Tourism consumption and the imagination of money

This paper supplements exisiting research on tourism consumption through a focus on money. It draws upon recent work in the geography of money and economic sociology, arguing that the understandings of money used by consumers are of importance to the social formation of tourism. Using a theoretical framework that links consumption studies and reconceptualizations of money, the paper develops a qualitative case study of British long-haul travellers. It concludes that consumers' understandings of money are integral to the ways in which tourists seek to engage with destinations, and points out some implications for the politics of tourism.     

Patterns of Diagenesis in Bone II: Effects of Acetic Acid Treatment and the Removal of Diagenetic CO3

Archaeological bones of varying preservation have been treated with 0·1 M acetic acid in order to investigate the effect on structural and chemical alterations caused by diagenesis. Acetic acid is commonly used as a “cleaning agent” for removing diagenetic carbonate from bone and enamel, in an attempt to recover original, biogenic signals for use in dietary and¹⁴C dating studies.Diagenetic parameters were measured before and after treatment on a range of archaeological bones with good and bad preservation. Histological preservation defined the behaviour of the correlating parameters, where correlation coefficients between carbonate content and crystallinity, microporosity and macroporosity increased significantly after treatment. For histologically well preserved material, acetic acid is effective at returning carbonate content to around that of modern bone. Where bone is extensively damaged by micro-organisms, “loose” diagenetic material can be removed, but a fraction largely composed of hypermineralized bioapatite remains, which, we believe, cannot be reliably used to obtain accurate biological signals.     

„Das Gewässer als Ganzes betrachten“

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Maize,beans and the floral isotopic diversity of highland Oaxaca,Mexico

Oaxaca, Mexico has been inhabited by humans for over 10,000 years. From the time of earliest habitation, this environment provided a wide floral subsistence to its human inhabitants, notably documented at the cave site of Guila Naquitz. Light stable isotopes, primarily carbon and nitrogen, have been used in dietary and environmental reconstructions throughout Mexico and Central America. We report a large isotopic study of wild and market plants from Oaxaca that demonstrates 1) overlapping δ¹³C values of C4 plants, including maize, and plants that utilize the Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM) pathway for biosynthesis, 2) the existence of a significant C4 grass biomass, 3) the lack of isotopic separation in the δ¹⁵N of legumes and non-leguminous plants and 4) the increase in the nitrogen isotopic composition of crop plants relative to wild plant averages. These four observations are potential complicating factors in interpretations involving the origins and spread of maize agriculture, the relative amount of maize in the diet and assessments of trophic level or meat contributions to the human diet.     

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.