Preliminary U-series and Thermoluminescence dating of excavated deposits in Liang Bua sub-chamber,Flores, Indonesia

We report the results of a test excavation of deposits in a limestone cave sub-chamber located beneath the main chamber of Liang Bua, Flores, Indonesia; the discovery site of the small hominin species, Homo floresiensis. Well-preserved remains of extinct Pleistocene fauna and stone artefacts have previously been identified on the surface of a sediment cone within the sub-chamber. Our excavation of the deposits, at the base of the sediment cone in the sub-chamber (to 130 cm depth) yielded only a few fragmentary bones of extant fauna. Uranium/Thorium (U-series or U/Th) dating of soda straw stalactites excavated from 20 to 130 cm in depth demonstrates that the excavated sediments were deposited during the Holocene. Red Thermoluminescence (TL) dating of the sediments at the base of the excavation (130 cm depth) indicates these sediments were last exposed to sunlight at 84 ± 15 ka (thousand years), similar to red TL ages of cave sediments from the main chamber. Together, these results indicate that the surface faunal remains, which are morphologically analogous to Pleistocene finds from the main chamber excavations, were transported to the sub-chamber relatively recently from the main chamber of Liang Bua and probably originated from conglomerate deposits at the rear of the cave and from deposits around the front entrance. There is no evidence for hominin occupation of the sub-chamber, instead it seems to have acted as a sink for cultural materials and fossil remains transported from the surface via sinkholes. Despite the small number of finds from the test excavation, it is possible that more extensive excavations may yield additional transported cultural and faunal evidence at greater depths.     

Governing the Homeless in an Age of Compassion: Homelessness,Citizenship, and the 10‐Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County Washington

Abstract: In 2001, President Bush announced his intention to “end chronic homeless by the year 2012” as part of his broad “Compassion Agenda”. Since then, departmental consolidation, changes in funding allocation, and continued decentralization of services provision have dramatically reshaped the landscape of homeless service provision in the US. In this paper I examine how these roll‐out policies reify and re‐entrench liberal equations of property with rational self‐governance at the local scale. Particularly, I illustrate how tropes of homeless otherness work alongside and through federal neoliberal roll‐out policies to exclude homeless voices from the formation of local social policy. In doing so, I attempt to call attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between the spatial management of homeless bodies, tropes of homeless deviance and dependence, and limits to citizenship in the context of neoliberal urban governance.     

Micropalaeontological investigation of late Pliocene marine sediments at Sangiran,Central Java

The Upper Kalibeng Formation and the marine intercalations of the lower part of the Pucangan Formation at Sangiran, Central Java, contain more than 30 taxa of fossil calcareous nannoplankton. These fossils indicate a Late Pliocene age for the Upper Kalibeng and lower Pucangan. The Upper Kalibeng Formation is assigned to calcareous nannoplankton Zone NN 16 (3.25 – 2.3 m.y.). The lower Pucangan Formation is within the NN 16 to NN 18 interval (3.25 – 1.65 m.y.).     

Gravity-Type Interactive Markov Models—Part I: A Programming Formulation of Steady States

An important class of interactive Markov migration models is characterized by gravity-type transition kernels, in which migration flows in each time period are postulated to vary inversely with some symmetric measure of migration costs and directly with some population-dependent measure of attractiveness. This two-part study analyzes the uniqueness and stability properties of steady states for such processes. In this first part, it is shown that a flow version of the steady-state problem can be given a programming formulation which permits global analysis of steady-state behavior. Within this programming framework, it is shown that when attractiveness is diminished by increased population congestion, the steady states for such processes are unique. The second part of the study will employ these results to analyze the stability properties of such steady states.