Multilateral cooperation and the prevention of nuclear terrorism: pragmatism over idealism

The second Nuclear Security Summit on 26–27 March 2012 in Seoul provides an important opportunity to gauge international consensus on the threat posed by nuclear terrorism, and to evaluate progress in the development of multilateral cooperative efforts to prevent it. However, the ‘nuclear security’ agenda has long been complicated by the complexity of the issues it covers and diverging perceptions of the risks and threats in this area. Further complications involve the politics that have constrained the development of formal cooperative approaches and the patchwork nature of the existing multilateral policy architecture. While the Summit is unlikely to go very far in mitigating these complications, it will nonetheless provide impetus to multilateral efforts to strengthen the international regulative framework in this area and, in the process, to develop the norm of nuclear security. Beyond Seoul several priorities stand out. Nuclear safety and nuclear security need to be approached in a more balanced way by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and it must also be allowed to adopt a more joined‐up, and less stove‐piped, approach to nuclear governance across the safeguards, safety and security fields. Developing countries that are concerned by growing demands for strengthened nuclear security arrangements need greater reassurance from those proposing them that these will not undermine their rights under the Nuclear Non‐Proliferation Treaty to pursue civil applications of nuclear energy. Greater progress also needs to be made in universalizing the key nuclear security conventions and their amendments, and attention should be given to how momentum and high‐level political buy‐in to the nuclear security agenda can be maintained in the future both as part of, and beyond, the Nuclear Security Summit process.     

Decline in firing technology or poorer fuel resources? High-temperature thermoluminescence (HTTL) archaeothermometry of Neolithic ceramics from Pool,Sanday, Orkney

The Neolithic ceramic assemblage from the multi-period coastal settlement at Pool on the island of Sanday, Orkney is unique because it stratigraphically spans both the earlier round-based (including possible Unstan bowls) and later flat-based (‘Grooved Ware’) traditions. High-temperature thermoluminescence (HTTL) analysis objectively demonstrates that ceramics from the earliest Neolithic layers have been consistently better fired compared to examples from later layers. We suggest two interpretations of these data: either firing technology declined with changing social structures and/or adoption of a different ceramic tradition or that there was greater pressure on fuel resource and management in the later Neolithic. Paleoenvironmental and chronological evidence indicate climatic deterioration in the later Neolithic, which adds further support to an interpretation of a poorer fuel resource at that time. In addition to studies of the HTTL signal, analysis of the ambient temperature modification of the TL signal has potential to support or evaluate dating evidence, and is readily applicable to optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) age data.     

Power,ideology and economy cultural policy in China

Abstract: Relying on the institutionalist framework, much literature conflating the structures of public action in the field of culture has been produced (e.g. papers concerning the targets of cultural administrations, levels of action, ways of financing cultural policies). In this context, cultural institutions have been considered as something given, but the question of their origins and shape has hardly ever been at stake. In other words, institutionalist theories make comparisons possible, but they deny any form of inner life to cultural administrations. It allows one to make static comparisons, but it fails to explain why national cultural administrations differ from each other. Hermeneutic philosophy mixed with historical institutionalism could then be used to refine traditional models. My point will be made with references to the French and American case-studies.     

Saami Circular Sacrificial Sites in Northern Coastal Sweden

Abstract

Saami circular sacrificial sites have been known for many years in northern Norway and northern interior Sweden. Oral or written sources regarding their origins are nevertheless lacking outside reindeer-herding areas. These circular features have now been documented in Swedish Bothnian coastal environments together with site complexes at elevations, suggesting that they were used during the Iron Age, medieval and historic periods. It is argued that these coastal features, stone circles or ring-shaped enclosures, are Saami sacrificial sites of the same character as documented in North Norway and in the mountains and the forest lands of northern Sweden.     

East Africa and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean world

The Indian Ocean has long been a forum for contact, trade and the transfer of goods, technologies and ideas between geographically distant groups of people. Another, less studied, outcome of expanding maritime connectivity in the region is the translocation of a range of species of plants and animals, both domestic and wild. A significant number of these translocations can now be seen to involve Africa, either providing or receiving species, suggesting that Africa’s role in the emergence of an increasingly connected Indian Ocean world deserves more systematic consideration. While the earliest international contacts with the East African coast remain poorly understood, in part due to a paucity of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological studies, some evidence for early African coastal activity is provided by the discovery of early hunter-gatherer sites on offshore islands, and, possibly, by the translocation of wild animals among these islands, and between them and the mainland. From the seventh century, however, clear evidence for participation in the Indian Ocean world emerges, in the form of a range of introduced species, including commensal and domestic animals, and agricultural crops. New genetic studies demonstrate that the flow of species to the coast is complex, with more than one source frequently indicated. The East African coast and Madagascar appear to have been significant centres of genetic admixture, drawing upon Southeast Asian, South Asian and Middle Eastern genetic varieties, and sometimes yielding unique hybrid species. The biological patterns reflect a deeply networked trade and contact situation, and support East Africa’s key role in the events and transformations of the early Indian Ocean world.     

Department of Neurosurgery,Seoul National University College of Medicine: 50th Anniversary (1957–2007) by History Compilation Committee (Chair: Young Seob Chung)

The public opinion and the scientific community incorrectly believe that the English term “lunatic” was originally related only to insanity, but it also referred to epileptic people. The aim of this article is to clarify the original meaning of the English word “lunatic” by analyzing the evolution of the relationship between psychiatric and neurological diseases and by pointing out the influence of the moon in the history of medicine, in popular traditions, and in English literature. The article also contains a detailed and accurate review of the modern scientific literature on the relationship between moon and epilepsy/psychiatric disorders.     

Domestic Spaces as Public Places: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study of Houses, Gender, and Politics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

In an ethnoarchaeological case study, we take a gendered perspective on the house as a locus of political life in Conambo, a village of about 200 Achuar- and Quichua-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this small-scale society, women and men engage actively in political practice in independent yet complementary ways, and the domestic context is a place where political life is conducted on a daily basis. In this article, the house is examined as a politicized context at three scales of materiality: the organization of settlement in the community, the spatial relationships in the house, and the scale of painted designs on pottery bowls used in the house. At each scale, we identify material correlates of women's and men's participation. Our goal is to bring attention to potential archaeological correlates of women's political involvement in past societies, to question assumptions about women's political lives and domestic spaces, and to expand the ways in which anthropological archaeology may contribute to understanding cross-cultural variation in women's and men's domains of power.