Prehistoric Bird Watching in Southern Iberia? The Rock Art of Tajo de las Figuras Reconsidered

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the relationship between humans and birds in the recent prehistory of the Southern Iberian Peninsula. With its high number of bird, mammal, and anthropomorphic paintings, a small rock shelter –Tajo de las Figuras– provides an excellent case study to address this topic. The cave is situated in an ecosystem that, as we will argue, favoured human-bird interactions and enabled prehistoric groups to engage with a diverse and rich bird community at particular times of the year. Even though the recorded depictions can generally be integrated into the wider ‘Schematic’ style regime characterising the recent prehistory of the region, they exhibit some outstanding features including a highly distinct naturalism. This naturalism enables us to identify the represented birds, not only at the family but also at the species level. Our contribution describes these pictorial data and contextualises them with the ecology, archaeology, and archaeozoology of the area. We intend to show that the singularity of the image-corpus registered at Tajo de las Figuras mirrors the unique conditions of human-bird interactions at the time. We suggest that the significance of the images derives from the special location of the cave in the wider landscape encouraging early practices of bird watching.     

Action research for tourism planning in rural areas? Examining an experience from the Couto Mixto (Galicia,Spain)

This paper reviews a tourist planning experience developed for the Couto Mixto in 2007–2008. The Couto Mixto is a small territory of three hamlets situated in Galicia (Spain) and bordering Portugal that, until the end of the 19th century, used to be a virtually independent state of 25 km². This tourism planning process is compared and contrasted with the well‐described Action Research (AR) approach. The paper begins by providing the conceptual foundations of tourism planning which were used as a framework for the research. Then, the tourism planning experience is introduced in detail, focussing on the results of the interviews conducted to identify the tourism resources of the area. Therefore, 23 resources were inventoried and further audited to determine their various degrees of potential for the purposes of tourism planning. Previous AR experiences and the tourism planning initiative developed for the Couto Mixto share a common objective to facilitate change in communities in trouble. However, the case‐study tourism planning experience was not fully compliant with genuine AR in several respects. We conclude by recommending AR as a worthy approach for tourism planning as a way to effectively put the local community in focus.     

Towards a definition of naval elites: reconsidering social change in Britain,France and Spain,c.1670–1810

Abstract

This work proposes the term ‘naval elites’ in order to provide a new interpretation of social change in the eighteenth century from a comparative perspective. Naval elites, a social group formed by a part of the naval officer corps and midshipmen, are here defined as a historical instrument, the particular and intriguing features of which may be useful in the revision of some perspectives on social change. In particular, the authors analyse shifting power relationships through the reconsideration of naval patronage and bureaucracy, revisit the process of naval professionalization and the transformation of the concept of merit, and suggest that naval elites embodied new notions of social distinction and exclusiveness.