The Archaeology of Baseball: Landscape and the Power of Place

That material culture is constitutive of culture as well as being one of its outcomes plays out especially strongly when one looks at the relationships between human communities and their landscapes. Cultural landscapes are created by communities, which in turn adapt to the landscape’s physical and social dimensions. This paper explores the dynamics of the landscape of American baseball through the eyes of the archaeologist, thereby creating an archaeology of baseball.     

Catalyzing Cultural Heritage Data for Mission Success: Project ORCHID

Cultural resources professionals of the U.S. Air Force partnered with other stakeholders in recent years to ensure U.S. military personnel engaged in contingency actions, disaster response, and other related activities have sufficient visibility of host nation important cultural properties to avoid or minimize harmful effects. Since 2009, Project ORCHID has established a baseline of institutional knowledge, procedures, and planning information to begin to meet this need. This paper summarizes the main components of the project to date.     

A Review of “Fighting for the Speakership: The House and the Rise of Party Government”

We explore the sensitivity of Congress to statements of administration policy (SAPs) and signing statements in the struggle with the executive over policy. We hypothesize that the nature and use of objections contained in these presidential communications generates additional congressional oversight. To test whether this happens, we developed a dataset with all SAPs, signing statements, and congressional oversight hearings from 1997 through 2007. The results indicate that the type and number of objections raised in presidential communications affects congressional oversight activity.     

Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns In St. Mary's County,Maryland, 1658–1777

Abstract. This article is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of theoretical papers that have attempted to explain the rise of dowries in South Asia. Despite these advances, there has been no systematic study of dowry inflation. Using large-sample retrospective survey data from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, researchers assess the empirical evidence for dowry inflation. They find no evidence that real dowry amounts have systematically increased over time in South Asia.     

Catharine Macaulay on the Will

Catharine Macaulay's discussion of freedom of the will in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth has received little attention, and what discussion there is attributes a number of different, incompatible views to her. In this paper the account of the nature of freedom of the will that she develops is related to her political aspirations, and the metaphysical position that she adopts is compared to those of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and others. It is argued that although Macaulay's position is ultimately ambiguous, she is most plausibly interpreted as following Locke's discussion of free will in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and of inheriting, from him, the ambiguity that we find in her account.     

Book reviews

Isfahan Is Half the World; Memories of a Persian Boyhood. By Sayyed Mohammad ‘Ali Jamalzadeh. Translated by W. L. Heston. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Sorayya dar Eghma [Sorayya in a Coma]. By Esma'il Fasih. Tehran: Nashr‐e No, 1983. 321 pp.

Klidar. 5 volumes. By Mahmud Dowlatabadi. Tehran: Nashr‐e Parsi, 1978–1983.

False Dawn: Selected Poems. By Nader Naderpur. In Literature East and West 22 (1985).     

From Traditional Farming in Morocco to Early Urban Agroecology in Northern Mesopotamia: Combining Present-day Arable Weed Surveys and Crop Isotope Analysis to Reconstruct Past Agrosystems in (Semi-)arid Regions

ABSTRACT

We integrate functional weed ecology with crop stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to assess their combined potential for inferring arable land management practices in (semi-)arid regions from archaeobotanical assemblages. Weed and GIS survey of 60 cereal and pulse fields in Morocco are combined with crop sampling for stable isotope analysis to frame assessment of agricultural labour intensity in terms of manuring, irrigation, tillage and hand-weeding. Under low management intensity weed variation primarily reflects geographical differences, whereas under high management intensity fields in disparate regions have similar weed flora. Manured and irrigated oasis barley fields are clearly discriminated from less intensively manured rain-fed barley terraces in southern Morocco; when fields in northern and southern Morocco are considered together, climatic differences are superimposed on the agronomic intensity gradient. Barley δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values clearly distinguish among the Moroccan regimes. An integrated approach combines crop isotope values with weed ecological discrimination of low- and high-intensity regimes across multiple studies (in southern Morocco and southern Europe). Analysis of archaeobotanical samples from EBA Tell Brak, Syria suggests that this early city was sustained through extensive (low-intensity, large-scale) cereal farming.