Relative frequency of butchering cutmarks produced by obsidian and flint: an experimental approach

An experimental approach was used to determine how stone tool materials affect the frequency of observed cutmarks. Five whitetail deer were butchered by an expert butcher using flint and obsidian tools and the skeletons were prepared and analyzed. The authors found that the deer butchered with obsidian tools generally displayed fewer incidents of cutmarks than their flint-butchered counterparts. Consideration of this variable may prove to be important to archaeologists attempting to answer questions of specialization or when making comparisons of cutmark data between sites.     

Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of the Fearless Cities

The Fearless Cities summit, coordinated by Barcelona en Comú in June 2017, marked the first global gathering of the nascent “new municipalist” movement. Responding to the “imperative that geographers engage critically and creatively with the way localism is being articulated”, this paper argues that the new municipalist initiatives are developing urban political strategies that successfully avoid the Local Trap. Rather than essentialising cities as inherently progressive or democratic, the municipal is instead becoming framed as a “strategic front” for developing a transformative politics of scale. Given this critical awareness, this nascent movement demonstrates how local loyalties can be mobilised as part of a progressive scalar strategy without falling into the trap of a “particular localism”. What remains to be seen is whether these initiatives are able to develop a variegated scalar strategy of transformation that retains the democratic essence that underpins them.     

Paleoanthropology Read in Tooth and Nail

Crump, Thomas. The Anthropology of Numbers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. x + 201 pp. including bibliography and index. $49.50 cloth.

Ascher, Marcia. Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishers, 1991. ix + 203 pp. including notes and index. $36.95 cloth.     

Across the sea and over the mountains: Documenting Albanian migration

Starting in 1990, Albania has witnessed one of the great emigrations of recent times; ten years later at least 600,000 Albanians, one in five of the population enumerated by the 2001 census, were living abroad, mainly in Greece and Italy. This paper documents and interprets this mass migration, and is in four parts. The first describes the evolution of the emigration against the demographic, economic and political background of Albania's post‐communist transition. The second and third parts look at Albanian migration to, respectively, Italy and Greece: topics covered include the chronology of movement; geographical distribution of the migrants; and the reaction of the host society, which has been one of stigmatisation and exclusion despite Albanians’ key contributions to the labour market. The final part of the paper explores some conceptual interpretations of Albanian migration, stressing the need for a broad synthesis which encompasses both economic and socio‐cultural approaches.