Pourquoi seules les villes sont-elles qualifiées d'intelligentes? Un vocabulaire du biais urbain

Since 2010, the term “smart city” has become a buzzword, used in a vague way to denote the increasing integration of information technology into city management processes and to describe the social and community processes they enable. The adjective “smart” is, however, only applied to cities: by implication non-cities (i.e., rural and peripheral regions) are not smart. In this paper we describe how the term “smart city” is used, and show that processes similar to those that make cities smart also occur outside cities. Reserving the term “smart” for cities therefore reflects a bias, similar to the bias that associates creativity and innovation with cities. As geographers we have become aware of our colonial and sexist biases: in this paper we argue that our urban bias is alive and well, and call attention to it.     

Shipwreck Evidence from Kilwa,Tanzania

This article reports on the artefacts and environment of marine ballast and pottery sites identified through inter‐tidal and underwater survey around Kilwa, Tanzania, one of the most important medieval sultanates along the east African coast. An inter‐tidal site on the limestone fringing reef on the approaches to Kilwa Kisiwani Harbour and an underwater site within the harbour have been dated from associated pottery to c.8th–10th century and the 13th–16th century respectively. The presence of exotic basalt ballast is discussed as an indicator of wreck‐sites.     

Assessing XRF for the geochemical characterization of radiolarian chert artifacts from northeastern North America

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the benefits of adopting non-destructive energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (ED-XRF) as a first-order technique to determine chert whole-rock geochemistry for archaeological sourcing. Chemical signatures for the Touladi and La Martre prehistoric quarries from the lower St. Lawrence and Gaspé Peninsula region of Quebec, Canada, are determined and serve as references to test the provenance of regional chert artifacts. Chert experimental flakes, created from quarry geological hand samples, are analyzed and used to validate the method. Archaeological flakes and tools recovered from three archaeological sites are analyzed and tested against quarry samples. Geochemical diagrams and Principal Component Analysis are used to establish artifact-quarry relationships. The effects of surface weathering on the geochemical analysis of archaeological chert artifacts are presented. Sample restoration and research avenues are discussed and proposed to further enhance the robustness of future chert geochemical data sets.