Prehistoric migration at Nebira, South Coast of Papua New Guinea: New insights into interaction using isotope and trace element concentration analyses

Migration is a commonly used explanation for cultural change in world prehistory, and is also a central theme in the prehistory of the Pacific Islands. However it is rarely subject to direct archaeological research. This paper applies strontium and oxygen radiogenic/stable isotope (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr, δ¹⁸O), and trace element concentration (Ba/Sr) analyses to 27 individuals buried at the archaeological site of Nebira (ca.720–300 BP), located inland on the South Coast of Papua New Guinea. The analyses seek to identify non-local individuals within the population and provide a more in-depth understanding about the social identity of the possible migrants in this community.The strontium isotope data indicates that five individuals were non-local to Nebira, having possibly come from a coastal location. Correlation with biological data, such as age and sex, also indicates that the pattern of migration at Nebira was not sex or age specific. The results support the archaeological findings that suggest the inhabitants from Nebira were in contact with coastal communities during a period in prehistory of increased cultural interaction. However, despite the considerable isotopic variation identified in the Nebira sample, it is also demonstrated that more research is needed to identify the possible origins of these non-local individuals.     

Oxygen isotope analysis of California mussel shells: seasonality and human sedentism at an 8,200-year-old shell midden on Santa Rosa Island,California

To evaluate coastal settlement and land use strategies among maritime hunter-gatherers, we analyzed oxygen isotope (δ¹⁸O) data from 131 marine carbonate samples from 21 California mussel (Mytilus californianus) shells obtained from a large ～8,200-year-old shell midden (CA-SRI-666) on California’s Santa Rosa Island. Seasonal distributions of the isotopic data were assigned using a paleo-sea surface temperature model created by comparing modern sea surface temperatures (SST) to a fully profiled ～8,200-year-old shell. For 20 additional shells, we used two sampling strategies to compare season-of-harvest inferences and explore whether the Early Holocene site occupants were sedentary. Estimated season-of-harvest differed by 35 % between the two sampling methods, corroborating recent isotope analysis of an 8,800-year-old shell midden on San Miguel Island. Shellfish appear to have been collected year-round at CA-SRI-666 from intertidal or subtidal water temperatures similar to modern SST in the vicinity of eastern Santa Rosa Island. The isotope results are consistent with other evidence from CA-SRI-666 that suggest that the site served as a residential base for relatively sedentary maritime people.     

Modes of Attentiveness: Reading for Difference in Geographies of Homelessness

Hegemonic accounts of urban homelessness, focusing on attempts to restrict homeless people's presence in public space, stress the punitive nature of current homelessness policy. In contrast, in this paper we explore the “messy middle ground” of the UK homeless services system. Examining Stacey Murphy's (2009) (Antipode 41(2):305–325) arguments regarding a shift to a “post‐revanchist” era in San Francisco, we chart the apparent similarities between developments in San Francisco and changes to the management of street homelessness bought in to effect by the New Labour government in the UK, and assess the extent to which such developments might be read as holding in tension more obviously punitive and supportive trends usually viewed as necessarily oppositional. In the final part of the paper we present a re‐reading of recent changes to the management of street homelessness in the UK through a postsecular lens. We suggest that this lens provides the possibility for a much more optimistic reading of homeless services and of the grammars of homelessness and urban (in)justice more broadly, and make the case for an alternative mode of academic attentiveness open to sometimes subtle and smaller‐scale yet nonetheless important examples of different ways of understanding and doing.     

Identifying Shell Middens With Historic Aerial Photos: An Example From California's Santa Cruz Island

Using 1929 aerial photos of western Santa Cruz Island, we identified numerous potential shell midden locations, followed by confirmation of site locations via field reconnaissance. Heavy grazing by sheep, cattle, and pigs closely cropped island vegetation in the early twentieth century, exposing shell middens now often covered with thick vegetation. We discuss the potential and limitations of early aerial photos as aids to archaeological site identification and management in island and coastal settings. Although results varied from island to island, we found historic aerial photos to be extremely useful for documenting previously unrecorded sites on Santa Cruz Island, ranging from historical EuroAmerican sites to Island Chumash sites dating to as much as 7250 cal BP. These methods may also be applicable to other islands around the world subject to heavy livestock grazing in the past, especially where introduced animals have been removed and recovering vegetation now obscures archaeological sites.     

The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.     

Varieties of mystical experience in William James and other moderns

ABSTRACT

In 1902, William James gave his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he claimed that such experience was a part of human nature, and was necessarily the foundation of all institutional religion. His work has often been singled out as leading to an increasingly private and individualistic understanding of religion, but this paper places his work in a broader movement of the early twentieth century that heralded a revival of interest in religious experience and, especially, mysticism. It explores the work of two English writers, W.R. Inge and Evelyn Underhill, in relation to James, and argues that the revival of interest in mysticism was a significant response to the intellectual challenges to faith in modernity.     

Land-beach-risk-scape: deciphering the motivators of risk-taking at the beach in Australia

Abstract

This article considers risk-taking associated with the popular leisure activity of beach going in Australia. It investigates the risk-taking proclivities and cultural protocols in Australian beach use which, to date, have received little research attention. Drawing on the testimonies of beachgoers, we provide a discussion on how risk can be both voluntary as well as accidental at the Australian beach. While accidental risk-taking can be attributed to a lack of beachscape safety or lack of hazard knowledge, it is often the result of peer, sociocultural and psychodynamic influences that result in the production and reproduction of a pervasive culture of risk-taking. This culture is explored via the influence of the enculturation of risk into Australian beach practices, the attenuation of safety perceptions among beachgoers, and the attraction to risky behaviours that affect those in the beach space. The reproduction of risk in Australian beach use and the feeling of attachment observed among research participants have been conceptualised as the embodied societal subject, as identified through geographic psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic geographic interpretation of participant attitudes and beliefs concerning risk-taking and beach use has been used to theorise how the prevailing discourses and fantasies of Australian beach use shape this site-specific culture of risk.     

Juvenal,satire and the persona theory: Some critical remarks

This article briefly outlines the origin of the persona theory as applied to Roman verse satire, particularly Juvenal. Scholars adapting this theory regard the speaker in the satires as a fictitious literary character, a dramatic mask (persona). The central arguments in favour of this concept put forward by W.S. Anderson and some of his followers are examined and discussed, and the validity of the whole persona doctrine in its more exceeding form is challenged.