Cities without politics

Max Neutze, Australian Urban Policy, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1978.

Leslie Kilmartin and David C. Thorns, Cities Unlimited: The Sociology of Urban Development in Australia and New Zealand, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1978.     

Refining Woodland Period Chronology and Interactions in Northeastern Missouri: Contributions from the Avenue of the Saints Project

The recently completed Avenue of Saints (AOS) highway project in the Mississippi Valley of northeastern Missouri resulted in the documentation of Woodland period sites ranging from approximately 200 cal BC to AD 1200. This article updates the existing Woodland chronology for this locality based on new information collected during the project. Data pertaining to Early, Middle, and Late Woodland sites are presented. The approximately 1,400-year occupation span provided researchers an opportunity to view diachronic trends in tool manufacture, subsistence economy, and landscape use. Based on regional comparisons of ceramic and lithic technologies and vessel decoration, the Woodland sequence in northeastern Missouri was influenced by population movements originating from east of the Mississippi River and from southern sources in the Salt River valley.     

A Victorian Embarrassment: Consular Jurisdiction and the Evils of Extraterritoriality

In 1856, the Treaty of Paris nominally welcomed the Ottoman Empire into the Concert of Europe, but this exposed a deep fault line in international relations. Although the gesture implied full sovereign rights, it seemed incompatible with the extraterritorial privileges held by Europeans in Ottoman lands under the age-old capitulations. New commercial treaties complicated the issue by extending similar privileges to British subjects as far afield as China, Siam and Japan. Consular jurisdiction soon became the focus of controversy in Westminster as extraterritoriality featured prominently in local disputes following British commercial expansion across Asia, among them the Arrow incident that led to the Second Opium War. In Japan and other states, it would also become a key grievance in popular campaigns against ‘unequal treaties’ and the injustices of informal empire. This analysis shows how, even before such narratives of resistance emerged, there was already a seam of ambivalence in Victorian political discourse on the question of extraterritoriality. In the Foreign Office, it came as no surprise to be told of defects in these treaties, but it was the context of the existing debate, notably fresh initiatives to set up mixed courts, that framed the British response.     

The measurement of taxonomic evenness in zooarchaeology

Zooarchaeologists frequently measure taxonomic evenness to document subsistence change and to understand the response of faunal communities to paleoenvironmental change. Although the measurement of evenness is commonplace, there are numerous challenges involved. Evenness indices are sensitive to changing richness, and by extension sample size, and various indices respond differently to changing taxonomic abundances (i.e., changing evenness). To refine protocol for comparing assemblages of varied sampling effort and identify indices that may be more useful for zooarchaeological applications, we examine the quantitative behavior of the widely used Shannon evenness and Simpson indices and two others more commonly used by ecologists. These indices are examined in relation to varied richness, sample size, and taxonomic abundances. We show that although zooarchaeologists are concerned with identifying and correcting for the effects of sample size on evenness, it may be appropriate to instead focus on how richness modulates evenness. Based on our analyses, we recommend the Simpson index for most zooarchaeological applications, except when comparing evenness across assemblages that are very even.