Review Article: Is there a French way of Explaining African Politics?

This article seeks to uncover the extent to which our ways of understanding contemporary Africa are influenced by our national (historical, cultural, political, intellectual) traditions through an examination of the influential French journal Politique Africaine , whose twentieth anniversary falls this year. In a wide-ranging review article that discusses in detail the 1999 issues of Politique Africaine but is informed by a consideration of the 'deep history' of that journal, the author argues that the French Africanist political scientists whose views appear in the journal are somewhat reluctant to open up to some of the new analysis of Africa available today.     

Approaches to violent death: a case study from early medieval Cambridge

This paper examines one of a number of weapon‐injury victims from the cemetery at Church End in Cherry Hinton, Cambridge (Hertfordshire Archaeological Trust/Archaeological Solutions site HAT358), which was in use from the late Anglo‐Saxon period until after the Norman Conquest. Drawing on precedents set by forensic studies, palaeopathology and more traditional spatial cemetery analysis, assertions are made about the nature of the attack and its context. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

European Corridors as Carriers of Dynamic Agglomeration Externalities?

Transport corridors are viewed as a promising way forward in European Union (EU) transport policy, assumed to contribute positively to regional economic development. However, the validity of this assumption is not evident. The aim of this paper is to empirically test whether agglomeration economies in European transport corridor regions are positively related to indicators of regional economic development compared to regions outside the scope of corridors. The results build on the notion that the type of agglomeration economy in combination with the structure of the economy matters for prospects of structural economic growth in different regions. In this way, the analysis not only contributes to enhancing the empirical scrutiny of the corridor concept in EU transport policy, but also provides new insights into how corridors contribute to regional economic growth. We find only limited evidence for a corridor effect across European regions on productivity and employment growth externalities. Instead, we find a large degree of spatial heterogeneity interacting with corridors—a heterogeneity that has been little recognized in EU policies. We suggest that recent attention to place-based development strategies may accord well with the kinds of agglomeration effects related to corridor development observed in this study.     

As the Worm Turns: An Enigmatic Calcified Object as Pseudopathology

A putative calcified soft tissue or parasite recovered in the pelvis of an adult male Late Roman burial from Aqaba, Jordan, is a fossil marine invertebrate. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.