Developing,designing and managing mixed tenure estates: implementing planning gain legislation in the Republic of Ireland1

This article reports the results of research on the implementation of recent legislation which enables Irish local authorities to require that up to 20% of new residential developments must be employed for social housing and for “affordable housing” for sale at below market value to low income households. The legislation will mean that most new residential developments will include several housing tenures. A survey of the number of mixed tenure estates constructed prior to its enactment indicates that, that without this legislation, few estates of this type would have been constructed in urban areas. Furthermore case studies of existing mixed tenure estates indicate that the prospects that this legislation can be successfully implemented are good. Opposition to tenure mixing among home buyers is less than some interest groups have claimed; there is little conflict between the residents of the different tenures in these estates and social housing managers and property developers hold similar views on the most appropriate design of these estates. However successful implementation of the legislation will require some reforms to arrangements for the planning and management of the developments subject to its provisions.     

Measuring prehistoric mobility strategies based on obsidian geochemical and technological signatures in the Owens Valley,California

We compare the organization of obsidian flaked stone technologies in two different time periods at CA-INY-30, a village site in southern Owens Valley, eastern California. Previous archaeological studies suggest a reorganization in settlement patterns between the Newberry (ca. 3500–1500 BP) and Marana (ca. 650-contact) periods, from a highly mobile to a more residentially sedentary one. New geochemical data, based on laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analyses of obsidian artifacts associated with discrete house floors, support this basic settlement model, but reveal new detail in how people moved across the landscape and accessed, extracted, reduced and used obsidian resources. In the earlier Newberry period, there is no relationship between flake size and distance-to-source, and the falloff curve relating frequency of obsidian against distance is more gradual, as expected, but contrary to our expectations, source diversity is not higher. These factors suggest extremely high mobility, but also selective extraction of particular sources. Newberry obsidian may have been acquired by groups of hunters who embedded quarrying within long-distance trips to distant hunting grounds, and subsequently transported bifacial cores to base camps. By contrast, Marana patterns show strong relationships between flake size and distance from source and steeper fall-off curves, suggesting groups acquired their obsidian primarily from closer sources, likely via exchange networks. At the same time, geochemical diversity, especially among smaller resharpening flakes, is higher in the Marana period, highlighting the wide-ranging conveyance systems through which obsidian moved.     

Linguistic boundaries as barriers to exchange

Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) data are used to explore the structure of obsidian acquisition for groups in the King Range National Conservation Area of northern California. The data indicate that, contrary to a distance-decay model, obsidian from more distant sources in the Medicine Lake Highlands, dominates the obsidian found at sites in the area. Furthermore, metric data indicate a positive relationship between size and distance to source with more distant sources represented by larger flakes. It is suggested that this pattern is the result of culturally mediated exchange relations under which Athabaskan speakers concentrated trade relations with one another to the exclusion of trade with linguistic groups to the south, with longer histories in the area, such as the Pomo and Yuki. Additionally, the use of redwood dugouts on rivers in northern California and the importance of northeastern Californian obsidian in ritual practices of California Athabaskan groups may have further encouraged the use of more distant, northeastern Californian, sources.     

Evaluating protein residues on Gainey phase Paleoindian stone tools

Blood protein analysis provides a method for acquiring and interpreting archaeological data bearing on human–animal relationships. The present study makes use of cross-over immunoelectrophoresis (CIEP) and a large sample of stone tools (N = 130) from an early Paleoindian site pertaining to the Gainey phase (ca. 11,200 BP) of the Midwestern USA. Results are used to interpret toolkit organization and site structure, and indicate that hafted tools with longer use-life potentialities are more likely to be associated with preserved residues than are tools of a more ad hoc or situational character. Protein residues derived from cervids are the largest category of identified samples, a result consistent with an interpretation that these animals were important first-line resources of Gainey phase populations. The identification of caribou (Rangifer sp.) is notable. Interpretations of subsistence importance, however, must be tempered by an appreciation of the possible confounding effects of tool manufacture and maintenance in early Paleoindian contexts.     

A thirteenth-century Anglo-Jewish woman crossing boundaries: visible and invisible

In 1242, the private life of an Anglo-Jewish couple, Muriel and David of Oxford, became very public when David asked the royal curia to intervene in the Jewish court (bet din) which had either refused or stalled his divorce from the childless Muriel. The curia not only agreed to force the divorce, but used it as an excuse to ban all betai din, catching the whole Anglo-Jewish community in the growing anti-Judaism of the time. Though David married a fertile widow who bore him a son shortly before his death in 1244, Muriel lived on in growing poverty. David was the most prominent financier of his time but examining the story from Muriel's usually silent point of view allows us insights into the life of a woman in a growing academic town. Her story especially highlights how she might have interacted with both male and female Christians in her daily life as well as in seeking help with her especially feminine problem of infertility.     

The European Merger Regime

Even though the European Union's merger regime has been warmly received, three distinct critiques of European policy in this field are identified. In acknowledging these critiques, this article reviews EU merger policy and suggests ways in which it might be reformed in the future. However, in order to understand the particular form that the policy now takes, emphasis must be placed on the context within which the European model of merger control has evolved. Three factors are considered: the rationale underpinning the policy; the origins of the policy as a hard-fought compromise among the (then) 12 members of the Union; and the role played by supranational actors in the implementation and enforcement of the policy. These three European characteristics of the policy help to explain the distinctiveness of the EU model.     

Introduction: Transnational retail and the global economy

The fastest retail-system transformation in history has beensweeping across the emerging markets of East Asia, Central andEastern Europe, and Latin America over the past decade withprofound impacts on economies and societies in those regions.Conceptualized by researchers in development studies and agriculturaleconomics as the ‘supermarket revolution in developingcountries’ (see, for example, Reardon et al., 2003; Reardon,2005; Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Humphrey, 2007; Reardon etal., 2007), that transformation has been driven not only bydemand-side forces such as urbanization and income growth inthe emerging markets, but also by supply-side forces such