Gendered responses to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria,Australia

This paper presents findings from a gendered analysis of resident responses to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires (wildfires) in Victoria, Australia. One hundred and seventy‐three people lost their lives in the bushfires and more than 2000 houses were destroyed. Previous research on Black Saturday has largely focused on issues of resident preparedness and response, with limited consideration of the role of gender in household decisions and actions. This paper examines the gendered dimensions of risk awareness, preparedness and response among households affected by the bushfires. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with over 600 survivors and a questionnaire of 1314 households in fire‐affected areas. Analysis revealed that women more often wanted to leave than men, who more often wanted to stay and defend property against the bushfires. Nevertheless, findings suggest that broad‐brush characterisations of staying to defend as a masculine response and leaving as a feminine response are misguided. Although some women expressed a strong desire to leave, others were resolute on staying to defend. Equally, while some men were determined to stay and defend, others had never considered it an option. Despite this, the research identified numerous instances where disagreement had arisen as a result of differing intentions. Conflict most often stemmed from men's reluctance to leave, and was most apparent where households had not adequately planned or discussed their intended responses. The paper concludes by considering the degree to which the findings are consistent with other research on gender and bushfire, and the implications for bushfire safety policy and practice.     

Zooarchaeology and Changing Food Practices at Carrizales,Peru Following the Spanish Invasion

Through analysis of zooarchaeological remains from two occupations at the site of Carrizales, we examine how an indigenous Peruvian maritime community responded to imperial interventions in their daily lives in the late sixteenth century. Following their forced resettlement into a planned reducción village, and amidst demographic decline and tribute extraction, Carrizales’s residents significantly changed how they put food on the table, pursuing less time-intensive strategies of food collection and incorporating Eurasian animals into their diets. These results illustrate the dynamism of relations between imperial political economies and domestic life and the efficacy of indigenous survival strategies.     

Hope in the Face of Temporal Devastation

This article evaluates Jonathan Lear's account of radical hope in light of the phenomenon of social acceleration. According to Lear's philosophical exegesis of the life of the Crow Nation's last chief, Plenty Coups, radical hope is hope based on the conviction that the world's goodness transcends but includes the goodness of human culture. Such hope enables a culture to persevere in the face of its own collapse through political humility, by which a culture draws on the resources of other cultures in order to revive itself. Social acceleration—which results in the warping of our sense of time as tensed between past, present, and future—demands a more primordial form of radical hope, based on the affirmation of the world's own temporalities as simultaneously resisting and sustaining our own cultural temporalities. This in turn involves a more self-critical form of political humility.     

Assessing the reliability of pRIA for identifying ancient proteins from archaeological contexts

The use of immunological techniques for identifying the origin of proteins and inferring foodstuffs exploited by prehistoric occupations has been conducted for several decades. Cases of experimental laboratory and archaeological studies have shown the potential of these techniques for reliable results. However, very few of these case studies employ archaeological sites that have excellent preservation and high-resolution spatial contexts between identifiable faunal remains, features, and stone tools. We present an assessment of the identification reliability of one immunological technique, protein radioimmunoassay (pRIA), using faunal remains and stone tools from two sites from arctic and subarctic contexts. The results of this research indicate that, even in contexts with excellent preservation, the identifications produced by the pRIA technique are subject to misidentification and cross-reactions due to diagenetic alteration of proteins. We propose a higher minimum reaction value (percent binding of labeled antibody) that mitigates these effects, and renders the pRIA results more reliable for ancient, poorly preserved organic remains.     

‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.     

Of Other Scapes: Archaeology,Landscape, and Heterotopia in Fascist Sicily

Foucault’s concept of the “heterotopia” has been applied broadly throughout the humanities and social sciences. Archaeologies of the recent past are well-suited to examine these “other spaces”: blurring the line between past and present while juxtaposing archaeological, archival, and ethnographic data, they can draw attention to the gaps, contradictions, and alternate orderings that make up the world around us. Using the extensive agricultural land reforms and building programs undertaken by Italy’s Fascist government in Sicily in the 1940s as an example, I extend the heterotopia concept to an analysis of archaeological landscapes, critically exploring the benefits and limitations of a heterotopic perspective in archaeological contexts.     

A biometric technique for assessing prehistoric freshwater mussel population dynamics (family: Unionidae) in north Texas

Biometry is useful for a suite of analyses relevant to zooarchaeology, which include analysis of mortality profiles, taphonomy, paleoecology, among other purposes. Here, size-age prediction models are developed for 10 freshwater mussel species found in north Texas to develop a method for studying paleoenvironmental conditions. Shell length is often used to evaluate the structures of modern mussel populations, but its use on paleozoological specimens is not feasible because complete shells rarely preserve. Instead, pallial line-to-lateral teeth length (PLL) and pseudocardinal teeth-to-pallial line length (PSP) are evaluated as proxy measures for shell length. Linear regression models based on PLL and PSP using modern mussels demonstrate that they are accurate proxies of shell length for multiple species from a variety of habitats. In addition, ontogenetic-age structures for a modern sample and for two late Holocene assemblages from north Texas are developed using PLL and PSP. These techniques are useful tools for evaluating past ecological conditions of freshwater mussel populations when large samples are available for study, which expands analytical potential of zooarchaeological studies of prehistoric unionid remains.     

Historic preservation in Nazi Germany: place, memory, and nationalism

While numerous studies have examined the post-war contestation surrounding commemorative sites associated with the legacy of Nazi Germany, relatively little attention has been dedicated to the ways in which the Nazi regime itself sought to create places of memory congruent with the movement's political and cultural goals. Indeed, party leaders sponsored a variety of disparate, and at times contradictory, programs to re-orientate some of Germany's most prominent historic places to better serve the needs of the regime. To expand our understanding of this process, this article examines the practice and rhetoric of historic preservation in Bavaria during the Nazi period with a focus on the preservationist program sponsored by Bavarian President Ludwig Siebert. Nazi propaganda promised to rejuvenate and protect Germany's architectural heritage for the public good, but the regime's actual priorities and policies led to widespread confiscation, damage, and eventually destruction.     

Kites — new discoveries and a new type

The stone structures known as kites and found widely in ‘Arabia’, are one of the more intriguing archaeological traces in what are often arid and bleak landscapes. They were first reported from the air in 1927, and by 1995 — largely through interpretation of old aerial photographs — c.500 had been identified. Now (2012), remote‐sensing techniques of various kinds have produced a huge increase, to over 3000. Recent work has also extended the geographical spread of kites in ‘Arabia’, from south‐eastern Turkey and north‐western Iraq to central Yemen. Much detailed work will be required to develop and refine a typology for kites as a whole and to digest and present data from remote sensing on which specialists may build interpretations and explanations. Current tabulation and mapping, however, already reveal patterns, and the discovery of an unusual form in the desert between Damascus and Palmyra in Syria deserves special attention.     

Carl Schmitt on land and sea

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), one of the leading conservative legal thinkers of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, is best known today for his critique of liberalism. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s, Schmitt wrote numerous articles and two books addressing the mythical and geopolitical significance of land and sea. In recent years, these texts have begun to attract attention from historians as well as theorists. This article reconstructs the origins of Schmitt's theories about land and sea, and shows how they developed in the context of his efforts to delegitimize the British Empire and justify the persecution of Jews. It also explains how Schmitt selectively misread the history of maritime law in order to critique the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Finally, it reveals that the meaning Schmitt ascribed to ‘the opposition of the elements of land and sea’ changed dramatically to suit his political needs. For all their evocative qualities and insights, Schmitt's texts on land and sea do not constitute a coherent theory, but rather a shifting field of polemical positions in search of theoretical support.