How Road Traffic Injuries Affect Household Welfare in Cambodia Using the Millennium Development Goals Benchmarks

This paper reveals the welfare costs of traffic injuries in Cambodia at the beginning of a decade in which greater research and resources will be focused on road safety. The results quantify how road traffic injuries affect progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) using survey data from 100 Cambodian households. The median age of the police-reported casualties was 28 years and 68 per cent were male. In terms of poverty (MDG1), injuries resulted in a 21 per cent loss of income for the 542 household residents. The poorest households, and those with a seriously injured resident, were worst affected. Primary education (MDG2) drop-out rates were eight times the province average. The gender (MDG3) income gap widened by 28 per cent, whilewomen bore 88 per cent of the burden of care for the injured. In terms of child health and mortality (MDG4), 31 per cent of respondents reported adeterioration in child health, while 24 per cent of respondents reported a deterioration in maternal health (MDG5). The households reported rates of priority diseases (MDG6) at twice the national average. Environment (MDG7) outcomes included increased wood fuel use and stagnation in improving drinking water access, with no apparent development partnership (MDG8) to address the negative welfare impacts of road traffic injury.     

Contemporary Histories of the Conflict in Solomon Islands

Happy Isles in Crisis. The historical causes for a failing state in Solomon Islands 1998–2004. Australian National University, Canberra: Asia Pacific Press 2004. Pp: xi + 265. By Clive Moore . Price A$35 The Manipulation of Custom. From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands Australian National University, Canberra: Pandanus Books RSPAS 2004. Pp: 262. By Jon Fraenkel . Price: $34.95     

Frontier engineering: from the globe to the body in the Cold War Arctic

The dual themes of sovereignty and wilderness have come to define, or at least dominate, historical discussions of the North American Arctic. This paper argues that neither adequately captures the role of the Arctic during the early Cold War, a period of unprecedented interest in northern landscapes. Political and environmental approaches, with their national undertones, were incorporated into a dominant narrative whose implications were far less abstract: the Arctic became a frontier for military science, both imaginatively and materially. Civilian institutions with military affiliations emerged to advocate for additional Arctic research in the natural and social sciences, whereas Canadian and American military agencies established laboratories and training centres, constructed complex defence networks and staged numerous military exercises across Arctic spaces, operations which tested the performance of both humans and machines. These projects actively engineered Arctic terrain in the name of scholarly advancement and military necessity. If the Cold War Arctic is to be understood geographically, then the national scale must be placed next to the broader views of geopolitics and scientific inquiry but also next to the finer perspectives of military bodies moving across 'hostile' terrain.     

Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-masculinity

Our article builds upon the insights of recent critical geographic inquiry that has examined the involvement of geography in a multitude of power relations, and in particular the processes of European imperialism and colonisation. The focus of this article, however, is the involvement of the discipline of geography in the constitution and maintenance of a hetero-masculine nationalist discourse. We focus our analysis on articles published in the New Zealand Geographer, but suggest that such hetero-masculine nationalist discourse exists also in the works of geographers writing about other nation-spaces. Our purpose is to draw geographers' attention to the constitutive effects of banal practices in geographic scholarship. We draw upon Michael Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to argue that the articulation of nationalist narratives is an endemic feature of the contemporary nation/state, and one that forms a particular discursive order that situates author, text and reader in an assumed national and hetero-masculine landscape.     

Archaeology of a Naval Battlefield: H. L. Hunley and USS Housatonic

The American Civil War shipwrecks H. L. Hunley and USS Housatonic have been the focus of intensive archaeological investigations since the discovery of Hunley in 1995. H. L. Hunley , the world's first successful combat submarine, sank the Union blockader USS Housatonic in 1864, but sank immediately afterwards. In work done prior to the recovery of Hunley in 2000, site-formation processes for both vessels were a primary research focus—a necessary precursor to identifying battlefield behaviour. This paper presents research on the Hunley / Housatonic Naval Engagement Site, where both wrecks are treated as complementary components of a single battlefield site.
© 2006 The Authors     

True blue: the connection between colour and loyalty in the later Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between the colour blue and the virtue of loyalty during the later Middle Ages. While it may not have been a colour with powerful symbolic resonances earlier in the medieval epoch, blue came to be regarded as increasingly prestigious as the period progressed. References to its association with loyalty and its concomitant virtues appear on the Continent and found their way to England. After briefly outlining the significance of blue in the medieval period, the paper examines this connection between colour and virtue in literature, heraldic treatises and works of art, arguing that it became generally accepted, although not all agreed on the association.     

Virtual zooarchaeology: building a web-based reference collection of northern vertebrates for archaeofaunal research and education

Osteological reference collections are a crucial tool in archaeofaunal analysis, but few are comprehensive; most lack a broad range of taxa or multiple individuals per taxon. This problem is especially prominent in arctic zooarchaeology, where difficulty in obtaining, transporting, and processing northern taxa has led to a dearth of appropriate reference collections. The Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project, or VZAP, seeks to develop a comprehensive virtual comparative assemblage for the skeletons of northern vertebrates. VZAP (http://vzap.iri.isu.edu) is designed to assist with identifications in the lab or field and provides significant educational value, for both classroom demonstration and personal consultation. The VZAP website presents high-resolution digital photographs and 3D models of skeletal elements via an intuitive graphical user interface, designed to mimic the visual experience of working with a real comparative collection. This custom-built interface, the Dynamic Image Engine, represents a new way to present heritage media in an interactive and engaging format. VZAP also implements unique 3D scanning protocols to increase the realism of 3D models, and delivers them on a platform that allows for point to point measurements, cross-sections, morphological labels, and anatomical orientations.