Conservation and Management Strategies Applied to Post-Recovery Analysis of the American Civil War Submarine H. L. Hunley (1864)

The 12-m long submarine H. L. [Horace Lawson] Hunley was successfully recovered from the Atlantic in August 2000 after nearly 140 years of immersion, and immediately brought to the Warren Lasch Conservation Center to be excavated in a controlled environment. In 2001 a multi-disciplinary team excavated the crew compartment and uncovered numerous fragile artefacts and human remains. This paper describes the conduct of the excavation and technological advancements developed to work with this complex and unstable iron vessel. Impressed current technologies, automated tank controls and water monitoring systems; laser mapping; fibre-optics; database management; in situ x and gamma rays; moulding and protection of fragile archaeological features; and protocols for moving artefacts to the laboratory will also be discussed.
© 2004 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

Settlement fortification in village and ‘tribal’ society: Evidence from contact-era New Guinea

Using ethnographic data from contact-era New Guinea, this paper seeks to advance an understanding of the logic of settlement fortifications—i.e., the principles governing their design and operational functioning. This issue has been largely neglected because the principles involved seem so obvious: fortifications function to improve the security of a position by impeding an attacker’s efforts to penetrate it. For village and tribal societies, though, this can be an oversimplification. In these communities, people are generally most dependent on their settlement fortifications at night, when they are home and asleep; yet the cover of night is precisely when settlement fortifications are at their most vulnerable to penetration. What the New Guinea evidence reveals is that settlement fortifications were designed not just to keep attackers out but, even more important, to keep them in once they had penetrated and launched their attack. Defenders could then rally and annihilate their assailants, creating a powerful deterrent against attack in the first place—the best defense of all. These findings are applied to an early Late Woodland site in Ohio to illustrate their potential for informing an archeology of war.     

Modeling Micro-Spatial Employment Location Patterns: A Comparison of Count and Choice Approaches

This article studies employment location patterns in the Puget Sound Region of Washington State at a micro level of geography. Traditional discrete choice modeling using multinomial logit (MNL) models may be problematic at a micro level of geography due to the high dimensionality of the set of alternative locations and the likely violations of the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption. Count models are free from the IIA assumption and, unlike logit models, actually benefit from large numbers of alternatives by adding degrees of freedom. This study identifies the best-fitting count model as the zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model, because this model more effectively addresses the large number of cells with no jobs and reflects a dual process that facilitates the identification of threshold clustering effects such as those found in specialized employment centers. The estimation and prediction results of ZINB are compared with those of MNL with a random sampling of alternatives estimated on an equivalent data set. The ZINB and MNL models largely agree on major trends, with the ZINB model providing more insightful details, but with less capacity to predict large count situations.     

Al-Aqir near Bahlā'– an Early Bronze Age dam site with planoconvex 'copper' ingots

Some 20 years ago the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture received an important collection of planoconvex copper ingots, tools and anthropomorphic figures which came from a site at al-Aqir near Bahlā' in the al-Zāhirah Wilāya. Several years elapsed before their provenance could be reconstructed and the site could be investigated. The finds had been deposited as building offerings in a prehistoric, 300 m-long dam built to trap soil and moisture for agricultural purposes. Although the area has been intensively used since at least 3000 BC, the evidence for irrigation installations does not pre-date 2000 BC. The finds are dedicatory rather than functional in nature.     

The Lawn-Chemical Economy and Its Discontents

The daily geographies of consumption represent some of the most ecologically important and economically complex frontiers for critical research. Among these, the turfgrass lawn is perhaps the most overlooked, owing to its very ordinariness. Despite the serious risks posed to human health and ecosystem viability by high-input lawn systems, little critical scholarship has engaged the lawn, especially as a structured economic phenomenon. This paper explores the forces and political economic conditions under which the lawn is produced, promulgated, and resisted in North America. In the process, we draw attention to the deeply structured economic impetus behind the direct sale of potentially toxic chemicals to urban dwellers. Based on survey research and a review of the industry, we argue (1) that chemical demand is driven by urban growth and classed aesthetics, (2) that direct and aggressive sales of chemicals to consumers are spurred by crises in the chemical-formulator industry, (3) that the search for consumer-lawn markets is driven by declining margins in the worldwide chemical trade, and (4) that counterinstitutional struggles against high-input lawns represent a salvo against otherwise abstract and daunting cultural-economic hegemony.