The effect of vacant building demolitions on crime under depopulation

The costs of demolishing a vacant building are often justified on the grounds of crime reduction. I explore this claim by estimating the spatial and temporal effects of demolitions on reported crime in the city of Saginaw, Michigan. To do so, I estimate a model that uses within‐block group variation to compare crime after a demolition occurs to before the permit for that demolition was issued. Results indicate that demolitions reduce crime by about 8 percent on the block group in question and 5 percent on nearby block groups, with the largest impact concentrated one to two months after the demolition occurs.     

HLO1‐south: An Early Neolithic site in Wadi al‐Hilo (Sharjah,UAE)

Site HLO1 (Sharjah, UAE), situated in a particularly favourable geographical position, has provided an extraordinary range of anthropogenic radiocarbon dates, spanning before 8000 to Zero BCE. The Neolithic is represented by finds from the eighth to the fifth millennium BCE. Apart from the dated fireplaces, however, there are almost no typical artefacts of this period. Small stone structures appear to have been early Neolithic graves. A middle Neolithic grave consisted of a large rounded stone heap which was reused as a grave during the Late Bronze Age. The site is interpreted as a campsite of nomadic herders, used throughout the Neolithic period. After a break in the fourth millennium BCE, the site became a Bronze Age smelting site which continued to be settled until the Late Iron Age.     

Experimental examination of animal trampling effects on artifact movement in dry and water saturated substrates: a test case from South India

This paper presents the motivation, procedures, and results of an experiment that examines short episodes of animal trampling in dry and water saturated substrates in South India. While horizontal artifact displacement was similar to that modeled by other trampling experiments, vertical artifact displacement in water saturated substrates was greater than any reported experiment to date. The toolstone used in this experiment, a silicious limestone, exhibited minimal damage after trampling. Artifact inclination patterning appeared to be a potentially diagnostic middle-range marker of trampling in water saturated substrates. Given the abundant number of Paleolithic sites that are located on flat, open surfaces near water-bodies, or experience monsoonal climatic regimes, we propose that future excavations should measure artifact inclination on a regular basis.     

Persistence and Change of Regional Industrial Activities: The Impact of Diversification in the German Machine Tool Industry

The paper investigates the stability and change of regional economic activities in the long run. As the unit of analysis, we selected the machine tool industry in West Germany for the years 1953–2002. We spot a strong variance in the activities between different regions. These differences are relatively stable over time, and the regional activities are rather path-dependent. Nevertheless, the paper also identifies changes in the level of activities. As the main driving factors for these developments, we examine the effect of changing regional degrees of diversification over time. We find that those regions which generally broaden their scope of activities have a higher likelihood to grow than regions which are specializing. Furthermore, diversification into totally new technological and product fields is only beneficial under specific circumstances based on technological and market developments. Hence, in most cases, a broad diversification is superior to one focusing on new state-of-the-art technological fields.     

Laughter and Truth in Fiji: What We May Learn from a Joke

This paper examines a series of events which took place in a Fijian village in the late 1980s and which, for the ethnographer, brought into question joking, lying and telling the truth. The analysis suggests that our ideas of what language is good for necessarily inform our understanding of the truth conditions of what is said, from which it follows that truth may be regarded not as an absolute, but as a function of the moral force of language — itself an historical phenomenon that is embedded in, and constituted through, the everyday social relations that we may analyse in terms of gender, kinship, chiefship, and ideas of the person. Laughter emerges as central both to the events described and their analysis. Subtle though they may be, people's ideas of the moral force of language are amenable to investigation and analysis; but for all we may learn from laughter, it ultimately eludes any analysis — an observation that provides the key to its revelatory force.     

Ceramic production in ancient Nasca: provenance analysis of pottery from the Early Nasca and Tiza cultures through INAA

We report the results of an instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) undertaken on a regional sample of pottery from the Southern Nasca Region. The samples included specimens primarily from the Early Nasca (ca. A.D. 1–450) and Tiza (ca. A.D. 1000–1476) cultures from a total of 16 different prehispanic sites. The results of the analysis demonstrate centralized production of Early Nasca polychromes and decentralized production of pottery from the Tiza culture. The results of this analysis confirm previous conclusions about the organization of these two indigenous cultures of the south coast of Peru and support the hypothesis of an excess production of polychromes at the ceremonial center Cahuachi for Early Nasca, and multiple centers of production for the Tiza culture.