Studies on Amerindian dogs, 3: Prehistoric wolf/dog hybrids from the northwestern plains

Discriminant function analysis is an invaluable statistical tool for the taxonomic identification of hybrids between various extant species of Canis in the eastern United States. This technique has recently been applied to the taxonomic identification of canid skulls from several Wyoming archaeological sites. Analysis indicates most canid remains, originally identified as wolf (Canis lupus), to be wolf/dog hybrids exhibiting constant and continual backbreeding to the local wolf populations. The spatial and temporal extent of the form is discussed.     

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

ABSTRACT

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace – Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly cultureless Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are ‘real’ cities because they have ‘civilization’ and ‘history.’ By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as ‘not Dubai.’ This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy.