A preliminary study of patterns of replication in Scoring linear enamel hypoplasias

In order to investigate replicability in scoring linear enamel hypoplasias 59 anterior teeth were evaluated by three observers. Hypoplasias were identified with low-power microscopy and by the unaided eye. Location on the tooth was determined through caliper and micrometer measurement as well as assignment to tooth ‘thirds’. Hypoplasia size was determined through measurement of episode width and comparison with a cast designed to categorize types of hypoplasia severity. Intra-observer analysis showed consistent scoring of about 65 per cent of individual hypoplasias between rounds, with high replicability in episode location, size and severity using all methods tested. Inter-observer error was similarly low for episode size and location, but consistent scoring of individual hypoplasias between observer pairs ranged between 21 and 39 per cent. It is likely that the most important factor in the low level of replicability is the slight size of the majority of hypoplasias involved. Thus, the results suggest that further work should be directed toward developing the minimum threshold for scoring episodes. Other issues include measures to control ‘drift’ in scoring procedures over time, and procedures to score large cervical hypoplasias in canines, which can appear as multiple episodes with magnification. Among the various scoring methods tested, determination of episode location was highly replicable using all three techniques. Episode width was also highly replicable using the micrometer, but the cast association proved less successful.     

Book reviews

CHINA

MURRAY A. RUBINSTEIN (ed). Taiwan: a New History . Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. 536 pp. Illustrations, maps, photographs, index. US$27.95, paper.

CLARA WING‐CHUNG HO (ed). Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women Vol 1: the Qing Period 1644–1911. Editors in Chief Lily Xiao Hong Lee and A. D. Stefanowksa. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. 424 pp. Bibliography, index. US$87.95, hardcover.

JUN JING. The Temple of Memories: history, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village. Oakleigh, Victoria: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 217 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, references, character lists, index. A$29.95, paper.

LISA ROFEL. Other Modernities. Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999. xvi, 330 pp. 3 b/w illustrations, 2 maps, notes, bibliography, index. US$16.95, paper.

HAIPING YAN (ed). Theater & Society: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. xlvi, 328 pp. Introduction, notes on translators. US$ 62.95, hardcover; US$ 24.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

MICHAEL J. GREEN. Arming Japan: defense Production, Alliance Politics and the Postwar Search for Autonomy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 206 pp. US$19.00, paper.

T. J. PEMPEL. Regime Shift: comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy. Idiaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. 263 pp. £13.50, paper.

IAN NISH (ed). The Iwakura Mission in America and Europe: a New Assessment. Surrey: Japan Library, 1998. 226 pp. Foreword, list of contributors, introduction, appendix, notes, index. £40.00, hardcover.

SUGIHARA SEISHIRO (trans. Norman Hu). Between Incompetence and Culpability: assessing the Diplomacy of Japan's Foreign Ministry from Pearl Harbour to Potsdam. Lanham: University of America Press, 1997. xxv, 227 pp. Appendices, glossary, bibliography. No price given, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

JOHN DOWSON. A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion. New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1998. 430 pp. Rs. 100, paper.

SURES CHANDRA BANERJI. A Companion to Dharmasastra. New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1998. 265 pp. Rs. 350, hardcover.

ANIL KUMAR. Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India 1835–1911. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 1998. 246 pp. £27.50, paper.

VTVEK PINTO. Gandhi's Vision and Values. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 1998. 176 pp. Index. Rs. 225, hardcover.

MINA SWAMINATHAN (ed). The First Five Years: a Critical Perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 1998. 313 pp. £35.00, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

PETER SEARLE. The Riddle of Malaysian Capitalism: rent Seekers or Real Capitalists? St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999. xvii, 318 pp. Tables, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. A$29.95, paper.

KATHERINE A. BOWIE. Rituals of National Loyalty: an Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xxii, 391 pp. US$49.40, hardcover; US$18.50, paper.

MICHAEL A. AUNG‐THWIN. Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Burma. Ohio University Center for International Studies, Athens, Ohio. Monograph No. 102. 1998. US$25.00, paper.

ANNE BOOTH. The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. A History of Missed Opportunities. Basingstoke: Macmillan, in association with the Australian National University, 1998. xvi, 377 pp. A$49.95, paper.     

Reinventing Imperata: Revaluing Alang‐Alang Grasslands in Indonesia

This article takes a new look at the economic value and cultural significance of Imperata cylindrica grasslands in Indonesia, drawing particularly on fieldwork in Bali, Lombok and West Timor, where the focus is on the use of alang‐alang grass for roof thatch. The development of tourism has resulted in the commodification of thatch in Bali and Lombok for quality roofing and insulation. With its visual impact reinforcing its traditional cultural significance, the thatched roof has become a tourist artefact, its resulting high price elevating Imperata to the status of temporary cash crop and lucrative export. In West Timor, on the other hand, the grass has become a scarce commodity for roofing traditional houses. While it lacks the high prices of Bali‐Lombok, in Timor the cheapness of thatch in this time of economic crisis has increased its value over alternatives. This article explores the valuing and revaluing of Imperata within various agro‐ecological and economic niches, and provides case studies of some of the highly adaptive and opportunistic responses of local people to land‐use change. While the Bali case represents an extreme example of the grass as commodity, the more significant view of its value is the place it continues to occupy, in a subsistence or contingency sense, in many rural economies.     

Manipulating the Maritime Cultural Landscape: Vernacular Boats and Economic Relations on Nineteenth-Century Achill Island,Ireland

Resistance to British control of Ireland’s maritime landscape under the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1800–1922) was highly localized, enacted in part through Irish choices in boat construction and patterns of movement at sea. British naval authorities overseeing Achill Island in County Mayo used both coercive and conciliatory means to replace Irish subsistence fishing from regional vernacular boats with commercial fishing from larger non-local vessels reliant upon piers and dredged harbors. These changes encouraged islanders’ dependency upon imported food and wage-based employment performed under Protestant surveillance. Indigenous boats including curraghs and yawls played central roles in Irish resistance to these changes, through the assertion of traditional lifeways and practices.     

An assessment of the luminescence sensitivity of Australian quartz with respect to sediment history

This study provides a preliminary systematic characterisation of OSL sensitivity, with respect to sediment history, of single grains of Australian quartz from a variety of source rocks and depositional contexts. Samples from two distinct lithologies and with relatively short modern sedimentary histories were compared in an examination of the influence of rock type on OSL sensitivity. Sediments derived from weathered sandstone were found to be brighter than those from metamorphosed schists, suggesting that sensitivity may be inherited from the source rock and its earlier sedimentary history. Secondly, quartz from the same source, but different modes of deposition, was compared to assess the effect on sensitivity of nature of exposure to light during the most recent bleaching event. Quartz grain sensitivity appears not to vary depending on the mode of sediment deposition, suggesting that the nature of exposure to light during deposition is less important in the sensitisation process. This study highlights the complexity and variety of natural sedimentary quartz, demonstrating the limitations of an investigation based solely on OSL sensitivity. Further systematic investigation into the physical, geological and geomorphological characteristics of sediments is proposed to better understand the mechanisms of luminescence sensitisation in quartz.     

Measuring reduction in stone tools: an ethnoarchaeological study of Gamo hidescrapers from Ethiopia

Stone tools were knapped, not built. This truism means that tools were reduced from larger pieces in the production process. But many tools were further reduced in use, to repair damage or as edges dulled. Reduction reduced size (trivially), but also changed the proportions among tools' elements or dimensions. Such allometric variation (change in proportion as a function of change in size) is useful to estimate the degree of reduction that tools experienced. Reduction itself is a measure of curation, a theoretical concept of great interest in lithic studies and Paleolithic archaeology. To determine the reduction that archaeological tools experienced, we must compare their size and proportions at first use to the same properties at discard that we directly measure. By now many size estimates can be made from discarded tools. Some are experimentally tested but few are validated using direct ethnoarchaeological controls. We validate two allometric reduction measures—ratios of plan area to thickness and of an estimate of original to discarded volume—against direct measures of use and reduction in ethnographic Gamo hidescrapers from Ethiopia.     

Political Economies of Predynastic Egypt and the Formation of the Early State

Considered one of the world’s earliest examples of a pristine state, the ancient Egyptian state arose by ca. 3000 BC. State formation in Egypt became a focus of much research in the 1970s and 1980s, as investigations of the Predynastic period in Egypt, when complex society arose there, began to uncover new evidence of the indigenous roots of this phenomenon. More recently, archaeological investigations in the Delta as well as continued work in southern Egypt have provided new evidence for the changes that took place in the fourth millennium BC. But the specific events and processes involved in this major sociopolitical and economic transformation and the resultant state still remain incompletely understood. To better understand the problem in Egypt, this study looks at the contrasting polities in fourth millennium BC Egypt and Nubia from the perspective of the political economy and the strategies to power proposed by the dual-processual theory, which also helps elucidate processes of state formation and the type of early state that developed there. The territorial expansionist model helps explain where and when this state first emerged.     

“You've Got to Work on This Axon”: J. Z. Young and Squid Giant Axon Preparations in 20th-Century Neurobiology**

Employing and extending Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's analytical concept of epistemic things, this essay proposes one reason why squid giant axons, unusually large invertebrate nerve fibers, had such great impacts on twentieth-century neurobiology. The 1930s characterizations of these axons by John Zachary Young reshaped prevailing assumptions about nerve cells as epistemic things, I argue. Specifically, Young's preparations of these axons, which consisted of fibers attached to laboratory technologies, highlighted similarities between giant axons and more familiar ones via lines of comparative study common to aquatic biology. Young's work convinced other biologists that the squid giant fibers were, in fact, axons, despite their unusual fused (syncytial) structures, thereby promoting further studies, such as intracellular measurements, made possible by the fiber's size. Tracing direct relations between preparations of squid axons and broader interpretations of neurons as epistemic things, this paper renders an actors’ category, “preparations,” into an analytical one. In turn, it offers glimpses into how aquatic organisms shaped twentieth-century neurobiology and how local experiments can drive broader, disciplinary changes.