Transport corridors and their wider economic benefits: A quantitative review of the literature

Transport corridors can generate both wider economic benefits (WEBs) and costs through their effects on diverse development outcomes. To advance understanding of how corridors could generate WEBs, this paper undertakes a quantitative review and meta-analysis of the literature that estimates the impacts of large transport infrastructure projects. The analysis finds that characteristics of individual studies and the design of the transport infrastructure influence estimated benefits. It also shows that, on average, while corridor interventions tend to benefit economic welfare and equity, they often detrimentally impact the environment. To mitigate trade-offs, policymakers can consider using complementary interventions.     

Investigating the dietary life histories and mobility of children buried in St Gertrude Church cemetery,Riga, Latvia, 15th–17th centuries ad*

Carbon and nitrogen isotope profiles were obtained from incremental dentine analysis of 19 non-adults from a cemetery in Riga, Latvia. The research compared the life histories and diet between people buried in two mass graves and the general cemetery. The δ¹³C profiles of several children from the mass graves were similar but did not resemble the patterns seen in children from the general cemetery, suggesting that they probably represented a different population group. The rise in δ¹⁵N values towards the end of the life of four individuals from one mass grave suggests they were victims of an historically documented famine.     

Excavations at MR11 on Marawah Island (Abu Dhabi,UAE): new insight into the architecture and planning of Arabian Neolithic settlements and early evidence for pearling

In 1992, an archaeological survey of Marawah Island conducted by the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey identified two significant Neolithic settlements known as MR1 and MR11. Both sites are constructed on prominent rocky platforms located towards the western end of the island. In 2000 and 2003, small-scale excavations took place at MR11, with the first full excavation taking place in 2004. Excavations continued at MR11 between 2014 up to 2019. Radiocarbon dating demonstrates that the site was occupied between the earliest part of the sixth millennium to the mid-fifth millennium BC. Three areas have been so far examined. Area A—a tripartite house (2004 and 2014–2017 excavation seasons); Area B—a partial structure (in 2003 and 2017–2018); and Area C—a series of at least five rooms (in 2017–2019). The results provide a valuable new insight into the architecture and planning of Arabian Neolithic settlements in the region, as well as the earliest known evidence for pearling.     

Historical duty,palimpsestic time and migration in the Decade of Centenaries

Abstract

This article analyses Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Alien (Dublin Tiger Fringe, 2014) and ANU Production’s Vardo (Dublin Theatre Festival, 2014) in relationship to the performative backdrop of the Irish Decade of Centenaries (2012–22) and a series of key extra-theatrical political events have that featured asylum seekers and migrants prominently in Ireland and to a limited extent in Europe at large from 2012 to 2015. Both theatrical productions centrally engage tropes of Irish national memory vis-à-vis engagement with migration through a primary focus on women’s stories and premiered against the backdrop of the Decade of Centenaries. How to Keep an Alien and Vardo’s embrace of what M. Jacqui Alexander terms “palimpsestic time” and their critical focus on gender during this moment of the Decade of Centenaries models a theatrical dramaturgy that aids in reading key theatrical and extra-theatrical events featuring asylum seekers and migrants against one another. These works reveal the relationship between these events and the ongoing redefinition of Irish national memory and political community, a process thrown into sharp relief by the present commemorative mode. They insist that a turn to the past is inseparable from querying the lived political structures of the present, structures that have repeatedly displaced as well as instrumentalised the bodies of migrant women from the post-inward migration of the mid-1990s onwards.