Governing childhood through crime prevention: the case of the German school system

Over the last decade, numerous crime prevention programmes have been implemented across the German school sector. Although several serious violent attacks have happened in the last 12 years in German schools, the emergence of crime prevention programmes within the education sector cannot simply be conceived as a reaction to a rise in youth crime. Following Michel Foucault's writings on power and governmentality, and drawing upon extracts of a discourse analysis of crime prevention programmes and political speeches, we argue that crime prevention within German schools signifies a new mode of governing childhood. Although we focus on Germany, our findings may illustrate an international trend within education policy, which first tends to spatialise socio-structural problems and transform them into local solutions, and second seeks to create childhood subjectivities that cause children to feel responsible for their own safety, while simultaneously subjecting children and young people to wide-ranging social control via area-based networks.     

Qadhat—a comparative study of ancient and new lime mortar from the Marib province/Yemen

Qadhat is the name for a lime mortar in Southern Arabia. Its usage has a long tradition. This work describes physical and mineralogical properties of ancient, historical and new samples, which seem to have been produced the same way. XRD, thin sections and SEM analyses show the similarity of the material. It consists of aggregates of volcanic material that are rich in volcanic glass and lime as binder. The production process includes several hours of crushing the material, which produces fine-grained splinters of aggregates in the binder matrix and gives the mortar a high stability. A weathering test with sodium sulphate on different samples confirms that the stability of this mortar is the result of the production process.     

Forests for cotton: Institutions and organizations in Brazil's mid-twentieth-century cotton boom

The western region of São Paulo state, Brazil, became one of several sites of global cotton production during the first half of the twentieth century in response to increased global demand and fears of cotton shortages. The cotton boom tapped a ‘forest rent’ that helped Brazil rise to become the largest producer in Latin America, providing both export revenue and critical raw material to a growing industrial economy that would become the largest in South America. This paper uses an organizational and institutional perspective to analyze causes and effects of the mid-century cotton boom that centered on São Paulo state. Organizations and institutions relating to cotton production are considered using oral histories, judicial documents, agronomic texts, and the sediment record in small catchments as empirical evidence. The state dramatically reformed some organizations to provide the key inputs to cotton production, while most contemporary observers ignored institutions, such as sharecropping and tenant farming, that supported cotton. São Paulo's institutions and organizations were characterized by the borrowing and adaptation of existing labor institutions, the creation of new state organizations that subsidized elite producers, and the weak development of institutions or organizations in response to soil fertility issues and labor supply.     

The Eulau eulogy: Bioarchaeological interpretation of lethal violence in Corded Ware multiple burials from Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

The Corded Ware is one of the major archaeological traditions of Late Neolithic Europe. Its burial customs are characterized by single graves but multiple burials also occur. We present a detailed study of antemortem and perimortem trauma in a group of Corded Ware skeletons from four multiple graves and give the most probable interpretation of the site, based upon all available bioarchaeological evidence. The pattern of observed injuries in male, female, and subadult skeletons, including cranial trauma, arrow wounds, and fractures of the forearm and hands points towards a violent event that resulted in the death of all individuals, most probably a raid. In contrast to comparable Neolithic raid sites, there was no complete extermination of the local population and no use of mass graves. The burials have been arranged with care and detailed knowledge about biological kinship ties [Haak, W., Brandt, G., de Jong, H.N., Meyer, C., Ganslmeier, R., Heyd, V., Hawkesworth, C., Pike, A.W.G., Meller, H., Alt, K.W., 2008. Ancient DNA, strontium isotopes, and osteological analyses shed light on social and kinship organization of the Later Stone Age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105, 18226–18231]. The combination of clear causes of death and the proven biological relationships among some of the individuals, including a nuclear family, provides new and important insights into Corded Ware mortuary customs and the reasons why and how multiple graves have been utilised.     

Building a tephrostratigraphic framework for the Paleolithic of Central Anatolia,Turkey

The Central Anatolian Volcanic Province (CAVP) in Turkey preserves widespread deposits of Quaternary tephra, presently associated with a small but growing number of Paleolithic archaeological sites. We use multivariate analyses of the abundances of a suite of nine major and minor element oxides determined by electron probe microanalysis. From these data, we construct a classificatory model for correlating distal tephra to one of five volcanic edifices or eruptive phases within the CAVP. Application of this model to distal deposits of primary tephra-fall and reworked tuffaceous sediments from the archaeological sites of Körkuyu and Kaletepe Deresi 3 indicates Late to possibly Early Pleistocene ages for the artifact assemblages there, and provides a fundamental tephrostratigraphic framework to examine spatial and temporal variation in hominin behavior comparable to that of other regions, such as eastern Africa.