Complex spaces of orphan care – a Russian therapeutic children's community

Institutions of orphan care are immensely complex spaces imbued with social and cultural norms, and can exhibit intricate power relations and particularly severe examples of surveillance. While there have been numerous excellent quantitative studies of these institutions, they reveal little of the complexity and heterogeneity of the spaces, and there remains a need for more qualitative and particularly ethnographic studies of spaces of orphan care to reveal their nuances. Drawing upon the author's reflections on a highly unusual space of orphan care, this article makes two major contributions to Children's Geographies: (1) it employs a sorely neglected aspect of Foucault's work in Children's Geographies, Mettray, in analysing surveillance and discipline in an institution providing care to orphaned children and (2) It highlights the heterogeneity of these spaces and provides an example of best practice in spaces of orphan care.     

Accessing Hunter-Gatherer site structures using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy: applications at a Taltheilei settlement in the Canadian Sub-Arctic

The results of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy on soils and caribou bone from a Taltheilei culture settlement in northern Canada contribute to developing micro-archaeological approaches suitable for locating and characterizing hearth and midden features on hunter-gatherer sites. A weak yet pervasive signal for montgomeryite was developed from the diagenesis of dispersed ash and caribou processing residues. Disordered calcite, carbonate hydroxylapatite, charcoal, and burned bone in two pit-house hearth deposits indicate that both wood and bone were used for fuel. Crystallinity indices and carbonate/phosphate ratios for bone indicate high intensity burning. These data, in tandem with the presence of semi-subterranean dwellings, demonstrate that this particular tundra-based encampment was occupied during cold seasons, a type of settlement behaviour previously unrecognized in the Taltheilei archaeological record. Our results confirm that Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy is an accessible, rapid, and cost effective means of discovering micro-archaeological evidence valuable for reconstructing hunter-gatherer site structures.