A strontium and oxygen isotope assessment of a possible fourth century immigrant population in a Hampshire cemetery,southern England

The aim of the project was to test the hypothesis, using oxygen and strontium isotopes, that a group of burials in the Late Roman cemetery of Lankhills, Winchester, southern England, were migrants from the Danube region of central Europe. The method assumes that the oxygen isotope composition of immigrants from this locale would be significantly more depleted that any one British origin and that the restricted range in Sr isotope compositions produced by chalk in the overlying biosphere of southern England would discriminate between the local population and settlers from elsewhere. As a control for the immigrant group a sample of Romano-British individuals were examined to provide a comparative data set. The results showed that the majority of the individuals used to define the “local” control group plotted in a restricted field of strontium and oxygen isotope composition that was consistent with the values expected for the Hampshire area of southern England. By contrast, the “exotic”, putatively immigrant population generated a much more dispersed field including four with δ¹⁸O drinking water values of −10‰ or less, which supports a non-British origin for these individuals. The study shows that the archaeological data suggesting that there is an exotic population buried at the Lankhills cemetery is generally supported by the isotope work, although the “exotic” group appears to a rather dispersed set of individuals rather than a single population from a restricted overseas location.     

Book reviews

CHINA

EDWARD FRIEDMAN and BARRETT L. McCORMICK, eds. What if China Doesn't Democratize? Implications for War and Peace. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000. 376 pp. Index, introduction, notes, tables. US$69.95, hardcover; US$26.95, paper.

SHAOHUA HU. Explaining Chinese Democratization. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2000. 194 pp. Acknowledgments, introduction, bibliography, index. US$62.50, hardcover.

S. A. SMITH. A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai 1920–1927. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. x, 315 pp. £45.00, hardcover.

MARAM EPSTEIN. Competing Discourses: orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 197, 2002. xii, 353 pp. US$39.50, hardcover.

JAPAN, KOREA

BRIAN J. McVEIGH. Wearing Ideology: state, Schooling and Self‐Presentation in Japan. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. 231 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. US$65.00 cloth; US$19.50 paper.

ALISON McQUEEN TOKITA. Kiyomoto‐bushi. Narrative Music of the Kabuki Theatre Sen Studien zur Traditionellen Musik Japans Bd. 8. Basel. London: Barenreiter Kassel, 1999. 400pp. Preface, foreword, Japanese and English abstracts, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices. DM68.00, hardcover.

BERT EDSTROM (ed). The Japanese and Europe: images and Perceptions. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000. 283 pp. £45.00, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

SIRI GAMAGE and I. B. WATSON (eds). Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: “Pearl of the East” or the “Island of Tears”. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999. 355 pp. Rs495, hardcover; Rs295, paper.

RANABIR SAMADDAR. The Marginal Nation: transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999. 228 pp. Rs 325.

GENERAL ASIA

DAVID WALKER. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. 312 pp. $29.95, paper.

J. S. EADES, TOM GILL and HARUMI BEFU (eds). Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2000. viii, 295 pp. A$39.95/US$26.00, paper.

YAMAMOTO YOSHINOBU (ed). Globalism, Regionalism & Nationalism. Asia in Search of its Role in the 21st Century. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. xi, 260 pp. £14.99/US$34.95, paper.

DONALD DENOON. Getting Under the Skin: the Bougainville Copper Agreement and the Creation of the Panguna Mine. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000. vii, 264 pp. Maps, bibliography, appendices, index. A$39.95, hardcover.

JOANNE R. BAUER and DANIEL A. BELL (eds). The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii, 394 pp. Notes, index. £40.00, hardcover; £14.95, paper.

ANNE‐MARIE HILSDON, MARTHA MACINTYRE, VERA MACKIE and MAILA STIVENS (eds). Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia‐Pacific Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2000. ix, 240 pages. Notes, index. £60.00, hardcover.     

Book reviews

CHINA

NI ZHEN. Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: the Genesis of China's Fifth Generation, trans. Chris Berry. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 234 pp. US$54.95, hardcover; US$18.95, paper.

CHUNHOU ZHANG and C. EDWIN VAUGHAN. Mao Zedong as Poet and Revolutionary Leader: social and Historical Perspectives. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. x, 140 pp. US$60.00, hardcover.

SUSAN BLUM and LIONEL JENSEN (eds). China off Center: mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Maps, photographs. 400 pp. US$165.00, hardcover; US$64.95, paper.

JIE TANG and ANTHONYWARD. The Changing Face of Chinese Management. London: Routledge, 2003. Tables, figures, bibliography, index. 234 pp. A$66.00, paper.

FRANK DIKÖTTER. Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China, 1895–1949. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 264 pp. US$38.00, hardcover.

JAPAN AND KOREA

BOB JOHNSTONE. We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age. New York: Basic Books, 1999. xxiii, 422 pp. US$27.50, hardcover.

ANDREW C. ROSS. A Vision Betrayed: the Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. xvii, 207 pp. US$30.45, hardcover.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

PREMA CLARKE. Teaching and Learning: the Culture of Pedagogy. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001. 223 pp. Rs 450, hardcover; Rs 250, paper.

ROBERT DELIEGE. The Untouchables of India. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999. xiii, 229 pp. Tables, bibliography. £42.00, US$65.00, hardcover; £14.99, paper.

BINA GUPTA (ed). The Empirical and the Transcendental: a Fusion of Horizons. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 284 pp. US$69.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

JYOTSNA AGNIHOTRI GUPTA. New Reproductive Technologies, Women's Health and Autonomy: freedom or Dependency ? New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 704 pp. Rs 775, hardcover.

PRADEEP BARUA. The Army Officer Corps and Military Modernisation in Later Colonial India. Hull: The University of Hull Press, 1999. iii, 234 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. No price given, paper.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

KEES VAN DIJK. A Country in Despair. Indonesia between 1997 and 2000. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2001. viii, 621 pp. Plates, index. 31.80 Euros, paper.

CHEAH BOON KHENG. Malaysia: the Making of a Nation. Singapore: ISEAS, 2002. xviii, 264 pp. No price given, paper.

ROBERT L. WINZELER (ed). Indigenous Peoples and the State: politics, Land, and Ethnicity in the Malayan Peninsula and Borneo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 46, 1997. xii, 316 pp.

ANDREA WHITTAKER (ed). Women's Health in Mainland Southeast Asia. New York, London and Oxford: The Haworth Medical Press, 2002. 128 pp. No price given, paper.

JAN BREMAN and GUNAWAN WIRADI. Good Times and Bad Times in Rural Java: case Study of Socio‐economic Dynamics in Two Villages towards the End of the Twentieth Century. Leiden: Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐en Volkenkunde No. 195, KITLV Press, 2002. viii, 330 pp. Maps, tables, photos, glossary, index. US$33.00, paper.

WILLIAM CASE. Politics in Southeast Asia: democracy or Less. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002. x, 318 pp. £60.00, hardcover; £17.99, paper.

ANDREW McWILLIAM. Paths of Origin, Gates of Life: a Study of Place and Precedence in Southwest Timor. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002. xvi, 331 pp. Figures, maps, plates, orthography, glossary, bibliography, index. US$40.00, paper.

PATRICIA M. PELLY. Postcolonial Vietnam: new Histories of the National Past. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 344 pp. US$19.95, paper.

SALLY ANN NESS. Where Asia Smiles: an Ethnography of Philippine Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. xvii, 300 pp. 4 maps, 11 photographs, notes, references, index. US$55.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

JOHN KELLY and MARTHA KAPLAN. Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. vii, 243 pp. US$40.00, hardcover; US$18.00, paper.     

Future Developments in Geographical Agent‐Based Models: Challenges and Opportunities

Despite reaching a point of acceptance as a research tool across the geographical and social sciences, there remain significant methodological challenges for agent‐based models. These include recognizing and simulating emergent phenomena, agent representation, construction of behavioral rules, and calibration and validation. While advances in individual‐level data and computing power have opened up new research avenues, they have also brought with them a new set of challenges. This article reviews some of the challenges that the field has faced, the opportunities available to advance the state‐of‐the‐art, and the outlook for the field over the next decade. We argue that although agent‐based models continue to have enormous promise as a means of developing dynamic spatial simulations, the field needs to fully embrace the potential offered by approaches from machine learning to allow us to fully broaden and deepen our understanding of geographical systems.     

An irreconcilable first-place: the precarious life of tourism and heritage in a southern European historic centre

Abstract

This article discusses the ambiguous relationship between heritage tourism and everyday life in the historic centre of Naples. This area, long characterised by a lower-class residential population and intermittently considered off-limits to tourists, has over the last two decades become the focus of a burgeoning heritage tourism industry. The article adopts the idea of precariousness – understood contra conventional formulations as a condition that elicits both anxiety and emancipatory release – in order to make sense of the allure and repulsion that the historic centre exerts in tourist encounters with the city. Through three examples – a bus sightseeing tour, online responses to a New York Times article about Naples and local people’s perceptions of a pedestrianised piazza as a tourist contact zone – the article illustrates how the historic centre as a tourist destination is constituted by a mix of foreboding and excitement; where affective experience tends to trump the monumental gaze. Thinking in terms of precariousness not only underlines the contradictory role that this area plays in the local production of cultural heritage but also poses a challenge to those accounts that see in the advent of a visitor economy the inevitable ‘museumification’ and gentrification of historic centres.     

Non-destructive characterization of archeological Cu-based artifacts from the early metallurgy of southern Portugal

In this study, Monte Carlo (MC) simulations combined with energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) spectroscopy have been used to characterize non-destructively a collection of Cu-based artifacts recovered from two archeological sites in southern Portugal: (a) the Chalcolithic E.T.A.R. site of Vila Nova de Mil Fontes and (b) the Middle Bronze Age site of Quinta do Estácio 6. The metal artifacts show a multilayered structure made up of three distinct layers: (a) brownish carbonate soil-derived crust, (b) green oxidized corrosion patina, and (c) bulk metal. In order to assess the reliability of the EDXRF-based Monte Carlo simulations to reproduce the composition of the alloy substrate in archeological bronze artifacts without the need to previously remove the superficial corrosion and soil derived patinas, EDXRF analysis together with scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) was also performed on cleaned and patina-/crust-coated areas of the artifacts. Characterization of the mineralogical composition of the corrosion products in the surface patinas was further determined by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD). Results suggest that the adopted EDXRF/Monte Carlo protocol may represent a safe and fast analytical approach in the quantitative characterization of the bulk chemical composition of Cu-based metal artifacts even in the presence of fairly thick corrosion patinas and/or soil-derived encrustations at the surface of the archeological objects.     

Baghla, Ghanja and Kotia: Distinguishing the Baghla from the Suri Ghanja and the Indian Kotia

The western-Indian-Ocean ship-types known as baghla s, ghanja s and kotia s, and previously thought to have been differentiated only by detail of decoration, are shown to have significant morphological and structural differences. Some of those differences are attributed to the different technologies or traditions of shipbuilding found in Arabia, Persia and India.
© 2006 The Author