Archaeological classification and ethnic groups: A case study from Sudanese Nubia

This is an attempt to discuss the central problem in archaeology, to understand the relationship between the artifacts and the cultural processes which produced them. Classification is our main methodology for the interpretation of this relationship: The problem is, however, to find the significant criteria. The focus of this paper is to show how archaeologists on the basis of classification of artifacts have tried to reconstruct culture history in terms of migration, diffusion or invention. The main example is from Sudanese Nubia. A criticism of the criteria here selected as significant for the identification of people and their movement, is based on a general theoretical discussion of ethnic groups.     

Man's role in the changing habitat of Mema during the old Kingdom of Ghana

The Mema area, Mali, situated climatologically within the Sahel zone, carries extensive traces of ancient settlements. Material from the author's 1978 excavation indicates environmental conditions similar to the present day inland Niger delta during the old Kingdom of Ghana (A.D. 800–1150). This centralized political power controlled gold trade from the south and salt from the north. The iron smelting in Mema was too extensive to be explained as local supply alone. It probably constituted an important basis for political centralization. The iron production seems to have caused deforestation, and the Kingdom may therefor have been weakened by ecological detonation connected with iron production.     

Contract for delivery of jars

The papyrus edited here is an example of a so‐called “delivery purchase” contract. The objects of the purchase are jars for the bottling of wine. The vendor is a deacon, who is said to be illiterate but signs in his own hand. The document is dated to AD 494 by reference to the Oxyrhynchite era and gives us the name of a hitherto unknown notary.     

A human-centered GIS approach to modeling mobility on southern Baffin Island,Nunavut, Canada

Southern Baffin Island has been occupied for several millennia, but its enormous size, coupled with scarcity of identified inland archaeological sites that can be confidently linked to coastal occupations, makes modeling ancient seasonal mobility across the region through traditional cost-surface least-cost pathway approaches impractical. We present a method that combines weighted multi-criteria cost surface analysis with a watershed function to create a “mobility-shed” of non-winter travel pathways covering the study area. We evaluate the predictive utility of the resulting pathways for future archaeological survey by assessing their spatial relationships to known archaeological sites. The results of this comparison suggest that elevation and land cover criteria should be augmented with ethnographic and resource availability data to model mobility in this region.     

Strengths and weaknesses of accessibility instruments in planning practice: technological rules based on experiential workshops

Accessibility instruments can play a valuable role in urban planning practice by providing a practical framework for exploring and testing relationships between land use and transport infrastructure. Despite many available accessibility instruments, they are still not widely used in planning practice. This paper explores the background of this problem by examining the findings of a EU-funded study on the usability and usefulness of existing accessibility instruments. The study applied 16 instruments in local planning contexts according to a standardized process protocol. The outcomes of these so-called experiential workshops were analysed through a standardized measurement protocol, which included participant observation along with pre- and post-workshop practitioner questionnaires. This broad investigation presents a rich analytical tool for understanding how different types of accessibility measures, spatial resolutions of output and levels of comprehensiveness affect usability and usefulness. Based on this we propose 10 technological rules that (a) can be used directly in practice to improve usability of accessibility instruments and (b) can provide hypotheses to be examined in further academic studies. Our results suggest that instead of striving for the ultimate accessibility measure, it would be more effective to identify which measures could successfully serve different user needs in accessibility planning.     

Collaboration for Local Economic Development: Business Networks,Politics and Universities in Two Swedish Cities

In this article we want to show how conceptions about collaboration for local eocnomic development in Sweden are constructed on national and local levels. We also show how these conceptions have been realized in two different company networks; in the city of Östersund (“Odenskog företagsstaden”) and in the city of Karlskrona (“Telecom City”). In politics and research, local collaboration or cluster formation are viewed as important tools and levers for local economic development. However, we argue that the local labour markets and unemployment rates in our case studies do not differ significantly, despite very different strategies for collaboration. Therefore, we suspect that the political focus on collaboration is a way of legitimizing the change in regional policy rather than a delegation of real power to the local level. If this continues, we fear that the current regional policy is reduced to a discourse of popular concepts rather than a real instrument for local economic development.     

Characterizing Quartz Artefacts: A Case Study from Manitoba's Northern Boreal Forest

Visual and geochemical analyses of 30 pre‐contact quartz tools from the Churchill River basin of northern Manitoba were used to provisionally assess source provenance based on comparison to local quartz quarry data. The results indicate that tools made from quartz acquired from these quarries were transported and eventually deposited into archaeological sites up to 200 km away. Transport of this quartz, which is of relatively moderate quality, over such distances suggests that stone tool–using hunter–gatherer populations that lived in the Churchill River basin of northern Manitoba were highly mobile. It also indicates that higher‐quality raw materials were unavailable in the immediate area.