Stone Tool-Making and Brain Activation: Position Emission Tomography (PET) Studies

This study introduces to archaeology a new experimental technique for examining the relationship between stone tool-making and brain function. The principal focus of this exploratory study was the development of effective methods for the identification and examination of the regions of the modern human brain recruited during the manufacture of simple (Oldowan or Mode I) stone tools. The functional brain imaging technique employed, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), examines task-related brain activity by assessing changes in regional cerebral blood flow during specific tasks. The single-subject study reported here represents a heuristic, initial exploration of this subject. Results indicate that during stone tool-making there was heavy activation of cortical and subcortical regions of the brain associated with motor and somatosensory processing. Especially interesting was the high degree of activation in areas known to be involved with complex spatial cognition requiring integration of diverse sensory inputs (e.g. vision, touch, and proprioception, or sense of body position and motion). Expansion of such higher-order association areas has been particularly important during the course of human evolution. This single-subject pilot study demonstrates the application of the PET brain imaging technique to the study of early stone technologies and suggests hypotheses to be tested in more comprehensive studies in the future.     

Do you never get tired of salmon? Evidence for extreme salmon specialization at Prince Rupert harbour,British Columbia

Faunal evidence from five village sites at Prince Rupert harbour, British Columbia reveals very high levels of dependence on one food resource, salmon, during the period from 500 BC to AD 1000. At some of these sites, it appears that little else in the way of vertebrate fauna was consumed. Comparisons with faunal data from other parts of the Northwest Coast show that the Prince Rupert villagers during this period were extreme salmon specialists, as highly focused on this one resource as any the Northwest Coast culture, and among the most highly resource specialized hunter–gatherer cultures worldwide.     

The first direct evidence of pre-columbian sources of palygorskite for Maya Blue

Maya Blue, a nano-structured clay–organic complex of palygorskite and indigo, was used predominantly before the Spanish Conquest. It has fascinated chemists, material scientists, archaeologists and art historians for decades because it is resistant to the effect of acids, alkalis, and other reagents, and its rich color has persisted for centuries in the harsh tropical climate of southern Mesoamerica. One of its components, palygorskite, is part of modern Maya indigenous knowledge, and ethnohistoric and archaeological data suggest that its modern sources were probably utilized in Prehispanic times. Yet no direct evidence verifies that palygorskite was actually mined from these sources to make Maya Blue. Here we characterize these sources compositionally, and compare our analyses to those of Maya Blue from Chichén Itzá and Palenque. We demonstrate that the palygorskite in most of these samples came from modern mines, providing the first direct evidence for the use of these sources for making Maya Blue. These findings reveal that modern Maya indigenous knowledge about palygorskite, its mining, and its source locations, is at least seven centuries old.     

Reviews of Books

PRADEEP P. BARUA. The State at War in South Asia. Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 437. $65.00 (US). Reviewed by Ashley J. Tellis

SASKIA SASSEN. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 493. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Richard W. Mansbach

BENJAMIN A. ELMAN. On Their Own Terms: Seience in China, 1550–1900. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xxxviii, 567. $55.00 (US). Reviewed by John B. Henderson

ISTVAN HONT. Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 541. $49.95 (US). Reviewed by David W. Bates

LIAM CHAMBERS. Michael Moore, c.1639–1726: Provost of Trinity, Rector of Paris. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2005. Pp. 160. $55.00 (US). Reviewed by Nicholas Canny

MEGAN VAUGHAN. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 341. $23.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Anthony J. Barker

GEOFFREY PLANK. Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 259. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by Paul Monod

B. W. HIGMAN. Plantation Jamaica, 1750–1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005; dist. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Pp. xiv, 386. $65.00 (US). Reviewed by Michael Craton

NICHOLAS B. DIRKS. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 389. $27.95 (US). Reviewed by Martha McL

SUJIT SIVASUNDARAM. Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–l850. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 244. $80.00 (US). Reviewed by John Stenhouse

PETER BECKER and RICHARD F. WETZELL, eds. Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 492. $85.00 (US). Reviewed by Clive Emsley

IAN BAUCOM. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 387. $23.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by J. R. Oldfield

SUGATA BOSE. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 333. $27.95 (US). Reviewed by Kenneth McPherson

MARTIN KITCHEN. A History of Modern Germany, 1800–2000. Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. xi, 455. $39.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Lawrence D. Stokes

MATT K. MATSUDA. Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. vi, 232. $113.95 (CDN). Reviewed by Joseph Zizek

DONG WANG. China's Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Pp. x, 177. $60.00 (US). Reviewed by J. Y. Wong

AMIRIA J. M. HENARE. Museums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xix, 323. $80.00 (US). Reviewed by Miriam Kahn

LEO LUCASSEN. The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 277. $25.00 (us), paper. Reviewed by Russell King

ROBERT W. RYDELL and ROB KROES. Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 209. $26.00 (US). Reviewed by Joy S. Kasson

LÁSZLÓ BENCZE. The Occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, ed. Frank N. Schubert. Boulder, CO: Center for Hungarian Studies, 2006; dist. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Pp. xi, 403. $50.00 (US). Reviewed by Scott W. Lackey

PAUL A. KRAMKR. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 538. $26.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Kristin Hoganson

JOHN LAWRENCE TONE. War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 338. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

GODFREY HODGSON. Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 335. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by John A. Thompson

KEITH DAVID WATENPAUGH. Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 325. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Donald Malcolm Reid

HYUN OK PARK. TWO Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xix, 314. $23.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by David Wolff

WILLIAM N. TILCHIN and CHARLES E. NEU, eds. Artists of Power: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Their Enduring Impact on US Foreign Policy. West-port, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp. xxv, 196. $139.95 (US). Reviewed by Lloyd E. Ambrosius

D. K. FIELDHOUSE. Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. vii,376. $195.00 (CDN). Reviewed by Roger Owen

ROBERT A. DOUGHTY. Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 578. $39.95(US). Reviewed by Robert J. Young

ELIZABETH GREENHALGH. Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 304. $88.95 (US). Reviewed by David French

DAVID R. WOODWARD. Hell in the Holy Land: World War I in the Middle East. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. xiii, 253. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Mary C. Wilson

KEITH NEILSON. Britain, Soviet Russia, and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 379. $85.00 (US). Reviewed by Michael Jabara Carley

EDWARD I. STEINHART. Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. Pp. viii, 248. $49.95 (US). Reviewed by Reuben M. Matheka

REIDAR VISSER. Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism, and Nationalism in Southern Iraq. Minister: Lit Verlag, 2006; dist. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Pp. x, 238. $39.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Peter Sluglett

AMOS NADAN. The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate: A Story of Colonial Bungling. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xl, 370. $19.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Martin Bunton

JAMES J. BARNES and PATIENCE P. BARNES. Nazis in Pre-War London, 1930–1939: The Fate and Role of German Party Members and British Sympathizers. Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Pp. x, 283. $67.50 (US). Reviewed by David Renton

MARK METZLER. Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism, in Pretvar Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 370. $49.95 (US). Reviewed by Janet Hunter

GLYN A. STONE. Spain, Portugal, and the Great Powers, 1931–1941. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiii, 316. $55.00 (US). Reviewed by David A. Messenger

VICTOR ROTHWELL. War Aims in the Second World War: The War Aims of the Major Belligerents, 1939–45. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006; dist. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Pp. 244. $25.00 (US), paper. Reviewed by Anthony Adamthwaite

WOLFRAM WETTE. The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii,372. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Martin Kitchen

PETER KENEZ. Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. ix,3i2. $75.00 (US). Reviewed by Bennett Kovrig

EMIKO OHNUKI-TIERNEY. Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 227. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by F. G. Notehelfer

RICHARD J. GOLSAN. French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 198. $55.00 (US). Reviewed by Donald Reid

BRIAN T. EDWARDS. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 366. $23.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Moshe Gershovich

BRUCE KUKLICK. Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 241. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Richard C. Thornton

JOHN H. BARTON, JUDITH L. GOLDSTEIN, TIMOTHY E.JOSLING, and RICHARD H. STEINBERG. The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law, and Economics of the GATT and the WTO. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 242. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Alfred E. Eckes

PETER MANGOLD. The Almost Impossible Ally: Harold Macmillan and Charles De Gaulle. London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Pp. vi, 275. $45.00 (US). Reviewed by Alan Sharp

GUY BEN-PORAT. Global Liberalism, Local Populism: Peace and Conflict in Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Pp.xii, 327. $29.95(US). Reviewed by Mary Ann Heiss

ANDREW PRESTON. The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 320. $49.95 (US). Reviewed by Marilyn B. Young

WARREN I. COHEN. America's Failing Empire: US Foreign Relations since the Cold War. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005 Pp. 204. $21.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Andrew J. Bacevich

KEITH A. HANSEN. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: An Insider's Perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xix, 233. $24.95 (US). Reviewed by Michael Krepon

SHAHRAM AKBARZADEH. Uzbekistan and the United States: Authoritarianism, Islamism, and Washington's Security Agenda. London and New York, NY: Zed Books, 2005; dist. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. xiv, 166. $19.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Jeff Sahadeo

GLYN MORGAN. The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 204. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Dario Castiglione

ELLEN LUST-OKAR. Structuring Conflict in the Arab World: Incumbents, Opponents, and Institutions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 279. $100.95 (US). Reviewed by Raymond Hinnebusch

FAWAZ A. GERGES. The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 345. $27.00 (US). Reviewed by John Obert Voll

PETER ALEXIS GOUREVITCH and JAMES J. SHINN. Political Power and Corporate Control: The New Global Politics of Corporate Governance. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 344. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Randall Morck

PHILIP D. CURTIN. On the Fringes of History: A Memoir. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 193. $24.95 (US). Reviewed by Ralph A. Austen

JEFFREY W. LEGRO. Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 253. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.     

Knowledge and professional identity in engineering: code‐switching and the metrics of progress

When nations redefine their priorities and re‐plot their directions of travel, engineers get worried about the contents of their knowledge. The cultural and historical specificity of their responses illustrates the extent to which the questions of what counts as engineering knowledge and what counts as an engineer are linked tightly together, and also suggests that both may be tied to local images of the nation. After summarizing recent historical work comparing national patterns in engineering knowledge and engineers' work, this essay outlines how a focus on professional identity may provide a way of accounting for national and transnational influences on engineers while avoiding the specter of determinism. Offering brief case studies drawn from France, the UK, Germany and the USA, the authors describe engineers as ‘responding’ to codes of meaning that live at different scales, including contrasting metrics of progress and images of private industry. The paper is concluded with a brief assessment of some further implications of the analysis of professional identity for work in engineering studies.     

The Sense of Oklahomaness: Contributions of Psychogeography to the Study of American Culture

What the authors are calling “Oklahomaness” is meant to evoke that (psychogeographic) feeling of what it is to be Oklahoman, both as experienced by Oklahomans and by those outside Oklahoma as well. While this study will delineate Oklahomaness per se, the authors hope that it will stimulate the reader's imagination so that the reader might take from it a new way of looking at, and feeling into, the human sculpting of natural and social space.     

Excerpts from Tables of Contents of other Translation Journals

The Russian conquest of Siberia was one of the great feats of history, bringing almost one-tenth of the landmass of the world under the control of the Russian Empire. This paper proposes a framework for examining the role of Siberia in the development of the Russian state and the evolution of the world economy from the sixteenth to early twentieth century. This study supports the contention that, rather than representing an interesting aside in the annals of European imperialism, Russian colonization of Siberia was not only affected by European colonialism and the European-based capitalist world economy, but, in fact, was part of it Moreover, the conquest and consolidation of Siberia is viewed as a “series of changing geographies,” over space and time, as it was affected by and in turn affected the rise of Russian nationalism and the development of European capitalism. The three-part framework for analysis suggested in this study employs (1) a world-systems model, (2) a multi-disciplinary approach, and (3) cross-cultural comparison.