Alkali extraction of archaeological and geological charcoal: evidence for diagenetic degradation and formation of humic acids

Charcoal forms a crucial source of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data, providing a record of cultural activities, past climatic conditions and a means of chronological control via radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dating. Key to this is the perceived resistance of charcoal to post-depositional alteration, however recent research has highlighted the possibility for alteration and degradation of charcoal in the environment. An important aspect of such diagenesis is the potential for addition of exogenous “humic acids’ (HAs), to affect the accuracy of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions based upon chemical analyses of HA-containing charcoal. However the release of significant quantities of HA from apparently pristine charcoals raises the question whether some HA could be derived via diagenetic alteration of charcoal itself. Here we address this question through comparison of freshly produced charcoal with samples from archaeological and geological sites exposed to environmental conditions for millennia using elemental (C/H/O) and isotopic (δ¹³C) measurements, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and proton Liquid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (¹H NMR). The results of analyses show that the presence of highly carboxylated and aromatic alkali-extractable HA in charcoal from depositional environments can often be attributable to the effects of post-depositional processes, and that these substances can represent the products of post-depositional diagenetic alteration in charcoal.     

The Periphery's Terms of Trade in the Nineteenth Century: A Methodological Problem Revisited

Abstract.

There is a major downward bias in the trend of most existing estimates of the periphery's nineteenth-century terms of trade. By using prices from the North Atlantic core as proxies for prices in the peripheral countries themselves, historians ignore the dramatic price convergence that took place during the nineteenth century. Measured correctly, the periphery's nineteenth-century terms-of-trade boom would appear considerably longer, greater, and more widespread than Jeffrey Williamson (2008 Williamson, J. G. 2008. Globalization and the great divergence: Terms of trade booms, volatility and the poor periphery, 1782–1913. European Review of Economic History 12:355–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S136149160800230X.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011 ———. 2011. Trade and poverty: When the Third World fell behind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]) supposes, greatly reinforcing his grand narrative about the relation between globalization and the “great divergence.” Many of the details of his narrative, however, must be revised. This is illustrated by the case of India.     

Developing geographic information infrastructures for local government: the role of trust

The United States's National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) model presumes that the local government agencies of counties and municipalities will share their geographic information freely with government agencies of regions, states and federal agencies. This article takes up the issue of local government involvement in the NSDI by asking the question: why should local governments involve themselves in the NSDI? This question is informed by considering the social and technological imbrication of the NSDI. One of the oldest spatial data infrastructure projects, the NSDI offers insights into the complexity of implementing infrastructure in federal models of shared governance. This article focuses on the political and financial dimensions of developing infrastructure among local governments. Trust is quintessential at this level of government. Local government agency activities experience an inherently closer coupling with political representatives and with different agencies in both intramunicipal and intermunicipal activities. Building the NSDI is fundamentally an interagency act and thus a matter of trust. Trust is a key issue in the development of the NSDI, as the results of a study of Kentucky local government agencies indicate.     

Targeting Research for Poverty Reduction in Marginal Areas of Rural Syria

Agricultural research in marginal dry areas can contribute to reducing poverty through the development of technological, institutional and policy options for poor farmers. Such research should address diversified opportunities and development pathways. This article analyses the diversity of livelihood strategies of rural people living in the Khanasser Valley in northwestern Syria, an area that is typical of marginal drylands. It proposes an operational classification of households based on their different livelihood strategies, applying an integrated methodology within a Sustainable Livelihoods framework. Households are classified into three clusters: agriculturists, labourers and pastoralists. The article examines the diversity of livelihoods involved, and considers where and how research should be directed to have greatest impact on poverty. Given that rural households are not homogeneous but dynamic entities, with diverse assets, capabilities and opportunities, the definition of household typologies can help to target development research. The article concludes that while agriculturists benefit most, poor labourers with enough land can also gain from pro‐poor agricultural research. The poorest households with little land, and pastoralists, benefit little or only indirectly.     

Enclosing difference and disruption: assemblage,heterotopia and the cruise ship

The cruise ship is as much a process as an object. Indeed, while the ship appears stable in its material and affective form, this state is maintained only through the interventions of a vast array of human and non-human agencies. The cascading affects flowing from these interactions allow for alternative sociomaterial orders to be established through the suspension and splintering of fixed notions of time and space. This paper brings the theories of heterotopia and assemblage together, through a speculative realist ontology, to explore these temporal and spatial discontinuities, and the way they can create a sense of enclosure amongst passengers on-board. This theoretical approach is utilized to examine articulations of the cruise ship in the self-solicited blog entries of passengers that demonstrate both the mutable and emergent qualities of the ship and the way in which its seeming enclosure is subject to constant disruption. Rather than a static reading of the ship as a heterotopic ‘other space’, we propose that these spatial configurations are vulnerable to entropic forces and unruly agencies that frame the cruise ship as an emerging, rather than realized object, affording it the potential to enact alternative sociomaterial orders.     

Osteometric scoring of adult residual rickets skeletal plasticity in two archaeological populations from southeastern England: Relationship to sunshine and calcium deficits and demographic stress

An osteometric scoring technique is developed for the quantification of rickets deformational effects persisting in the healed adult skeleton. Termed RR-15 scoring (for residual rickets estimate, based on 15 main diagnostic osteometric traits), the method is first validated for sunshine deficit, and is then tested in a comparison of three climatically distinct archaeological populations from southeastern England. Two well-dated cemetery series were sampled: the Saint Bride's Church columbarium collection (SBC) from London at the time of the Industrial Revolution, for which the sex, age, and calender year at death of each individual are known; and the early Anglo-Saxons from Abingdon, near Oxford (AAS). Estimates of insolation in the past were developed indirectly by reference to δ¹⁸O mass spectrometer analyses of dated layers of the Greenland ice sheet. In SBC and AAS, the RR-15 score varies primarily as a direct function of computed sunshine deficit, but is also incremented by deficits of bioavailable calcium in their reconstructed diets, and by demographic stress in AAS, the inferred result of a high birth rate. The amounts of interglobular dentine present in the permanent first and third molar crowns of SBC and AAS have been shown to correlate similarly with sunshine and calcium deficits. The relatively high RR-15 score obtained in a small sample of northwestern European neanderthals lends quantitative support to the bioenvironmental hypothesis that sunshine-deficit rickets accounts for much of their paranormal gross morphology.