The goodness of fit and statistical significance of seriation solutions

This paper presents a method for determining the statistical significance and goodness of fit of seriation solutions based on correspondence analysis. The basic assumption is that seriation solutions corresponding to relative chronological sequences should have unimodal distributions of types across assemblages in a sequence. In order to evaluate significance of chronological signal in data, the observed number of modes of a seriation solution based on correspondence analysis is compared to a distribution of number of modes generated by randomization of the original data table. A quantitative measure of the goodness of fit is presented. The method is tested on two data sets: 1) archaeological data with a known chronological ordering 2) non-archaeological data without a chronological patterning. The method successfully detected a significant chronological signal in the former, and failed to detect it in the latter.     

Comparison of GIS‐Based Logic Scoring of Preference and Multicriteria Evaluation Methods: Urban Land Use Suitability

Multi‐criteria evaluation (MCE) methods are useful tools to evaluate the land suitability for various uses and assist in the effective management of available land. Many common GIS‐based MCE methods, such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP), ordered weighted averaging (OWA), and a combination of AHP and OWA methods (AHP–OWA) are not able to fully represent all the logic that constitute a wide range of human decision‐making reasoning. Consequently, improved GIS‐based MCE methods such as Logic Scoring of Preference (LSP) method are needed. The main objectives of this study are to: (1) implement the GIS‐based LSP method for land suitability evaluation and (2) compare qualitatively and quantitatively the suitability maps generated by LSP and three GIS‐based MCE methods. This study was implemented with data sets from Boulder County, Colorado, USA for the case study of the urban land suitability evaluation. The qualitative properties of MCE methods and the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) statistics were used as comparison metrics. The results indicate that soft computing methods and particularly LSP performed the best among GIS‐based MCE methods for the urban land use application.     

Analysis of Medieval and Post‐Medieval Glass Fragments from the Dubrovnik Region (Croatia)

Dubrovnik was an important trade city throughout the medieval and post‐medieval time period, maintaining its own glass production from the 14th to the 16th century. Unfortunately, Dubrovnik glass discoveries have not been well investigated up until now, except via archival data in large data analyses. In the following work, we will shed new light on the glass material found in this region, which has diverse origins, chronology, typology and style. Medieval and post‐medieval glass finds (10th/12th–18th centuries) discovered during archaeological excavations in Dubrovnik and the Dubrovnik region were analysed using particle‐induced X‐ray emission (PIXE) and particle‐induced gamma‐ray emission (PIGE), which revealed three main compositional groups: natron glass, plant‐ash glass and potash glass. This demonstrates the important commercial links present between Dubrovnik and other major glass‐making centres.     

Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post-racial self-image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings.     

The impacts of spatial planning on the sustainable territorial development of the Rhine-Danube Trans-European Transport Corridor through Serbia

The Danube River is both the international waterway E-80 and the Rhine-Danube Core Network Corridor of nine European corridors in the trans-European transport network, and it is the core area of the most significant Danubian development axis in the Republic of Serbia. The present research focus of this paper is the integrated impact of spatial planning on achieving the sustainable territorial development of the Rhine-Danube Corridor through Serbia and its potential transboundary impact. Integrated assessment (environmental and social), based on the combined application of the standard strategic environmental assessment (SEA) method and the newly presented adapted strategic environmental assessment (ASEA) method, has made it possible to predict the effects of future activities on the sustainable territorial development of the waterway corridor, not only in Serbia, but also in other Danubian countries. The applied combination of the SEA and ASEA methods is presented in the form of key planning solutions in three selected sectors: international inland waterway, water management infrastructure and tourism. The results indicate that the negative impacts of potential conflicts between the planning solutions are far greater than the negative impacts of individual planning solutions, and that it is more difficult to control and mitigate or neutralize them.     

Serbian Spatial Planning among Styles of Spatial Planning in Europe

The classification of spatial planning styles in Europe has been successively reviewed a few times. Most recently, it has been done in the framework of the European Spatial Planning Observatories Network (ESPON) 2.3.2 project dealing with the territorial governance. Based on national overviews for 29 European countries, this project uses the classification of spatial planning systems in four styles: comprehensive-integrated, regional-economic, land-use and urbanism. This study did not take into account the spatial planning system in Serbia since it is neither in the European Union nor a member of the ESPON similar to Norway and Switzerland. This article uses the form of national overviews elaborated for the ESPON project and puts Serbia in a comparative spatial planning perspective, classifying it between the comprehensive-integrated and land-use planning styles.     

Modeling Expansive Phenomena in Early Complex Societies: the Transition from Bronze Iron Age in Prehistoric Europe

The Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in Prehistoric Europe represents a perfect case study to test different and competing hypotheses of social dynamics and economic change in small-scale societies. The paper discusses the possibilities of modeling what could have happened in Europe between 1800 and 800 bc, in terms of spatiotemporal dynamics. The paper presents some theoretical aspects of the dynamic study of expansive phenomena and gives an overview of a computer model programmed to explain the way new burial forms expanded in Europe. The main idea is comparing classic demic diffusion models (spread of population), cultural transmission models (spread of ideas), and technological innovation diffusion model (spread of goods). We will present the fundamentals of a preliminary study towards the computational simulation of such hypothetical social mechanisms, using a dataset composed of more than 1,500 georeferenced and radiocarbon dated archaeological contexts of a period between the Early Bronze Age and the first Iron Age (1800–800 bc) from an area including the North-East of Iberian Peninsula, Southern France, Northern and Central Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Southern Germany.