Progress in the human geography of the Maghreb

Sutton and Lawless review a selection of the prolific literature on the Maghreb's human geography published from the late 1970s onward. The pedigree of the discipline in Maghreb was established by several notable geographers who lived, researched, and wrote there. Augustin Bernard's writings on rural settlement, his atlas, and study of Algeria are still cited. Jean Despois's regional study with Raynal and his work on Tunisia, together with the detailed rural research of Jean Poncet, provides a particularly rich coverage for that country. Jean Dresch's early work on Morocco exemplified an early critique of the contemporaneous uncritical colonial human geography. The Sahara's fascination also inspired pioneering studies by Robert Capot-Rey. The work of these notables and others provided a solid background of geographical literature on the Maghreb to be supplemented, criticized, and challenged by more recent researchers, sometimes pupils of the above individuals, and increasingly North African by birth. The tradition of general texts on the Maghreb has continued, though increasingly with systematic approaches replacing regional appraisals. The geography of the decolonization of the Maghreb by Isnard has been replaced by a study summarizing recent collaborative work by a team of French geographers. The Saharan extensions of the Maghreb states have often been linked in general works, sometimes being juxtaposed against the Maghreb as in the essays offered to Jean Despois. Lawless and Findlay's collaborative study juxtaposes geographical studies of each country's economic development with political scientists' evaluations of their sociopolitical development. This review limits itself largely to geographers and geographical journals, only occasionally including significant works from other subject areas, and to 1977-1978 publications, with a few notable exceptions. The spatial juxtaposition of contrasting approaches to economic development, liberal market economy approaches by Tunisia and Morocco arguably leading to dependency, and centrally-planned strategies by Algeria and Libya resulting in bureaucratic constraints serves to offer the Maghreb as a pertinent case-study region for the applied geographer of developing countries.     

The stone circle sites of Komaland,northern Ghana,in West African archaeology

An Iron Age complex which flourished around the fifteenth to the seventeenth century AD is currently under investigation in Komaland, northern Ghana. The complex is known chiefly from its numerous burial sites characterized by stone circles and earth mound superstructures, and containing human and animal burials, domestic pottery, milling stones, metal implements and cast figures, together with ubiquitous and distinctive terracotta sculptures. This paper discusses the findings from the first season's excavation and their significance in West African archaeology.

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Résumé Des recherches actuellement en cours portent sur un complexe de l'Age du Fer, qui a prospéré entre le 15e et le 17e siècle après J.C., en Komaland, au nord du Ghana. Le complexe est connu surtout par ses nombreux sépultures caractérisées par des cercles de pierres, avec comme superstructures des tumulus de terre où se trouvent des inhumations de humains et d'animaux, de la céramique domestique, des molettes, des outils en métal, et des figures coulées, avec des sculptures en terre cuite ubiquistes et distinctives. Cet article présente des résultats de la première saison de fouilles, et discute de leur signification dans l'archéologie de l'Afrique Occidentale.

     

Hunter-gatherer adaptations and assemblage structure

There is a growing tendency to conceive of hunter-gatherer adaptations as points on a yardstick, with foragers at one end and collectors on the other. Such a view limits our perspective and may trap anthropologists into seeing these categories as steps in an evolutionary progression. It is more productive to think of human adaptation as an N-dimensional space, with individual cases occurring at the intersections of the various dimensions. When this viewpoint is taken, it becomes clear that a search for a single dimension in archaeological data that can be used to characterize all prehistoric adaptations is unlikely to be fruitful. This paper explores the multidimensionality of hunter-gatherer adaptive behavior and reviews those archaeological manifestations that are empirically or logically linked with various dimensions of three components of adaptation: mobility, predation, and technology. Those manifestations with the greatest potential for characterizing prehistoric hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies are identified as measures of mobility type, frequency, stability, scheduling, demography, and range; predation mode, breadth, and scheduling; and the time budgeting and storage dimensions of technology. A subset of these measures is evaluated by comparing assemblages from the late prehistoric Columbia Plateau with expectations derived from ethnographies written on the same local area.     

Elimination of Source A and B Errors in p-Median Location Problems

The p-median problem is a powerful tool in analyzing facility location options when the goal of the location scheme is to minimize the average distance that demand must traverse to reach its nearest facility. It may be used to determine the number of facilities to site, as well as the actual facility locations. Demand data are frequently aggregated in p-median location problems to reduce the computational complexity of the problem. Demand data aggregation, however, results in the loss of locational information. This loss may lead to suboptimal facility location configurations (optimality errors) and inaccurate measures of the resulting travel distances (cost errors). Hillsman and Rhoda (1978) have identified three error components: Source A, B, and C errors, which may result from demand data aggregation. In this article, a method to measure weighted travel distances in p-median problems which eliminates Source A and B errors is proposed. Test problem results indicate that the proposed measurement scheme yields solutions with lower optimality and cost errors than does the traditional distance measurement scheme.