Ancient soil resources of the Usumacinta River Region,Guatemala

In this study we present the results of a combination of methods used to identify possible agricultural activity of the ancient Maya in the Usumacinta River Basin in Guatemala. These methods included stable carbon isotope analysis of bulk soil organic matter, soil profile investigations and a spatial model of gentle slopes and well-drained soils to identify favorable agricultural conditions. Stable carbon isotope analysis of bulk soil organic matter in particular offers potentially direct evidence of agricultural activity. The δ¹³C results suggest that there is a strong signature of C₄ plants, such as maize and tropical grasses, throughout the study area. Further, the current soil conditions and extent of relatively gently sloped areas are favorable to agriculture. Overall, the results are supportive of the hypothesis that the area, located between the polities of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilán, was agriculturally important to surrounding areas.     

Transnational Development on the Frontier: The FAO's Fishery and Forestry Missions in the Brazilian Amazon

In the early 1950s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) organized a mission to the Brazilian Amazon Valley to assess development needs and help implement a development plan. The Brazilian government saw this as part of an initiative to integrate a sparsely populated and ‘backward’ region more firmly into the nation. The FAO's local partner was the Superintendancy for the Plan of Economic Valorization of the Amazon (SPVEA), a regional development agency created in 1953. This article analyzes the operation of the Mission, specifically its fishery and forestry sections, to understand the dynamics of transnational development cooperation. The mission eventually failed because the Brazilian state never offered sufficient support on FAO terms; SPVEA never acquired the necessary financial resources, administrative capacity and technical expertise. The FAO experts recognized the problems, but had no means to enhance the resources or change the approach of the local partner. The government's decision, in the late 1950s, to prioritize the building of a major road from Brasília to Belém, aggravated the lack of resources for the Mission's work. Importantly, the failure was not a question of ideological resistance to foreign meddling or a fundamental opposition to the FAO development strategy.     

Playful and multi-sensory fieldwork: seeing,hearing and touching New York

Geographical fieldwork is being reinvigorated through pedagogical and methodological innovations. Yet, while there are many good ideas in circulation, there is less evidence of where these ideas are taking us: what students are getting out of them, and what significance they may have for the discipline. These questions are explored through case studies involving playful and multi-sensory fieldwork: collecting sounds, urban climbing, finding “accidental art” and getting lost. Students tend enjoy this approach to fieldwork, which inspires them to learn actively and creatively, fosters the acquisition of new skills and explores the broader possibilities of playful and multi-sensory geographies.     

How Legislative (In)Activity,Ideological Divergence,and Divided Government Impact Executive Unilateralism: A Test of Three Theories

During the past two decades scholars from a variety of different fields (law, history, journalism, political science) have written extensively about the development and implementation of the Unilateral Presidency. Because several explanations for unilateral action have been posited, we provide a thorough test of three theories of executive unilateral action. Applying a newly-developed methodology to the most comprehensive dataset of unilateral presidential directives to date, results of the Bayesian Poisson Vector Autoregressive model suggest that although executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations are all strategic tools that presidents utilize to unilaterally alter policy, fundamental differences exist between them, as well as the inter-dependence among them. More important, our results show that whereas the percentage of bills passed is related to presidential proclamations, legislative activity actually depends on the number of executive orders issued. However, CQ success scores are related to both executive orders and presidential proclamations. We also find that presidential ideology and congressional ideology are related to executive action, whereas the impact of divided government is at best only weakly related.