Beyond cooperation: towards an Oceanic community

Oceania, through the Pacific Islands Forum, is re-examining its processes and institutions in an attempt to become more effective as a region. Pacific leaders have adopted a ‘Pacific Plan’ that is designed to detail how the region will improve its governance, develop economically, ensure democratic values and deepen its commitment to human rights. The Plan argues that more and deeper cooperation is necessary to achieve these outcomes. But the region's states already cooperate closely in many spheres and there is no evidence that more cooperation will achieve anything but more cooperation. What is needed is the development of an explicit regional community within which the members (both states and citizens) can achieve their full potential unconstrained by the many structural and cultural barriers that exist with even the closest cooperative arrangements.     

EU Regional Policy After 2006: Will Scotland Notice the Difference?

In order to accommodate the recent enlargements of the European Union (EU) there has been considerable changes to the operation of EU regional policy which means that Scotland along with other regions in the EU-15 will receive considerably less money from the Structural Funds in the future. This article discusses the extent to which the reduction in EU funding for economic development will impact on the Scottish economy. The issue is explored by considering the contribution, which Structural Funds have made in the past to economic development in Western Scotland, which has received the lion's share of the money allocated to Scotland. It is suggested that whilst the amount of economic development in Scotland will not be significantly reduced as a result of the decline in EU funds the types of projects and organizations receiving funding will alter because of changes made to the way in which the funds are administered in Scotland.     

Tracing the Busy Gap Rogues

Busy Gap is one of the earliest attested place names located along the line of the central sector of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, yet in Newcastle during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was a term of abuse, applied collectively to those who came from upland Tynedale and was synonymous with the Border Reivers. Archaeological and historical sources indicate that throughout the Middle Ages the place was located in a zone of seasonal settlement, characterized by groups of shielings probably associated with townships located in the valley of the South Tyne. The question is how to understand the role of Busy Gap, a place identified with a triangular earthwork on the north side of the Roman Wall. This paper will consider the results of recent archaeological investigations carried out by the author on the site and will investigate the place and its setting within the archaeological and historical context of early-modern Northumberland.     

Local recipes or distant commodities? Lead isotope and chemical compositional analysis of glaze paints from the Salinas pueblos,New Mexico

For nearly four hundred years, Pueblo potters in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico produced technologically innovative glaze-decorated bowls and exchanged them widely among different villages. While potential sources of lead ores used to make glaze paints are found throughout the Rio Grande Valley region, researchers have only recently begun to identify which ore sources potters exploited and to understand the social and economic factors underlying patterns of ore resource use. In this paper we use stable lead isotope and electron microprobe analysis of glaze paints on Rio Grande Glaze Ware made at two Salinas pueblos to identify ore sources and glaze recipes used by their potters. Despite some isotopic overlap of ore sources, the lead isotope data point to regular exploitation of ores from the Socorro area of the southern Rio Grande. Salinas potters apparently used other sources as well, and likely mixed ores from different sources. We also identify four local glaze recipes that appear to incorporate multiple ore sources, suggesting that Salinas potters obtained raw ores rather than finished glaze paints.     

Pedestrian perils on the road to Irish identity in Joyce and Bowen

This article identifies and explores some major facets of an important theme in the works of James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen that adds to our understanding of the complex ways in which both writers construed Irishness. Striving to acknowledge what they saw as the value of walking without embracing its English nationalist or Romantic associations, these modernists depict walking in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland as a beneficial means of expressing and experimenting with different permutations of Irish identity, largely because of the opportunity it presented to negotiate a variety of dangers. By emphasising walking’s taxing and often perilous material realities, Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and Bowen in Seven Winters and The Last September recast the idealised English Romantic view of walking as a darker and more menacing activity that nevertheless offers a useful strategy for articulating fluctuating conceptions of Irishness during the tumultuous period lasting roughly from the death of Parnell through to the Irish War of Independence.