Raw material quality and Oldowan hominin toolstone preferences: evidence from Kanjera South,Kenya

The role of raw material quality in Oldowan technology has not been fully explored. There are numerous studies suggesting Oldowan hominins preferred certain types of stone for artifact manufacture. Previous studies of the artifact assemblage from the early Pliocene Oldowan locality of Kanjera South (South Rachuonyo District, Kenya) show that raw material selection and transport was an important aspect of Late Pliocene hominin adaptations. Yet the exact properties of stones that hominins were selecting remain enigmatic. Two potentially important features of artifact raw material are durability and fracture predictability. We investigate fracture predictability through mechanical tests of stone and investigations of the affect of stone properties on fracture patterns in archaeological collections. We investigate stone durability with actualistic studies of edge attrition combined with further mechanical tests of various lithologies. Oldowan hominins at Kanjera appear to have selected raw materials based on their durability. The ability for a stone to fracture consistently does not appear to be as important in hominin toolstone preference as previously assumed. Hominins that produced the assemblages at Kanjera South appear to have incorporated an extensive understanding of various attributes of raw material in the transport and production of stone artifacts. When combined with previous research on the transport patterns at Kanjera, the results of this study provide evidence for a more complex raw material acquisition strategy than has previously been suggested for Late Pliocene Oldowan hominins.     

The efficacy of violence mitigation: A second look using time-series analysis

Among peace researchers and practitioners, it is generally accepted that efforts to prevent violence can be instrumental in its mitigation. So, it was distressing to read the research findings of Meier, Bond, and Bond (2007) that mitigation was positively related to organized raids in the Horn of Africa where there is pastoralist–pastoralist and pastoralist–agriculturalist violence. This article seeks to build on their research. It uses a ‘de-trending’ approach for time-series analysis that is commonly used in economics and financial studies. It reports an opposite statistically significant finding. When the data used by Meier et al. are de-trended, violence associated with organized raids is negatively correlated with mitigation. This negative correlation is similar when data on mitigation and organized raids are de-trended with time as a predictor, on the one hand, and with seasonality over time as a predictor, on the other. Implications regarding the temporal dimension of peace research and practice are presented.     

THE EFFECT OF LAND‐USE CONTROLS ON THE SPATIAL SIZE OF U.S. URBANIZED AREAS*

ABSTRACT On a sample of U.S. urbanized areas in 2000, we test theoretical hypotheses of the effect of land‐use controls on the spatial size of urban areas. We find that minimum lot‐size zoning and maximum FAR restrictions expand the urban area, while maximum lot‐size zoning, urban growth boundaries, minimum square footage limits, maximum building permit restrictions, minimum person per room controls, and impact fees contract the urban area. All of these findings are consistent with theoretical predictions although the effect of urban growth boundaries and minimum square footage limits are not statistically significant.     

Whose Wealth Is It Anyway? Mozambique's Outstanding Economic Growth with Worsening Rural Poverty

Despite rapid economic growth and massive inflows of aid, rural poverty in Mozambique is worsening. Agricultural production and productivity have not increased in the last decade. Use of chemical fertilizers and other modern technology is at a low level and decreasing. The present development model emphasizes that the role of government and donors is to provide human capital and infrastructure, while the private sector is responsible for economic development and ending poverty. The most recent national surveys confirm what is being seen elsewhere in Africa — that this non‐interventionist strategy does not raise agricultural productivity or reduce poverty. While 80 per cent of Mozambique's population is engaged in agriculture, this sector contributes only 20 per cent of GDP. This suggests that investments in agriculture are likely to generate pro‐poor growth, both to rural and urban dwellers. This policy failure is increasingly recognized, but donors and government have invested too much political capital in the current policy to change easily.     

When Policy Goes Wrong: The Problem of Transmitted Risk

Why do policies fail? There are many answers to this question, and many ways of answering it. In this paper, we use the tools of policy framing and systems thinking to investigate two recent Australian examples of public policy failure, each involving a different policy milieu and time-span. We show that, in both these cases, unintended consequences arose because governments lost control of the implementation process while remaining politically accountable for the outcomes. We develop the concept of transmitted risk to show how this occurred. We argue that governments expose themselves to this kind of risk when they make policy decisions involving a combination of excessive incentives and poorly controlled third parties.     

From medicine to psychotherapy: the placebo effect

If placebos have been squeezed out of medicine to the point where their official place in in clinical trials designed to identify their own confounding effect, the placebo effect nevertheless thrives in psychotherapy. Not only does psychotherapy dispose of placebo effects that are less available to medicine as it becomes increasingly technological and preoccupied with body parts, but factors of the sort inhibiting the use of placebos in medicine have no equivalent in psychology. Medicine today is disturbed by the placebo effect in a way psychotherapy is not. Psychotherapy does not have to grapple with such a disconcerting paradox as successful sham surgery, and unlike those physicians who once pretended to treat the patient's body while actually attempting to treat the mind, the psychotherapist can treat the mind in all frankness. Perhaps it is because psychotherapy is less burdened by doubts about the placebo effect that it was able to come to its aid when it was orphaned by medicine. It is vain to expect something with so long a history as the placebo effect to disappear from the practices of healing.     

A 4,000-year-old shaman’s stone cache at Casita de Piedra, western Panama

During new excavations at the preceramic rockshelter of Casita de Piedra in western Panama, a cache of 12 unusual stones was recovered near the back wall, dating to between 4800 and 4000 cal bp. The stones include quartz, pyrite, a chalcedony vein nodule, a bladed quartz and jarosite aggregate and a human-modified dacite cylinder. Based on the unusual lithic types and the context of the cache, we suggest that these stones once belonged to a ritual specialist, such as a healer or shaman. Special stones are frequently mentioned as being an important component of a shaman’s ritual paraphernalia in ethnographic records of various historic Native American groups throughout Central and South America, including the Bribri and Cabécar of southeastern Costa Rica and western Panama (formerly known as the ‘Talamanca’). The cache of stones recovered at Casita de Piedra may represent the earliest material evidence in Central America of shamanistic practice.     

The long‐term effects of explosive munitions on the WWI battlefield surface of Verdun,France

This paper aims to characterise the varying magnitudes of landscape disturbance across the WWI battlefield of Verdun, France. Five study sites were surveyed to best reflect the varying degrees of disturbance under common similar environmental characteristics, e.g. bedrock, soil type and topographic position. Disturbance magnitude was determined by counting and measuring the dimensional attributes of craters in two 0.25 hectare plots at each of the five study sites. Additionally, a survey of microtopography was performed at each of the five study sites to record changes in elevation of damaged sites. The spatial character and variation in the magnitude of disturbance at the five disturbance study sites was linked to four variables: (1) location of armies in relation to the front; (2) stagnation of front lines; (3) topographic location of armies; and (4) geologic characteristics of the site.