On the Location Quotient Confidence Interval

The location quotient is a useful tool for comparing area characteristics. It has applications in areas such as health care and economics. Individual location quotient standard deviations play an important role in comparing area characteristics. Using the Delta Method, a closed‐form expression is derived for calculating the standard deviation of the individual location quotient. The performance of the proposed method is assessed by simulation. The application of individual location quotient confidence intervals based on the estimated standard deviations is illustrated using health utilization data.     

Cartoon epic heroes in indigenous Siberian revival: The meaning of ethnicity in Putin's Russia (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

This article outlines a motivation for the Russian Federation's incursion into the Crimea, which concerns the Putin administration's relationship with Russia's citizens, rather than the outside world. I use a case study from Siberia – the Sakha people's revival of their national epic, the Olongkho – to explore the possibility that Putin's behaviour during the Ukrainian crisis serves to legitimate his authority within Russia, by appealing to conceptions of ethnicity that have their roots in Soviet‐era social engineering. Rather than deducing the Putin administration's motives from the events and relationships they immediately concern, I explore motivations emerging from the configuration of values, perceptions, and conventions that shapes and reproduces social difference in Russia. The Sakha Olongkho revival shows how the perceptions of ethnicity fostered during the Soviet era have become powerful indexes of morality and authority. Individual Sakha citizens now demonstrate their identities and values through adopting a stance towards a reified conception of Sakha ethnicity expressed in their choices of recreation, fashion and consumption. Sakha ethnicity has become integrated into the process whereby hierarchical social groupings emerge within Sakha society according to their avowal of specific tastes and norms. The relatively small size of the Sakha population – which is nevertheless the dominant ethnic group in their republic, Sakha (Yakutia) – enables us to see trends affecting the rest of Russia in microcosm. Thus, I suggest that former Soviet ethnicity has become so closely woven into Russia's morality that Putin's invasions of foreign states, in the name of the ethnic Russian community, bolster his claim to be a moral person and a legitimate and authoritative national leader.     

A review of lessivage and neolithic cultivation in southern England

A critical re-examination is undertaken of a model for soil development which has been put forward to explain the occurrence of buried sols lessivés (Argillic brown earths) under several neolithic earthworks in southern England. The model attributes the formation of sols lessivés to neolithic agricultural activity, and is based on the assumption that lessivage will not occur under woodland, but will be facilitated by clearance and cultivation. A review of the pedological literature shows both these assumptions to be unsubstantiated, and a survey of the sites used in the development of the model reveals that at only one is there any independent evidence for neolithic agriculture. An alternative hypothesis for sol lessivé development is put forward which associates it with the post-glacial forest. The original model was taken as an environmental cause of the change in the neolithic economic base. In view of the arguments presented here this explanation is no longer tenable.     

SIEVING FOR SOIL MARKS

Summary. Recent work has suggested that greater attention might be paid to the archaeological potential of the modern ploughsoil. In particular, it seems likely that soil marks in chalkland areas can be remarkably resilient. This paper describes an attempt to recover and analyse soil marks on a gravel site through sieving of the modern ploughsoil. Such an approach may shed considerable light on the original form of earthwork monuments otherwise obliterated by modern agriculture, but does not entail any disturbance of stratified deposits.