An Assemblage of Collegiate Ceramics: Mid-Nineteenth Century Dining at Trinity Hall,Cambridge

A large assemblage of ceramics related to dining at Trinity Hall, in which many of the vessels were marked with the name and/or the crest of the college, was recovered during recent excavations undertaken at Newmarket Road, Cambridge. The material, which was produced c. 1845–77 and deposited c. 1877–80, indicates that three distinct dining services were employed by Trinity Hall at this time. In addition to shedding considerable light into dining at this mid- nineteenth century college, the assemblage also indicates how ceramics were employed to visually denote status differences within the college. Other material within the assemblage, allied with the location of its disposal, provides significant information on how the material moved between its contexts of use and deposition. This also allows insights into how such large assemblages may be categorized and interpreted.     

The Effects of Competition‐Based Public Policy on Contractual Arrangements

When competition is naturally limited, policymakers craft regulation to obtain effects similar to those that would have occurred in the presence of competition. In many instances, regulation of this type is not successful in overcoming market failures. We rely on property rights theory and transaction cost theory to predict when state‐level policy statements will actually lead to a redistribution of benefits at the city level. We test this theory in the context of cable television franchise renewal agreements—a setting historically resistant to competition. We look to the language of the franchise agreements for evidence of concessions made by the cable operator to the city, and using a difference‐in‐difference estimator, we find that pro‐competitive regulation translates into concessions to the city. However, a credible threat of competition embedded in regulation is not enough to curb opportunism associated with monopoly supply in cases of large franchisees; larger cable operators are at least 60 percent less likely to offer more favorable terms of trade. However, consistent with transaction cost predictions, asset‐specific investments by the cable operator do curb opportunism; there is a 51 percent increase in the odds of a franchisee offering more concessions for a 1 standard deviation change—about 1,020 mi of the plant. These findings are important for those involved in crafting policy at all levels of government as well as for researchers interested in understanding the role of long‐term contracting and the use of hybrid mechanisms such as franchise agreements in contemporary governance.     

Practical and Auspicious: Thai Handbook Knowledge for Agriculture and the Environment

This article is the first thorough examination of the Thai handbooks that are produced to explain agricultural and environmental knowledge. These khu-meu (handbooks) and tamra (textbooks) come into use when knowledge is moving from one party to another. They also establish symbolic correlations within the human, terrestrial world, or between the human, terrestrial world and the worlds of the gods, spirits, ancestors, or the unseen. Despite the fact that handbooks are pervasive for the organising, preserving, retrieving, transmitting and consuming of knowledge throughout the Southeast Asian region, there has been very little concerted study of handbook knowledge. Our analysis of environmental handbooks in Thailand shows that simplified mastery is a common goal of the handbook genre in both its “how to” and “reading signs” forms. The knowledge captured by the Thai language handbooks is of a practical, predictive kind and suited to particular circumstances. Such knowledge can ultimately bridge and blur the dichotomy between scientific and local epistemologies.     

Landlord Villages of Iran as Landscapes of Hierarchy and Control

This paper analyses the walled landlord villages of the Tehran Plain in terms of hierarchy and control, and how these structures are created and expressed through the spatial landscape of the villages. Drawing on original fieldwork, the ways in which landlords used the physicality of the villages to maintain and reinforce control over farmers is explored. We suggest that the “success” or at least longevity of the land tenure system in Iran prior to the later twentieth century can be attributed at least in part to the buildings and spaces of the villages themselves.     

The National Sample from the 1851 Census of Great Britain an Interim Report on Methods and Progress

Abstract

In the last years, the use of geographical information systems has been common in many historical and geographical studies. Perhaps one of the least known applications is network analysis, a series of functions related to hydrology and mobility. Since 1994, researchers have used network analyses to understand costs and time expenditure in transportation in Roman times, with the aim of modeling commercial routes. Archaeological objects were employed to confirm those commercial distributions whose quantities were related basically to transport costs. The present articles go far beyond and attempt to understand decisions in building a transport network based on time series. It seems that not all Roman decisions in transport infrastructure were due to economic reasons; some parts of Roman roads were built basically for political reasons and affected later developments.     

The use of an improved pRIA technique in the identification of protein residues

Blood and protein residue identification in archaeological research has been a controversial subject for the last 20 years. This paper reports on the use of an improved protein radioimmunoassay (pRIA) technique in identifying protein residues. Results from the blind testing of the original and improved pRIA techniques in identifying bloodstains on experimental lithic artifacts are described and compared. We argue that the improved pRIA technique is highly sensitive and accurate for identifying protein residues to genus, and thus has excellent applications for archaeological research.     

St. George Tucker: The First Modern American Law Professor

This article argues that St. George Tucker, during his tenure as Professor of Law and Police at the College of William and Mary from 1790 to 1804, transformed American law professors, as distinguished from their English counterparts, into teachers who have primarily focused on educating students for the practice of nearly all areas of law, and who have influenced the development of law through legal scholarship and activism.     

Archaeological collagen: Why worry about collagen diagenesis?

DNA appears to decay by random chain scission resulting in a predictable range of fragment lengths. Collagen decay has also been modelled in this same way, although it has become increasingly evident that collagen decay does not follow this same pattern. Radiocarbon and stable isotope analysis now use ultra-filtration to isolate large fragments (>30% of original polymer length) even in Pleistocene bone. How then does collagen decay? This study contrasts experimentally degraded samples with collagen extracted from forensic, archaeological and fossil bone. In experimentally degraded bone, values for amino acid and elemental (C:N) composition, bulk δ ¹³C, δ ¹⁵N, and aspartic acid racemisation (AAR) changed very little until 99% of the collagen was lost, suggesting that the collagen triple helix and polypeptide chains remained remarkably intact. This suggestion was demonstrated directly by examining the integrity of individual polypeptide chains using cyanogen bromide (CNBr) cleavage followed by SDS-PAGE electrophoresis. In ancient samples, AAR values remain remarkably stable and the pattern of CNBr-cleavage was only replaced with a smear of smaller polypeptides in the oldest (Pleistocene) bones investigated. Smearing may reflect both modification of the methionine resides (the sites of CNBr-cleavage) and/or partial hydrolysis of the collagen molecule. The findings reveal why it is not usually necessary to worry about collagen diagenesis; it is mostly intact. However, evidence of partial deterioration of the oldest bone samples suggests that alternative purification strategies may increase yields in some samples.