Battle/fields: braceros,agribusiness, and the violent reproduction of the California agricultural landscape during World War II

The first years of World War II were marked by a series of battles in and over the fields of California. Workers struggled with growers, growers struggled with the state, and federal and California bureaucrats struggled to gain control over the anarchic labor conditions that marked California agriculture. The introduction of a guest worker program – the bracero program – that brought farmworkers from Mexico to the harvests of California and other states, brought these battles to a head as growers ought to secure their traditional access to ‘cheap labor’ and their presumed right to control the farm labor process in the state. This paper examines these battles to show how growers fought – and managed – to preserve a landscape of great power and profit. The paper argues that the agricultural landscape extant at the beginning of the war shaped the nature of these multifaceted struggles, even as it was an object of those struggles.     

Sourcing Iron Age softstone artefacts in southeastern Arabia: results from a programme of analysis using Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry/Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-MS/OES)

Iron Age softstone vessels manufactured in southeastern Arabia are widely distributed across that region and in lesser amounts throughout Western Asia. Results from a pilot programme of analysis using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry/Optical Emission Spectrometry on vessel fragments from two southeast Arabian sites are presented. These results indicate the existence of geochemically distinct groups that are separated by both transition metals and rare earth elements. While this indicates the potential for the application of the provenance postulate in softstone analysis, these promising results need to be further tested by an expanded programme of analysis which includes quarry fragments.     

Multi-disciplinary research on the past human ecology of the east Arabian coast: excavations at Hamriya and Tell Abraq (Emirate of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates)

The results of two seasons of research at Hamriya and Tell Abraq (Sharjah, UAE) by an international team of researchers are presented. The research has revealed extensive evidence for occupation from c. 5000 BC to the recent past adjoining lagoon areas that face the Arabian Gulf. C¹⁴ analysis of shells has contributed to understanding the chronology of settlement and also assisted our understanding of species-specific deviation from the global reservoir effect.