Peter Berger’s Early Work on Baha’i Studies

At the very beginning of his academic career, Peter Berger made an important contribution to the sociological study of the Babi and Baha’i religions. This article provides an overview of (1) Berger’s early ideas in the sociology of religion; (2) his overall analysis of the Babi and Baha’i movements; (3) his account of the contemporary Iranian Baha’i community; and (4) his impressions of the American Baha’i community of the time. A brief discussion of the continuing value of Berger’s Babi‐Baha’i study in the Sociology of Religion and in Baha’i Studies is also offered.     

Urban Open Space and Governance in Ancient Mesoamerica

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Analyzing the nature of governance of early states and cities is a major challenge for archaeology today. Blanton and Fargher’s (Blanton and...     

“We Have Mingled Politeness with the Use of the Sword”: Nature and Civilisation in Adam Ferguson’s Philosophy of War

Adam Ferguson’s twin reputations as the most republican of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and as one of the founding fathers of sociology make him one of the most interesting figures in eighteenth-century political thought. I argue that in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and elsewhere, Ferguson develops a novel understanding of the place of warfare in human social experience. By deploying a proto-sociological account of the naturalness of warfare between nations he proposes a normative criterion for the assessment of civilisation. This argument sets Ferguson apart from contemporaries like Kant who argued for perpetual peace as a criterion of civilisation.     

Integrating Stable Isotope and Zooarchaeological Analyses in Historical Archaeology: A Case Study from the Urban Nineteenth-Century Commonwealth Block Site,Melbourne, Australia

This paper presents the first use of bone collagen stable isotope analyses for the purpose of reconstructing historical animal husbandry and trade practices in Australia. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of 51 domesticate and commensal specimens demonstrate that meats consumed at the mid to late nineteenth-century Commonwealth Block site in Melbourne derived from animals with a diverse range of isotopic signatures. Potential factors contributing to this diversity including animal trade and variability in local animal husbandry practices are discussed. From these results we suggest that stable isotope-based paleodietary reconstructions have significant potential to illuminate a variety of human-animal relations in Australia’s historical period as well as other New World contexts.