Ancient Solomon Islands mtDNA: assessing Holocene settlement and the impact of European contact

Archaeologists, linguists and geneticists generally agree that Near Oceania was subject to two major pulses of human dispersal: a Pleistocene occupation around 40,000 BP and a Late-Holocene migration at 3500 BP commonly associated with the Austronesian expansion out of Taiwan. The latter led to the development of the Lapita cultural complex in the Bismarck Archipelago which resulted in the settlement of Remote Oceania and there are a variety of competing models (express train, slow boat, entangled bank, etc.) used to explain this. Recent genetic studies have focused on this issue, but none of them have taken into consideration the bias possibly introduced by 19th-century historically reported population decline caused by European contact.     

Aggregation Decomposition and Aggregation Guidelines for a Class of Minimax and Covering Location Models

Facility location problems often involve movement between facilities to be located and customers/demand points, with distances between the two being important. For problems with many customers, demand point aggregation may be needed to obtain a computationally tractable model. Aggregation causes error, which should be kept small. We consider a class of minimax location models for which the aggregation may be viewed as a second‐order location problem, and use error bounds as aggregation error measures. We provide easily computed approximate “square root” formulas to assist in the aggregation process. The formulas establish that the law of diminishing returns applies when doing aggregation. Our approach can also facilitate aggregation decomposition for location problems involving multiple “separate” communities.     

"It tears the heart right out of you": Memories of Striker Replacement at International Paper Company in De Pere, Wisconsin, 1987 88

In the summer of 1987, more than 370 workers at Nicolet PaperCompany in De Pere, Wisconsin, walked out on strike after refusingto agree to a wide range of concessions demanded by InternationalPaper Company (IP), Nicolet's parent company. Within a few weeks,however, IP had permanently replaced the strikers, a tacticthat became increasingly common in the 1980s. The author usesoral history interviews to provide a valuable, unique insightinto the effects of the permanent replacement tactic, whichbitterly divided the small community and left workers with psychologicalscars that were all too apparent more than a decade later. Asthe Nicolet workers were part of a broader showdown betweenIP and the United Paperworkers' International Union, the articlealso helps to illuminate the history of a major labor disputeof the 1980s.     

Spillover Effects of Welfare Reforms in State Labor Markets

This paper estimates the effects of welfare reforms on a state's employment and wage rates. Welfare reforms include: pushing welfare recipients into the labor force, financial incentives to recipients for working, wage subsidies to employers of recipients, and community service jobs for recipients. The effects of these policies are analyzed using a newly estimated model of state labor markets. Simulations show that jobs found by welfare reform participants cause sizable displacement effects for nonparticipants. Displacement effects of labor supply policies are highest when a state's unemployment is high, whereas displacement effects of labor demand policies are highest when a state's unemployment is low.     

A Dilmun temple in Bilad al‐Qadim,Bahrain: A preliminary indication?

Excavations and surveys completed in the putative former Early Islamic capital, Bilad al-Qadim in Bahrain, uncovered a variety of structural remains of seemingly pre-Islamic date. These, an altar, ashlars and column drums recorded at the disused spring of Abu Zaydan, are conceivably from a Dilmun period structure, perhaps a temple. This idea is briefly explored and the relevant material described.     

考古学与民族学视野中的酋邦

“酋邦”这个术语是用来研究非国家社会的社会复杂化。尽管进化类型学受到尖锐的批判,但酋邦概念和相关阐述为理解集中决策等级制和社会不平等发展的演化比较研究提供了一个框架。在过去十年间,我们对酋邦的理解因大量历史学和考古学研究而发生了根本的改变。研究方式已经不再是将社会分类为酋邦与否,而是转而考量可见变化的原因。     

Refiguring the Archaeology of Greater Cahokia

Revised theoretical constructs and an enlarged database allow substantive revisions to a processual accounting of greater Cahokia. Measures of political consolidation, demographic nucleation, central transformations, and centrifugal dispersions reveal the form, scale, and developmental trajectory of greater Cahokia to have been highly centralized, regional, and punctuated by abrupt and pervasive social changes, respectively. Social restructuring, political rituals, and large-scale labor mobilizations are recognizable among the archaeological remains, as are the pre-Mississippian traditions that tempered regional government. Greater Cahokia was a product of local agricultural populations dominated and accommodated over three centuries. The processes of domination and accommodation, occurring at a time when regional administration was not yet commonplace, left unmistakable regional and panregional signatures.