A Preliminary Study of the Aqueduct of Reccopolis

Reccopolis was a new urban foundation of the late sixth century AD, built by King Liuvigild during the period of the Visigothic state formation. The city was equipped, alongside other facilities, with an aqueduct built ex novo in the Roman technique. This has only recently been studied. The construction of a new city and a new aqueduct indicates a great economic effort by the Visigothic ruler: the event was in itself also a grand act of propaganda in addition to its obvious functional purpose. The aqueduct is itself unmatched in public constructions of this period.     

Small firm innovation networks in the Valencia region

This article makes a contribution to the study of the role of regional authorities in the process of regional development by analyzing the case of the Valencia region, a Spanish peripheral region whose economic success was historically dependent upon the maintenance of low labour costs in traditional artisan manufacturing activities. This led to an extreme focus on products of poor quality. In order to overcome this situation, Valencian regional authorities have launched an important number of policies that aim at solving two of the most important weaknesses of the regions: the high dependence on a few manufacturing activities, and the lack of a technology policy that could help to enhance the quality of the Valencian products. The analysis of the measures adopted by the regional authorities in the region of Valencia is expected to be of interest for other peripheral regions characterized by a similar situation—i.e. a traditional lack of interest in technology and innovation.     

American Seeds of ABACC? Findley's Proposal to Create a Mutual Nuclear Inspections System Between Brazil and Argentina

ABSTRACT

After the first Indian peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974 international observers perceived Argentina and Brazil, long-time rivals in South America, as countries that could follow suit. Not only had they not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), they had also not joined the Tlatelolco Treaty: the Latin American and Caribbean nuclear-weapon-free zone. In this context, the US began to reassess and tighten its nonproliferation policy, particularly throughout the Jimmy Carter presidency (1977–1981). Carter's foreign policy sought to stall Argentine–Brazilian efforts to master the nuclear fuel cycle, as well as push them toward Tlatelolco. These efforts ultimately proved unsuccessful. However, after a visit to Argentina and Brazil, US congressman Paul Findley suggested in 1977 that they consider a bilateral agreement, whereby they would agree to mutual inspections and renounce the right to conduct peaceful nuclear explosions. Even though it was disregarded at the time, these are the core ideas behind the creation of the Brazilian–Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) established in 1991. This article, then, seeks to fill the gaps in what today constitutes an unknown episode in the dense nuclear nonproliferation history of the 1970s.     

Bound by blood: the ethnic and civic nature of collective identities in the Basque Country,Catalonia and Valencia

This paper explores the factors determining collective identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, paying special attention to language and birth as key domains of ethnolinguistic divide. We will also make a comparison to the case of Valencia, a region with a native language that nevertheless has not developed a nationalist movement. We have performed a cluster analysis to compare the differences between collective identities in these regions using data from the survey on National Identity in Spain, and discriminant analysis is used to test the validity of our model. Results show that an ethnolinguistic division, based on parental origin and linguistic skills, defines peripheral identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, but this singularity cannot be found for Valencia. Finally, our model corroborates the relevance of ethnolinguistic factors in defining collective identities in the Basque and Catalan regions, while the civic factor may be more relevant in Valencia.     

Damaged Burials or <Emphasis Type="Italic">Reliquiae Cogotenses?</Emphasis> On the Accompanying Human Bones in Burial Pits Belonging to the Iberian Bronze Age

Social Sciences and Humanities are increasingly interested in the relationship between society and material culture, and archaeology can provide, among other contributions, its chronological depth and the variability and certain regularities in mortuary rituals. In this respect, archaeological literature frequently cites cases of a few human bones redeposited at mortuary sites, often burials of adults accompanied by some bones of an infant, but without a clear pattern being discernable. In contrast, research on the Bronze Age Cogotas I archaeological culture in the Iberian Peninsula (MBA and LBA, ca. 1800–1100 cal BC) has identified what seems to be an emerging pattern: primary burials of very young children accompanied by the bone of an adult, possibly female, who had died before, even long before, as the statistical analysis of the radiocarbon dates of the individuals involved appears to corroborate. This may therefore be a ritualised mortuary practice that included bone relics, but its explanation is not simple, due to the polysemic nature of such relics. The creation and maintenance of real or fictitious kinship ties, a special protection for dead infants, possible gender aspects, ideas about fertility and renewal, strengthening interpersonal relationships, legitimisation of emerging inequality, etc., are some of the possible components of this social practice which was until now unknown in the Iberian prehistory, but also little known in other areas in European prehistory.     

The SAFE Experimental Research on the Frequency Dependence of Shear Wall Seismic Design Margins

The SAFE experimental programme consists of a series of 10 specimens of shear walls, with different reinforcement ratios, tested until their ultimate capacity under seismic input motion by the pseudo dynamic method. A unique input signal is used, calibrated for controlling the seismic demand. Its input central frequency is selected so that for some specimens it is lower than their eignenfrequency, while for other ones it is the opposite. In conclusion there is clear experimental evidence that design margins are much larger in the second case (input central frequency larger than structure eignenfrequency) than in the first one.     

Nicotine in the hair of mummies from San Pedro de Atacama (Northern Chile)

The consumption of plant-derived hallucinogenic substances through smoking and snuffing is a long-standing tradition in the south-central Andes. Chemical and archaeobotanical evidence point to the consumption of nicotine and tryptamine alkaloids in Northwestern Argentina and of tryptamine alkaloids in San Pedro de Atacama (SPA), in prehispanic times. In this paper, results are reported of gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analyses aimed at identifying nicotine and tryptamine alkaloids in the hair of mummies from different cultural periods of SPA. Fifty-six samples were examined. While tryptamines were not found in any of the samples, nicotine was found in 35 samples, assigned to the Late Formative (1 of 1 sample from this period), Late Formative or Middle (1 of 2 samples from either of these periods), Middle (4 of 6 samples from this period) and Late Intermediate periods (8 of 12 samples from this period), or without assignment to period due to lack of contextual information (21 of 35 samples unassigned to a period). These results show a continuous consumption of nicotine from the Late Formative to the Late Intermediate periods of SPA (ca. 100 B.C.–1450 A.D.). No associations were found between presence of nicotine in the hair of mummies and presence of snuffing trays or of other snuffing paraphernalia in the corresponding tomb; furthermore, neither the diversity of the funerary context, measured in terms of the number of types of objects, nor the presence of gemstone necklaces differed between tombs with mummies with or without nicotine in their hair. Overall, these results suggest that consumption of nicotine was performed by members of the society at large, irrespective of their social and wealth status.     

TESTING THE NEW ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY: MIGRATIONS AND INDUSTRIAL AGGLOMERATIONS IN SPAIN*

ABSTRACT This paper examines whether access to markets had a significant influence on migration choices of Spanish internal migrants in the interwar years. In it we perform a structural contrast of a New Economic Geography model that focuses on the forward linkage that links workers location choice with the geography of industrial production. The results prove the existence of a direct relation between workers' localization decisions and the market potential of the host regions. This could help to explain the apparently low intensity of internal migrations in Spain until the 1920s as well as its geography.