Augustine on Justice: A Reconsideration of City of God,Book 19

I argue that Augustine’s message in City of God, Book 19, has been consistently misinterpreted and hence a vital part of his argument in City of God has been misunderstood. The received reading of Book 19, as found in the work of Mary Clark, Rowan Williams, John Milbank, Oliver O’Donovan and Robert Dodaro, is that in Book 19 Augustine rejected the possibility of finding social and political justice among pagans. I argue that Augustine reached no such conclusion in Book 19. On the contrary, I find that the only justice that Augustine denied to pagans in Book 19 was justice as righteousness, that is, the justice of worshipping and serving the true God. He found that pagans claimed justice as righteousness for themselves and on this basis claimed that Rome had been a republic. Augustine denied that pagans could ever possess justice as righteousness, and hence denied that pagan Rome had ever been a republic.     

The Use of Ethnoarchaeology for the Archaeological Study of Ceramic Production

Ethnoarchaeological studies have longed served as a critical source of hypotheses, comparative data, and explanatory frameworks for archaeologists interested in describing and explaining ceramic production. In this paper, I lay out the central questions addressed by archaeologists studying craft production, discuss how ethnoarchaeology has contributed to our understanding of ancient production systems, and suggest avenues of further research that can benefit archaeological investigation of the organization of ceramic production.     

Specialization and social inequality in Bronze Age SE Arabia: analyzing the development of production strategies and economic networks using agent-based modeling

This paper investigates the role of specialized production strategies in the development of socio-economic inequalities in Bronze Age south-eastern (SE) Arabia, and particularly, the ways in which a localized, internal exchange economy may have produced stress and instability in the SE Arabian socio-economic system. While archaeological research has established that the communities of SE Arabia participated in a widespread Bronze Age exchange system that included areas of the ancient Near East, South Asia, and Central Asia, it is unclear to what degree this interaction fostered the broad-scale socio-economic changes seen in the Early Bronze Age of SE Arabia. Here we present the results of an agent-based model that suggest the nature of the internal exchange economy in SE Arabia itself may have precipitated the social conditions necessary for change by allowing individuals to profit disproportionately. We thus emphasize the importance of local production strategies in generating socio-economic change, in addition to the well-established economic and cultural contacts with the wider Bronze Age world.     

The burden of profession: Applied anthropology at the crossroads

Elizabeth M. Eddy and William L. Partridge, eds. Applied Anthropology in America. New York: Columbia University Press. 1978. 484 pp.

Walter Goldschmidt, ed. The Uses of Anthropology. Special Publication No. 11. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association. 1979. 280 pp.     

Fat Christians and fit elites: negotiating class and status in Evangelical Christian weight-loss culture

As American culture has become increasingly concerned about fatness, the fat body and weight loss have become salient symbols for other social tensions. This article uses the case of evangelical Christian weight-loss culture to argue that class is one of those tensions. Drawing on ethnographic work in a Christian weight-loss program as well as on recent theories of class, I argue that certain recurring concerns in Christians’ weight-loss discourse, notably concerns about fat Christian leaders and appearing healthy, reflect tensions about class-based aspirations and class-based denigrations evangelicals face in negotiating their position in American society.     

Differential diagnosis of cartilaginous dysplasia and probable Osgood–Schlatter's disease in a Mississippian individual from East Tennessee

This paper details the differential diagnosis of an adult female skeleton displaying features consistent with a cartilaginous dysplasia and Osgood–Schlatter's disease. This burial was excavated in 1940 from a Mississippian platform mound at the DeArmond site (40RE12) in Roane County, Tennessee as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) archaeological investigations. The right humerus and left femur of this individual display traits consistent with achondroplasia, such as shortened length and normal width. However, the rest of the long bones display typical morphology. The affected humerus and femur are 82 mm and 58 mm shorter than their counterparts, respectively. This makes for obvious asymmetry. A review of the various cartilaginous dysplasias was undertaken to identify those conditions concordant with the differential manifestation of the long bone asymmetry. Morphological and radiographic analyses were used to rule out possible diagnoses. The most likely candidate is enchondromatosis out of the presented conditions, as it most commonly affects the long bones, does not affect every bone in the skeleton, and is asymmetrical in its manifestation. In addition to the cartilaginous dysplasia, both anterior proximal tibial metaphyses of this individual display defects that are roughly triangular with pitted, irregular floors. Osgood–Schlatter's disease is caused by repeated trauma to the tibial tuberosity during childhood. This individual would have walked with an obvious limp, and perhaps the added biomechanical stress on both quadriceps muscles as a result caused the injuries and resultant defects to its attachment points. Evidence of these conditions in an adult indicates that the Mississippian people in this community offered some sort of social support to differently‐abled individuals. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.