Namilamadeta snideri,a new diprotodontan (Marsupialia,Vombatoidea) from the medial Miocene of South Australia

Namilamadeta snideri new genus and species, from the medial Miocene Namba Formation, was found on the western side of Lake Tarkarooloo, South Australia. It is tentatively assigned to the Wynyardiidae and may be the plesiomorphous sister group of the Vombatidae.     

The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House

By focusing on two successive phases in the traditionalisation of the Maori meeting house — exhibition and aestheticisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and standardisation and tribalisation during the 1930s and 1940s — I seek to illustrate how the diverse projects of national identity, tourist marketing, ethnology and state-directed rural development converged to displace meeting houses out of time. I argue that while the short-term effect of this displacement was to suppress developing traditions of oppositional Maori agency this was not the case in the longer term, nor was it always the intention of those engaged in the process.     

How Should We Wage the War on Drugs? Determinants of Public Preferences for Drug Control Alternatives

When citizens are presented with alternative policy solutions to a given social problem, why do they choose to support one over another? In this article, the authors analyze a survey of residents of the five largest U.S. metropolitan areas to understand determinants of public support for spending on three major components of American drug control policy: law enforcement programs, rehabilitative services for addicts, and school‐based prevention programs. The authors estimate effects of self‐interest, political socialization, and policy attitudes on support for total drug control expenditures and on preferences for each drug control alternative versus the others. Effects of group self‐interest, societal interest, and political socialization change dramatically across dimensions of support. Policy attitudes are strong predictors of both types of support, whereas individual self‐interest measures are not associated with either dimension.     

Testing the ‘Laacher See hypothesis’: tephra as dental abrasive

In a series of recent studies, changes in material culture and settlement pattern in the Late Glacial of Northern Europe have been linked to the eruption of the Laacher See volcano. This eruption occurred c. 13,000 years ago towards the end of the Allerød chronozone. It is argued that the tephra fall-out from this eruption set in motion significant demographic fluctuations along the northern periphery of Late Glacial human settlement and that these led to a number of material culture transformations. In particular, the emergence of the regionally distinct techno-complexes with large tanged points – the Bromme culture in southern Scandinavia and the Perstunian culture in northeastern Europe – and the temporary abandonment of central European regions are thought to relate to this eruption. While numerous archaeological datasets are in accord with this ‘Laacher See hypothesis’, the forcing mechanism or mechanisms that brought about these archaeologically visible changes have remained largely unexplored. A particular challenge is to explain how some of the culture-historical effects of the Laacher See eruption seem to change or become more pronounced with distance from the eruptive centre. We here investigate one potential middle-range link between the Laacher See eruption and Late Glacial fauna and foragers: tephra as dental abrasive. We use instrumented nanoindentation to quantitatively investigate tephra from a number of sites covering the medial and distal fall-out zones as well as the dental enamel of Homo sapiens and key prey species of Late Glacial foragers. Our results show that the Laacher See tephra contained particles roughly twice as hard as even the hardest portions of any of the teeth investigated. We also suggest that fluoride-induced weakening of dental enamel may have further aggravated tooth wear. These mechanisms may have acted in concert to produce elevated levels of, in particular, animal mortality, which in turn may have led to an abandonment of the affected landscapes.