Sunshine and the Open Shop: Ford and Darwin in 1920s Los Angeles

By 1910, Los Angeles was already notorious as national capital of the open shop. During World War I, the Chamber of Commerce launched an ambitious campaign to attract eastern investment to new manufacturing districts southeast of downtown. With the arrival of hundreds of branch plants in the 1920s, Los Angeles' business leaders—quoting Ford and vulgarizing Darwin—embraced a sweeping vision of Urban Eugenics based on scientific factory planning, proprietary industrial suburbs, mass-produced bungalows, and a racially selected workforce. Even Mother Nature was a scab.     

Carlisle: Function and Change between the First and Seventh Centuries AD

Archaeological excavations combined with antiquarian observations shed considerable light on the evolution of Roman Carlisle. From being a fort in the northern advance under Cerialis and Agricola, Carlisle developed as a nodal hub supported by a number of activity ‘zones’. By the early third century most had become absorbed into the newly created civitas capital. The Roman town declined and stone buildings became ruinous, a process that probably commenced before the fourth century and continued until the land was taken over by the kings of Northumbria and the church in the seventh century. Scanty archaeological records for the sub- and post-Roman periods are supplemented by implications for socio-political structures drawn from texts.     

LOS ANGELES AFTER THE STORM: THE DIALECTIC OF ORDINARY DISASTER

This article weighs recent scientific evidence that the urbanization of Southern California has taken place during one of the most unusual episodes of climatic and seismic benignity in the last 3500 years. Official disaster and resource planning, moreover, has been based on record-keeping shorter than the temporal wavelengths of the most important landscape processes. Indeed, the “biblical” flood, fire, and earthquake disasters of the last three years may only be a prelude to seismic and climatic events of far greater magnitude. What will be the future of the Los Angeles area if Congress refuses to continue federal disaster subsidies?     

Governmentality, subject-building, and the discourses and practices of devolution in the UK

This paper uses a Foucauldian governmentality framework to analyse and interrogate the discourses and strategies adopted by the state and sections of the business community in their attempts to shape and influence emerging agendas of governance in post-devolution Scotland. Much of the work on governmentality has examined the ways in which governments have developed particular techniques, rationales and mechanisms to enable the functioning of governance programmes. This paper expands upon such analyses by also looking at the ways in which particular interests may use similar procedures, discourses and practices to promote their own agendas and develop new forms of resistance, contestation and challenge to emerging policy frameworks. Using the example of business interest mobilization in post-devolution Scotland, it is argued that governments may seek to mobilize defined forms of expertise and knowledge, linking them to wider political debates. This, however, creates new opportunities for interests to shape and contest the discourses and practices of government. The governmentalization of politics can, therefore, be seen as more of a dialectical process of definition and contestation than is often apparent in existing Foucault-inspired writing.     

Urban Governance Under Neoliberalism: New Labour and the Restructuring of State‐Space

Abstract: In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in‐depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll‐out) of neoliberalism. While these “new institutional fixes” are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism.     

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis on human remains from the Early Mesolithic site of La Vergne (Charente-Maritime,France)

We report here the results of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of human and faunal remains from La Vergne (Charente-Maritime, western France), a rare Early Mesolithic burial site (ca. 8500–8000 cal BC). The results for nine humans (average δ¹³C = −19.3‰; δ¹⁵N = 9.4‰) indicate a strongly terrestrial diet, dominated by animal protein, with the possibility of, at best, a slight contribution of marine-derived protein. Given lower sea-levels in the early Holocene, the site would have been some 60–80 km from the sea at the time of its use; nevertheless, contacts with the coast are shown by the presence of numerous marine shell beads in the graves. In the light of the stable isotope results, it is suggested here that such contacts most likely took the form of exchange with coastal communities whose remains now lie underwater.     

American digger and archaeology (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This editorial reflects on the nature of public archaeology. It looks at the relationship archaeologists have with popular TV, focusing in particular on the new series American digger by Spike TV, and Diggers by National Geographic, and reflects on the relationship archaeologists have with amateurs using metal detectors to uncover treasures.     

How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom

In recent times, a conventional wisdom concerning the governance of cities has emerged. It revolves around the contention that policy and planning frameworks are increasingly closed off from public and democratic accountability, in order to facilitate the pursuit of efficiency over equity objectives. The implication is that 'old' styles of governance were more open and accountable, while the 'new' seek to close off debate and streamline procedures. Yet the evidence to sustain such claims seems limited; this paper situates the policies and practices of local government in the UK within a historical perspective, and develops the contention that the claimed differences between old and new styles of governance are overdrawn. Using empirical material from two UK cities, we demonstrate that there are significant continuities in the procedures and practices of policy-makers, in terms of policy objectives, styles and modes of accountability. In this sense, greater clarity is required in terms of what constitutes both the old and new modes of local governance in the British cities.     

Collagen fingerprinting of archaeological bone and teeth remains from Domuztepe,South Eastern Turkey

We applied a recently developed method of collagen peptide mass fingerprinting for taxonomic identification in faunal remains to 111 specimens from the Neolithic site of Domuztepe in southeastern Turkey. Advances on the published technique allow us to move beyond the key domesticated fauna (sheep, goat, pig and cattle) to include non-domesticates (deer and gazelle, as well as humans). As the animal economy of Domuztepe was dominated by domestic sheep and goats, a large number of the samples tested were morphologically indistinguishable sheep/goat remains. A number of samples represented elements that provide information on age (i.e., mandibles) or sex (pelvis); thus, this represents the first major study to attempt to improve kill-off profiles using collagen fingerprinting. We also show that the collagen extracted from dentine is equally amenable to the proposed methodology as bone collagen.