Wave Hindcasting and Anchoring Activities in Ancient Harbours: The Impact of Coastal Dynamics on Ancient Carthago Nova (Cartagena,Spain)

Journal of Maritime Archaeology - This study analyses nautical harbour activities and their spatial distribution using a high-resolution method of wind-wave hindcasting, in order to identify the...     

PINKER AND PROGRESS

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long‐term decline in person‐on‐person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread of a cultural pattern of self‐restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism. For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad‐news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold‐War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter‐Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti‐Communism.     

Bigberry Camp,Harbledown, Kent

Despite containing one of the largest stone and timber circles in Britain, the Late Neolithic monument complex at Stanton Drew, Somerset, has seen surprisingly little archaeological work. This paper presents the results of new fieldwork, which included excavation around a recently discovered recumbent stone, test-pitting on the floodplain of the River Chew and fieldwalking close to the monuments. The excavations revealed that the recumbent stone had been deliberately buried in the medieval period and also uncovered other archaeology of this date. The test-pitting exposed thick deposits of alluvium and from this it is argued that the landscape has changed dramatically since the monuments were constructed. The fieldwalking revealed a relatively low density of lithics which may indicate that activities around the monuments were carefully controlled. Also considered is the siting of the Stanton Drew monuments and their intimate relationship with the River Chew.     

Comparing methodologies and emerging data of long term studies on emotion,stress, and retardation

Scherer, Klaus R., Harald G. Wallbott, and Angela B. Summerfield, eds. Experiencing Emotion: A Cross‐Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. v + 302 pp. including tables, appendices, references and index. No price.

Cohen, Sheldon, Gary W. Evans, Daniel Stokols, and David S. Krantz, eds. Behavior, Health, and Environmental Stress. New York: Plenum Press, 1986. vii + 284 pp. including tables, charts, references, author index, and subject index. $27.50 cloth.

Langness, L. L., and Harold G. Levine, eds. Culture and Retardation. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986. ix + 212 pp. including chapter notes, chapter references and index. $59.50 cloth.     

The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA,Pakistan

Abstract: This paper provides a critical analysis of how and why US‐led drone warfare is conducted in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. First, we provide detailed statistics on the scale and funding of US drone operations, noting a rapid acceleration of its adoption by the military. This is then situated within an overarching narrative of the logic of “targeting”. Second, we study a legal document called the “Frontier Crimes Regulation” of 1901 that defines the relationship of FATA to the rest of Pakistan as an “exceptional” place. In the third section, we argue that the drone is a political actor with a fetishized existence, and this enables it to violate sovereign Pakistani territory. In this sense, the continued violence waged by robots in Pakistan's tribal areas is a result of the deadly interaction between law and technology. The paper concludes by noting the proliferation of drones in everyday life.