Welsh Indians and savage Scots: History,antiquarianism, and Indian languages in 18th-century Britain

This paper compares late eighteenth-century claims for the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian and for the existence of Welsh Indians. It shows that although both claims were supported in part by appeals to similarities between Celtic and American Indian languages, the appeals in each case were very different. On the one hand, the Edinburgh literati who supported Ossian's authenticity focused on expressive structures shared by all primitive societies. On the other hand, radically Protestant antiquarians and philologists focused on lexical similarities that they argued demonstrate a genetic link between certain American Indians and the Welsh. The paper uses this fundamental difference underlying a superficial similarity, to explore in greater detail the distinction between philosophical historians among the Edinburgh literati, who were religiously moderate, politically conservative, and promoted Scotland's integration into a modern, polite, commercial and English-speaking empire, and the Welsh antiquarians, who were religious and political radicals and whose interest in the Welsh Indians reflected and reinforced their attempts to resurrect a distant golden age of Celtic Britain.

pe’nguin. (1) A bird. This bird was found with this name, as is supposed, by the first discoverers of America; and penguin signifying in Welsh a white head, and the head of this fowl being white, it has been imagined, that America was peopled from Wales …     

Modern witnesses: foreign correspondents, geopolitical vision, and the First World War

The First World War was the first modern, mediated conflict. In this paper I argue that British correspondents on the Western front attempting to accurately witness the war encountered a crisis of representation and visuality. They occupied a particularly unstable position between the many sites and points of view within a cubist landscape of shattered geographies and unstable boundaries. Their writings, though rich in masculinist and nationalistic accounts of heroism, also contain a newer perspective characterized by the failure to fit these older narratives into the inhuman, incomprehensible spaces of modern war.     

Smog Reduction's Impact on California County Growth

Over the last twenty years, environmental regulation has sharply reduced pollution levels in the Los Angeles region. Population growth has soared in the Los Angeles suburbs that have experienced the largest pollution reductions. This paper posits that regulation has increased local quality of life which has encouraged in-migration. I explore alternative explanations for this growth.     

Covert Control? Indigenous Agency in Edward Winslow Gifford’s Fijian Archaeological Expedition of 1947

ABSTRACT

The story of University of California archaeologist Edward Winslow Gifford’s 1947 Fijian fieldwork has been told up to now as a classic piece of colonial fieldwork with aims and direction dictated by the foreign specialist. But examination of the extensive Gifford archive held in the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and its Hearst Museum and a bit of ‘reading against the grain’ reveal a quite different story. Indigenous agency played a major, probably even decisive, role in how the expedition unfolded. The value of archival research into the history of archaeology, and particularly its contribution to the teaching of archaeological practice today, is significant in revealing ‘hidden histories’ that make a difference.     

Collaborative Governance of Climate Change Adaptation Across Spatial and Institutional Scales

We examine two related questions that are key for understanding collaborative outcomes in complex governance systems. The first is the extent to which collaboration among policy actors depends upon their joint participation in policy forums. The second is how the scales at which these forums operate conditionally affect the likelihood of collaboration. We address these questions using data from a recent survey on actors’ collaborative interactions as well as their participation in climate change adaptation policy forums in the Lake Victoria region in East Africa. Exponential random graph models show that actors are more likely to collaborate if they jointly participate in policy forums. However, this effect weakens at progressively higher spatial levels at which forums operate. Similarly, collaboration is less likely among actors jointly participating in forums that sponsor decision making at the higher collective choice level rather than lower operational choice level. While policy forums may catalyze collaboration, our findings suggest that their capacity to do so may be subject to scale‐dependent transaction costs of political contracting.     

Core Use-Life Distributions in Lithic Assemblages as a Means for Reconstructing Behavioral Patterns

Artifacts with varying use-lives have different discard rates and hence are represented unequally among archaeological assemblages. As such, the ability to gauge the use-lives of artifacts is important for understanding the formation of archaeological assemblage variability. In lithic artifacts, use-life can be expressed as the extraction of utility, or work potential, from existing stone volume. Using experimental data and generalized linear modeling, this study develops models of artifact use-life on cores in the form of reduction intensity. We then apply these models to two archaeological case studies to (a) reconstruct the reduction intensities of archaeological cores and (b) investigate the survivorship curves of these archaeological cores across the reduction continuum using the Weibull function. Results indicate variation in core reduction and maintenance with respect to raw material properties and place use history and implicate evolutionary differences between Early Stone Age hominins and Holocene modern humans.