WORKING WITH 'WILD ROSE I': LEAN PRODUCTION IN A GREENFIELD MILL

The Alberta Newsprint Company mill in Whitecourt, Alberta, with its state-of-the-art paper machine dubbed Wild Rose I' is one of the most efficient newsprint mills in North America. This paper documents the systematic drive by the Alberta Newsprint Company to achieve lean production by the use of flexible work practices in a greenfield mill, which began production in 1990. The analysis begins by examining the way in which the workforce for the new mill was recruited as the first step to creating a flexible workplace. Information from questionnaires completed by 96 employees, who represent approximately half the total labour force, and semi-structured interviews with managers and employees, is used to describe the extent to which the anc mill has achieved various forms of labour flexibility. The nature and extent of these new work arrangements are compared among departments within the mill. Finally, we explore the recent restructuring of wages in the mill. These events illustrate some of the unanticipated consequences arising from the implementation of lean production in a remote geographical setting.     

Pleistocene sites in southern Yemen

In the autumn months of 1992 a small team conducted an archaeological survey in southwest Yemen in search of Pleistocene sites dating back to the early colonisation of the Arabian peninsula. The survey focused on those escarpments and terraces with exposed Pleistocene sediments. The team discovered thirty-seven sites, most of them multicomponent, with sixteen having a pebble-tool industry called Mode 1 and twenty-seven with a bifacial industry called Mode 2. Both industries were represented side by side on some sites. These thirty-seven sites, together with others found in northern Arabia and eastern Yemen, contribute to the growing recognition of a Pleistocene occupation of the Arabian peninsula.     

Labour—Travail

Female outwork, according to the Tilly‐Scott thesis, is an indication of the spread of the family wage economy. Unmarried women as wage‐earners are primarily considered to be the agents of new family formation. In Hungary between 1900 and 1930, the agrarian population provided the main source of female employment both in agriculture and urban domestic service. Using standard census data, the changes in female labour force participation seem only in part to confirm the Tilly‐Scott formulation. The operation of the labour market for domestic servants in Budapest, however, underlines the definitely gendered way of how women (married and unmarried alike) qualify themselves for paid labour.     

GEOPHYSICAL SURVEY AT BODEN VEAN,CORNWALL, INCLUDING AN ASSESSMENT OF THE MICROGRAVITY TECHNIQUE FOR THE LOCATION OF SUSPECTED ARCHAEOLOGICAL VOID FEATURES*

A geophysical survey was conducted at Boden Vean, St. Anthony Meneage, Cornwall, over the site of a buried chamber thought to be the remains of a souterrain or fogou. A combination of geophysical techniques was successfully applied including an experimental microgravity survey over the location of the buried chamber itself. Magnetometer survey revealed a complex palimpsest of archaeological activity extending throughout the surrounding landscape, centred on a rectangular ditched enclosure containing the fogou. A series of gravity anomalies were recorded in the vicinity of the latter which were consistent with the collapsed section of the feature recorded by the Cornish Archaeological Unit. Further gravity anomalies suggested the presence of additional void features, possibly related to the extended passages of the fogou.     

LEAD GLAZES IN ANTIQUITY—METHODS OF PRODUCTION AND REASONS FOR USE*

Transparent high lead and tin-opacified lead-alkali glazes have been extensively used throughout Europe and the Near East from their first appearance in the Roman era and the tenth- to eleventh-century Islamic world, respectively, up until the present day. Using, to a large extent, information which is widely scattered through a diverse range of literature, the methods employed in the production of these two glaze types are first outlined and their merits are then compared with those of alkali glazes in terms of ease of preparation of the glaze mixture, ease of application of the glaze, ease of firing, cost of production, glaze-body fit and visual appearance. The principal advantages of transparent high lead glazes as compared to alkali glazes are shown to be ease of preparation and application of the glaze suspension, low susceptibility to glaze ‘crazing’ and ‘crawling’ and high, optical brilliance. Factors that influence the choice of tin-opacified lead-alkali glazes include ease of production of tin oxide by melting tin and lead metals together; a reduced risk of reduction of lead oxide to lead metal and consequent blackening of the glaze; and, again, low susceptibility to ‘crazing’ and ‘crawling’. Limits of current knowledge regarding these two glaze types and requirements for future research are outlined.     

Fourth World Conference on Women. Seeking action for equality,development, peace

There is a strong international push to secure broader rights for women. In the 20 years since the first global conference on women's issues was held in Mexico City, governments have adopted legislation which promotes equal opportunity, treatment, and rights, and women are entering the labor market in unprecedented numbers. There is evidence that investments in women have had an enormous impact upon society overall, but millions of individual women continue to face discrimination in social, economic, political, and cultural spheres. They are disproportionately denied access to positions of leadership, undereducated, underpaid, die from complications related to childbirth and unsafe abortions, and are battered and killed by men. The Fourth World Conference on Women will be held September 4-15, 1995, in Beijing, to allow participants to assess the progress and shortfalls of the past two decades and identify action to be taken into the next century. The UN-sponsored global meeting will offer governments, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and individuals the opportunity to review their efforts and renew their commitment to improve the equality and conditions of women and defend their human rights. The main objectives are to adopt a plan of action against obstacles to the advancement of women worldwide, to determine priority actions to be taken by the international community over the period 1996-2001, and to mobilize men and women at the grassroots level to achieve those objectives. A parallel nongovernmental organization forum on women will be held August 30 - September 8, also in Beijing.     

ESR Dating of the Last Interglacial Mousterian at Karaïn Cave, Southern Turkey

We have obtained ESR ages on 18 teeth from archaeological levels AH16-AH27 exposed at the east profile in compartment E at Karaïn Cave. This sequence exhibits a transition in lithic assemblage from a Classic Charentian to a Karaïn (Zagros-type) Mousterian between levels AH27 and AH25, and two calcite-cemented soils at levels AH22 and AH16 which have been interpreted as climatic warm phases. Since we found no systematic increase in tooth ages with depth, we assigned this sequence a mean early uptake (EU) age of 108 ± 23 ka and mean linear uptake (LU) age of 121 ± 27 ka, on the basis of 37 subsamples from 16 teeth. In this site, the precision of individual tooth ages suffered little from the problems associated with uranium uptake. However, this advantage was offset due to uncertainties arising from the rather inhomogeneous nature of the enclosing strata which contained various sizes of limestone blocks with intervening sediment. This led to difficulties in ascribing a precise annual gamma radiation dose to individual teeth in such a "lumpy" gamma radiation field. Considerable scattering of the individual tooth ages occurred mainly because the annual gamma dose comprised greater than 50% of the total annual dose to the individual teeth. On the basis of the ESR dating results, we infer that deposition of the two different lithic assemblages and both the penultimate and the final climatic warm phases at Karaïn probably occurred during oxygen isotope stage 5. We also conclude that these lithic assemblages are significantly different than contemporaneous Levantine Mousterian industries which occur about 700 km to the southeast.