Earthquakes and Petticoats: Maria Graham,Geology, and Early Nineteenth-Century ‘Polite’ Science

Re-visiting the controversy caused by the first female-authored report in the Transactions of the Geological Society, this article probes the gendered layers of the early nineteenth-century scientific community. Maria Graham's ‘Account of Some Effects of the Late Earthquakes in Chili [sic]’ (1824) had considerable influence, and was referred to by Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. In 1834, however, George Greenough, President of the Geological Society, questioned the accuracy of Graham's observations. Graham in turn defended herself adroitly, in an acrimonious exchange which found an international audience. While this dispute has received some attention from historians of science, previous discussions assume that Graham was no geologist, but simply a traveller who witnessed events of great relevance to contemporary geology. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article demonstrates to the contrary that Graham had considerable interest and expertise in this branch of science. Using the dispute to shed light on the multiple milieux in which early nineteenth-century science took place, it explores the constraints and opportunities faced by women with scientific interests, and the rhetorical strategies required of them, as they negotiated the diverse modes of contemporary science. It also highlights little-known networks of friendship, correspondence and intellectual exchange between scientifically minded women.     

Materialities of Nostalgia at the Old Homestead

This paper reflects on processes of memory- and history-making at the Elihu Akin House, a historic site in a New England coastal village. Since the late 18th century, the house has been a place of dwelling and deliberate recollection. Recent archaeological excavations, a 1922 silent movie, and an Akin son’s 1778 letter represent multiple media, periods, and perspectives, for which the house serves as a touchstone. These three occasions comprise an archive of nostalgia. Remembrance is repeatedly filtered through and entangled with in-process experiences. The material and emotional are mutually constituted as the house is reinvested with significance. Understanding these processes has implications as the site is developed into a heritage center striving to present not only local and regional history, but also the methods and challenges of heritage management.     

Triangulating the borderless world: geographies of power in the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle

This paper argues that the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross-border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of 'globalization'. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross-border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo-economics of intra-regional competition), land (including post-colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the 'borderless world'.     

A Critical Comment on the Taylor Approach for Measuring World City Interlock Linkages

In the study of economic‐geographic structures, the shifting focus from the national state to the city and its region has highlighted the lack of reliable interurban data sets. The abundance of usable data sets on international structures and flows has no counterpart when studying interurban relations, which makes it hard to draw any extensive conclusions regarding the structure of world city networks. Instead of relying on available data sets, Peter Taylor has developed a method for generating data sets that, it is argued, can be used in research on the structure of the world city network. In this approach, actors are defined as cities with internal attribute service values, values reflecting the presence of different transnational service‐producing corporations in each city. The structural values between each pair of cities are then established by a mathematical formula based on the service value of each firm in each pair of cities. This procedure can be criticized on two accounts. First, although internal attributes on exceptional occasions can be used as a proxy and as a rough estimate for structural values, such studies must have a firm theoretical underpinning in order to be valid from a network‐analytical perspective. If not, such generated structural values become nothing more than a function of internal attributes, thus losing the whole basic idea of social network analysis. Second, the Taylor function used for generating structural values can be questioned. Why should a large presence of TNC offices in a pair of cities imply a larger city interlock link than would be the case between a high‐ranked city and a low‐ranked city, as the city with the larger service value probably serves cities with a lower service value with economic command, control, and support functions?     

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Cultural transmission, copying errors, and the generation of variation in material culture and the archaeological record

Archaeologists are adept at analyzing variation in artifacts. The discipline has well established and tested methods to track change through time and to evaluate the function of artifacts that depend upon measures of variation in the archaeological record. Although a critical concept, the means by which variation in material culture is generated is not well understood. This paper explores one source of variation, copying errors, and systematically examines how cultural transmission processes act to amplify, reduce, or maintain such variation. Using simple models, we generate expected distributions for the amount of variation that occurs through time under varying circumstances. This variation is caused by small errors that are transmitted from one person to another in the propagation and replication of cultural traits. These baseline values provide useful null models for explaining variation in prehistoric assemblages of artifacts. We use measurements of projectile points from Owens Valley and Woodland ceramics from Illinois to demonstrate the value of this approach.