Down Little Lon: An Introduction to the Casselden Place Archaeological Excavations, Melbourne

In 2002 Melbourne’s Casselden Place excavation provided a window into the urban past opened by an innovative relationship between the development industry, heritage consultancy and La Trobe University. The project demonstrated that with the support of consent authorities and the co-operation of the development industry, collaborations between the academic world and heritage consultants could be highly successful. The Casselden Place Project made a significant contribution to the ‘slum debate’ in Australia and delivered an enhanced understanding of the cultural, social and scientific significance of an inner-city block, and shed new light on a notorious chapter in the city’s history.     

Guilt by Association? The Hazards of Linking the Concept of the State with Violence

The last 30 years have seen an increasing acceptance of an apparently ubiquitous link between the state and the use of force, with violence now seen as a defining attribute of the state. Few have questioned this approach, but it constitutes a significant shift that contrasts with that of previous eras, where violence was a symptom of failure. This unquestioned link would appear to be deepening our problems in considering the difficulties facing liberal democracies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Résumé:?Les trente dernières années ont vu le renforcement du lien entre l'état et l'usage de la force et la violence comme un attribut essentiel de l'état. On a peu contesté cette approche bien qu'elle soit en contradiction avec des interprétations précédentes qui considérait la violence comme l'admission d'un échec. Remettre en question ce lien entre état et violence permet de reconsidérer les difficultés des démocraties libérales au début du vingt et unième siècle.     

Port Development and Town Planning in North West England

This paper examines the links between the development of harbour facilities and planned towns, especially in the head port area of Carlisle in North West England. Largely based on documentary research and field observation it examines the development of Whitehaven and other Atlantic ports it influenced in Cumberland, Westmorland and north Lancashire. It examines these developments in their international context and shows how they were initiated by local landowners to maximise the output of their estates and to enhance their personal prestige. Beginning in the seventeenth century the paper demonstrates how this tradition of town and harbour foundation continued on into the nineteenth century when it was adopted by corporate concerns, especially railway companies. The paper concludes by highlighting how harbour developments associated with town planning helped to urbanise and stimulate the economy of a previously under-developed area. Two maps identify the locations of the places discussed.     

The Politics of Service Delivery Reform

This article identifies the leaders, the supporters and the resisters of public service reform. It adopts a principal–agent framework, comparing reality with an ‘ideal’ situation in which citizens are the principals over political policy‐makers as their agents, and policy‐makers are the principals over public service officials as their agents. Reform in most developing countries is complicated by an additional set of external actors — international financial institutions and donors. In practice, international agencies and core government officials usually act as the ‘principals’ in the determination of reforms. The analysis identifies the interests involved in reform, indicating how the balance between them is affected by institutional and sectoral factors. Organizational reforms, particularly in the social sectors, present greater difficulties than first generation economic policy reforms.     

Medical education reform efforts and failures of U.S. medical schools, 1870-1930

The dramatic decline in the number of US medical schools in the early twentieth century has been traced to a medical education reform movement that gained momentum after the Civil War. The major parties to reform-the universities themselves, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), state licensing boards, the American Medical Association (AMA), and Flexner-had different interests and strategies, however, and scholars have continued to debate the impact each had on the decline. To isolate the independent effects that the temporally intertwined forces for reform had on medical school failures, this study applies statistical survival analysis to an extensive and unique data set on medical schools operating in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Contrary to the views of some scholars, the results indicate that schools closed in response to critical evaluations published by the Illinois State Board of Health in the nineteenth century and the AMA and Flexner in the twentieth century. Additionally, the results indicate that schools were less likely to have failed if they adopted certain reforms implemented at leading schools or joined the AAMC, and were more likely to have failed if their state's licensing regulations mandated lengthier premedical and medical training.     

Beneath the Rising Sun: “Frenchness” and the Archaeology of Desire

This article takes the case of “rouge pot” fragments found in an archaeological context in New Orleans’ French Quarter associated with the circa 1822 Rising Sun Hotel and investigates the discourses and desires that shape our interpretations of artifacts. We argue that archaeological, historiographic, and public desires overlap and inform one another in a complex web of relations. In New Orleans, the particular web into which the archaeology of cosmetic jars and hotel sites can fall is spun by the ways in which the former French colonial capital is sexualized in both textbooks and folk songs.     

Oldowan behavior and raw material transport: perspectives from the Kanjera Formation

The archaeological record of Oldowan hominins represents a diverse behavioral system. It has been suggested that exploitation of lithic resources by Oldowan hominins was simplistic and represented mostly use of local sources of stone. Here we investigate the raw material selection and transport behaviors of Oldowan hominins reflected in the stone artifact assemblages from the Kanjera South Formation, South Rachuonyo District, Kenya. Using geochemical methods (ED-XRF) artifacts are linked to primary and secondary source outcrops throughout southwestern Kenya. These data show that hominins selected raw materials for transport at frequencies that are significantly different from their availability on ancient landscapes. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of the assemblage represents transport over relatively long distances (>10 km). Our study further suggests that in the early stages of stone tool use hominins used a wide variety of raw materials and selected these materials at some distance from their eventual discard locations. Early hominin behavior may have incorporated an understanding of raw material source distributions across a more extensive landscape than has been previously documented. This supports the growing perspective that Oldowan technology represents a more complex behavioral pattern than is usually associated with the beginnings of hominin tool use.