The Seasonal Mobility of Prehistoric Gazelle Herds in the Azraq Basin,Jordan: Modelling Alternative Strategies Using Stable Isotopes

The hunting of Gazella subgutturosa was a dominant practice for Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic hunter–gatherers in the east Jordan steppe. The seasonal mobility of this taxon in the Levant is poorly understood, especially for early prehistory when herd movements would have influenced hunter-gatherer use of the steppes. This paper proposes four patterns of seasonal herd mobility for G. subgutturosa centred on Jordan’s Azraq Basin. The four patterns are modelled using oxygen, carbon and strontium stable isotopes. Seasonal environmental signatures of each are understood through carbon and strontium isotopic variation in sixty modern plant specimens collected from twelve selected locations in north Jordan, published data on oxygen isotopes in local precipitation, and the adaptive behaviour of G. subgutturosa. The integrated isotopic datasets provide clear discriminatory markers for each proposed mobility pattern. Results will be applied in future to isotopic data from archaeological gazelle teeth from the Azraq Basin.     

Climate Change: How Should the World Heritage Convention Respond?

The World Heritage Convention has been considering how best to respond to the impacts of climate change. This poses a number of challenges, aside from the complexities of climate change itself. The Convention is not accustomed to addressing broad, interdisciplinary matters beyond World Heritage; it has not historically had strong links with other conventions outside UNESCO; it has relatively few resources; and climate change will result in escalating change, whereas the World Heritage Convention is based upon a presumption of relative stability and manageable change. Responding to climate change in the longer term will require a clear definition of the role of the World Heritage Convention in this area, and new types of expertise within the Convention process. This article reviews these and other issues to chart a forward path.     

The Psychologization of the Socialist Self: East German Forensic Psychology and its Deviants, 1945--1975

In the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s, East Germanylargely criminalized and politicized such things as drug abuse,alcoholism, delinquency, and even mental illness, often treatingthem as moral threats and acts of subversion. By the 1960s,however, policy makers, courts, and social services in the GDR,in a development paralleled in other industrialized countriesat the time, began turning to psychological and psychiatricapproaches in addressing antisocial behaviour. Based on publishedand archival records, this essay argues that this change wasthe result of a constellation of social, party-political, institutional,and international developments that led not only to a reconsiderationof anti-social conduct in the GDR, but also to a sweeping reconceptualizationof the psychological workings of the individual within socialism,culminating in the ideal of the ‘socialist personality.’This mirrored trends in contemporary western Europe and theUnited States, granting psychological complexity and depth todeviant personalities in East Germany; however, it representedless a pragmatic concession to western reforms than an extensionof the socialist utopian project. As a result, professionalsand policy-makers in the GDR minted an historically unique conceptof deviance that wedded Marxism—Lenin-Leninism with mainstreampsychiatry and psychology. The example of forensic psychologyin East Germany raises important questions about the relationshipbetween liberal, socialist, and fascist projects of social reformin twentieth-century Germany.