Marc Bloch: Did he repudiate Annales history?

Since the summer of 1944 when Marc Bloch fell before a Nazi firing squad, no book dedicated to him and his historical writing has yet appeared. There is, however, an imposing corpus of publications in learned journals and collections of articles discussing his contributions to historical methodology and also his life, especially those acts of courage that led to his untimely death. The task here, then, is to probe into Bloch's writings and to ponder his life and what others have said about him in an attempt to ferret out his thoughts about the nature of history and historical methodology and to determine whether in the last few years of his life his view of history altered dramatically.     

The Archaeology of Poverty and Human Dignity: Charity and the Work Ethic in a 1930s Depression Era Itinerant’s Camp on the Toowoomba Range Escarpment, Queensland

This paper outlines the ethnohistory and archaeology of a Great Depression camp for unemployed men, established at Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1932. The camp was self sufficient and highly ordered. We interpret the material signature of the camp as a symbol of main-stream middle-class Australian values. Thus the camp is also a material symbol of the work ethic central at this time to notions of human dignity, respect and the moral development of individuals. We conclude that the archaeology of the camp demonstrates a strong work ethic among the ‘inmates’ and a degree of visible charity enabled by the historical concept of the ‘deserving poor’.     

Environmental Public Voluntary Programs Reconsidered

Environmental “public voluntary programs” (PVPs) involve government offers of positive publicity and technical assistance to firms that reach certain environmental goals. A growing body of empirical work suggests these programs generally have little impact on the behavior of their participants. A natural policy conclusion would be to eliminate PVPs, but we argue that such a conclusion is premature. Many PVPs are best viewed as information diffusion programs, so identifying their effects econometrically is difficult because information is likely to diffuse to nonparticipants. Thus, after the early phases of even a successful PVP, it may well be impossible to detect a difference in the performance between participants and nonparticipants. We argue that new estimation approaches are needed to identify the effects of PVPs. We also explore the design of PVPs in detail, showing how PVPs can potentially enhance the diffusion of cost‐effective techniques for pollution abatement.     

The ritual dugong bone mounds of Koey Ngurtai,Torres Strait,Australia: Investigating their construction

The islands of Western Torres Strait, between Papua New Guinea and Australia, saw the emergence of ritual dugong bone mounds approximately 400 years ago. These mounds were used as a means to commune with, and as an aid for the hunting of, dugongs. This paper explores the bone contents of three dugong bone mounds on the small, uninhabited island of Koey Ngurtai as a means to determine their construction and in doing so to explore the historical emergence of ritual bone mounds associated with dugong hunting magic—and thereby to historicise ethnographically known cultural practices—in Torres Strait. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.