shannon evenness index can be used as a quantitative means of distinguishing between bone assemblages characterized by subtle variations in skeletal element abundances. The evenness index can also be used to evaluate whether observed correlations reflect sampling error. Results from our simulations are applied to three published faunal assemblages to evaluate likely carcass transport strategies.