LOCALIZATION AND INDUSTRY CLUSTERING ECONOMETRICS: AN ASSESSMENT OF GIBBS MODELS FOR SPATIAL POINT PROCESSES

The objective of this paper is to assess an approach to statistical modeling of point referenced establishment data that permit inclusion of “environmental” or establishment‐specific covariates and specific forms of interestablishment interaction. Gibbs models are used to decompose the conditional intensity of the spatial point process into trend and interaction components. The trend is composed of access measures (primarily different classes of roads) and three different interaction processes are tested: Geyer, area interaction, and Strauss hard core. While the models used have proved to be useful in ecology, we are unaware of any applications to establishment or firm data. In empirical application, the models yield intuitively appealing results for the trend component, and the ability to specify the interaction component gives deeper insights into interestablishment spatial dynamics than any previously published methods.     

First record of a fossil selenariid bryozoan in South America

López-Gappa, J., Pérez, L.M. & Griffin, M. February 2017. First record of a fossil selenariid bryozoan in South America. Alcheringa XX, xxx-xxx. ISSN 0311-5518.

Selenariidae Busk 1854 (Bryozoa) is considered endemic to Australia and New Zealand. Here we describe a new species of Selenaria Busk 1854 from the lower Miocene Monte León Formation (Patagonia, Argentina). Selenaria lyrulata sp. nov. is characterized by autozooids with a lyrula-like, anvil-shaped cryptocystal denticle, opesiular indentations and lateral condyles, as well as avicularia with a shield of fused costae. This is the first record of a selenariid bryozoan in South America.

Juan López-Gappa [lgappa@macn.gov.ar] CONICET—Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales. Av. Ángel Gallardo 470, C1405DJR, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Leandro Martín Pérez [pilosaperez@gmail.com] and Miguel Griffin [patagonianoyster@gmail.com], CONICET—División Paleozoología Invertebrados, Museo de La Plata. Paseo del Bosque s/n, B1900FWA, La Plata, Argentina.     

Writing on the edge: the poet,the printer,and the colonial frontier in Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–1590)

It took Alonso de Ercilla (1533–1594) thirty years to finish La Araucana, a first-person narrative epic poem about the brutal war of Arauco, in southern Chile, and one of the most canonical texts of colonial Latin America. By focusing on a crucial episode of Ercilla's eyewitness account, this essay revisits a number of scholarly discussions that have been central for our understanding of the text. First, it takes into consideration previous scholarship overlooked by specialists, as well as hitherto unstudied copies of the poem, in order to offer a thorough reevaluation of the textual and editorial history of the poem. Moreover, it explores the frontier as a chronotope and as a locus of enunciation for colonial epic, a space that is also crucial for Ercilla's carefully crafted authorial persona. Finally, it interrogates the ways in which the discursive representations of colonial frontier spaces were mediated by the material practices of early modern book production, arguing for a more fruitful relation between ecdotics and poetics, between material bibliography and theories of authorship and textuality in our approaches to colonial texts.     

Conciencia nacional y devoción jacobea en el Poema de Fernán González

Jacobean devotion and national awareness are closely related in the Poema de Fernán González (PFG). The great advance of the Reconquest in the thirteenth century and the reevaluation of the past that it caused enabled the broad Hispanic perspective of the PFG. Spain is not only a distant and longed-for reality (“regnum Gothorum”) but a current political concept. This is the frame of the PFG's intense Castilian sentiment. Castile is the bastion of the Visigothic monarchy, which did not yield to the Muslims and was the foundation for the recovery of Spain. The territorial diversity becomes the outstanding feature of this country, in which the “Montaña” takes an important role. Confronting the proposal of the cult of Saint Millán by the Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, the author of the PFG, aware of the damages that such a cult was causing to his monastery, clings to the Jacobean devotion that achieved a broad Hispanic scope.     

Janitors and Sweatshop Citizenship in Canada

Janitors in Canada increasingly suffer from what I call here “sweatshop citizenship”, which is a combination of disintegrating workplace rights and eroding social citizenship rights. This condition has been institutionalized by neoliberal state policies which have undermined the welfare state and the assumptions of citizenship which it embodied. Through an exploration of how sweatshop citizenship is being instituted in Ontario and British Columbia, I consider the difficulties which contemporary industrial practices in the cleaning industry and anti‐union legislation are presenting janitors, together with the possibility for their resisting such conditions.     

The Historic Port of El Real de Salinas in Campeche, and the Role of Coastal Resources in the Emergence of Capitalism in Yucatán, México

The emergence of capitalism in the peninsula of Yucatán is generally presented as a process resulting from the capitalization of the agricultural sector and the export of products from its sugar, cotton, and henequén plantations in the nineteenth century. In addition to these products, the peninsula also had a dynamic coastal economy in which the harvesting of salt and the extraction of logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum), played a major role and contributed to the flow of goods to international markets. We present a preliminary archaeological survey and historical documentation of El Real de Salinas, a salt-producing port on the north coast of Campeche, which was also involved in the extraction of other coastal products and closely linked to the inland plantation system.

Chemical analyses of the earliest pigment residues from the uttermost part of the planet (Beagle Channel region,Tierra del Fuego,Southern South America)

This paper presents the results of chemical analyses of the organic and inorganic fractions of pigment residues found in three archaeological sites located in the Beagle Channel region, Tierra del Fuego, Southern South America. Twenty-one archaeological samples have been analysed through XRD, SEM–EDX, FT-IR and GC–MS in order to characterise their inorganic colouring components and to search for the presence of organic substances used as binders. Lipids found in some samples are considered as potential binders. These organic components are compared to those found in archaeological sediment samples from the same layers where the pigments have been found, in order to search for potential taphonomic contaminations of the latter by the former. Results show that such contaminations are unlikely, hence the lipid contents are deemed of anthropic origin. The pigment sample results are also compared to data from analyses of natural sediment samples collected in several localities of the Beagle Channel in order to search for potential natural pigment sources. Results show that organic and inorganic components of these sediments are not the same than those present in the archaeological pigment samples, hence the pigment raw material sources have not been yet located. All these data provide for the first time evidence of the existence of ancient activities of pigment sourcing and paint preparation with organic binders which range from 6000 BP to 1900 BP in the southernmost region of the planet.