Invading Mongols and the Preservation of Korean Traditions: The Monk Iryŏn and the Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms

In the thirteenth century, when the Kingdom of Kory?—a state ancestral to modern Korea—was threatened culturally as well as politically by Mongol invasion and domination, a leading monk of that era, Iry?n, undertook to record the folklore of the ancient period, the era of the so-called Three Kingdoms, and to compile it into a major work. This effort might now be called ‘salvage folklore’, but the way in which Iry?n conducted his research and analysed his materials suggests that he should be regarded as Korea’s first folklorist, and that his work, the Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, should be regarded as the earliest extant compendium of folkloric material from Korea.     

Craft economies in the north American Southwest

Debates concerning sociopolitical organization in the North American Southwest are clarified and confounded by the conclusion that craft specialization was not always a sufficient condition of complexity in the region. Understanding the relationship between varying dimensions of craft specialization (e.g., context, scale, and intensity) and sociopolitical organization in the region requires us to examine a variety of social institutions (e.g., leadership, gender, and ethnicity) that potentially generated differentiated economies. New research on middle-range societies in the North American Southwest and elsewhere in the world should focus on identifying and interpreting the archaeological signatures of specific social institutions and their linkages to craft economies.     

A Spatial Prior for Bayesian Vector Autoregressive Models

In this paper we develop a Bayesian prior motivated by cross-sectional spatial autoregressive models for use in time-series vector autoregressive forecasting involving spatial variables. We compare forecast accuracy of the proposed spatial prior to that from a vector autoregressive model relying on the Minnesota prior and find a significant improvement. In addition to a spatially motivated prior variance as in LeSage and Pan (1995) we develop a set of prior means based on spatial contiguity. A Theil-Goldberger estimator may be used for the proposed model making it easy to implement.     

Modernity and its Discontents: On the Durability of Nationalism in the Arab Middle East

Abstract. Because many area experts studying the Arab Middle East commonly credit assumptions about nationalism that have, for the most part, been abandoned by their colleagues working in other parts of the globe, they assert that nationalist sentiment in the region has declined, either as a result of a series of political shocks or as the result of competition from other ideologies (such as Islamism). However, popular forms of nationalism not only have strong roots in the region, they have been continually reinforced over time. As a result, the current popular support for Islamism cannot be taken as a sign that nationalist sentiments are on the decline, particularly in light of the fact that Islamic movements share with nationalism a number of significant attributes.     

Handedness and directional asymmetry in the long bones of the human upper limb

The long bones of the human upper limb usually show lateral asymmetries of length. This pattern can be attributed either to the mechanical consequences of handedness bias or to genetic or hormonal factors acting directly on longitudinal bone growth. Length data was obtained from the long bones of the upper limbs of a large skeletal assemblage from Wharram Percy, Yorkshire (England), predominantly deriving from the 11th-16th centuries A.D. The Wharram Percy adult skeletons had a population distribution of lateral asymmetries of length in the humerus and in the humerus-plus-radius (a proxy arm length index) which closely parallels the pattern of behavioural handedness found in modern populations. This pattern was developing in the skeletons from the infant and juvenile age ranges, but was absent in the neonates (of whom 12 out of 14 had longer left humeri). We argue that this supports the environmental hypothesis that the ontogeny of long bone length asymmetry is consequent to the earlier development of lateral bias in mechanical loading of the upper limbs.     

Bayesian Estimation of Limited Dependent Variable Spatial Autoregressive Models

A Gibbs sampling (Markov chain Monte Carlo) method for estimating spatial autoregressive limited dependent variable models is presented. The method can accommodate data sets containing spatial outliers and general forms of non‐constant variance. It is argued that there are several advantages to the method proposed here relative to that proposed and illustrated in McMillen (1992) for spatial probit models.