Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first‐wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second‐wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre‐modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre‐modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product – something that is not static but continually re‐created and sometimes contested – we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non‐western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them.     

Exploring patterns of movement suspension in pedestrian mobility

One of the main tasks in analyzing pedestrian movement is to detect places where pedestrians stop, as those places usually are associated with specific human activities, and they can allow us to understand pedestrian movement behavior. Very few approaches have been proposed to detect the locations of stops in positioning data sets, and they often are based on selecting the location of candidate stops as well as potential spatial and temporal thresholds according to different application requirements. However, these approaches are not suitable for analyzing the slow movement of pedestrians where the inaccuracy of a nondifferential global positioning system commonly used for movement tracking is so significant that it can hinder the selection of adequate thresholds. In this article, we propose an exploratory statistical approach to detect patterns of movement suspension using a local indicator of spatial association (LISA) in a vector space representation. Two different positioning data sets are used to evaluate our approach in terms of exploring movement suspension patterns that can be related to different landscapes: players of an urban outdoor mobile game and visitors of a natural park. The results of both experiments show that patterns of movement suspension were located at places such as checkpoints in the game and different attractions and facilities in the park. Based on these results, we conclude that using LISA is a reliable approach for exploring movement suspension patterns that represent the places where the movement of pedestrians is temporally suspended by physical restrictions (e.g., checkpoints of a mobile game and the route choosing points of a park).     

One Landscape, Many Tenants: Uncovering Multiple Claims, Visions and Meanings on the Theban Necropolis

The archaeology of the Theban Necropolis is well documented. Under represented in the literature are the studies which deal with the meaning of the site to the multitude of contemporary users who interact with the heritage landscape and with each other in the designated archaeological zone. This article will investigate how different stakeholders engage with the heritage ‘space’ and invest it with multiple meanings. By exploring the areas of agreement, difference and contradiction, we hope to show how contemporary experiences and future visions for the management of global heritage at the Theban Necropolis can be analogous and simultaneously worlds apart.     

Spatial distribution of innovation networks,technological competencies and degree of novelty in emerging economy firms

This paper analyses the relationship of the accumulation of technological competencies at the firm level, the spatial distribution of the firm's innovation networks and the degree of novelty of product innovation. Firm-based primary data collected in two innovative regions in emerging economies are used to predict higher degrees of novelty in emerging economy firms. Similarly to advanced economy firms, the results show that international linkages are associated with higher degrees of novelty. However, new-to-the-world innovation in emerging country firms is fundamentally externally driven, suggesting that international linkages seem to be a compensating mechanism for the initially lower technological capabilities rather than a complementary source of knowledge.     

Fishing gear from the Roman period in the Netherlands: An overview

This paper presents an overview of fishing gear recovered from Roman period sites in the Netherlands. Fish hooks, line sinkers, net sinkers, floaters, wickerwork fish traps, canoes with live wells and fish tanks have been identified. These artefacts provide additional insight into the widespread practice of fishing and thus of fish consumption during this time period and is a valuable addition to research on archaeological fish bone remains.     

The Archaeology of South Asian Cities

Urbanism in the Indian subcontinent occurred in three distinct time periods in which cultural cohesion over large regions is archaeologically demonstrated through the architecture and artifacts of social, ritual, and economic activity. In the Indus (2500–1900 B.C.) and Early Historic (3rd century B.C. to 4th century A.D.) periods, cities were not necessarily tied to political territories or guided by strong political leaders, but by the Medieval period (after the 9th century A.D.), urban zones were the base for political growth, warfare, and aggrandizement. The comparison of these three eras is undertaken within a framework for defining cities that balances quantitative criteria such as population size and areal extent with two types of qualitative criteria: internal specialization on the basis of materials found within archaeological sites, and external specialization on the basis of data recovered through regional analysis. Cities from the three eras also are evaluated from the perspective of the ordinary inhabitant through the examination of the social, religious, and economic factors that prompted and rewarded urban residence. While the Indus and Early Historic cities were attractive because of the networks of opportunity found there, Medieval cities additionally benefitted from a “push” factor as ordinary inhabitants allied themselves to urban areas in times of political stress and uncertainty.

La Espiral Cave (Cuba): Guano and signs of Plant Substances Used as Paint Ingredients

At La Espiral cave, located in Bahia Honda municipality (Artemisa province, Cuba), there are several pictographs, including two of particular importance due to the design used: one of concentric circles and another of a spiral. We analyzed the pigments and binders used in one of these pictographs. The chemical ingredients of the paint are considered in this article, as well as the use of bat guano as a major pigment compound. The apparent presence of ellagic acid, ellagitannin, or anthocyanins would strengthen the hypothesis that artists used vegetable protein as a paint binder or solvent.     

Diet,Geography and Drinking Water in Polynesia: Microfossil Research from Archaeological Human Dental Calculus,Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Microfossil analysis of human dental calculus provides consumption‐specific and archaeologically relevant data for evaluating diet and subsistence in past populations. Calculus was extracted from 114 teeth representing 104 unique individuals from a late 16^th to early 18^th century skeletal series on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to address questions of human–environment interactions and possible dietary preference. Scanning electron microscopy was used in lieu of optical microscopy for its superior depth of field and resolution of surface detail. The calculus microfossil recovery produced 16,377 total biogenic silica microfossils: 4733 phytoliths and 11,644 diatoms. The majority of phytoliths correspond with the Arecaceae or palm family (n = 4,456) and the minority corresponds to the Poaceae or grass family (n = 277). Because of the relatively large sample size, we were able to test hypotheses related to age cohort, sex, dental element and geographic region. Results indicate no significant difference in phytolith or diatom recovery based on age cohort or sex. The high frequency and proportion of Arecaceae phytoliths found in calculus extracted from the anterior dentition suggests consumption of soft or cooked foods containing palm phytoliths and the high frequency of diatoms recovered from the southern part of the island argue for different sources of drinking water. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The “Coptic” textiles of the “Museo Egizio” in Torino (Italy): a focus on dyes through a multi-technique approach

The Coptic textile collection of the Museo Egizio in Torino (Italy) has been the object of a broad project aimed at investigating the production techniques, at documenting the conservation state and at reconsidering the attributed age. The collection was also analysed by non-invasive and micro-invasive techniques with the aim of detecting the dyes that have been employed to obtain the colours, in order to complete the set of technological information available for each textile. The data collected in the present work have been compared with published results from other Coptic textile collections, with the aim of highlighting a possible link between the age of the textile and the dyes that were employed. Moreover, the combined use of spectroscopic and chromatographic techniques allowed us to compare the results for the non-invasive and the micro-invasive approaches and to go deeper into the dyeing technology by detecting unexpected combinations of dyes. In particular, the use of a double dyeing with madder and Indian lac dye was revealed in some Roman-Byzantine and Byzantine textiles from the collection.