A seventeenth-century trade gun and associated collection from Pine Island,Alabama

A set of artifacts, apparently associated with human remains (one tooth), from Pine Island, Alabama, was donated to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in 1915. In preparation for repatriation, this collection was investigated extensively by a volunteer team. This paper reports the results of this analysis, focusing especially on a new type of trade gun and the glass beads. The goal of the research is to provide an accurate date for the collection to assist in identifying the Native American group represented.     

Cadastral Politics: The Making of Community‐Based Resource Management in Zimbabwe and Mozambique

Projects promoting community‐based management of natural resources frequently encourage local smallholders to share flora, fauna, or land forms with state agencies and/or private companies. Ideals of common property and moral economy have inspired this agenda and helped spread it globally. In Southern Africa, however, the general model of shared landscapes has collided with a bitter history of white colonization and land grabbing. This article recounts the rise and fall of one CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) project in eastern Zimbabwe. There, cadastral politics — struggles over the bounding and control of land — overwhelmed negotiations for joint management and eco‐tourism. Across the border, in Mozambique, community‐based resource management has engaged with cadastral politics in a more fruitful fashion. In the midst of latter‐day Afrikaner colonization, this project mapped smallholders’ claims to land. Thus, the Zimbabwean project ignored territorial conflict and ultimately succumbed to it. The Mozambican project jumped into the fray, with some success. On past or current settler frontiers, community‐based management may learn from this lesson: dispense with an ideology of sharing and join the rough‐and‐tumble of cadastral politics.     

Global commodity networks, ethical trade and governmentality: organizing business responsibility in the Kenyan cut flower industry

This paper engages critically with current ethical trading practice in the global cut flower trade, focusing on the specific case of Kenyan export production for European markets. Notions of governmentality are adopted in the analysis, in order to understand the rationalities and materialities that underpin the organizational geographies of business responsibility in this context, and serve to re-regulate the trading network. Mentalities of stakeholding and practices of auditing are shown to play prominent roles in this process. However, it is argued that regulatory contradictions associated with the audit economy place organizational limits on the effective practice of ethical trade.     

Leviathan vs. Lilliputian: A Data Envelopment Analysis of Government Efficiency

In this paper we present a new approach to measuring government efficiency, based on the theory that communities that allocate resources efficiently in the local public sector maximize property values. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to identify the counties in Minnesota that are characterized by property-value maximization and hence an efficient public sector. The results indicate that the dominant source of public sector inefficiency is an inappropriate scale of operations. It appears that some county jurisdictions are too large to service the population efficiently. The size and concentration of government power are also responsible in part for observed inefficiencies.     

Transforming the landscape: Cistercian nuns and the environment in the medieval Low Countries

This article investigates the extent to which women’s monastic communities intervened in the natural landscape of the southern Low Countries in the Middle Ages, irrevocably transforming the environment in their efforts to support their communities. Focusing on the county of Flanders in particular, it contributes to an expanding historiography that traces the impact of human intervention on the natural world in the pre-modern period. Simultaneously, it offers a glimpse into a world where religious women worked alongside their male counterparts, challenging past notions about how gender shaped monasticism in the Middle Ages. While scholars have often noted the role of monastic communities in reclamation activities, this article makes a unique contribution by inserting Cistercian nuns into the narrative, ultimately producing a more inclusive and more accurate understanding of monastic experience in the Middle Ages.