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.     

A benign bone-forming tumour (osteoma) on the skull of a fossil balaenopterid whale from the Pliocene of Chile

Hampe, O., Witzmann, F. & Asbach, P., 2014. A benign bone-forming tumour (osteoma) on the skull of a fossil balaenopterid whale from the Pliocene of Chile. Alcheringa 38, xxx–xxx. ISSN 0311–5518.

A pathology of the fossil baleen whale ‘Megaptera’ hubachi from the early Pliocene of Chile is described. It is a bony outgrowth on the left side of the supraoccipital, which is interpreted as a benign bone-forming tumour (osteoma). This diagnosis is based on X-ray imaging and CT scans of the abnormal bone, revealing a homogeneously dense internal structure with no evidence for lytic areas. The osteoma described here in ‘Megaptera’ hubachi is the first unequivocal evidence of a bone tumour in a cetacean, fossil or extant.

Oliver Hampe [oliver.hampe@mfn-berlin.de] and Florian Witzmann [florian.witzmann@mfn-berlin.de], Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung, Invalidenstraße 43, D-10115 Berlin, Germany; Patrick Asbach [patrick.asbach@charite.de], Institut für Radiologie, Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, D-10117 Berlin, Germany. Received 28.8.2013, revised 7.11.2013, accepted 12.11.2013.     

Another Look at Lerna: An EH IIB Trading Post?

The Early Helladic IIB sealings from Lerna have rarely been considered as functional documents even though they are often called as evidence for EH II economic complexity, for elite control of resources or even for ‘central place’ redistribution. Close analysis of the sealings, however, casts doubt on whether the documents support these economic or social interpretations, seeming rather to point to the grafting of a foreign system of resource management onto a less developed society. After examining the specific functions of the sealings —‘who did what?’— we consider their implications for social organization. This evidence is then linked to the wider picture: a whole range of new sealing practices as well as the striking innovations in architecture and construction which appear at much the same time. We conclude that these developments are largely due to the arrival of foreign (probably Anatolian) traders at Lerna early in EH IIB.