Bundled Worlds: The Roles and Interactions of Complex Objects from the North American Plains

This paper explores the many dimensions of power exercised by ceremonial bundles that have been held by North American Plains groups since time immemorial. Because bundles are multifarious but strictly ordered sets of objects, they embody the corpus of ecological and cosmological knowledge needed to survive in the human and supernatural worlds. Bundles, like persons, are subject to hierarchical and heterarchical power relations that parallel societal relations within tribal groups. Observations are drawn about the value of studying complex objects such as bundles for expanding and refining archaeological systematics.     

Early Neolithic Agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula

The spread of agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula is documented from at least ca. 5600–5500BC, although botanical data are absent or very limited for large areas. Archaeobotanical information shows from the beginning an imported agrarian system with a great diversity of crops: hulled and naked wheats and barleys, legumes such as pea, lentil, fava bean, vetches and grass peas, flax and poppy. This diversity of plants with different requirements, processing and uses, implies that the first farmers quickly imported or acquired a wide range of agrarian knowledge. Regional and inter-site agrarian differences are discussed in relation to factors like ecology, culture, use of the cultivated plants and management of the risk of crop failure. The adoption of farming resulted in significant ecological, economic, dietary, and social changes for the Neolithic people of Iberia.     

Garden plants in medieval Iberia: the archaeobotanical evidence

Of all the plants that were used in early medieval times, many were grown in gardens and orchards and contributed to the subsistence of medieval communities. Archaeobotany provides direct evidence of the range of species used either for food or for other purposes. In this contribution, we explore the evidence of garden produce in early medieval Iberia focusing on archaeobotanical data. First, we will analyse the available data, taking into consideration different types of preservation. Second, we will examine the diversity of species, trying to establish the uses and purposes of the taxa identified. Finally, we will discuss results within the better‐known wider European context.     

Global Metropolitan-Regional Scale in Evolution: Metropolitan Intermediary Cities and Metropolitan Cities

The case of Madrid is used as empirical focus to propose a new classification of the metropolitan region urban medium-sized or secondary city system. Based on a methodology that integrates the morphological (size, location and socioeconomic history) and the functional dimensions (centrality index, advanced producer services (APS) concentration and commuting), the article compares new employment centres—cities with metropolitan origin—and historical cities—previously free standing cities, progressively integrated in metropolitan processes. The results show a distinction between (1) metropolitan cities, with a traditional intermediation role, and (2) metropolitan intermediary cities, that include an additional quality to their traditional intermediation role, that of concentrating APS. The article confirms that some medium-sized cities—metropolitan intermediary cities—linked to different origins and up to 100?km away from the metropolis are more visible in the global scene and are establishing an emerging global multicore-network at a metropolitan-regional scale.     

Capac Women and the Politics of Marriage in Early Colonial Peru

During the major Inca civil wars, Atahualpa had almost exterminated Huascar’s kin. Only a few capac women, those who descended from Manco Capac, the founder of the Inca dynasty, remained alive. Atahualpa had planned to take them as his principal wives since only this type of marriage could successfully maintain the authority of the Incas over a large Andean territory. The Spanish arrival in 1532 interrupted his plans, but it did not eliminate Inca claims of sovereignty through marriage. In fact, it was through marriage that Atahualpa aimed to establish political alliances with Francisco Pizarro. While both Incas and Spaniards understood marriage on their own terms, there were many instances in which both were willing to redefine their own concepts of marriage in their struggle for power. In all of these, the women engaged in these unions were not only conscious about their political roles, but agents in the main historical events of this period.     

The ‘She-Land,’ social consequences of the sexualized construction of landscape in North Patagonia

This article voices a perspective founded in gender geography and regional history, through the study of the symbolic constitution of core and peripheral areas inside Chile and Argentina. This analysis focuses upon the Patagonian territory and aims to reveal the use of female stereotyped metaphors as the basis for territorial subalternity. At this point, revision of Patagonian history shows that this construction of landscape is related to territorial integration, and could have been seen as gender ideology because of the metaphors involved in the State's arguments. This idea is illustrated with an ongoing nationalist discourse established in Patagonia since the 1930s, which operates as a permanent patriarchal reference and allows the projection of gender metaphors in land. It also takes the particular experience of Patagonian women to question the recognition of the problem behind the construction of landscape and the geographical and historical patriarchal order. As a result of this process, the possibility to argue against the subordination of the region emerges from highlighting feminine metaphors of land and feminine praxis, which nowadays confront both the landscape's official interpretation and an unequal access to resources.     

Are All Policy Decisions Equal? Explaining the Variation in Media Coverage of the UK Budget

A country's budget is one of the most important public policy instruments, as it establishes the government's policy priorities and has the potential to determine winners and losers. The budget, however, is a mixture of different components and these get varying degrees of attention in the media. Drawing on sociology of news research, this paper seeks to explain this heterogeneous coverage of a budget's policy decisions. To do so, it uses a unique data set of over 5,000 articles of press coverage of six UK budgets (2008–2012). These articles are coded for the presence/absence of each of the budget's policy decision, via automated content analysis. On the basis of a multivariate negative binomial model, we find that the salience of a policy decision in the coverage is determined by its cost, whether it is negative (i.e., tax hikes and spending cuts) or positive, the income group that is the most affected by it, and the level of attention given to it by the government.     

Responses of South African Agate and Chalcedony When Heated Experimentally,and the Broader Implications for Heated Archaeological Minerals

Here we present a database of responses by South African agate and chalcedony to heat treatment. This will assist analyses of heated stone tools not only in South African archaeological sites, but wherever heated agate and chalcedony pieces were knapped. The minerals are abundant worldwide. To replicate potential heating methods during the Stone Age we placed some minerals in a wood fire, some under coals, and others were buried in sediments beneath fires. Thermal responses include lustrous flaked surfaces, pot lid fractures, semi-circular internal fractures, rough internal surfaces, and crazing. Aerobic heating is implied by pot lid fractures. To explain the thermal responses we analyzed the minerals using X-ray fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, and carbon and sulfur analyses. Our chalcedony contains more water and impurities than agate, making it more vulnerable to thermal damage. Our method of combining field experiments with chemical analyses has global applications even though we expect that mineral components of agate and chalcedony will vary slightly in different parts of the world.     

Late Prehistoric High-Altitude Hunter-Gatherer Residential Occupations in the Argentine Southern Andes

Test excavations were conducted at Risco de los Indios (RDLI), a site at 2480 masl with 29 residential features and a well-developed midden containing abundant floral, faunal, lithic, and ceramic materials. Analyses indicate the site was intensively used ca. 500 cal b.p. as a residential base for groups focused on hunting guanaco, supplemented by locally-available wild flora and fauna as well as domestic beans transported from the lowlands. Ceramic and obsidian artifacts indicate these groups were highly mobile and in contact with groups on the eastern and western margins of the Andes. These patterns compare favorably to those seen in the region’s other high altitude villages. It appears that the development of these patterns began with population increase and economic intensification in the lowlands ca. 2000 cal b.p. and that the move to slightly lower elevation settings like RDLI may have been conditioned by the onset of the Little Ice Age.