Crossing the Line: The Early Expression of Pattern in Middle Stone Age Africa

This paper provides a synthesis of the currently known evidence for cross-hatch patterning on stone, ochre and ostrich eggshell from Middle Stone Age Africa, between 100,000 and 60,000?BP. The significance of the incised artefacts is that they are used as proxies for an early capacity for symbolic thought, and potentially the emergence of language to convey their meaning. Beyond their significance in theoretical debates, these marked objects demonstrate conjunctions in the expression of design, exhibiting vertical, horizontal and oblique incised or engraved lines, patterns that have been classified as cross-hatching. Yet very little attention has been paid to the patterns themselves. This paper examines the archaeological evidence and looks at why these patterns might be important from a perceptual perspective. Taking a neurological approach, it considers current knowledge of neural, and especially visual, plasticity and the interconnectedness of brain areas relating to vision, learning, memory and emotion.     

Claiming disability in the field of geography: Access,recognition and integration

The topic of physical disability has long been neglected in the field of geography. Geographers have challenged this neglect by undertaking studies of, for, and by persons with disabilities. This paper extends that challenge by examining the roles that disability and persons with disabilities play within the field of geography itself. The recognition and integration of persons with disabilities includes concerns with physical access, but also requires an examination of the institutional means by which geography departments, publications and conferences have worked and can work to challenge ableism: the neglect of disabled people's lives and perspectives. After centuries of exclusion, the recognition and integration of disability into society will surely be an issue of profound importance in coming years. We need geographers prepared and willing to study these processes.     

Warped by the field: the gravity of the margins on West Forty-Sixth Street

Reflecting on a recently completed ethnographic research project, I try to understand how things that may seem marginal to my central question nonetheless remain active within my arguments in unanticipated ways. I begin with an overview of my original research aims and activities before presenting eight marginal examples from fieldwork. I conclude with a meditation on the epistemic force that the marginal must be understood to exert on projects of knowledge production.     

Technology,Free Labor,and Slavery: Lincoln on Discovery and Invention

Abstract

Abraham Lincoln presented a lecture in 1858–1859 on the process of “Discoveries and Invention.” In this lecture he discusses man's desire to improve his condition and the use of technology to that end. The process of discovery and invention allows man to develop that technology and alleviate his state. Education, especially literacy, allows knowledge to be passed down through time, facilitating yet further improvement. Yet, Lincoln warns that human nature can also become raw material, as seen in the institution of slavery. In light of Lincoln's more commonly known natural rights argument against slavery, this warning about human nature takes on greater significance. Coupled with an address on agriculture from 1859, Lincoln's lecture on discovery and invention attempts to illustrate the liberating power of invention and education while reminding us of the limits posed by man's natural equality.     

Measurements,figures and formulas for the interpretation of Western Norwegian boats and viking ships

Along the coast of Norway we find a family of closely‐related boats. The Nordlands boat is one of them, and in many respects it is the most modern. The plan for the shape of these boats is typically coded into figures. Thus the “secret” of the boat's structure is a sort of “number code”. The question addressed here is: to what extent can the shape of the hull in Viking ships be expressed as a number code similar to that of the 19th‐century west‐coast boats of Norway. The principles behind the methods used to explore this question will be illustrated by three basic concepts, which will be treated separately below.     

Andrea's Baggage: Reading (in) Laforet's Nada

One overlooked feature of Andrea's arrival in Barcelona at the beginning of Nada is the old and battered suitcase that she drags with her to her relatives’ apartment. It is filled almost entirely with books, books that—we may assume—she has read and plans to read again. Reading, it is clear, has played a large part in her intellectual and psychological formation as a teenager, but one of the strands of her overall maturation process during the forthcoming year will involve achieving a greater understanding of the distortions involved in how people (including her) see life through the optic of literature and literature through the optic of life. Gradually disabused of her overly literary adolescent imaginings, then, she eventually becomes a writer—of the text that is Nada—who is well aware of the traps that reading and writing hold.     

Waterfowl and Lunate Crescents in Western North America: The Archaeology of the Pacific Flyway

California and Great Basin archaeologists have long discussed and debated the function of chipped stone crescents found in Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites in the Far West of North America. Because they are found over a vast area, in sites occupied over a period spanning at least 4,000 years (~12,000–8,000 cal BP), it may be that crescents were used for a variety of purposes. Here we focus on lunate crescents and their strong association with wetland localities (lakes, marshes, estuaries, and islands). We reconsider whether crescents could have been used as transverse projectile points to hunt waterfowl. We also assess the biogeographical legacies of migrating birds to propose that as many as four species of large anatids (tundra swan, greater white-fronted goose, snow goose, Ross’s goose) that now breed in the Canadian High Arctic once bred in the Great Basin and adjacent regions during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. We propose that crescents were used primarily in the taking or processing of geese and swans, some of which may have bred and molted in what are now temperate latitudes. After the Laurentide ice sheet retreated, these four species established High Arctic breeding grounds and no longer bred in the Great Basin. In this scenario, the absence of some populations of molting geese and swans helps explain why crescents fell out of the archaeological record after ~8,000 cal. BP. When crescents were used, Native Americans in the Far West may have had access to millions of large waterfowl.     

Morphology and Significance of Transverse Ridges (De Geer Moraines) Adjacent to the Moray Firth,NE Scotland

Abstract

High-resolution NEXTMap digital surface models and aerial photographs are used to map suites of transverse ridges at Tarbat Ness and to the west of Elgin, along the margins of the Moray Firth in northeast Scotland. Based on their morphology, configuration and location, interpret these landforms as De Geer moraines which formed at or near former grounding line positions of the Moray Firth palaeo-ice stream. The Tarbat Ness De Geer moraines almost certainly formed at a marine margin. Reaching altitudes of 55 m above present OD, these landforms may provide one of the highest geomorphological indicators for former relative sea level in mainland Britain. Evidence from surrounding landforms and sediments suggest that the ridges formed between c. 15 000–18 000 cal yrs BP, indicating that a significant fall in relative sea level may have taken place prior to an ice margin re-advance in the Moray Firth, known as the Ardersier Oscillation.