Best practices for measuring community resources across Canada: A comparison of coding classifications

Social scientists, geographers, criminologists, and health scientists are often tasked with finding data to best capture the impact of “community context” on individual outcomes, including residential services, physical resources, and social institutions. One outlet for such data in Canada is Digital Map Technologies Inc. (DMTI) Spatial, which offers a national repository of over one million businesses and recreational points of interest. The database is generated through CanMap Streetfiles, which includes geocodes of each point's precise location. These data are available to researchers from their university data library and Esri Canada, but primarily available to private sector and government markets. That said, the goal of the current paper is to encourage researchers to access this rich yet under-utilized data source. Each service, business, or resource in the DMTI Spatial database is assigned to a respective category using Standard Industrial Classification codes and North American Industrial Classification System codes. It is not clear, however, which is the more reliable coding criteria. We provide an overview of our review of DMTI Spatial data and take-away suggestions for using this valuable resource for future research on meso-level residential markers.     

House Societies in the Ancient Mediterranean (2000–500 BC)

House societies have become popular with archaeologists in recent years, due to (among other things) their conspicuous material basis (wealth, heirlooms and the houses themselves). As yet, however, most archaeological studies have focused only on individual societies. In this article, we offer a comparative and long-term approach to the phenomenon, using as case studies the Bronze Age and Iron Age communities of the Levant, the Aegean and the central Mediterranean. We describe the elements that define them as house societies and examine their evolution through time. We follow a strictly Lévi-Straussian definition of the house that prevents the concept from losing heuristic power. Using this definition, we consider that houses are to be found in ranked societies without centralization and in complex agropastoral systems, like those of the Mediterranean, where agricultural soil is scarce and liable to be monopolized. We argue that the house emerges in these competitive contexts as an institution to control land and retain patrimony undivided. Through a combination of archaeological and written sources, we try to demonstrate that it is possible to document several strategies used by house societies to acquire and retain power and wealth, including dowry, levirate, a bilateral system of marriage alliances, ancestor cults, specific architectures and house treasures. The case studies addressed here offer good comparative material for assessing similar processes elsewhere. At the same time, we argue that the Mediterranean area developed a particular ideology, that of the shepherd ruler, that was essential to legitimate the house.