Histoire embrouillée: Making material histories in Southern Africa

This article examines how historical knowledge about Southern African chiefdoms was produced in D.F. Ellenberger's research archive (c. 1860–1913) and archaeology drawing on his scholarship. I describe a historiographic approach detailing how Ellenberger's work co-opted the material world to create historical facts, obscuring diverse meanings of home, movement, and authority.     

A new Late Devonian acanthodian fish from the Hunter Formation near Grenfell,New South Wales

The ischnacanthid acanthodian Grenfellacanthus zerinae gen. et sp. nov. is described on the basis of two large jaw bones from the Late Devonian (late Famennian) Hunter Formation, near Grenfell, N.S.W. The new species is the youngest known ischnacanthid, and the largest ischnacanthid from Gondwana. As for many ischnacanthids, the structure of the jaws and teeth indicate that Grenfellacanthus was probably an ambush predator.     

Cheshire Castles of the Irish Sea Cultural Zone

Along the valley … of the Dee and their mountain tributaries, where they begin to open towards the English plain, mottes and ringworks succeed one another like beads on a string. There was no overall plan of defence …. They served only for local protection against an enemy who came by stealth and at night to forage and to loot … (Pounds 1990, 70)     

A human-centered GIS approach to modeling mobility on southern Baffin Island,Nunavut, Canada

Southern Baffin Island has been occupied for several millennia, but its enormous size, coupled with scarcity of identified inland archaeological sites that can be confidently linked to coastal occupations, makes modeling ancient seasonal mobility across the region through traditional cost-surface least-cost pathway approaches impractical. We present a method that combines weighted multi-criteria cost surface analysis with a watershed function to create a “mobility-shed” of non-winter travel pathways covering the study area. We evaluate the predictive utility of the resulting pathways for future archaeological survey by assessing their spatial relationships to known archaeological sites. The results of this comparison suggest that elevation and land cover criteria should be augmented with ethnographic and resource availability data to model mobility in this region.     

The dynamics of global visual effects and games development industries: lessons for Australia’s creative industries development policy

The paper critiques the focus of creative industries policy on capability development of small and medium sized firms and the provision of regional incentives. It analyses factors affecting the competitiveness and sustainability of the games development industry and visual effects suppliers to feature films. Interviews with participants in these industries highlight the need for policy instruments to take into consideration the structure and organization of global markets and the power of lead multinational corporations. We show that although forms of economic governance in these industries may allow sustainable value capture, they are interrupted by bottlenecks in which ferocious competition among suppliers is confronted by comparatively little competition among the lead firms. We argue that current approaches to creative industries policy aimed at building self-sustaining creative industries are unlikely to be sufficient because of the globalized nature of the industries. Rather, we argue that a more profitable approach is likely to require supporting diversification of the industries as ‘feeders’ into other areas of the economy.