The APSA journal list: popularity,purpose and performance

ABSTRACT

For over a decade, the Australian Political Studies Association (APSA) has maintained a list ranking journals into A*, A, B and C bands. However, we know little about how Politics scholars use and view the list. In this study, we firstly discuss the history of the APSA list, before then presenting the results of an original survey conducted in March 2017 with over 250 members of the discipline. While the APSA list seems to enjoy overall support, we find that there are concerns about its purpose, its assessment of journal quality and how it treats different subfields and methodologies. In the discussion section, we address some of the main criticisms that have been made of the list and offer a number of suggestions for revisions. These include widening the consultation process, making submissions to the ranking committee public and extending the range of journals included in the list.     

Collapsing Commodities or Lavish Offerings? Understanding Massive Metalwork Deposition at Langton Matravers,Dorset During the Bronze Age–Iron Age Transition

The discovery of 373 intact and broken tin‐bronze socketed axes accompanied by 404 fragments in four pits at Langton Matravers collectively represents one of the largest hoards found to date in prehistoric Britain and Ireland. They were very probably never meant to be used as axes as the very high levels of tin they contain would have made them brittle. Many were poorly finished, with the majority still containing their casting cores. The axes are typologically dated to the Llyn Fawr metalwork phase (c.800–600 BC) and span the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition, when the production, circulation and deposition of bronze appear to have been substantially reduced throughout north‐west Europe. By placing the Langton Matravers hoard(s) in a broader metallurgical, material and archaeological context, existing theories for this phenomenon, such as the preference for iron, a collapse in bronze supply, or the sharp devaluation of a social or ritual ‘bronze standard’, are evaluated. It is proposed that the Langton Matravers axes belong to a short phase in the centuries‐long processes underlying the changing roles of bronze and iron.     

Incisions,breakages and charring,some probably man-made,in fossil bones from Mammoth Cave,Western Australia

Two small patches of richly fossiliferous deposit in Mammoth Cave, excavated early this century, yielded tooth-bearing and post-cranial material. We have studied a notched tibia, various broken femurs and charred bones, many of which are attributable to extinct taxa, and have concluded that deliberate action by Aboriginals is the most probable explantation for their condition.

The age of one of the deposits, and probably also of the other, is in excess of 37,000 years.     

Plant exploitation of the last foragers at Shizitan in the Middle Yellow River Valley China: evidence from grinding stones

China is one of the few centers in the world where plant domestication evolved independently, but its developmental trajectory is poorly understood. This is because there is considerably less data from the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene documented in China than in other regions, such as the Near East and Mesoamerica, and previous studies on Paleolithic subsistence in China have largely focused on animal hunting rather than plant gathering. To resolve these problems the current research investigated the range of plants used by late Paleolithic hunter–gatherers in the middle Yellow River region where some of the earliest farmers emerged. We employed usewear and starch analyses on grinding stones to recover evidence for plant use in a hunting–gathering population at a late Paleolithic site, Shizitan Locality 9 in Jixian, Shanxi (ca. 13,800–8500 cal. BP). The usewear analysis shows that all artifacts preserved a range of usewear patterns best matching multiple tasks and indicating multi-functional use. Starch remains recovered from these tools indicate that the Shizitan people collected and processed many types of grass seeds (Panicoideae and Pooideae subfamilies), acorns (Quercus sp.), beans (Phaseoleae tribe) and yams (Dioscorea sp.). The Shizitan people represented some of the last hunter–gatherers in the middle Yellow River region. Their broad spectrum subsistence strategy was apparently carried on by the first Neolithic farmers in the same region, who collected similar wild plants and eventually domesticated millets. The trajectory from intensified collection of a wide range of wild plants to domestication of a small number of species was a very long process in north China. This parallels the transition from the “broad spectrum revolution” to agriculture in the Near East.