A charcoal-rich horizon at Ø69, Greenland: evidence for vegetation burning during the Norse landnám?

It is often assumed that the colonisation of Greenland by Norse settlers in c. A.D. 985 had a sudden and dramatic effect on the environment, involving substantial vegetation clearance and environmental degradation. Consequently, it has been argued that charcoal-rich horizons, visible in many sections in Greenland, represent the initial burning of the vegetation by Norse farmers to create land suitable for agriculture. In this study a charcoal-rich layer, visible in a modern drainage ditch beside the Norse farm of Ø69, was analysed using archaeobotany, sedimentary analysis and radiocarbon dating to test the date and formation processes of the horizon. It is demonstrated that the charcoal-rich layer at Ø69 was not derived from in situ vegetation burning in the 10th century and concluded that the layer was probably formed by the addition of midden material to the infields around Ø69 in the 13th and 14th centuries cal AD, perhaps as part of a soil amendment strategy. It is argued that caution must be exercised when interpreting charcoal-rich horizons as time-specific chronological markers in palaeoenvironmental sequences in Greenland.     

Airborne laser bathymetry – detecting and recording submerged archaeological sites from the air

A new generation of airborne bathymetric laser scanners utilises short green laser pulses for high resolution hydrographic surveying in very shallow waters. The paper investigates its use for the documentation of submerged archaeological structures, introducing the concept of airborne laser bathymetry and focussing on a number of challenges this novel technology still has to face. Using this method, an archaeological pilot study on the northern Adriatic coast of Croatia has revealed sunken structures of a Roman villa. The results demonstrate the potential of this novel technique to map submerged archaeological structures over large areas in high detail in 3D, for the first time providing the possibility for systematic, large-scale archaeological investigation of this environment. The resulting maps will provide unique means for underwater heritage management.     

THE EMERGENCE OF CENTRALITY IN A TRANSITION ECONOMY: COMPARING LAND MARKET DYNAMICS MEASURED UNDER MONOCENTRIC AND SEMIPARAMETRIC MODELS*

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the emergence of Krakow's historic core as the city's economic center after Poland's economic reforms of 1989—reforms that introduced market forces into land markets. Using a semiparametric approach to identify pricing centers, an evolving and polycentric price surface is revealed. While the traditional city center emerges as the dominant node, the evolution of the price surface is far more complex than that found using alternative approaches. Accordingly, it yields superior explanatory power compared to simpler monocentric models and should caution against their use in metropolitan areas in transition or those that are polycentric.     

Punctuated Equilibria and Budgets in the American States

In this article, we examine long-term state budget trends to find evidence of punctuated equilibrium. We use the American states as a broad set of institutional variation with which to examine the nature of policy change through the lens of incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theories of policymaking. The strength of this article is its sensitivity of variations in policy outcomes across time (18 years), across space (50 state institutions), and across issue space (10 budget categories). This research advances the characterization of policy outcomes by employing a quantitative measure that is both less sensitive to outliers and one that characterizes budget distributions on a simple numeric scale. Our general findings are: (i) state budget categories are interdependent; (ii) state budgets are generally punctuated; but (iii) to varying degrees: Thus, considerable stability (indicated by tall peaks) and punctuations (represented by fat tails) are a central feature of policy outcomes in the American states. This result confirms the logic of punctuated equilibrium theory, but raises future questions about the impact specific variations in institutional costs have on policymaking across the 50 states.     

Possible obsidian sources for artifacts from Timor: narrowing the options using chemical data

Measurements made at the Australian National University using laser ablation ICPMS show that none of the 88 analyzed obsidian artifacts from East Timor match either the known Papua New Guinea or the five Island SE Asian source samples in our ANU collections. There is a coastal journey of more than 3000 km between the occurrence of obsidians from the Bismarck Archipelago volcanic province of Papua New Guinea and the Sunda-Banda Arc volcanic chain, yet obsidian artifacts from the two important PNG sources of Talasea and Lou Island are found at coastal Bukit Tengkorak in eastern Sabah at a similar distance along with material that has no known source. Timor lies south of the eastern section of the active volcanic Banda Arc island chain but it is within range of possible rhyolite sources from there. Although there is a continuous chain of around 60 active volcanoes stretching from west Sumatra to the Moluccas most are basaltic to andesitic with few areas likely to produce high silica dacite–rhyolite deposits. This does not exclude the possibility that the volcanic landscapes may contain obsidian, but without detailed survey and chemical analysis of sources from the Sunda-Banda Arc the attribution of the Timor obsidian artifacts remains to be demonstrated. Timor may seem to be an unlikely source for the presence of obsidians as it lacks reports of the silica-rich rhyolite volcanic centers necessary to produce this material. Despite the absence of detailed survey and analysis of Indonesian obsidian sources, especially from the volcanically active Banda Arc, this paper presents evidence that one of two obsidian sources is clearly from Timor while the other, with less certainty, is also from an unknown local source.     

Klimawandel in Deutschland: Handlungsm?glichkeiten der Regionalplanung

Fortgeschrittene Klimamodelle lassen erwarten, dass die Folgen des Klimawandels in Deutschland regional differieren werden. Ebenso variiert auch das Ausma?, mit dem die einzelnen Regionen zum Klimawandel beitragen. Die regionale Ebene ist daher besonders gefordert, den Herausforderungen des Klimawandels zu begegnen. Die institutionalisierte Regionalplanung kann ein Tr?ger des vorbeugenden Klimaschutzes sein: Einerseits geht es darum, eine Beschleunigung des Klimawandels zu verhindern, andererseits müssen Anpassungen an die sich ver?ndernden Bedingungen erfolgen, um schlimmere Folgen des Klimawandels zu vermeiden. Der Artikel gibt einen überblick über die Diskussion der regionalen Klimamodelle und zeigt das breite Spektrum von existierenden und potenziellen neuen Instrumenten der r?umlichen Planung auf regionaler Ebene. Schlie?lich kann der Klimawandel als ein Anlass gesehen werden, die r?umliche Planung politisch zu st?rken.     

Die Petrografie himyarischer Keramik vom Jabal al ‘Awd,Jemen

Early Himyarite ceramics (first century BC–third century AD) from the Jabal al ‘Awd in Yemen are classified by visual criteria into a number of ware groups. Following classification the ceramics were investigated with petrologic methods (porosity and density). Mineralogical and physical properties were determined from thin sections according to cathodo‐luminescence spectra. The ceramics are divided into six ware groups, each of which has distinctive material properties and mineralogy.     

Kant and the magnitude of sensation: a neglected prologue to modern psychophysics

Quantitative relations between the sensations and the stimuli that produce them are the domain of psychophysics, a branch of natural science not yet known at the time of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). But Kant's philosophical doctrines of perception imply that sensations can be quantified. Accordingly, he proposed not only to consider the magnitude of both sensations and stimuli but also to work out an appropriate mathematics that would relate these magnitudes to each other. This part of Kant's work received almost no attention up to the present time although it contains some essential elements of modern psychophysics.