Glaze-paints,technological knowledge,and ceramic specialization in the fourteenth-century Pueblo Southwest

The advent of glaze-painted ceramics by Ancestral Pueblo peoples in the US Southwest occurred during an important period of cultural change. In east-central Arizona, potters used glaze-paints to decorate a striking, representational-style pottery during the early fourteenth-century AD. We evaluate the possibility that these vessels were manufactured by emergent specialists who possessed crafting-knowledge that was not widely shared with others in their communities. Time of flight-laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (TOF-LA-ICP-MS) was used to characterize the composition of a large sample of red ware sherds from sites in the Silver Creek area. This analytical approach precisely measures the chemical composition of paints, which can then be used to model ancient technological “recipes.” Our study highlights the complexities of craft production in small-scale societies and the utility of practice-based versus typological approaches to specialization.     

THE SPATIALITIES OF ACTUALLY EXISTING NEOLIBERALISM IN GLASGOW, 1977 TO PRESENT

Resisting the temptation to view the neoliberalization of urban policy as unidirectional, pure and hegemonic, this article sets out to make sense of the biography of the process in one city in particular, Glasgow. It attempts to organize, marshall and discipline existing literature on the city's local economic, planning and welfare policies, so as to offer a longitudinal reading of Glasgow's encounter with neoliberal reform across the period 1977 to the present. The article questions whether Glasgow's new political‐economic dispensation is capable of stabilizing local capitalist social relations and securing a new local growth trajectory. Space emerges as a critical part of the story. Neoliberalism has interlaced with historical structures, ideologies and policies to produce a range of new hybrid and mutant socio‐spatial formations and because it does not amount to a pure and coordinated project these socio‐spatial formations contradict and collide as often as they reinforce. Precisely because of the contingent and complicated spatialities it deposits, neoliberalism will continue to struggle to secure a regulatory framework capable of stabilizing local accumulation indefinitely.     

William Laud and the Parliamentary Politics of 1628–9

This article seeks to highlight the important part played by Bishop William Laud in the counsels of Charles I in the 1620s, and, in particular, his involvement in the parliamentary sessions of 1628 and 1629. Having demonstrated his usefulness as a parliamentary spokesman for the crown in the parliaments of 1625 and 1626, and having been promoted to the privy council, the parliament of 1628–9 witnessed the height of Laud's parliamentary engagement. His key role as a writer of memoranda and speeches both for the duke of Buckingham and for Charles himself demonstrate the weight accorded to his political views. These views, reflected in his writings, sermons and his contributions to parliamentary debate, embody a dislike of parliamentary bargaining, a firm commitment to uphold the royal prerogative, particularly in matters of taxation, and a determination to resist encroachments upon it by the common lawyers, whether by the confirmation of Magna Carta or in the form of the Petition of Right. The expression of these views in such an emphatic fashion would come back to bite him, in the parliamentary attacks on him in 1629, but above all at his trial in 1644. Nevertheless, his articulation of them suggests that Laud himself was a more considered political thinker, and a more active politician, than he has hitherto been given credit for, and that there were ideas around in influential conciliar circles that do not appear to reflect the ‘anti‐absolutist’ consensus that, it is widely claimed, prevailed within the early Stuart political nation.     

Points and prey: a quantitative test of the hypothesis that prey size influences early Paleoindian projectile point form

Understanding the causes of variation within and between projectile point types is an important task for Paleoindian archaeologists since they rely heavily on points to investigate such things as settlement dynamics and hunting practices. One long-held explanation for the variation in early Paleoindian point form is that prey size influenced the size and shape of projectile points. The study reported here evaluated this hypothesis with standard and geometric morphometric data recorded on Clovis and Folsom points from the Southern Plains and Southwest that are associated with mammoth or bison remains. Points used to hunt mammoth were found to be larger and of a different shape than points used to hunt bison, which supports the hypothesis. However, when both point type and prey size were taken into account, the results ran counter to predictions. Potential explanations for this discrepancy are discussed.     

Ethical predicaments: Advocating security for mobile pastoralists in weak states (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Some have argued that anthropologists have a moral responsibility to advocate on behalf of research subjects suffering from structural and other forms of violence. However, advocacy is not without its problems; action taken on behalf of one's research subjects may have adverse consequences for others. This is our current predicament. Violence and insecurity have always been major themes in our work with mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, who have suffered deadly cattle raids for decades. More recently, pastoralists have been subject to child kidnappings and extortion by criminal gangs. As researchers working with these people, we have repeatedly informed development projects, NGOs and government authorities about these and other insecurity problems. The difficulty is that the government response, in particular the use of paramilitary forces, has created another kind of insecurity which has adverse effects on others.     

Monuments, Memory and Marginalisation in Adelaide's Prince Henry Gardens

Social and cultural dominance is (re)produced in the landscape by the exclusion or marginalisation of subordinate and minority groups. This paper illustrates the long-standing and ongoing exclusion of representations of indigeneity in and around Prince Henry Gardens, part of one of the most significant cultural and memorial sites in South Australia. Prince Henry Gardens is home to a large number of monuments and memorials that commemorate almost solely non-indigenous people and events. This is a selective and deliberate landscape of the dominant culture. It confirms a legacy of indigenous dispossession and is symbolic of ongoing marginalisation. While there have been recent compensatory initiatives by state and city agencies to create landscapes of reconciliation through symbolic gestures such as renaming parkland areas, these are argued to be contentious. They associate indigeneity with the city's margins, with violent places and public drunkenness, and perpetuate problematic associations between ‘real’ indigeneity and nature. The paper concludes with some ideas for new memorial landscapes intended to help construct a postcolonial Australian city.