Pests in an ancient Egyptian harbor

Our investigations combine detailed identification and interpretation of plant remains and associated fauna and their mode of arrival in one of the rock-cut galleries, Cave 3, at the site of Mersa/Wadi Gawasis on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. The site served as a staging area and harbor from which Middle Kingdom pharaohs launched seafaring expeditions to the land of Punt in the early second millennium BC. Quantities of wood, including ship timbers, fastenings, debris related to ship dismantling and reworking, and charcoal were excavated and analyzed. Evidence of marine mollusk infestation (shipworm) was abundant in Cave 3, as were the remains of insect pests of stored foods. We also report on a unique find of a plaster “spill” that preserved the floor of Cave 3 as it was when people worked in the gallery ca. 3800 years ago. The plaster spill created a sealed deposit of plant and insect remains with a diagnostic ceramic fragment, allowing us to securely associate insect remains and “hollow” spikelets of emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) recovered from the gallery. An impression of the beetle Trachyderma hispida and its associated exoskeleton fragments provide new evidence of this species as a potential pest not yet reported from an archaeological grain storage site in Egypt. The finding of Tenebroides mauritanicus from the same deposit is the earliest known association of this pest with stored grains. These unique finds shed new light on the risks associated with preserving food supplies, combating pest infestation, and dealing with marine organisms on land and at sea in the pharaonic harbor.     

Virtual Campaigning: Australian Parties and the Impact of the Internet

This paper examines the impact of the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail on Australian parties in two key areas: (1) party communication: what exactly are parties using their Websites for? and (2) party competition: does the Internet lower the threshold for smaller parties to communicate their message compared with the traditional media? We examine these questions with two types of data--a questionnaire of party communication staff and content analysis of a representative sample of party Websites. Our findings show, first, that Australian parties have taken a fairly cautious approach to the new medium, using it primarily as an information storehouse rather than putting it to more innovative use. Second, while almost all Australian parties have a Web presence, there is a divide between those parties with parliamentary representation and those without in terms of their site quality and visibility on the Web. The study concludes by interpreting the findings in the context of research on parties' use of the Internet worldwide.     

Excavating the Logic of British Urban Policy: Neoliberalism as the "Crisis of Crisis–Management"

This paper suggests that crisis theories provide a framework for analyzing the urban spaces of neoliberalism. Drawing on crisis–theoretic approaches to state theory, we examine the path–dependent links between neoliberalism, urban policy, and Britain's cyclical and crisis–prone cities through three tendencies: the geographies of state regulation, the institutionalization of interurban competition, and rescaling as the "crisis of crisis–management." These are used to explore the argument that Britain's cities are hosts to ineffectual regulatory strategies because urban policy appears to be a response to the sociopolitical and geographical contradictions of previous rounds of urban policy, and not the underpinning contradictions of accumulation.
Whether state power is able to manage and reproduce the highly oppressive, irrational, and self–contradictory capitalist system is of course an open question. (Offe 1984:257)     

Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City

Some of the most recent literature within urban studies gives the distinct impression that the contemporary city now constitutes an intensely uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces that are, to all intents and purposes, physically proximate but institutionally estranged. For instance, so–called edge cities (Garreau, 1991) have been heralded as a new Eden for the information age. Meanwhile tenderly manicured urban villages, gated estates and fashionably gentrified inner–city enclaves are all being furiously marketed as idyllic landscapes to ensure a variety of lifestyle fantasies. Such lifestyles are offered additional expression beyond the home, as renaissance sites in many downtowns afford city stakeholders the pleasurable freedoms one might ordinarily associate with urban civic life. None–the–less, strict assurances are given about how these privatized domiciliary and commercialized 'public' spaces are suitably excluded from the real and imagined threats of another fiercely hostile, dystopian environment 'out there'. This is captured in a number of (largely US) perspectives which warn of a 'fortified' or 'revanchist' urban landscape, characterized by mounting social and political unrest and pockmarked with marginal interstices: derelict industrial sites, concentrated hyperghettos, and peripheral shanty towns where the poor and the homeless are increasingly shunted. Our paper offers a review of some key debates in urban geography, planning and urban politics in order to examine this patchwork–quilt urbanism, In doing so, it seeks to uncover some of the key processes through which contemporary urban landscapes of utopia and dystopia come to exist in the way they do.     

Repatriating the Japanese from New Caledonia, 1941–46

This paper considers the negotiations for the repatriation of the Japanese residents of New Caledonia who were transferred to Australia for internment after the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. It shows that whilst the Japanese residents’ place of origin was New Caledonia, it was deemed instead to be Japan, and they were repatriated to Japan either as part of the Anglo–Japanese civilian exchange of September 1942 or after the cessation of hostilities. The paper also shows that the Australian government had security concerns regarding the Japanese before and during the war but was willing to repatriate the Japanese to New Caledonia after the war should the New Caledonian authorities have been willing to accept them back. The New Caledonian authorities’ decision not to accept the Japanese back in New Caledonia resulted in their repatriation to Japan even though some expressed the wish to return to New Caledonia.     

Book reviews

The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution. 1750–1850. Edited by KENNETH J. ANDRIEN and LYMAN L. JOHNSON. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Pp. viii, 263.

Mexico in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, 1750–1850. Edited by JAIME E. RODRIGUEZ O. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994. Pp. xiii, 330.

Transiciones hacia el sistema colonial andino. By CARLOS SEMPAT ASSADOURIAN. Lima: El Colegio de México—Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1994. Pp. 304.

El Comercio Libre en el Perú. Las estrategias de un comerciante criollo: José Antonio de Lavalle y Cortés Conde de Premio Real, 1775–1815. By CRISTINA ANA MAZZEO. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Católica, 1994. Pp. 279.

Barbarie y canibalismo en la retórica colonial. Los indios Pijaos de Fray Pedro Simón. By ALVARO FELIX BOLAÑOS. Bogotá: CEREC, 1994. Pp. 243.

America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Edited by KAREN ORDAHL KUPPERMAN. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 428.

After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Edited by GYAN PRAKASH. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp. viii, 352.

A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. By ELINOR G. K. MELVILLE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii, 203.