Mobility-driven cultural transmission along the forager-collector continuum

Hunter-gatherers mobility regimes are often treated as discrete adaptive strategies. Here we present a model of forager mobility which treats collectors and foragers as two ends of a continuous spectrum. We show that a mobility regime can be situated along this spectrum by specifying the number of foraging moves a group makes before returning to its home base. The model allows us to explore the behavioural space between forager (i.e. residential mobility) and collector (logistical mobility) adaptations. We discuss the heuristic value of the model by showing how it can be used to make testable predictions about the impact of mobility strategies on archaeological measures such as occupation intensity and raw-material transportation distance. We then use the model to investigate the impact of mobility on rates of cultural transmission. We show that mobility-driven cultural transmission may be equivalent to a Poisson process and that the time it takes for a cultural behaviour to be transmitted between two mobile groups is optimized when the mobility regime is somewhere between pure forager and pure collectors adaptations. In addition, we find that rates of cultural transmission decline in a very regular way, as the inverse of the square root of the number of moves made before returning to home base. This suggests that there is a mechanistic connection between the mean-squared displacement of hunter-gatherers in space and the transmission of cultural traits.     

Power Plus Persuasion: The Anatomy of Kennedy’s Housing Order

We examine the influence of various political actors on the substance and timing of presidential orders. Specifically, we analyze President John F. Kennedy’s decision to issue E. O. 11063, which directed the federal bureaucracy to eliminate discrimination in the sale or lease of residential property overseen by the federal government. We show that this order did not result solely from Kennedy’s policy preferences; rather, it was a product of persuasion by several political actors who coaxed Kennedy to act. This reinforces previous findings that the president’s power of the pen is often conditioned by the informal political costs of unilateral executive action.     

Brazilian Horrors Past and Present: José Mojica Marins and Politics As Reproductive Futurism

Director José Mojica Marins is both the mastermind and actor behind Zé do Caixão, an icon within Brazilian popular culture and an international cult sensation. Marins encountered numerous conflicts with Brazil’s military dictatorship, and after producing the first two films of an intended trilogy, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), the third film, Embodiment of Evil, was not made until 2008. Throughout this trilogy, Zé do Caixão kidnaps, tortures, and murders scores of victims, effectively mimicking the human rights abuses that occurred under the dictatorship. He advocates liberation from the oppression of traditional morality while reinscribing its rhetorical raison d’être: purpose through procreation. The popular appeal of these films, their political intentionality, and their production during and after the dictatorship allow for an analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Marins in his attempt to both shock audiences and instill in them a counterhegemonic consciousness. Despite the radical agenda at work in Marins’s films, I will argue that this trilogy is conservative in its rhetorical framework, serving as an example of Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism, wherein political legitimacy is contingent upon procreation.     

On the Ancient Parliament and Castle of Acton Burnell

The remains of an iron dagger within an iron sheath were found in 1998 at Castlethorpe, Buckinghamshire: the only one recorded in Britain and Ireland. Their typological characteristics are those of early iron-age examples, made somewhere between 600 and 400 B.C. A unique design feature and the circumstances of its deposition are discussed.     

The Royal Councils of Worcester

The possible existence of a Roman signal station at Whitby has a significant impact upon the study of the Roman defensive system of the North Yorkshire coast and our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical topography of the area. Whitby lies at the mouth of the River Esk and its associated harbour on the North Yorkshire coast, amidst an intervisible chain of five known signal stations, but is perhaps best known for its Anglo-Saxon monastery founded by the Northumbrian king Oswy in A.D. 657. No absolute archaeological evidence of a signal station at Whitby exists, but the toponym suggests that the site had an association with a signal station or watchtower. It is clear that the existing stations were designed to function as a cohesive system, given their similar form and contemporary dates: communication and intervisibility were therefore essential aspects of this defensive network. Despite this, the stations to the north and south of Whitby—those at Goldsborough and Ravenscar respectively—are not intervisible. A station positioned at Whitby would effectively close this gap in the system.

Attempting to reconcile the near complete absence of archaeological remains with the place-name and geographical evidence, this paper uses geologically determined erosion rates to examine the possibility that such a station existed on the more than three hundred metres of coastal land that has eroded since the Roman period. In doing so it addresses the extent to which archaeologists can reconstruct and work with an ancient coastline on a local scale. Having established the probability of a ‘lost’ station, the paper discusses the results of a GIS viewshed application which address the feasibility of such a station's intervisibility from its neighbouring station to the south. The concluding sections investigate the stations' possible form.