Incisor labial surface wear striations in modern humans and their implications for handedness in Middle and Late Pleistocene hominids

Over the past four decades several workers have argued that the orientations of striations on the labial surfaces of the front teeth of Middle and Late Pleistocene fossils attributed to Neanderthals and antecedent archaic hominids can tell us something about handedness. These researchers have suggested that such scratches result from stone tools scraping across the incisors during ‘stuff‐and‐cut’ behaviours, and that they reflect directions of hand movements and handedness. In this study, we examine comparable wear features on the incisors of anatomically modern humans to determine whether striation angle may reflect handedness. The teeth from 66 individuals representing four groups with known differences in subsistence practices (Aleut, Arikara, Illinois Bluff, and Puye) were examined. Photomicrographs were made of the maxillary central incisor labial surfaces of all individuals at 56× magnification. These photomicrographs were scanned to image files, and orientations of all visible wear striations were measured using a semi‐automated image analysis procedure. Approximately three‐quarters of all labial surfaces showed a preferred striation orientation. Of those, most had preferred apico‐cervical or vertical striation orientations, independent of cultural affiliation. Few showed the tendency toward diagonally‐oriented scratches expected if handedness is related to scratch orientation. We found no evidence for ‘stuff‐and‐cut’ striations, despite the fact that at least one of the groups studied—the Aleut—are documented to have used this behaviour. In sum, there is evidently no relationship between striation orientation and handedness in the groups studied. It is, therefore, unlikely that labial scratch orientation in Middle and Late Pleistocene hominids reflects handedness if they used their front teeth in a manner comparable to that of any of the anatomically modern groups considered here. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Feminist Mediations of the Exotic: French Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, 1921–39

This article considers why and how locality influenced feminists' perceptions of colonised women. It does so through an analysis of how militants and novelists linked with the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (French Union for Women's Suffrage, UFSF) perceived the Arab and Berber women of colonial North Africa. The organisation had branches in North Africa, and thus feminists in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia are compared to those in France. Where these women lived shaped their understanding of French women's roles in the colonies, along with their opinions regarding the rights to which colonised women could lay claim. Tensions among UFSF members are traced here through the literary figure Elissa Rhaïs, articles in the feminist newspaper  La Française  and correspondence among UFSF members. These sources indicate that while all these French women positioned themselves as mediators of colonialism and women's rights, their precise interpretations of that mediation were consistently influenced by local concerns.     

Introduction: the feminist politics of refugee migration

The interdisciplinary field of refugee studies includes gender analyses, but feminism is not its forte. Scholarship in the field has neglected the development of feminist frameworks to trace the power relations that shape the gender and other politics of forced migration. Specifically, the underplayed concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’ is elaborated as a form of globalization where the social and political intersect in particular ways.     

Canids as persons: Early Neolithic dog and wolf burials, Cis-Baikal, Siberia

Interpretations of dog burials made by ancient foraging groups have tended to be based upon our own relationships with such animals and modern western cosmological and ontological concepts. Osteological studies of early dogs often focus only on issues of taxonomy, and as a result very little is known about these animals’ life histories. Eastern Siberia has produced many Holocene dog burials, but these are typically not well described and the explanatory frameworks provided for them are very underdeveloped. Here we examine in detail two Cis-Baikal canid burials, one of a wolf and the other a dog, both in large Middle Holocene hunter-gatherer cemeteries. We link the mortuary treatment of these animals to other cultural practices, particularly the treatment of the human dead, and broader patterns in Northern human-animal relationships. This interpretive model is combined with detailed osteobiographies for the canids and contextual information for these and other dogs and wolves from Middle Holocene Cis-Baikal. It is argued that canids here were understood and treated in a variety of ways. We suggest that some animals with unique histories were known as distinct persons with ‘souls’ and because of this at death required mortuary rites similar to those of their human counterparts.     

Interpreting the expansion of sea fishing in medieval Europe using stable isotope analysis of archaeological cod bones

Archaeological fish bones reveal increases in marine fish utilisation in Northern and Western Europe beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries AD. We use stable isotope signatures from 300 archaeological cod (Gadus morhua) bones to determine whether this sea fishing revolution resulted from increased local fishing or the introduction of preserved fish transported from distant waters such as Arctic Norway, Iceland and/or the Northern Isles of Scotland (Orkney and Shetland). Results from 12 settlements in England and Flanders (Belgium) indicate that catches were initially local. Between the 9th and 12th centuries most bones represented fish from the southern North Sea. Conversely, by the 13th to 14th centuries demand was increasingly met through long distance transport – signalling the onset of the globalisation of commercial fisheries and suggesting that cities such as London quickly outgrew the capacity of local fish supplies.     

Dis-placed voices: sense of place and place-identity on the Sunshine Coast

The geographical literature on place interrogates, amongst other notions, sense of place, place identity, and their connections or disruptions. Although notions of place are multiple and very fluid, place transformation in rural and regional areas may be more rapid than the changing understandings of place held by residents. This research examines notions of place held by residents on the Sunshine Coast of Australia, one of the fastest growing ‘sea change’ regions in the nation. It presents a reading of empirical material that suggests sense of place and place-identity cannot be easily equated in the region. Sense of place was more important to rural and long-term residents than was the place-identity. Landscape change in the region is narrated, and images of place-identity interpreted, to suggest that place-identity has been created and imposed by the globalising forces of development, rather than emanating from many resident's perspectives. Those local voices have been, and continue to be, successively displaced and disrupted. Thus discursive power in various ways shapes and is shaped by dominant place-identity in the region, and some voices are blocked by the discourses of urbanisation. The unequal geographies of power shaping the regional landscape need to be acknowledged within place transformation processes. These geographies of power suggest that sense of place can be thought of as a ‘view from the bottom’, while place-identity primarily functions as a ‘view from the top’.