Hygiene,health, and bodily knowledge, 1880-1940: a New Zealand case study

One of the key aims of the Dunedin Southern Suburbs project has been to examine the factors that structured opportunity in a period of rapid modernization in New Zealand, 1880-1940. This article argues that health was a key determinant of opportunity and examines how people thought about their bodies and sought to maintain health. It argues that older, humoral theories about health were maintained alongside new understandings wrought by the germ theory and that both placed a high value on regimen. Mothers were regarded as the household experts on health but lacked a vocabulary to communicate with their daughters about menstruation. While bodily health was an ideal to be striven for, there was little communication about bodily pleasure, a situation subject to change with the adoption of family limitation.     

Testing for Regional Differences in Means: Distinguishing Inherent from Spurious Spatial Autocorrelation by Restricted Randomization

Tests for differences among regional means are typically carried out by analysis of variance (ANOVA). When such data are spatially autocorrelated (SA), the assumptions of ANOVA are not met, giving rise to excessive type I error rates. Two spatially adjusted ANOVA methods, Griffith's and COCOPAN, have been proposed to overcome this problem. In this study we show, by means of extensive simulations, the magnitude of the error rates introduced by SA induced in isolation-by-distance models typical of those used in population genetics. For data suspected of exhibiting such SA, we propose a strategy for distinguishing between inherent SA, generated within the data by a contagious process, and spurious SA, introduced by regional differences in means. The approach adopted is that of restricted randomization of distance matrices. We also furnish error rates and power estimates for both Griffith's method and COCOPAN. In addition to the simulated data, the methods are applied to an actual example from plant population biology.     

City Size Distribution Analyses Based on the Concept of Entropy Competition

The present work pursues theoretical and empirical objectives. With regards to the former, it is demonstrated that the natural tendency to uniformity of both the probability distribution of a city to have a certain number of inhabitants and that of a person to reside in a town of a given number of citizens leads to a competition between their information entropies, which provides the power law distribution as the most probable one for city size. It is also shown that Zipf's law reflects the significant control of the existence of interconnections between cities on the self-organization of their size. With regards to the empirical objectives, based on population data of European countries and Italian municipalities, the theoretical approach proposed is validated. At the Italian scale, city distribution is shown to be a power law for cities above 10,000 inhabitants. In the 20 Italian regions, the breakpoint in the distribution is generally lower. Finally, the geographical control on city distribution is discussed based on the results achieved in some regions.     

The Social and Historical Context of Short-Term Stylistic Replacement: A Zuni Case Study

Large collections of ethnographic ceramics created over multiyear periods of intensive collecting provide a way to bridge discrepancies between the temporal scales of ethnographic studies based on single field visits and archaeological analyses of assemblages accumulated over much longer periods of time. The Smithsonian's Stevenson collections of Zuni ceramics, consisting of 3500 vessels, were assembled in three intensive field seasons over a 6-year period. They are particularly useful for addressing questions about rates of stylistic change and the relative use-lives of vessel forms and sizes with known ethnographic functions.