The Search for the 1871 Whaling Fleet of the Western Arctic: writing the final chapter

During 2015, the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries led a systematic seabed mapping survey along the Arctic coast of Alaska in search of whaling ships abandoned in 1871. The purpose of the expedition was to determine if wreckage from these abandoned ships was still present in the survey area, and, if so, to assess and document its location, status and condition. The project mapped approximately 50 km² of seabed using sidescan sonar and magnetometry and identified six sites that contained wreckage from at least two whaling ships. Magnetometry data also suggested that additional wreckage may be buried in the seabed.     

What is ‘needed’ to keep remembering? War‐specific communication,parental exemplar behaviour and participation in national commemorations

Given the abundance of literature on collective memory practices, there is relatively little empirical research on the socialization processes explaining the transmission of such practices. This article examines to what extent war‐specific communication and parental exemplar behaviour function as a link between the collected memories of individuals and society's collective memory. Utilizing data from an online survey conducted in 2014, we focus on participation in the activities organized on Remembrance Day and Liberation Day in the Netherlands in remembrance of the Second World War. We distinguish between public and private practices. Our findings highlight that different forms of socialization substitute for one another. Whereas communication with non‐relatives is particularly relevant for those communicating less frequently with parents about past war experiences, parental exemplar behaviour, such as participating in the two‐minute silence on Remembrance Day, plays a bigger role amongst those with lower levels of communication with either relatives or non‐relatives.     

Learning by doing: enhancing hydrology lectures with individual fieldwork projects

Hydrology teaching deals with processes happening outside the classroom, which calls for active-learning methods to complement lectures. In a geography undergraduate course, new teaching methods and assessment were designed, in which students investigated a river of their choice by completing homework tasks and presenting their results on a poster. During a 3-year implementation process, the changes were evaluated using a combination of formal and informal student and lecturer feedback. Students mentioned that they enjoyed doing the project and that it helped their understanding of theory, their research skills, and their ability to select, organize and present information. Questionnaire results showed that, over the implementation period, students’ perceived value of homework increased strongly, while their perceived value of lectures remained high. In informal feedback, students noted that they enjoyed learning about where they live, preferred doing the projects individually and seeing each other’s projects, and spent more time on the coursework when assessed. When looking back in interviews, students commented that the projects had prepared them well for their dissertation and summer job. The advantage of using homework-based projects complementing lectures is the strong link between theory and practice, which could be further enhanced by discussing the homework in the lectures.     

Status of geoinformatics education and training in Sub-Saharan Africa: initiatives taken and challenges

This paper presents an update on some of the activities that have taken place since a World Bank report; “Guidelines for Education and Training in Environmental Information Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Key Issues” was published and provides details on the current situation. It shows how organizations such as the African Association on Remote Sensing of Environment, International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, European Association of Remote Sensing Companies, Group on Earth Observation, and several others have helped to increase manpower resources in the region and strengthened institutional capacity in the field of geoinformatics, through capacity building, technology transfer, international cooperation and the provision of internal African resources. After reviewing what has happened in the field of geoinformatics education and training, we focused on current initiatives taken and challenges in five Sub-Saharan countries: Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. We reviewed GIS education and training in the private sector, government, information communications technology in higher education institutions, GIS application areas and challenges facing GIS education and training. Findings show that; change should involve education stakeholders in all levels of education and curriculum quality, regional and international cooperation through exchange programs, should be a priority for Sub-Saharan Africa countries.     

Troubled Encounters: Payments for Ecosystem Services in Chiapas,Mexico

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is a well-established conservation policy approach worldwide. Where forests are owned and managed by rural and indigenous communities, PES initiatives often aim to incentivize the joint adoption of forest protection and sustainable management practices. However, not all communities might have the will or capacity to maintain such practices over the long term. This article examines a PES programme in a rural community of Chiapas, Mexico. It shows that while a majority of the community's landowners have engaged in PES through two distinct working groups, a large share of the community forests remain outside the PES programme, and many landowners resist the extension of PES rules to non-targeted forests. The authors argue that this incipient form of fragmented collective action on forest management results from challenged leaderships, and from PES accommodating a history of increasing individuation of the commons. This accommodation, however, has ignited social conflict, reified tenure inequalities, and failed to strengthen local institutions to enable them to legitimately deal with the contested interests that underpin the fate of community forests. This article shows the limits of PES when parachuted into a context of uneven land tenure, weak collective action and contested leaderships.     

Changes in the body,glaze and enamel compositions of early Meissen porcelain, 1723–c.1740

The evolution of early Meissen body, glaze and colorant compositions is examined using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) measurements on three artefacts that can be accurately dated to the period 1723–c.1740. The results are interpreted based on recipes recorded in the earliest documents of the Meissen archives. The pure Aue kaolinite contains low levels of Ti and can be distinguished from secondary clays, for example, clay from Colditz. The excess Ti in the glaze versus the body reported earlier and confirmed by the present authors is explained by the exclusive use of Colditz clay for the glaze, as described in the recipes before 1730, providing a terminus ante quem for Meissen porcelain exhibiting this particular asymmetry. After 1730, the presence of elevated Ti in the body could serve as a marker for the experimental admixture of clays to Aue kaolinite to alter its properties. Based on the detection of As, Ba and Bi, it is suggested that smalt from Erzgebirge was the colorant for blue enamels until at least 1725.     

Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis, and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of ceramic fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC–third century AD): the fluid, the categorical and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such, a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.     

Analyses of Early Medieval Stained Window Glass From the Monastery of Baume‐Les‐Messieurs (Jura,France)

The collection of early medieval window glass found in the abbey of Baume‐les‐Messieurs (Jura, France) is exceptional because it dates to the end of the eighth century, and due to the number of fragments as well as their state of conservation. Different colours and forms have been identified. These pieces are a rare opportunity to address the glass craft, its recipes and techniques for a phase of its history that has remained little known. Analyses in PIXE–PIGE prove that, in addition to fragments from two soda glass items, the pieces are made from wood‐ash glass. Most of them probably came from the same production and the raw material is present in the region. At this early stage of wood‐ash glass production, the glassmakers had mastered the glass as well as the colour processes.     

Whose Permits? The Tenacity of Permissive Development Control in Flanders

This paper explains how a permissive planning permit system is embedded in Belgian/Flemish society and how this contributes to urban sprawl. We base our analysis on an institutionalist approach as developed in previous and current research and analyse the Flemish planning permit system since 1962 as one of different interacting planning systems, all (re)produced, maintained, transformed and struggled over by specific individual and collective actors and shaped by a range of institutional dynamics. The analysis shows how in the dynamics of the Flemish planning permit system, a general struggle between actors defending property-based private initiative and actors arguing for collective action in space is especially apparent. In this struggle, property ownership expressed through a permissive planning permit system and limited enforcement of regulations is seen to be predominant, especially in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Changes in the 1990s, making the planning permit system more strict, have partly and momentarily challenged the institutional frame which structures the predominant planning permit practice, but left the logic of individual property largely untouched. Today, the Flemish planning permit system has again been reoriented towards the protection of private property, which hampers the capacity of government to implement a coherent spatial policy.     

Film-viewing in Turkish and Moroccan diasporic families: a gender and place perspective

This article explores the relation between gender identities and spatial aspects of audience reception by means of a case study on film-viewing in the Turkish and Moroccan diasporic communities in the Belgian city of Antwerp. Drawing on feminist and gender approaches to audience reception on the one hand, and research into the spatial dynamics underlying audience reception on the other, we look at film-viewing as a socially and spatially meaningful practice that is relevant for the understanding of gender identities in diasporic families. This article is based on the results of a four-year project on diasporic film cultures in Antwerp that investigated how film-viewing practices relate to social and cultural dynamics within the Turkish and Moroccan communities. The data that are discussed include participant observations, in-depth interviews and group interviews with a varied sample of people with Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds. The results show that although film-viewing, especially in the public space of the film theatre, can be mobilized by women as an emancipating social practice, gendered power structures often prevail. Also in the domestic contexts, a more traditional gender division is articulated by the respondent concerning family viewing. We conclude that the space of the film theatre and film-going serve the continuity and stability of gendered family relations, rather than subverting them.