A discussion of rock carvings in Ra’s al Khaimah Emirate,UAE, and Musandam province,Sultanate of Oman,using local considerations

Conversations about various examples of rock carvings with interested local tribespeople across the study region revealed information about the different loci of carvings; subject matter and techniques; and the identities of possible carvers. It was possible to place sorts of rock carvings in specific cultural contexts and in long‐standing traditions across the peninsula. Rock carvers, in most cases, were either immature tribal members or male adults from outside Arab tribal society.     

Alice's Unrepresentative Council: Cause for Intervention?

The troubles of Alice Springs have been widely discussed in the Australian media since The Weekend Australian published Nicolas Rothwell's (2011) feature article ‘Destroyed in Alice’ in February. Discussion has covered many things: violence, drugs, alcohol, sex, town camps, property crime, Aboriginal people coming in from outlying communities and the idea of another Commonwealth intervention. One topic that has not been mentioned is Alice's highly unrepresentative town council, built on a little-known electoral system used in Northern Territory local government called ‘exhaustive preferential’. This paper explains and critiques this electoral system and suggests that it is causing significant problems for both Alice Springs Town Council and other local governments in the Territory.1 ¹A version of this article was published in April 2011 in the Canberra Times monthly supplement The Public Sector Informant. Their by-line for the article was ‘A town like Alice needs an intervention’. View all notes It notes that the Northern Territory government is currently reviewing the system and is possibly moving slowly towards change. If change is not effected soon, it asks: is this electoral system cause for another Commonwealth intervention?     

Investigating the production and distribution of plain ware pottery in the Samoan archipelago with laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS)

This paper presents a provenance study of 170 ceramic artifacts and 21 ceramic tiles from three islands in the Samoan archipelago using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). Our analyses confirm that LA-ICP-MS can be used to differentiate between clay formations on a single island. We identify different distribution patterns for pottery recovered from lowland and highland sites on Tutuila Island. We also examine evidence for movement of pottery between islands, and find only limited evidence for such movement. Our findings suggest dynamic patterns of prehistoric interaction and site use that need to be evaluated with further data from across the archipelago.     

Legal realism and human rights

This essay uses Schmitt's work to cast new light on the relevance of the American legal tradition known as ‘legal realism’ for the history and analysis of human rights. It does so by exploring several of Schmitt's most famous criticisms of international law and human rights, and then suggests how they might correspond with a widespread critical legal tradition in the 1920s and 1930s. This essay describes in detail two fundamental features of this tradition: historicism and realism. It concludes by suggesting that a return to some of these earlier law writers and texts might be a more substantive way to develop a constructive critical position in the fields of human rights and international law than an overreliance on the politically provocative (and problematic) rhetorical flourishes of Carl Schmitt.     

Eco-cultural niches of the Badegoulian: Unraveling links between cultural adaptation and ecology during the Last Glacial Maximum in France

This study details an application of eco-cultural niche modeling (ECNM) using two modeling architectures—a genetic algorithm (GARP) and maximum entropy (Maxent)—aimed at examining the ecological context of sites with archaeological remains attributed to the culture termed the Badegoulian (ca. 22–20 k cal BP), which dates to the middle part of the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 23–19 k cal BP). We reconstructed the ecological niche of the Badegoulian and assessed whether eco-cultural niche variability existed within this technocomplex. We identified two broad but distinct spatial entities in the distribution of Badegoulian sites based on lithic raw material sources and circulation, and found that these spatial units share a similar ecological niche. We discuss the implications of territorial differentiation within this niche in light of research on land use by culturally affiliated groups within a broad cultural entity. We propose that Badegoulian circulation networks reflect distinct social territories associated with particular conditions within a single ecological niche. This study illustrates the utility of combining ecological niche reconstructions with archaeological data to identify and evaluate diachronic trends in cultural continuity for situations where such patterns may be missed when the focus of study is restricted solely to lithic technology and typology.     

Malagasy Judaism: The ‘who is a Jew?’ conundrum comes to Madagascar

With the virtual disappearance of the centuries‐old Jewish community in Ethiopia through wholescale emigration to Israel, African Jewry is in the process of reconstituting itself into new Jewish movements (NJMs). One of these NJMs is emerging in Madagascar. However, the number of Malagasy adherents to normative (i.e. rabbinic) Judaism is eclipsed by those within the larger society who affirm genealogical descent from ancient Israel – and therefore the mantle of ‘Jew’. They do so while practising Christianity. Thus, the longstanding, sensitive question ‘who is a Jew?’ has migrated from Israel, America and Europe to Africa and Madagascar. This article introduces an array of Malagasy ‘Judaizing’ communities – believers in an Israelite Lost Tribe origin, descendants of a Jewish convert to Islam, Leviticus‐like ‘Aaronites’ – before focusing on Malagasies practising normative Judaism. The new Jews of Madagascar extend the cultural and geographic scope of new religious movements literature to greater Africa and, by extension, to societies in the developing world.     

Spatial autocorrelation tests and the Classic Maya collapse: Methods and inferences

Spatial autocorrelation, resulting in pattern or structure in geographically distributed data, is discussed in theoretical and practical terms. Tests for spatial autocorrelation are presented, along with an explication of the relationship between autocorrelation models, the product-moment correlation coefficient and the spatial autocorrelation test statistic. Two archaeological examples illustrate the application of the auto-correlation test statistic. The first uses a hypothetical data set, which shows the type of map patterns that appear with various levels of spatial autocorrelation, and the second examines the terminal distribution of long-count-dated monuments at lowland Classic Maya sites. The results of the second example fail to support arguments for simple patterning in the cessation of the erection of these monuments and, by inference, in the Maya collapse itself. Finally, it is argued that while the identification of spatial autocorrelation is often the goal of spatial analyses, the presence of autocorrelation violates the assumptions of certain statistics used in such analyses.