Documenting Archaeological Mortuary Features using High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging

This technical note presents a refined technique for photo‐documenting archaeological mortuary features using High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. Mortuary features in archaeological context can be complex and delicate given the wide variability in grave constructions and preservation of human skeletal remains. It is therefore critical to obtain the greatest detail possible when photo‐documenting these features. HDR techniques represent more contrast in photographs and provide greater detail across the DR of illumination within mortuary features—where complex arrangements of human remains can obscure or darken other elements or associated funerary objects, making them difficult to identify in traditional photographs. HDR can be employed with most standard digital single lens reflex cameras used for archaeological field projects, is easy to learn and employ (as described here), can be processed and produced with commonly used photo editing programs, and is ideal for use in unpredictable conditions that are often encountered with archaeological mortuary features and in field conditions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Book reviews

The Solitary Self: Jean‐Jacques Rousseau in Exil and Adversity. By Maurice Cranston (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997) xii + 247 pp. $29.95 cloth.

The Self‐Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta‐Painting. By Victor I. Stoichita (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xv + 345 pp. $85.00, £55.00 cloth.

The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Edited by Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ix + 403 pp. $18.95, £13.95 paper, $59.95, £40.00 cloth.

David Hume: Political Essays. Edited by Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) lxvi + 346 pp. $49.95, £30.00 cloth, $15.95, £10.95 paper.

Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason. By Thomas R. Flynn (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997) 340 + xvi pages. $18.95 paper.

Shaping World History: Breakthroughs in Ecology, Technology, Science, and Politics. By Mary Kilbourne Matossian (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997) 264 pp. $62.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.     

Book reviews

THE PHILIPPINES

FILOMENO AGUILAR. Clash of Spirits—the History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island. Ateneo de Manila University Press and University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

CHINA

BENJAMIN VANG. Deng: a Political Biography. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. 360 pp. Bibliography, index. US$59.95, hardcover; US$21.95, paper.

CHING KWAN LEE. Gender and the South China Miracle. Two Worlds of Factory Women. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998. xiii, 210 pp. Bibliography, index. £12.95, paper.

LINDA BENSON and INGVAR SVANBERG. China's Last Nomads: the History and Culture of China's Kazaks . New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. 270 pp. Index, photographs, maps, charts, bibliography. US$63.95, hardcover; US$ 24.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

TESSA MORRIS‐SUZUKI. Re‐inventing Japan: time, Space, Nation. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. US$21.95, paper.

DAVID MYERS and KOTAKU ISHIDO (eds). Japan at the Crossroads. Tokyo: Seibundo, 1998. xv, 253 pp. Bibliography. ¥3000, paper.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

LINDA CONNOR, PATSY ASCH and TIMOTHY ASCH.

Films: A Balinese Trance Séance (30 mins). Jero on Jero (16 mins). The Medium is the Masseuse (31 mins). Jero Tapakan (26 mins). Produced and distributed by the Ethnographic Film Unit, Department of Anthropology, RSPAS, ANU, Canberra. 16mm (VHS cassette). Colour. English subtitles. A$80.00.

CARL A. TROCKI (ed). Gangsters, Democracy, and the State in Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1998. 94 pp. No price given, paper.     

Everyday nationalism and international hockey: contesting Canadian national identity

This paper examines how hockey is used to construct and demarcate the Canadian national community from external others, namely, the USA, Europe and Russia/USSR. The paper suggests popular nationalist narratives around the sport of hockey construct difference from external others in ways that place them in tension with state and corporate interests. Drawing on the concept of everyday nationalism, this article explores how the interplay between international competition, national identity and commercial sport has made hockey an ambiguous and contested national symbol in Canada.     

Suffolk Place,Southwark, London: a Tudor palace and its terracotta architectural decoration

Suffolk Place (c. 1518–22), Southwark, was the London residence of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. This majestic palace is visible in the foreground of Wyngaerde’s London panorama (c. 1544), from which it can be inferred that it possessed a double courtyard plan. The southern and eastern ranges of the outer courtyard of Suffolk Place were apparently adorned with architectural terracottas at both entablature and parapet level. As the palace was demolished in 1557–58, the finds of ex-situ terracottas are a key source of information concerning the decorative scheme of this vanished palace. Petrological study and other research indicates that the terracottas were locally manufactured, implying the existence of a London-area workshop.     

Matching Rates and Mandates: Federalism and Children's Medicaid Enrollment

An important focus of the federalism literature has been on analyzing the responses of lower levels of government to the financial incentives of intergovernmental grant programs. But grant conditions and mandates are also important features of grant programs, and these have received considerably less attention in the literature. This article examines the implementation of federal Medicaid mandates during the 1980s and 1990s to explicitly compare the relative responses of the states to matching rate incentives and statutory mandates. Using individual-level information on program enrollment to measure policy implementation, the results indicate that the federal mandates led to large changes in children's Medicaid enrollment. In contrast, the effects of the federal matching rate were much more limited. Moreover, the statutory mandates not only raised the average level of enrollment but also reduced the degree of policy variation across the states. While the current pattern of federal Medicaid matching payments reduces policy variation to some extent, these effects are modest compared to the impacts of the mandates. Mandates are a more powerful instrument for national policymakers than the comparatively weak fiscal incentives provided by matching rates.     

Prehistoric dental disease and the dietary shift from cactus to cultigens in northwest Mexico

Differences in dental health of prehistoric human groups are commonly attributed to specific subsistence practices, whereby food foragers generally have a lower incidence of dental disease than agriculturalists. Dental health was assessed on a sample of 135 human skeletons from northwest Mexico that date to the Early Agricultural period (1600 BC–AD 200), which coincides with the initial introduction of domesticated cultigens into the region c. 2000 BC. High rates of dental caries (13.5%) and antemortem tooth loss (17.6%) encountered in these prehistoric forager‐farmers from the Sonoran Desert were determined to be the result of the consumption of highly cariogenic local wild resources such as cactus. These patterns mask the degree of reliance on agriculture in the area and highlight the importance of constructing local nutritional histories to better understand the diversity of human diets and their relationships to health and disease. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Placing of Early Bronze Age Metalwork Deposits: New Evidence from Scotland

This paper considers the earliest metalwork hoards in Scotland, most of which have been found at conspicuous points in the landscape. The treatment of individual objects suggests that they had been carefully selected before they were deposited. Fieldwork, combined with computer reconstruction, shows that half the collections with adequate provenances come from places with direct views of the rising and setting sun at the solstices. The main emphasis seems to have been on midwinter.