Archaeobotanical evidence of prehistoric maize (Zea mays) consumption at the northern edge of the Great Plains

Analysis of starch granules, phytoliths, and plant macrofossils from archaeological features and carbonized food residue provides important new insight into the extent of prehistoric maize (Zea mays) consumption on the North American Great Plains. These data suggest that consumption of maize, and probably other cultigens, was widespread on the eastern Canadian Prairies between approximately AD 1000 and 1600. Domesticated plants may have been grown locally, acquired through trade, or transported into the region following dispersal of family groups from horticultural villages located elsewhere. However, the lack of strong artifactual evidence of gardening, and the small-scale nature of sites on the eastern Canadian Prairies indicate that local horticulture, if practiced, was non-intensive.     

Direct evidence of the use of beehive products in pre-Roman Sardinia

Written sources and iconographic evidence suggest that honey and beehive products, used in culinary, medicinal, and technological functions since pre-Neolithic times, were likely known and used in Phoenician and Punic Sardinia. The role of these resources is nonetheless poorly understood because no direct evidence survives on a macroscopic level. Significant advances in the knowledge about beeswax and beehive products processing in the past have been offered in recent decades by organic residue analyses (ORA), an approach that enables the characterisation of surviving chemical compounds or suites of compounds that provide information relating to human activity in the past. The relatively recalcitrant nature of lipid compounds comprising beeswax means that this commodity is among the products that can be unambiguously identified through ORA. Here we present and discuss the results of analyses undertaken on 368 pottery sherds from Phoenician and Punic Sardinia (eighth to third century BCE). These analyses offer direct evidence for the presence of beehive products on the island, suggesting the use of honey for culinary purposes in pots, and possibly connecting one specific vessel category with beeswax decanting during beekeeping and honey production processes. Our results also now clearly illustrate the widespread use of beehive products in pre-Roman Sardinia.     

Ways of Seeing: Sexism the Forgotten Prejudice?

Recent developments in feminism, charted in Gender, Place and Culture over the past 21 years, have stressed the relational, differentiated and contested nature of gender. This has led to the rejection of the unified category women, and with this the right for feminism to make claims on behalf of all women. This paper argues that an unintended consequence of this development in ways of thinking about gender is that patriarchy as a form of power relations has become relatively neglected. It draws on research from a European Research Council project (including biographical interviews and case studies of a gym and workplace) to demonstrate that while the development of equality legislation has contained the public expression of the most blatant forms of gender prejudice, sexism persists and is manifest in subtle ways. As a consequence, it can be difficult to name and challenge with the effect that patriarchy as a power structure which systematically (re)produces gender inequalities,is obscured by its ordinariness. Rather, sexism appears only to be ‘seen’ when it affords the instantiation of other forms of prejudice, such as Islamophobia. As such, we argue that Gender, Place and Culture has a responsibility going forward to make sexism as a particular form of prejudice more visible, while also exposing the complexity and fluidity of its intersectional relationship to other forms of oppression and social categories.     

Understanding Prehistoric Lithic Raw Material Selection: Application of a Gravity Model

Provenance studies can tell us which sources of lithic raw material were used in the past, but can they tell us why? After all, many factors can have entered into a person’s choice to use one source rather than another. Those factors can be grouped into two categories, the geologic/geographic characteristics of the source itself (quality, abundance, size of pieces, etc.), and the human factors (direction of travel, time available, social restrictions, etc.). This paper demonstrates how the geologic/geographic characteristics can be quantified and calculated together to give one value, the attractiveness of the source, which can then be used in a gravity model approach to predict which sources ‘should’ have been used more than others. Deviations from the predicted pattern point to situations where the human factors were of greater or lesser importance. The values are also used to delineate geographical areas within which particular sources would be likely to be used (‘areas of influence’), which gives us a useful new way of understanding the landscape within which the prehistoric group lived.     

The Impact of Program Design on Enrollment in State Children's Health Insurance Programs

The success of State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP) in expanding insurance coverage among low‐income children varies considerably across states. Scholars have looked to different program characteristics to explain this variation, but have arrived at disparate conclusions regarding the impact of one of the most significant design choices—the decision to create a new program or to pursue increased child health insurance rates through an expansion of the existing Medicaid program. This study suggests that understanding the impact of programmatic choices requires a more careful consideration of the mechanisms through which these different program designs might influence enrollment than has been offered in previous research. Employing a multilevel governance framework, it suggests that there is a hitherto unexplored indirect impact, where design choices influence administrative behavior, which in turn influences enrollment success in SCHIP programs. It is important to understand the effect of administrative design choices because this is one of the key areas in which states exercise discretion in the implementation of many federal programs.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

‘It’s a very isolating world’: the journey to HIV care for women living with HIV in British Columbia,Canada

HIV health services research conventionally defines place in terms of proximity to care. However, understandings of place must also include the social spaces that women living with HIV (WLWH) occupy which shape their experience of health and access to care. Drawing on focus group data from the Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study, we explored how 28 WLWH navigate geographic place and social space in attempting to access HIV-related healthcare within and across a range of urban to rural localities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. We describe how existing services, even if physically close, can be socially marginalizing as women confront HIV stigma, racism, and classism, which operate to exclude women from the places and spaces they must access for care. We also emphasize how women enact ‘geographies of resistance’ and succeed in carving out their own safe options for care and support. Finally, we share recommendations identified by women themselves towards developing local and community-driven ‘geographies of change’ that support the health and healing of diverse communities of WLWH. Our findings stress the urgent need to acknowledge and redress socio-spatial barriers to care and to work with WLWH to co-create a therapeutic landscape that reflects women’s diverse identities, localities, emotions, and experiences.     

Bringing the Prisoner into View: English and Welsh Census Data and the Victorian Prison Population

The 1881 England and Wales census is now available as a fully-searchable electronic file. What can this source of big data tell us about the shape of the late-Victorian prison population? This article explores how the 1881 census compares to other sources of prison population data, and examines how the census can be analysed to reveal the demographic structure of the prison population in England and Wales. We argue that the census enables us to bring breadth of information about incarcerated individuals, identifying the ‘typical’ and ‘atypical’ prisoner, to a depth of information already available through small-scale qualitative research. In doing so, census data provides both quantitative and qualitative data essential for bringing context and scale to social and personal histories of crime.