Forty Thousand Arms for a Single Emperor: From Chemical Data to the Labor Organization Behind the Bronze Arrows of the Terracotta Army

This paper explores the integration of chemical data with metric studies and spatial analyses of archaeological artifacts to investigate questions of specialization, standardization, and production organization behind large-scale technological enterprises. The main analytical focus is placed on the 40,000 bronze arrowheads recovered with the Terracotta Army in the First Emperor’s Mausoleum, Xi’an, China. Based on the identification by portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry of chemical clusters that correspond to individual metal batches, and combined with a study of their context in the tomb complex, we argue that the manufacture of arrows was organized via a cellular production model with various multi-skilled units rather than as a single production line. This system favored more adaptable and efficient logistical organization that facilitated dynamic cross-craft interaction while maintaining remarkable degrees of standardization. We discuss the use of “the batch” as an analytical category and how our method might be applied to other studies of craft organization in complex societies and imperial systems.     

Staging Politics and Activism in the Kirchner Era: Documentary and Fiction in El estudiante

This article claims that Santiago Mitre's 2011 film El estudiante stages a confrontation regarding the notions of politics and activism that polarize Argentina in the Kirchner era (and arguably Latin America in the so-called New Left in general). The mixture of documentary and fiction and the filmic images' particular combination of indexical and symbolic components unveil a tension between a practical notion that considers politics to be the result of either gestión or emotions, and an ideal notion that sees politics as a series of principles and concepts and sees activism as a morally subordinate sphere. Thus, on the one hand, the article breaks with a monolithic view of politics and activism during Kirchnerismo, unpacking a confrontation that can resignify these concepts. On the other, it helps to further understand how the mixture of documentary and fiction, which is quite typical in new Argentine cinema, can be read ideologically.     

The Malleability of Participation: The Politics of Agricultural Research under Neoliberalism in Bolivia

This article analyses how neoliberal restructuring encouraged the use of participatory methods in agricultural research in Bolivia and how, at a later stage, participatory development initiatives had to be adapted to prevent conflicts with the post‐neoliberal views of farmer organizations. The article contributes to the debate on the normalization of participatory methods in agrarian development. Engaging with Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, our analysis goes beyond interpretations of participation which conceptualize it exclusively as a technology of power to discipline subjects. Drawing on a distinction between a liberal and a neoliberal moment in the restructuring of agricultural research, we study the case of PROINPA (Foundation for the Promotion and Research of Andean Products), a national NGO that was once part of the state system for agricultural research but was then privatized. Although PROINPA employed participation mainly to enhance managerial effectiveness, it also facilitated moments of participation from below. We argue that participation designed by this type of NGO is not just ‘technical’ as PROINPA professionals would like to perceive it, nor is it simply ‘political’ as critical views on participation hold. Instead it is malleable in the sense that each actor is involved in finding a new balance between technical, economic and political considerations.     

The Icelandic medieval monastic garden - did it exist?

In the multidisciplinary project presented here, 12 known monastic grounds in Iceland were surveyed by a group of medievalists from different fields in the summers of 2009, 2010 and 2011. The aim of the survey was to increase knowledge of the Icelandic monastic garden and of the plants that were known and used there; to look for possible medieval cultural relict plants; to observe continental influence on the island; and to vitalize discussion and research. Landscape and plants were surveyed at the 12 monastic sites, and full botanical investigations made. Many of the plants found have a medieval past as medicinal and utility plants, and some of their properties may have been common knowledge to medieval Icelanders. An investigation of written sources and archaeological and archaeobotanical findings from excavated sites added to the investigators’ knowledge. So were there monastic gardens in Iceland in the Middle Ages? The answer is a rather confident yes. With all the evidence combined, the investigators were able to trace the deliberate use of medicinal, food and utility plants in the monastic contexts. Whether they were cultivated, tended in situ, gathered growing wild or imported is another matter. Continental influence was more evident than has previously been observed.     

Manufacturing in the 18th Century

The putting-out spinning of flax for merchants and weaving of kersey in house-manufactories for export are examples of new elements in wool production and manufacturing in late 18th-century Iceland. The import of luxuries also increased, and a broader group of inhabitants acquired these items from the monopoly-trade merchants. The article analyses how these elements can be understood in light of Iceland’s pre-industrial society. How did these changes become visible and have an impact on the country? Did changes in wool production and consumption signify new trends in 18th-century society, or should one interpret them as extensions of structures that already existed within what can be called the ‘Old Society’?     

On the Informational Basis of Regional Innovation Policy: From Growth to Capabilities

The shift from the linear to the innovation system-based approach has resulted in the emergence of differentiated regional innovation policy. However, certain common presumptions bind these location-specific policies together. The set of information that is used to design these policies and the set of information excluded are fairly similar. The theoretical sections of this paper provide a critical review on the informational basis of regional innovation policy by contrasting the interpretations of the welfare effects of technological change in the utilitarian tradition and in Sen's capability approach. The empirical sections analyse the correspondence of the innovation capacity and welfare (well-being) situation in a Hungarian micro-regional data set. We conclude that the conventional informational basis of innovation policy is too narrow from a welfare perspective. Not only should the differences in the innovation systems, but also the peculiarities of the region's welfare situation be considered during the design of innovation policy.     

Charcoal in alluvium of mountain streams in the Bieszczady Mountains (Polish Carpathians) as a carrier of information on the local palaeoenvironment

Fragments of charcoal are present in floodplain alluvium of the San and Strwi?? rivers in the Polish part of the Bieszczady Mountains, Polish East Carpathians. They occur as single clasts or in lenses in the basal part of fine-grained alluvium, together with unburnt wood debris, or in the middle part of the vertical sequence of the floodplain alluvium. 14 samples of charcoal from the upper courses of the San (ca. 50 km) and the Strwi?? (ca. 10 km) were dated with radiocarbon. The obtained dates fall mainly in the 15^th through 19^th century interval; only one sample is markedly older (9^th–10^th century). Taxonomic composition of the charcoal source wood was also studied and compared with that of coeval forests. Correlation of the charcoal age with the history of economic development of the studied region indicates that charcoal is of anthropogenic origin: older charcoal from intense slash-and-burn deforestation, while younger charcoal was produced by local industries.     

Philosophy as a cultural resource and medium of reflection for Hermann Weyl

In a talk given at Zurich in the late 1940s, Hermann Weyl discussed Ferdinand Gonseth's dialectical epistemology and considered it as being restricted too strictly to aspects of historical change. His experiences with post-Kantian dialectical philosophy, in particular Johann Gottlieb Fichte's derivation of the concept of space and matter, had been a stronger dialectical background for his own 1918 studies in purely infinitesimal geometry and the early geometrically unified field theory of matter (extending the Mie-Hilbert program). Although now Weyl distantiated himself from the speculative features of his youthful philosophizing and in particular from his earlier enthusiasm for Fichte, he again had deep doubts as to the cultural foundations of modern mathematical sciences and its role in material culture of high modernity. For Weyl, philosophical «reflection» was a cultural necessity he now turned towards Karl Jaspers' and Martin Heidegger's existentialism to find deeper grounds, similar to his turn towards Fichte's philosophy after World War I. The discussion in the late 1940s can be read as a kind of post-World-War-II «Nachtrag» to Weyl's more widely known philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s.     

Albert Lautman et le souci brisé du mouvement

We locate Albert Lautman's work as a sort of agent of the break of symmetry in the framework of the traditional opposition of speculative philosophy and the physico-mathematical sciences. The stakes for philosophy are, with very rare exceptions, very poorly perceived. On this level, we return to the question of Lautman's supposed «Platonism» and we confront it with its fundamental reading of Martin Heidegger. The consequences of this insertion in the heideggerian furrow are fundamental for a just restitution of this thought and this philosophy into what they retain in current thought. On the other side, that of Lautmanian entries in the field of mathematical physics, we insist on the extreme prospective alacrity of his gaze, his philosophic power which comes to reinforce this strange sensibility toward what constituted the essential part of theoretical mathematics and physics in his time. In this sense, his position occupies actually one of the nodal points of the «surrationalistic» landscape.