The chemical identification of baltic amber at the Celtic oppidum Staré Hradisko in Moravia

The Celtic oppidum Staré Hradisko north of Brno in Moravia, SSR, has long been noted for its wealth of archaeological amber artifacts. Since there are several substantial deposits of fossil resins in the immediate vicinity of the site, it has been an open question whether the settlement was a centre of exploitation and exportation of these local raw materials, or whether it was an entrepôt of Baltic amber on its way to southern and southeastern Europe.Because of extensive weathering, many of the amber finds at Staré Hradisko cannot be identified by infra-red spectroscopy. A new analytical method, which determines the amount of succinic acid by means of gas chromatography, has been developed to show that the amber of Staré Hradisko is, in fact, of the Baltic variety called succinite.     

Renewing the purpose of geography education: Eco-anxiety,powerful knowledge,and pathways for transformation

Concerns about the decline in uptake of secondary geography education continue despite arguments supporting the value of geography education, the power of geographical thinking, and geography’s critical role in preparing students to deal with complex challenges. Already constrained by neoliberal politics of disadvantage, young people must plan and prepare for chaotic futures. Consequently, young people are becoming distressed and worried about their futures and feeling powerless as society fails to adequately address these issues. In this article, we ask what schools and universities can do as place-based public institutions to serve young people to effectively respond to eco-anxiety and build capacities to surf the unrelenting waves of change. We draw on journeys that brought three young doctoral candidates to study geography. From their stories, we sketch what a geographical education could offer in terms of relevance, practicality, and engagement with transformative system change. We think that under current world conditions, this is a moment to revive geography education and give it renewed purpose to encourage young people to develop skills and competences to tackle wicked problems.     

The Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene archaeology of the Great Basin

The archaeological record of the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in the Great Basin consists largely of surface lithic artifacts, and consequently research has concentrated on typological and technological studies. The small suite of radiocarbon dates available suggests human presence in the Great Basin by at least 11,500 B.P., but evidence of subsistence is scanty. Technological analyses as well as artifact distributions suggest that the earliest occupants of this region subsisted primarily by hunting, possibly large terrestrial game. As elsewhere in North America, the earliest occupants of the Great Basin faced a rapidly changing environment, with the drying of shallow pluvial lake remnants and the creation of new habitats. Paralleling these changes, significant subsistence resource diversification coupled with expansion into new environments is evident by the close of the Pleistocene.     

Book reviews

T. B. Millar, The Commonwealth and The United Nations, Sydney University Press, Sydney 1967, pp. 237 + xv, $5.50.

A. C. Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 1967, pp. 184 + ix, $6.00.

Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution: Vietnam, Andre Deutsch, London 1966, pp. 404 + xii, $5.45.

Elias Duek‐Cohen, ed., Utzon and the Sydney Opera House, Morgan, Sydney 1967, pp. 128, paperback, $1.20.

G. C. Bolton, Dick Boyer, An Australian Humanist, A.N.U. Press. Canberra 1967, pp. 295 + viii, $5.40.

Richard Rose, Influencing Voters: A Study of Campaign Rationality, Faber & Faber, London 1967, pp. 288, $7.35.

Ian Turner, Sydney's Burning, Heinemann, London 1967, pp. 245 + xv, $6.75.     

And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying,death and mourning

A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh.     

Student experiences of multidisciplinarity in the undergraduate geography curriculum

This paper explores the student experience of multidisciplinarity within the undergraduate Geography curriculum. It considers the drivers that have underpinned this development before considering the findings of research into student experiences in two universities in the south of England. The results suggest that most students view this development positively and recognize a number of advantages that it brings, citing expanded opportunities for learning, working with people from other disciplines, expansion of perspectives and perceived benefits to employability. However, for a minority this development is more problematic. The research points here to issues with specialist knowledge and disciplinary pedagogies, social issues within the classroom and class organization and some reservations regarding groupwork. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations.     

Language as apparatus: entanglements of language,culture and territory and the invention of nation and ethnicity

Postcolonial linguistics has shown that African languages emerged from a complex figuration of missionary, scientific and colonial practices. The article interprets this emergence as the result of an existential onto-epistemological dislocation stabilised through the hegemonic project of colonialism. It rests on an apparatus of modernity that separated nature and culture/society and stabilised this new order with a particular notion of language as an autonomous object. In the nineteenth century, language enters a conjunction of territory and culture, which played out in Europe in the terms of a nationalist, hegemonic trajectory and in Africa as the fractionation of ethnic/linguistic groups and the pervasive linguo-ethnification of contemporary societies. Thus, language can be understood to be an apparatus productive of nationalism as well as ethnicity. In an attempt to demonstrate the plausibility of this conceptualisation, I show how today these trajectories have effects in that Afrikaans in South Africa as ethnified language loses and Swahili in Tanzania as national language gains ground at the respective universities. Both languages compete with global academic English, which despite its colonial heritage appears as a deterritorialised, culturally neutral language.     

Reviews

Kavosh‐e rasad khaneh‐ye Maragheh va negahi be pishineh‐ye setareh shenasi dar Iran , [The Excavation of the Maragheh Observatory and a Look at the History of Astronomy in Iran], Parviz Varjavand, Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1987, xvi+ 513 pp.

Khans and Shahs: A Documentary Analysis of the Bakhtiyari in Iran , Gene R. Garthwaite, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, xiii + 213 pp., 3 microfiche negatives.

Kalila wa Dimna: An Animal Alleqory of the Mongol Court: The Istanbul University Album , Jill Sanchia Cowen. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, xiii + 176 pp. + index, 16 color plates and some 75 black‐and‐white illustrations. $40.00.

Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World , Priscilla Soucek, ed., University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press for the College Art Association of America, 1988,277 pp., 223 black‐and‐white‐photographs; hardcover, $42.50

The History of al‐Tabari: Ta'rikh al‐rusul wa'l‐mulük, an Annotated Translation , Muhammad ibn Jarir al‐Tabari, General editor, Ehsan Yar‐Shater, various translators, vols. II, IV, VII.’XVIII, XXVII, XXXV, XXXVII, XXXVIII, New York: State University of New York Press, 1985‐, SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies (ed. Said Amir Arjomand): Bibliotheca Persica (ed. Ehsan Yar‐Shater).

Iran: The Crisis of Democracy 1941–1953 , Fakhreddin Azimi, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989, xi + 344 pp., notes to p. 404, bibliography to p. 422, index to p. 422. $39.95.

The Vanished Imam: Musa al‐Sadr and the Shi'a of Lebanon , Fouad Ajami, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1986, 228 pp., $17.95.

Freedom from the Self: Sufism, Meditation, and Psychotherapy, Mohammad Shafii, New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985, 261 pp.

A Jeweler's Eye: Islamic Arts of the Book from the Vever Collection , Glenn D. Lowry, with Susan Nemazee. 240 pp., 76 color plates, b&w illus.

An Annotated and Illustrated Checklist of the Vever Collection , Glenn D. Lowry and Milo Cleveland Beach with Roya Marefat and Wheeler M. Thackston. 448 pp., 456 b&w illus.Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and University of Washington Press, Washington, D.C. and Seattle, 1989, 2 volume set, $125.00

Iran in the Twentieth Century: A Political History , M. Reza Ghods. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989, 296 pp., including notes, selected bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth.

Insurgency Through Culture and Religion: The Islamic Revolution of Iran , M. M. Salehi. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988, pp. vii + 186. $37.95 cloth.

Qajar Persia , A.K.S. Lambton, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988, 341 pp., index, hardcover, $27.50.

Nameha‐ye Tab'id , (Letters in Exile), Mirza Aqa Khan Kcrmani, Homa Nateq & Mohammad Firuz, eds., Bonn: Hafez Verlag, 1365/1986, 201 pp., no price indicated.

The Iranian Mojahedin , Ervand Abrahamian, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, 261 pp., notes, bibliography and index to p. 307, hardcover $27.50

Texte sur Agrargesetzgebung in der Isiamischen Republik Iran, übersetzt, kommentiert und annotiert , [Texts about Agrarian Legislation in the Islamic Republic of Iran], Asghar Schirazi, (Ethnizität und Gesellschaft, Probleme ethnischer grenzziehung in gesellschaften des vordern und mittleren orients, Frcie Univcrsilät Berlin), Berlin: Das Arabisch Buch, 1988, 381 pp.

The Chronicle of Theophanes , Translated from the Greek, with an introduction and notes, by Harry Turtledove, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 201 pp.

“The Government of God” — Iran's Islamic Republic , Chery1 Benard & Zalmay Khalilzad, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, xiv + 240 pp.

Advice on the Art of Governance (Mau'izah‐i Jahangiri) of Muhammad Baqir Najm‐i Sani: An Indo‐Islamic Mirror for Princes , Persian translation with introduction, translation, and notes by Sajida Sultana Alvi, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, x + 215 pp., Paper $14.95; cloth, $44.50

Cinema in Iran, 1900–1979 , Mohammad Ali Issari, New York: Scarecrow Press, 1990,446 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated.

The Ghazals of Hafez: Concordance and Vocabulary , Daniela Meneghini Correale. Rome: Cultural Institute of the the Islamic Republic of Iran in Italy, 1988, 894 pp.

Naser‐e Khosraw's Book of Travels (Safarnama) Translated from Persian, with introduction and annotation by W.M. Thackston, Jr., Persian Heritage Series, No. 36, New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1986, xii + 135 pp.

Roots of North Indian Shi'ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1858 , J.R.I.Cole, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, xiv + 327 pp., $38.00.

Musaddiq, Iranian Nationalism, and Oil , James A. Bill and W.M. Roger Louis, eds. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 1988, 358 pp. Published simultaneously by the University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. $30.00 hardcover.

A Bibliography of Afghanistan , Keith McLachlan & William Whittaker, Cambridgeshire: Middle East & North African Studies Press Limited (Menas Press Ltd.), 1983, xiii, + 671 pp., index, map, hardcover, UK£ 55.25, paperback, UK£ 19.50

The Qashqa'i of Iran , Lois Beck. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, xvi + 384 pp., maps, bibliography (p. 353), and index (p. 369). S30.00 hardback.

Iran Media Index , Hamid Naficy, compiler. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984, xxxiii + 265 pp.

Religious Trends in Early Islamic Iran , Wilferd Madelung, Albany: State University of New York Press (Bibliotheca Persica), 1988, x + 128 pp., hardcover $32.50, paper $9.95

The State and Social Revolution in Iran: A Theoretical Perspective, Farrokh Moshiri, New York: Lang Publishing Inc., 1985, xvii + 232 pp., no price listed.