How to Make an Unfired Clay Cooking Pot: Understanding the Technological Choices Made by Arctic Potters

Between about 500 a.d. and the late nineteenth century, clay cooking pots associated with the Thule culture were produced in the Arctic region. Ethnographic and archaeological records indicate that these vessels were typically underfired (often even unfired), highly porous, and easily broken. Despite these characteristics, the evidence indicates that they were used to heat water over open fires. In this paper, we examine how Arctic potters were able to produce unsintered vessels capable of holding liquids without disintegrating. We conclude that the application of seal oil and seal blood to the pot’s surface was the key to their success.

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY WITHIN AND BETWEEN EUROPEAN NATIONS: THE ROLE OF MARKET POTENTIAL AND DENSITY ACROSS SPACE AND TIME*

ABSTRACT In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics, and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We estimate simple versions of these two views on economic geography and also establish if the relevance of spatial linkages varies across aggregation levels or time. For our sample of 14 European countries and 213 corresponding regions, we find that spatial linkages are more important at the country level and that its relevance varies across time.     

Latitudinal variation in a photoperiod response gene in European barley: insight into the dynamics of agricultural spread from ‘historic’ specimens

Between ca. 6000 BC and ca. 500 BC, barley cultivation spread across the continent of Europe from the extreme south to the extreme north. Carbon-dating would suggest that this spread, and indeed the spread of crop cultivation generally, varied in its pace, with ‘delays’ at certain points along its route. Such delays in the spread of agriculture have been explained as resulting from the slow assimilation of agricultural practices by existing indigenous human populations or as the time taken for the crops to adapt to novel climatic conditions, such as altered temperature regimes and day-lengths. A mutant form of the photoperiod response gene, Ppd-H1, causes barley to be non-responsive to long days, while the wild-type responsive form allows plants to flower in response to long days. We sequenced this gene in 65 ‘historic’ barley accessions, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in order to explore the potential role of environmental adaptation in the spread of agriculture. We chose to use ‘historic’ material, to complement the richer patterns in extant genetic lines, by spreading the data range in both time and space. Our ‘historic’ barley data shows a latitudinal divide in the Ppd-H1 gene similar to that found in extant lines, but with clearer geographical resolution, and extending northwards into the Arctic Circle. We discuss the implications of our results in relation to the dynamics of agricultural spread across Europe.     

Internal Decolonization? British Politics since Thatcher as Post-colonial Trauma

In recent years a growing number of commentators, especiallyones associated with the idea of a ‘new imperial history’,have argued that British politics and culture remained moreheavily shaped by colonialism and decolonization than had previouslyconventionally been thought. This paper pursues that line ofthought in relation to political debates during and since the1980s, especially those concerning devolution, constitutionalreform, and race relations. It then, however, highlights somemajor problems with and limitations of this kind of argument,suggesting that the emerging historiography of Britain's ‘internaldecolonization’ remains at present empirically weak, conceptuallycloudy, and often unhelpfully polarized.     

Democracy,Equity and Common Property Resource Management in the Indian Subcontinent

This article addresses the relationship between democracy, equity and common property resource management in South Asia, both at the national and at the local level. Its substantive focus will be largely on forests, and its geographical concentration mostly on India, although other sectors (primarily water) and areas (Nepal and Bangladesh) will also be included. The article opens by looking at Garrett Hardin's (1968) three strategies to preserve the commons. It finds that democratic politics is compatible with both privatization and centralization as conserving strategies (although not necessarily successful). With the third approach—local control—democracy has at best a problematic relationship, for where governmental units are the relevant actors, there tends to be more interest in consuming than in conserving or preserving resources at the local level. Local user groups, however, do much better at common property resource management, because they can restrict membership and thus avoid free riders, and they can establish a close linkage in their members' minds between benefits and costs of participating in group discipline to maintain the resource.