ITALIAN TERRA SIGILLATA: A SOPHISTICATED ROMAN INDUSTRY

Summary: The fine red terra sigillata pottery of Italy, associated in both ancient and modern times with the Etruscan town of Arezzo, is now known to have been produced in many different parts of the peninsula. Indeed, it is clear that some of the largest factories were capable of setting up distant manufacturing subsidiaries in order to take advantage of particular markets. It is also becoming apparent that the potters working at Arezzo itself might supply their products to quite distinct provincial or regional markets from one another. It is hoped that research now under way will clarify such complex patterns of manufacture and trade.     

Voting across ethnic lines in late Imperial Austria1

ABSTRACT. The Austrian party system, following the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in 1907, has conventionally been characterised as being divided along ethno‐national lines, reinforcing perceptions that politics within the Habsburg Empire was overwhelmingly driven by nationalism. However, the electoral results in a number of districts only make sense if one assumes that voters cast ballots for their alleged ethnic opponents. A systematic analysis of election results, utilising a simple process of elimination and drawing on the highly detailed statistical records available, strongly suggests that such voting was commonplace. Furthermore, alternative explanations based on differential voting qualification rates, errors in the census, and electoral fraud do not withstand close scrutiny. One must therefore conclude that although ethnic conflict did occur, it was paralleled by inter‐ethnic bargaining and compromise, thereby supporting more positive appraisals of Austrian electoral and parliamentary politics and of representative political institutions in ethnically divided societies.     

Reviving Agrarian Studies in South‐East Asia: Geography on the Ascendancy

This paper examines the recent revival of agrarian studies in the social science scholarship of South‐East Asia following a period of decline from the 1980s onward. The hiatus provides an opportunity to examine the changed empirical contexts and theoretical framings of agrarian change in the intervening period. Renewed interest in rural agricultural and social change is also marked by a disciplinary shift, with the centre of gravity moving away from anthropology and political science and towards a geographical focus. This is explained both by institutional factors, as a large international research programme based in (but not limited to) geography has taken the lead on the revival, and also by the substantive shift in agrarian studies away from narrowly local village ethnographies or broad‐based scholarship inspired by Cold War concerns, towards a multi‐scale and contextualised approach in which environment, globalisation, migration, territorial expansion, spatial inequality, and other key geographical themes have framed explorations of agrarian change.     

The Multiple Meanings of Troy in Early Modern London's Mayoral Show

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural, scientific and poetic life of ambergris in the seventeenth century, in the context of contemporary theories about smell, and changing attitudes to style and expression. Most widely used as an ingredient in perfumery, this mysterious substance (now known to be the pathological secretion of a sperm whale) attracted significant interest: natural philosophers speculated on its origin, and imaginative writers used it as a trope for the exotic and the powerfully ephemeral. In surveying the appearance of ambergris in natural philosophical writings (including the proceedings of the Royal Society, and works by Browne and Boyle), as well as in botanical treatises, recipe books, travellers’ narratives, and lyric poetry, this paper seeks to recover a sense of the forgotten olfactory codings of the past. It ends with an attempt to place ambergris within the highly nuanced vocabulary of scent employed by Robert Herrick, the most distinguished nose of the early modern age.     

The Evolution of Biotechnology in Three Continents: Schumpeterian or Penrosian?

This Editorial introduces the Special Issue on ‘Biotechnology Clusters and Beyond’. Drawing on the interventions of five commissioned articles from Canada, Germany, Israel, the UK and the US it suggests that biotechnology clusters are interesting and important intellectually and for policy deliberation. They pose questions about basic cluster theory because localized networks, though intense, may not be as extensive as global ones in firm practices, especially as these evolve over time. Moreover, innovation is more deeply embedded in the publicly funded science base than for ‘Porterian’ clusters. Regarding innovation, biotechnology is also less obviously Schumpeterian, there being little market-driven ‘creative destruction’, and is arguably, with its strong emphasis on both large- and small-firm ‘capabilities’—Penrosian—an emphasis in clustering research and applications that warrants further investigation. Finally, at the specific technology-exploitation phase, market interactions assert themselves over milieu characteristics because scientists know the value of their discoveries and there is accordingly high appropriability associated with such knowledge capabilities.     

OF BOUNDARIES,PLACES, AND SITUATIONS

Thomas F. Gieryn's Truth-Spots: How Places Make Us Believe presents eight case studies to support his historical-sociological thesis that “Places … have agency and exert a force of their own on the direction and pace of knowledge and belief” (18). Gieryn adds a new angle to a century-old discourse on the social construction of truth: the emplacement of credibility in narrated material locations. Throughout his career, Gieryn has contributed extensively to the spatial and placeful analysis of knowledge and social power: from advancing the concept of discursive “boundary-work” in the 1980s, to a refined method of “cultural cartography” in the 1990s, and in the twenty-first century, toward investigations of places: defined as meaning-enriched material locations. He has now advanced “truth-spots” as a type of place that credibilizes truth-claims. This essay reviews the key concepts in the career of this historical sociologist of scientific knowledge, through a mapping of Gieryn's own trajectory within the arc of a long pragmatist tradition in US social science. I shall use Gieryn's own case studies to test two key claims in his account of how place operates in the social-cultural construction of belief: (1) The model of “place” that Gieryn proposed in 2000, and has used consistently ever since (termed here a “Gieryn-place”), and (2) Gieryn's claim that features of “truth-spots” exhibit an observably independent (“agentic”) effect on the credibility of claims made there. I argue that both Gieryn-places and truth-spots suffer from incomplete specification of the ways in which people attach meanings to locations; of the boundaries of places; and of the sites of conscious encounter with places. They suffer also from his own boundary-work to exclude imaginary, cultural, and virtual spaces from his conception of place. This essay argues that a credible account of how place operates in/as history will require a focus on situation and situatedness, drawing on the pragmatist tradition of the Thomas Theorem. The concept of situation completes the circuit between meaning-production and the attachment of meaning to places and opens a gate for historical investigation, across the boundary between imagined, virtual, and conceptual spaces, and lived, material embodied places.     

Cranioskeletal Size Variation in San Francisco Bay Prehistory: Relation to Calcium Deficit in the Reconstructed High-seafoods Diet and Demographic Stress

An osteometric–statistical study of residual rickets (RR) skeletal plasticity has been made of a time-ordered sequence of 11 series of adult skeleton sets (n=251) from shellmound sites around San Francisco Bay (the Bay) spanning the three archaeological horizons of Central California Indian prehistory in this region: Early (EH), Middle (MH) and Late (LH). To control for major differences of subsistence ecology and ethnolinguistic affiliation, the Bay sequence was further subdivided into four subregions: East (EB, Costanoan), South (SB, Costanoan, high acorns), West (WB, Costanoan, low acorns) and Northwest (NWB, Coast Miwok). In the eight EB series, a non-linear downward trend in cranioskeletal size was observed between EH and LH2, coinciding with a modest upward trend in the RR-15B score. To ascertain if food calcium deficit (CADEF) can explain the observed secular decline in cranioskeletal size, the evolving aboriginal Bay archaeodiet—relatively high in marine mammals, birds, fish and calcium-rich mollusks—was reconstructed by the diet grid method: in the three subregions with large stands of oaks (EB, SB, NWB), CADEF rose from negligible in the EH to moderate in the LH, as the subsistence base became more dependent on leached acorn meal for energy. Temporal and areal variation in Bay cranioskeletal size relates mostly to CADEF, demographic stress in females (DS), and the ‘male nutritional advantage interaction co-factor’ (MNAIC), in descending order of importance. This study has also confirmed the existence of the San Francisco Bay Indian physical type.