Rosner,Erhard, Guide Signs of the Empire： Programmatic Place Names in the History of China （in German）

Successive dynasties used to emblazon their respective political agendas on the Chinese landscape by bestowing programmatic names on the towns and cities of their empire. Depending on the ruling elites＇ propagandistic aims, these messages could be allusive or blunt, bellicose or pacific, deprecating towards outsiders or culturally inclusive.     

Opportunities and constraints for intensive agriculture in the Hawaiian archipelago prior to European contact

Intensive agricultural systems interact strongly and reciprocally with features of the lands they occupy, and with features of the societies that they support. We modeled the distribution of two forms of pre-European contact intensive agriculture – irrigated pondfields and rain-fed dryland systems – across the Hawaiian archipelago using a GIS approach based on climate, hydrology, topography, substrate age, and soil fertility. Model results closely match the archaeological evidence in defined locations. On a broader scale, we calculate that the youngest island, Hawai'i, could have supported 572 km² of intensive agriculture, 97% as rain-fed dryland field systems, while Kaua'i, the oldest island, could have supported 58 km², all as irrigated wetland systems. Irrigated systems have higher, more reliable yields and lower labor requirements than rain-fed dryland systems, so the total potential yield from Kaua'i (49k metric tons) was almost half that of Hawai'i (97k metric tons), although Kaua'i systems required only 0.05 of the agricultural labor (8400 workers, versus 165,000 on Hawai'i) to produce the crops. We conclude that environmental constraints to intensive agriculture across the archipelago created asymmetric production efficiencies, and therefore varying potentials for agricultural surplus. The implications both for the emergence of complex sociopolitical formations and for anthropogenic transformation of Hawaiian ecosystems are substantial.     

An Analysis of Actual and Potential Clustering Structures,Stakeholder Governance Activities and Cross-locality Linkages in the Welsh Aerospace Industry

Commercial aerospace is a key sector in the Welsh economy, engaged in complex overlapping activities from aircraft manufacture (AM), through maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), to research, development and training (RDT). Defining and operationalizing a framework for analysis using both qualitative and quantitative data, this paper examines the actual and potential roles of the relationships in Wales between commercial aerospace firms, industry, government and institutional stakeholders, at both local and non-local levels. Concentrations of manufacturing in North Wales, and MRO in South Wales along with RDT operate as distinct constituent parts of aerospace clusters in neighbouring regions of England and beyond. The results, however, highlight links between the location of AM, MRO and RDT in Wales, emphasizing their (partially) geographically symbiotic relationships. Moreover, there are key inter-linkages that need consideration if the long-term health of Welsh aerospace is to be secured. Simultaneously, all three sub-sectors in Wales exhibit weaknesses which could render them vulnerable to greater external competition, particularly from developing countries. This emphasizes a need to alter the current governance arrangements and utilize different clustering characteristics that currently exist, with government, as a major sponsor of the industry, having a strong (but changing) role to play in encouraging these more balanced industry structures and decision-making processes.     

Prehistoric iron production technologies in the Upper Thai-Malay Peninsula: metallography and slag inclusion analyses of iron artefacts from Khao Sam Kaeo and Phu Khao Thong

This article presents a preliminary attempt to characterise Upper Thai-Malay Peninsula prehistoric iron technologies based on assemblages from two recently excavated coastal sites: Khao Sam Kaeo and Phu Khao Thong. These are the earliest known sites involved in the early trans-Asian exchange that connected the eastern Indian Ocean to the South China Sea from the mid-first millennium bc. It is from this period that iron assemblages start appearing at both continental and insular Southeast Asian sites. Three models have been offered confronting an indigenous vs. Chinese or South Asian impetus for the introduction of iron metallurgy in Southeast Asia. These models are discussed in the light of the metallographic and compositional analyses of iron and slag assemblages from these two sites using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometry, energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence and slag inclusion analysis techniques, together with other production materials from these and other contemporaneous Southeast Asian sites.     

The Figure of Yan Zhuoju 顏涿聚 in Ancient Chinese Literature

Contributing to the surging interest in rhetorical uses of anecdotal narratives in ancient China, the present article investigates sources about a purported follower of Confucius going by the name of Yan Zhuoju, or variants thereof. The main advantage of focusing on such an obscure figure is that extant sources can be exhaustively analysed – an approach intractable for more fully documented personalities – in order to gauge the mechanisms which created the textual record historians utilise to reconstruct events of the ancient past. The article demonstrates how the same figure can be appropriated across different discourses, to wit, in attacks on Confucius's alleged improprieties; in attempts to counter such attacks; and in arguments for the increasingly meritocratic social order of the Warring States period. Rarely adding up to a complete story, such appropriations are constituted by fragmentary narratives, summary statements, and intertextual references.