Book reviews

Australian Politics

Eric Aarons, What's Left? Memoirs of an Australian Communist (Ringwood, Melbourne: Penguin, 1993)pp.260. $14.95 ISBN 014 015704 2.

Andrew Hede, Scott Prasser and Mark Neylan (eds), Keeping Them Honest: Democratic Reform in Queensland (St Luda: University of Queensland Press, 1992) pp.312. $17.95 ISBN 0 7022 24871.

Richard Lucy, The Australian Form of Government: Models in Dispute (Melbourne: Macmillan, second edn. 1993) pp.386. $34.95 ISBN 0 73291294 6.

Phillip Mendes, The New Left, The Jews and the Vietnam War, 1965–1972 (North Caulfleld: Lazare Press, 1993) pp.236. $n.p. ISBN 0 64613389 6.

Audrey Oldfleld, Woman Suffrage in Australia: Gift or Struggle? (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1992) pp.263. $29.95 ISBN 0 521436117.

Derek Parker, The Courtesans: The Press Gallery in the Hawke Era (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991)pp.203. $16.95 ISBN 0 04 442343 8.

Comparative and International Politics

Elise Boulding (ed.), New Agendas for Peace Research: Conflict andSecurity Reexamined (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1992) pp.199. $US35.00 ISBN 15587 290 5.

T.M. Boyce, Infrastructure and Security: Problems of Development in the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 93 (Canberra: Canberra Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, RSPacS, Australian National University, 1992) pp.231. $23.00 ISBN 0 7315 1417 3.

John F.N. Bradley, Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution: A Political Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) pp.139. $US29.59 ISBN 0 88033 242 5.

Nigel Swain, Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism (London: Verso, 1992) pp.264. $45.00 ISBN 0 86091569 7.

David Butler and Austin Ranney (eds), Electioneering: A Comparative Study of Continuity and Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) pp.294. $80.00 ISBN 0 19 827375 4.

Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty: The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Aldershot: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992) pp.297. $n.p. ISBN 185228 032 0.

Helena Catt, Paul Harris and Nigel S. Roberts, Voter's Choice: Electoral Chance in New Zealand (Palmerston North: The Dunmore Press, 1992) pp.143. $n.p. ISBN 086469 147

John Davis, Exchange (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992) pp.100. $27.95 ISBN 033515583 9.

Gilbert R. Winham, The Evolution of International Trade Agreements (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992) pp.155. $Canl5.95 ISBN 0 8020 7691 2.

Patrick Dunleavy, Helen Margett and Stuart Weir, Replaying the 1992 General Election: How Britain Would Have Voted Under Alternative Electoral Systems. LSE Public Policy Paper No. 3 (London: Public Policy Group, London School of Economics, 1992) pp.20. £5.00 ISBN 085 328147 5.

Werner Feld, The Future of European Security and Defence Policy (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993) pp.177. $n.p. ISBN 155587 353 7.

Gary P. Freeman and James Jupp(eds), Nations of Immigrants: Australia, the United States and International Migration (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp.250. $24.95 ISBN 019 553483 2.

Peter Godwin and IanHancock, Rhodesians Never Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp.400. $130.00 ISBN 019 820365 9.

Colin S. Gray, House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must Fail (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) pp.242. $n.p. ISBN 0 8014 2703 7.

Richard Higgott and J.L. Richardson (eds), International Relations: Global and Australian Perspectives on an Evolving Discipline (Canberra: Australian National University, 1991) pp.479. $n.p. ISBN 0 7315 1284 7.

Steve Hoadley, The South Pacific Foreign Affairs Handbook (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, in association with the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, 1992) pp.258. $19.95 ISBN 186373 176 8.

Andrew Hurrell and Benedict Kingsbury (eds), The International Politics of the Environment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) pp.492. $34.95 ISBN 019 827778 4.

Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well‐being?: How Kerela became ‘a model’ (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1992) pp.285. $89.95 ISBN 0 333 54808 6.

Paul Keal(ed.), Ethics and Foreign Policy (Sydney: Allen & Unwin/ANU, 1992) pp.259. $24.95 ISBN 186373 396 5.

Sebastian Mallaby, After Apartheid (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) pp.210. $40.00 ISBN 0 57116560 5.

Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) pp.191. $US17.00 ISBN 023106463 2.

Baruch Kimmerllng and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York: The Free Press, 1993) pp396. $n.p. ISBN 0 02 9173213.

Ian McNeill, To Long Tan: The Australian Army and the Vietnam War 1950–1966 (Canberra: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1993) pp.614. $49.95 ISBN 186373 282 9.

Alison Dundes Renteln, International Human Rights: Universalism versus Relativism (London: Sage Publications, 1990) pp.205. £13.95 ISBN 0 8039 3506 4.

Eric Rolls, Sojourners: The Epic Story of China's Centuries‐old Relationship with Australia (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992) pp.531. $49.95 ISBN 0 7022 24782.

Chlh‐yu Shin, China's Just World: The Morality of Chinese Foreign Policy (Boulder and London: Lynnc Rienner, 1993) pp.223. $US37.00 ISBN 155587 350 2.

Rachel Walker, Six Years that Shook the World: Perestroika—The Impossible Project (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993) pp312. $35.00 ISBN 0 719032873.

Political Theory and Methodology

Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society: An Historical Argument (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) pp310. $39.95 ISBN 0 7456 0533 8.

Chilla Bulbeck, Social Sciences in Australia: An Introduction (Marrickville: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993) pp.494. $34.95 ISBN 0 72951260 6.

Robert E. Goodin, Motivating Political Morality (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992) pp.201. $34.95 ISBN 1 55786 247 8.

Preston King (ed.), Thomas Hobbes. Critical Assessments, 4vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) $n.p. ISBN 0 415 02004 2.

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice, and Its Critics (London: Polity, 1990) pp.169. $32.95 ISBN 0 7456 0282 7.

Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen (eds), A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law—1791 and 1991 (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.474. $99.00 ISBN 0 52141637 X.

Gene Outka and John P. Reeder Jr. (eds), Prospects for a Common Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) pp.254. $34.95 ISBN 0 69102093 0.

Elisabeth Porter, Women and Moral Identity (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) pp.223. $22.95 ISBN 004 442332 2.

Alan Ryan (ed.), Justice: Oxford Readings in Politics and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp.200. $28.95 ISBN 019 878038 9.

Peter Vallentyne (ed.), Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.339. $39.95 ISBN 0 52139815 0.

Teaching in Higher Education

Paul Ramsden, Learning to Teach in Higher Education (London: Routledge, 1992) pp.290. £12.99 ISBN 0 415 06415 5.

Video Review

Frank RJjavec (director), Exile and The Kingdom (Lindfield, Sydney: Film Australia, 1993). Co‐produced by Rljavec and Aboriginal people from Injibandi/Ngaluma Tribes, Western Australia (screened recently by the ABC). $164.95.     

Human ecological niches and ranges during the LGM in Europe derived from an application of eco-cultural niche modeling

We apply eco-cultural niche modeling (ECNM), an heuristic approach adapted from the biodiversity sciences, to identify habitable portions of the European territory for Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), circumscribe potential geographic extents of the Solutrean and Epigravettian technocomplexes, evaluate environmental and adaptive factors that influenced their distributions, and discuss this method's potential to illuminate past human–environment interaction. Our ECNM approach employed the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Prediction (GARP) and used as input a combination of archaeological and geographic data, in conjunction with high-resolution paleoclimatic simulations for this time frame. The archaeological data consist of geographic coordinates of sites dated by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry to the LGM and attributed to the Solutrean and Epigravettian technocomplexes. The areas predicted by ECNM consistently outline the northern boundary of human presence at 22,000–20,000 cal BP. This boundary is mainly determined by climatic constraints and corresponds well to known southern limits of periglacial environments and permafrost conditions during the LGM. Differences between predicted ecological niches and known ranges of the Solutrean and Epigravettian technocomplexes are interpreted as Solutrean populations being adapted to colder and more humid environments and as reflecting influences of ecological risk on geographic distributions of cultures.     

ANIMAL HISTORY

This review reflects on animal history as a subfield of the discipline of history and presents its main arguments and future tasks. Its main goal is to identify the new research prospects and potentials proposed by the book edited by Susan Nance, The Historical Animal. These include such topics as the problem of “the animal's point of view,” animal agency (animals understood as “historical” agents and actors), the problem of identifying traces of animal actions in “anthropocentric” archives and searching for new historical sources (including animals’ testimonies). It also explores methodological difficulties, especially with the idea of the historicization of animals and the possible merger of the humanities and social sciences with the natural and life sciences. The review considers how studying animals forces scholars to rethink to its foundations history as a discipline. It claims that the most progressive proposals are coming from scholars (many of whom are historians) who advocate radical interdisciplinarity. The authors are not only interested in merging history with specific sciences (such as animal psychology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and zoology), but also question basic assumptions of the discipline: the epistemic authority claimed by historians for building knowledge of the past as well as the human epistemic authority for creating such knowledge. In this context several questions emerge: can we achieve “interspecies competence” (Erica Fudge's term) for creating a multispecies knowledge of the past? Can research on animals’ perception of change help us to develop nonhistorical approaches to the past? Can we imagine accounts of the past based on multispecies co‐authorship?     

Review symposium

Australian Political Science — Past and Present Directions

Don Aitkin (ed.), Surveys of Australian Political Science, Sydney, George Allen and Unwin, 1985, pp.xi, 365. $14.95 (paper)

Brian Head (Review Editor, Politics)     

The 1984 Australian elections: Find the women?

There was a record number of women candidates in the 1984 Federal Elections. 105 (25%) ran for the House of Representatives enlarged from 124 seats to 148. 53 (25%) ran for the 48 positions at the half Senate Elections. This resulted in increased representation for women, with 2 new MHRs (including one who moved from the Senate) and after some musical chairs one extra Senator.⁽¹⁾ These were not the numbers predicted by some politicians and commentators on the eve of the December Elections and the increase was certainly not in proportion to the greater number of candidates and seats, taking 1983 as the base year.⁽²⁾     

Preservation of bird bones: erosion versus digestion by owls

Surface damage to bird bones from pellets of three species of owls (S. aluco, A. otus and B. bubo) was compared with that of bird bones exposed to weathering and soil corrosion (Záskogo Cave in the Western Balkan Mountains, Bulgaria and Ciemna Cave, southern Poland). Scanning electron microscopy and light microscope examinations indicate that the effects of weathering of bird bones (extensive pitting and flaking away on whole bones, holes with sharp edges, depressions with rough bottoms and sharp edges of breakage) are distinguishable from those of digestion (rounding of hole edges on articular ends and sometimes on shafts, rounding of breakage). However, soil corrosion may produce similar rounding to that of digestion, which may hamper taphonomic interpretations of fossil assemblages. Two stages of weathering in bird bone are distinguished. Generally, the kind of damage done to bird bones is similar to that done to mammalian remains. Taphonomic studies of fossil bird remains should take into account a combination of features, including surface damage, fragmentation and possible chemical alterations of bone tissues. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cluster analysis of mixed-level data: Pottery provenience as an example

Provenience or “sourcing” studies of archaeological objects most commonly employ quantitative measurements of amounts of chemical constituents in the artifacts and source materials. These are then used in statistical grouping procedures known as cluster analyses. Many additional attributes of artifacts and sources, yielding lower-level qualitative data, are also of potential importance in determinations of artifact origins. These attributes are usually neglected because of the longstanding difficulty in treating “mixed-level” data, that is, combining both qualitative observations and quantitative information in a single powerful statistical procedure. A series of cluster analyses were run on two data sets consisting of archaeological pottery, using mixed-level characterization data in the CLUSTAN program with Gower's coefficient of similarity. The clustering solutions are interpretable in terms of provenience and production strategies.