Unpacking Central Place Geometry I: Single Level Theoretical k Systems

This paper examines the spatial and potential economic consequences of relaxing the geometrical packing requirement of classical central place theory. Diagrams are used to demonstrate that geometric packing is not necessary to satisfy demand at all discrete points at a given hierarchical level. With unpacked landscapes the same population can be served from fewer, more widely spaced, central places without increasing the length of journey to shop. Consumers have fewer choices in an unpacked landscape, but economies of scale may increase the array of consumer goods and services available. Relaxing the packing requirement allows the development of a range of stable k systems (i.e., further market entry is disallowed). Between the limits of the k = 3 system (Christaller's marketing principle) and the k = 7 system (the sociopolitical or administrative principle), a range of unpacked k systems can develop including a k = 5 and a k = 6 system. Noninteger k systems are also possible as are systems which are stable mixtures of coexisting k principles. In certain instances, it is economically advantageous for two or more entrepreneurs to co-locate in the same central place rather than attempting monopolistic control over a more limited hinterland. Such a result is consistent with both Berry and Garrison's concept of the duplication ratio and with recent trends in retail location.     

Approaches to Interpreting Mesolithic Mobility and Settlement in Britain and Ireland

The Mesolithic communities of northwest Europe have generally been considered inherently mobile, and all the material evidence associated with them has been interpreted accordingly. This has resulted in entrenched, theoretically polemical and largely hypothetical mobility models, focusing on seasonal rounds and extraction activities. However, recent reanalyses of the ethnographic sources, and discoveries of both substantial and ephemeral Mesolithic structures, as well as new data from recent innovative lithic and scientific analyses (including DNA, isotope research on human remains, and geochemical analyses of lithic artefacts), have forced us to rethink the rather static models of Mesolithic mobility strategies. This paper, examining Mesolithic hunter-gatherer mobility and settlement models from Britain and Ireland, is part of that reassessment. In particular, it assesses the impact of the multiple lines of consilience on our understanding of Mesolithic habitation of landscapes. These include the archaeological evidence and the efficacy of recent theoretical and methodological approaches that have been employed to interpret it.     

Metallurgical traditions and metal exchange networks in late prehistoric central Myanmar,c. 1000 BC to c. AD 500

Myanmar has been notably underrepresented in recent studies of archaeometallurgy in Southeast Asia, despite its richness in both mineral and cultural resources and its potentially central role in long-distance exchange networks linking India, China and peninsular neighbours. Here, we present original analytical data on copper-base artefacts from several Bronze Age and Iron Age sites in Myanmar. Observed microstructures range from as-cast, worked, to fully annealed; compositions include leaded copper, low-tin to high-tin bronzes, and arsenical copper/bronze. Lead isotope analyses indicate that the metal originates from different geological sources, including several that match the lead isotope signatures of known prehistoric copper mines in Thailand and Laos. These archaeometallurgical data, including evidence for secondary copper-base production, more than double those currently available for Myanmar and document the presence of multiple local alloying and working traditions, perhaps chronologically differentiated, as well as identifying possible links to primary mineral sources across the region. Overall, this adds significant new information to the emerging picture of Southeast Asian prehistoric metallurgy at the crossroads of several major ancient cultures.     

When wildcats feed on rabbits: an experimental study to understand the taphonomic signature of European wildcats (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Felis silvestris silvestris</Emphasis>)

Studies of the feeding ecology of the European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris) demonstrate that leporids, mostly European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), dominate their diet in regions where they are present. The remains of wildcats have been found at Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites, raising the possibility that they actively accumulated leporid bones in caves and shelters shared with other terrestrial carnivores, raptors and humans. We present the first taphonomic study of rabbit remains consumed by this terrestrial carnivore, with the ultimate aim of understanding their role in bone accumulations at archaeological sites. An experimental study was carried out with a wildcat female, who was fed with nine complete rabbit carcasses. Non-ingested remains and scats were recovered for the analysis of anatomical representation, breakage and bone surface modification. This revealed that non-ingested remains and scats of the European wildcat can be discriminated from most other agents of accumulation. The referential framework provided will permit the discrimination of hominids and wildcats as agents of fossil accumulations of rabbits.     

Burning Libraries: A Community Response

ABSTRACT

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a growing recognition that widespread impacts of climate change (erosion, sea level rise, wildfires, warming soil temperatures) are rapidly destroying archaeological sites and permanently wiping out millennia of cultural heritage and important scientific data on a global scale. This paper provides a brief overview of the efforts of the international archaeological community and its allies to organise a broad and coordinated response to this widespread and urgent threat to our basic record by mobilising at the local, national and international level. The work of the archaeological professional societies has supplemented a growing host of initiatives on multiple scales by national and local governmental agencies, regional research teams, local and Indigenous heritage groups and the international global change scientific community. This paper provides some reflections on the Society for American Archaeology’s Climate Change Strategies and the Archaeological Record team effort from 2015 to 2018, some links to more contacts and resources and some suggestions for future directions.     

From Cold War battleground to a footnote to history? Labour history in divided and unified Germany

History of labor and industrial relations was a well-established and mutually contested subdiscipline in both parts of Germany during the Cold War. Though it did not stand in the center of the overall settling of accounts with the communist past in unified Germany the swift opening of all relevant archival sources made sure that these themes established themselves as relevant topics on the research agenda about the history of the GDR. Profiting both from an advanced state of art in West Germany and a handful of original innovators in East Germany the GDR was explored and increasingly understood as an essentially ‘work-centered society’ governed by a panoptic ‘welfare dictatorship’. When it came to interpreting the multifold and heterogeneous findings one line of reasoning gained peculiar attractiveness, namely to read the East German ‘case’ as a variant of Fordist modernization in the middle of the twentieth century which unable to face the challenges of globalization.     

Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: reconceptualising rural childhood roaming

This paper argues for reconceptualising how children use technology ‘outdoors’ as a technology-nonhuman-child assemblage, or roaming pathway. Founded in contemporary fears about children’s reduced opportunities to access nature and roam in rural environments, in part due to the ubiquitous presence of technology in their lives, we instead illustrate how the agencies of technologies and plants are folded into children’s outdoor roaming. Combining visual methods, video analysis and qualitative geovisualisation, and in collaboration with the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, this paper exposes how assemblages are contingently brought into being through the actions of what technologies, plants and children do together. We demonstrate how the agentic capacities of non-humans and technologies are assembled through children’s imaginative interaction with them, and how these imaginative interactions make such agencies visible.