Vegetation,land, and wood use at the sites of Bat and Al‐Khashbah in Oman (fourth–third millennium BC)

About 4200 charcoal fragments have been identified from the fourth‐ to third‐millennium BC archaeological sites of Bat and Al‐Khashbah in order to gain an understanding of plant resources available at the sites. Acacia sp., Ziziphus sp., and Tamarix sp. were the main taxa identified at both sites and indicate a similar vegetation composition as today. Phoenix sp. (date palm) charcoal also has been found at both sites. Whereas the cultivation of date palm for the 2700–2300 BC layers from Bat was likely, given other circumstantial evidence (i.e. local cereal cultivation and floodwater irrigation), it is unclear whether date palm was cultivated at Al‐Khashbah. Especially for the older periods (3300–2700 BC) it is possible that nomadic pastoralists were exploiting and/or managing wild date palms. The find of Avicennia marina at Al‐Khashbah indicates long‐distance contacts with the coast.     

Going the extra mile: the impact of theological orientation and other congregational factors on the drive times of growing and declining church attendees

ABSTRACT

This study is part of a larger research project that collected and analysed data from 22 Mainline Protestant churches in Canada, 13 declining and 9 growing. Nearly 30 clergy and over 2000 church attendees were surveyed. Survey questions from the previous research explored the demographic and religious characteristics of these churches. In this paper, we analyse and compare the travel distance of the declining church and growing church attendees and then explore which characteristics of the attendees, clergy, and the church correlate with longer attendee drive times to worship. Through regression analysis, we conclude that theological conservatism of attendees, contemporary worship style, and greater emphasis on youth programming are predictors of longer drive times for attendees; while greater age of attendees is associated with a shorter commute to church.     

Visions of My Youth: Representations of the Childhood of Medieval Visionaries

This article is based on visionary narratives and vitae of twenty‐seven female and thirteen male visionaries from Britain and Europe, from the late eleventh to the early fifteenth century. Across this chronological and geographical span, the differences between the childhood representations of male and female visionaries are shaped by prevailing beliefs about the nature of men and women. Male visionaries rarely include reminiscence of their childhood in their narratives, while women offer childhood memories relatively consistently. For male visionaries, childhood seems irrelevant in terms of their adult spirituality. For women, childhood reminiscences reaffirmed their association with the purity of virgin childhood.     

Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment

Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare policy, including decisions about the eligibility of immigrant residents. Leveraging state‐level data from before and after reform, we estimate a difference‐in‐difference model to identify the effect of variation in immigrant inclusivity on educational attainment. We find that when states broaden the inclusivity of the social safety net to immigrants, young Latinos are more likely to graduate from high school. This effect is present beyond the group of Latino residents who receive additional benefits, suggesting that policy decisions about immigrants spill over to broader communities and communicate broader messages about social inclusion to racial and ethnic groups. We find similar patterns among Asian youth, but not among black and non‐Hispanic white youth. We conclude that immigrant inclusion has consequences for the life prospects of the growing population of youth in high‐immigrant ethnic groups.