Mining Boom,Labour Market Segmentation and Social Inequality in the Congolese Copperbelt

The study of the impacts of new mining projects in Africa is generally set in a normative debate about their possible contribution to development, which leads to a representation of African societies as divided between beneficiaries and victims of foreign investments. Based on research in the Congolese copperbelt, this article aims to examine in more detail the inequalities generated by the recent mining boom by taking the processes of labour market segmentation as a starting point. It shows that the labour market in the mining sector has progressively been organized along three intersecting lines that divide it: the first is between employment in industrial and artisanal mining companies, the second is between jobs for mining or subcontracting companies and the third is between jobs for expatriates, Congolese skilled workers and local unskilled workers. Far from simply reflecting existing social inequalities, the labour market has been actively involved in their creation, and its control has caused growing tensions in the Congolese copperbelt region. Although largely neglected in the literature on extractive industries, processes of labour market segmentation are key to making sense of the impacts of mining investments on the shape of societies in the global South.     

A note on the dating of the clay smoking pipes collected in the course of two archaeological surveys conducted in Saudi Arabia: the Comprehensive Survey of Saudi Arabia (1976–1981) and Michael Gilmore’s survey of the Darb al‐Hajj

Several clay smoking pipes (chibouks) were recovered during the course of two archaeological surveys conducted during the late 1970s and early 1980s in Saudi Arabia. At the time these projects took place, no published clay tobacco pipe typologies existed, forcing the participants to assign a cursory date of ‘Ottoman period’ to the pipes. Since then, considerable archaeological research has been done on the Ottoman clay pipe. The following concerns the refining of the dates of these tobacco pipes in light of new studies.     

Bite marks on an ichthyodectiform fish from Australia: possible evidence of trophic interaction in an Early Cretaceous marine ecosystem

Wretman, L. & Kear, B.P., 2013. Bite marks on an ichthyodectiform fish from Australia: possible evidence of trophic interaction in an Early Cretaceous marine ecosystem. Alcheringa 38, 000–000. ISSN 0311-5518.

A well-preserved fish skull from late Albian deposits of the Allaru Mudstone near Richmond in Queensland displays a conspicuous V-shaped pattern of indentations, punctures and depression fractures consistent with a vertebrate bite trace. This is the first direct evidence of trophic interaction between vertebrates within an Early Cretaceous marine ecosystem from Australia. The specimen is taxonomically referable to the large-bodied (ca 1?m snout–tail length) ichthyodectiform Cooyoo australis, but the size and spacing of the tooth marks is incompatible with attack by a conspecific individual. The lack of osseous growths concordant with healing also suggests that the bite occurred shortly before or after the animal’s death. Comparison with the dentitions of other coeval vertebrates indicates compatible tooth arrangements in longirostrine amniote predators such as polycotylid plesiosaurians, ornithocheiroid pterosaurs and especially the ichthyosaurian Platypterygius. The implications of this as a potential predator–prey association are that Early Cretaceous actinopterygians occupied middle-level trophic niches and were in turn consumed by higher-level amniote carnivores, similar to many extant marine vertebrate communities of today.

Lovisa Wretman [lovisa.wretman@ebc.uu.se], Subdepartment of Evolution and Development, Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, Norbyvägen 18A, SE-752 36 Uppsala, Sweden (address for correspondence); Benjamin P. Kear [benjamin.kear@geo.uu.se], Palaeobiology Programme, Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Villavägen 16, SE-752 36 Uppsala, Sweden. Received 8.8.2013, revised 17.9.2013, accepted 23.9.2013.     

A note on the excavation of an Ottoman and British Mandate period Bedouin campground at Nahal Be'erotayim West in the Negev desert,Israel

The preliminary results of excavations conducted at Nahal Be'erotayim West, an abandoned Bedouin campground in the Negev desert, Israel, indicate that multiple tents were pitched in this location in different periods and at different times of the year. The recovered artefacts and architecture provide a means to identify gender and seasonality in the archaeological record, respectively. Radiocarbon dates from an ash layer and two hearths offer evidence of intermittent occupation from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century AD, and chronologically diagnostic artefacts also indicate occupations from the late nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century.     

The (Mis)Use of Disaster as Opportunity: Coerced Relocation from Celaque National Park,Honduras

Abstract: “Disaster capitalism” refers to political economic processes that take advantage of mass trauma to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies, facilitating the redistribution of wealth and exacerbating socio‐economic divisions. Here the basic tenets of disaster capitalism are applied in another context: how natural disasters can be used to impose exclusionary protected area conservation principles with similar socio‐economic consequences and ecological ramifications. The post‐Hurricane Mitch relocation of resident populations from Celaque National Park, Honduras serves as a case study whereby a natural disaster, combined with the effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, created the opportunity to implement a universal model of exclusionary nature protection. The resultant displacement and increased semi‐proletarianization of the affected population effectively served the capitalist interests of international conservation and the agro‐export coffee industry and, contradictorily, worked against the proclaimed goals of nature preservation through exclusionary national park policies.