Trouble in the Hedgerows

Along with all interdisciplinary enterprises, archaeological science has more serious problems with maintaining professional standards and ethics than do established fields of scholarship. There are no simple solutions, but neither is it justifiable to accept such lapses as inevitable. All members of the profession must share the responsibility of exposing shoddy work and curbing abuses.     

Wandering intellectuals: establishing a research agenda on gender,walking, and thinking

Building on a study of three women who practice walking-for-thinking as a part of their intellectual work, the analysis identifies potential themes for a future research agenda on gender, walking, and thinking. A particular focus is the subtle, daily, management of gendered expectations and ways in which walking, for these women, is a contribution to such management. We name this ‘walking away from expectations’ and identify three themes: walking away from others’ gaze, walking away from restlessness and domestic responsibility, and walking away as belonging. Walking emerges as a skilful way of creating the conditions to do one’s intellectual work and manage gendered expectations. Further, the meanings of silences about gender in the context of intellectual work and walking is discussed and questions for future research agenda are suggested.     

WHAT I BELIEVE: STRUCTURE AND THE PROBLEM OF MACROSOCIALITY

The recent turn in archaeology and other social sciences to the microscale analysis of agency, personhood, and identity has led to a neglect of analysis at the macroscale. With older frameworks such as neoevolution discredited or rejected, there has been relatively little emphasis on patterns of social change at larger geographical and temporal scales. Proceeding from the work of sociologist William Sewell Jr., I suggest that a focus on structures, events, and processes offers Southeastern archaeology a useful and theoretically flexible perspective on such patterns of incremental and exponential social change.     

Hohokam and Patayan interaction in southwestern Arizona: evidence from ceramic compositional analyses

Ceramic raw material use is one line of evidence for prehistoric territorial boundaries and social interaction. In this paper, we characterize the raw materials used by Hohokam and Patayan potters along the western Hohokam frontier, using data from oxidation analysis, laser-ablation inductively-coupled plasma spectrometry, and petrographic analysis. The sample includes 150 sherds from three sites (AZ Z:1:29[ASM], AZ Z:1:30[ASM], and BMGR-02-F-04) south of Gila Bend, Arizona. Similar Lower Gila River sediments were used for Hohokam and Patayan ceramics during the period A.D. 700–1150. Patayan potters apparently used clay sources from an area dominated by Hohokam settlements, and their ceramics were transported at least 50 km into the desert interior, perhaps representing seasonal movements between the river and the desert.     

The spatial extent of agglomeration economies across the wage earnings distribution

We investigate the spatial extent of agglomeration economies across the wage earnings distribution using economic mass (total employment) in four distance bands around each individual’s establishment in a quantile regression framework. We control for observable and unobservable individual and establishment characteristics. Remaining endogeneity in the model is assessed with a set of instrumental variables. Results indicate a positive effect of economic mass on wage earnings up to 25 km away from the establishment. The spatial extent of agglomeration economies is similar across the wage earnings distribution. However, increases in economic mass shift the wage earnings distribution in a nonsymmetric way.     

SOCIAL CHANGE BY COMPROMISE?

The article raises the question of how a person argues for social change by compromise. The study is about the leading theorist of the reformist Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), Ernst Wigforss, and how he argues for a compromise in the relations between capital and labour. My hypothesis is that social change is argued as necessary, possible, and desirable. The guiding idea for the analysis is to use Quentin Skinner’s understanding of political thought and its expression as a political manoeuvre bounded by a historically given context. However, the latter needs to be specified as an analytical concept, as well as audience and interest. Despite his efforts Wigforss failed to create an agreement about new relations between capital and labour. His problem situation and his efforts to work through the problem mirror a general political problem, the possibilities of reformism to convert the existing society on crucial issues. More specifically, however, in his effort to redefine what the interest of each party should be, Wigforss had to consider the character of the object of conflict he was addressing, as this determined what the interest of each party was, and the sort of compromise that might be reached.     

An example of the establishment of the Bronze Age cultural landscape in SW Scandinavia

In the Lake Hullsjön area, Västergötland, SW Sweden, the increase in the deposits of artifacts, the erection of monumental graves, and the intensification and expansion of cultivation and grazing, is discussed in terms of cultural landscape changes at the Neolithic/Bronze Age transition c. 2500–1500 B.C. The expansion included an intensified use of low‐lying clayey areas and caused an increase in soil erosion, as indicated by the sediment stratigraphy.     

Neuplatonismus und politik 1

According to a widely accepted view, the dialect used in Archaic Greek choral lyric is predominantly Doric and is strictly correlated with this genre. This article reconsiders the linguistic data as well as earlier attempts to dispute this scholarly consensus (which included interventions by Antoine Meillet, Carlo Pavese, and Natan Grinbaum), and puts forward an alternative theory of the nature and the origins of the distinctive idiom used in choral lyric. It argues that choral lyric preserves an ancient poetic language which predates the Homeric epic and in most likelihood arose in the (Proto-)Aeolic realm. This account, on the one hand, makes it possible to correlate the history of cult-embedded lyric with the history of narrative epic, which is generally held to include an Aeolic phase. On the other hand, it explains the progressive Ionization of the language of choral lyric by the rise of the Ionic poetic language during the 6th-5th c. BCE.