Ancient Microbial DNA in Dental Calculus: A New method for Studying Rapid Human Migration Events

Ancient human migrations provide the critical genetic background to historical and contemporary human demographic patterns. However, our ability to infer past human migration events, especially those that occurred over rapid timescales, is often limited. A key example is the peopling of Polynesia, where the timing is relatively well defined, but the exact routes taken during the final stages and the source populations are not. Here, we discuss the technical limitations of current methods for inferring rapid human migration events, using the final stages of Polynesian migration as an example. We also introduce a promising new proxy method to infer human migrations—patterns of bacterial evolution within ancient dental calculus (calcified plaque). While we focus on Polynesia, this method should be applicable to other past migrations, enhancing our understanding of human prehistory and revealing the crucial events that shaped it.     

Studying Immigrant Policy One Law at a Time

This article shows that, in the study of immigrant integration policy in the U.S. states, it is critical to report data and coding decisions for individual laws. This analysis uses an updated and public database of law‐level decisions, which includes 2,703 legislative actions recorded by the National Conference of State Legislatures from 2005 to 2016. These data are used to estimate models of aggregate state policy activity in a variety of ways: as a single continuum of policy balance versus separate models of welcoming and hostile, lumping all policy subareas together versus analyzing a specific subarea, and lumping all years together in one cross section versus panel analysis. The results in these models differ enough to indicate that reporting codes for individual‐level laws is absolutely essential so that each researcher easily can construct the measure that fits his or her theoretical framework best.     

A. V. Dicey and English constitutionalism

The jurist A. V. Dicey’s study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) has been since its publication the dominant analysis of the British constitution and the source of orthodoxy on such subjects as parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This canonical status has obscured the originality of Dicey’s ideas in the history of legal and political thought. Dicey reworked the traditional idea of sovereignty into two separate concepts – legal and political sovereignty – in order to square the common law notion of the sovereignty of parliament with the democratic idea of the sovereignty of the people. He forged a new concept – ‘the rule of law’ – to explain the legal basis of liberty in common law countries in a manner that was both Benthamite and constitutionalist. Finally, he provided a democratic and anti-federalist rationale for maintaining the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. This majoritarian, centralist and utilitarian constitutionalism has been one of the most enduring products of Victorian scholarship. This article seeks to recover it in its original context and, in so doing, to show the value of reintegrating legal thought into the mainstream of modern British history and the history of political thought.     

The exploitation of marine resources at Saruq al‐Hadid: Insights into the movement of people and resources in Bronze and Iron Age south‐eastern Arabia

Marine resources were an integral and consistent component of subsistence strategies employed in south‐eastern Arabia throughout late prehistory. Of particular interest is the movement of these resources from the coast to interior sites and the implications of this movement for transhumance and trade in the region during this period. Marine species were frequently identified in the faunal assemblage from the inland site of Saruq al‐Hadid, dating from the Bronze Age to Early Iron Age (c.2000–c.800 BCE). This included marine fish species, along with two cormorant species (Phalacrocorax sp.) and several fragments of dugong (Dugong dugon). Twenty‐seven families of marine shell were also identified in the remains recovered from the site. The presence of these remains at this inland site demonstrates that resources were frequently moved from the coast to the interior throughout Saruq al‐Hadid’s occupation, indicative of their enduring significance in subsistence strategies employed at the site. This paper presents the results of zooarchaeological analysis of these remains and discusses the significance of their presence at Saruq al‐Hadid, with reference to subsistence, craft production and intra‐regional exchange during the Bronze and Iron Ages.     

Measuring Complex State Policies: Pitfalls and Considerations,with an Application to Race and Welfare Policy

Welfare policy is multidimensional because of the political compromises, competing goals, and federalist structure underpinning it. This complexity has hindered measurement and, therefore, the comparability of research on race and welfare policy. This paper describes a measurement strategy that is transparent, replicable, and attuned to matching the assumptions of statistical models to the policy process. We demonstrate that this strategy leads to more nuanced conclusions regarding the relationship between minority caseloads and the flexibility of state welfare policies. The strategy and recommendations are adaptable to research agendas that scholars bring to the comparative study of welfare in the U.S. states, countries, or other units—and to other complex policies enacted in federal systems.