Encountering Alan Wilson,filling the gaps in data sets (from the knowns to the unknowns) … and disciplinary history/progress

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines my interactions with Alan Wilson over more than four decades, focusing on my early work on gravity models and then my adoption of his entropy-maximizing procedure in the study of disaggregated voting patterns. Using that example, the essay explores its implications for the study of disciplinary history.     

阿马尔那泥板书信中所见的古代近东大国外交方式

阿马尔那时代是近东历史上的和平外交时代，五大国支配着外交的走向和国际关系的格局。在大国外交中，存在3种外交方式，礼物交换、王室联姻和信息沟通，这3种外交方式构成了当时外交的主要形式，促进了和平外交的持续发展。     

The evolution of maritime Chinese historiography in the United States: toward a transnational and interdisciplinary approach

ABSTRACT

Once considered a marginal side-story to the Fairbank-inspired narrative of an agrarian-centered, land-bound China, Chinese maritime history has received increasing attention in the United States as a research field in its own right. Through sustained engagement with trends in regional, comparative, military, and global histories, and dialogue with European and Asian academia, the efforts of several generations of scholars after Fairbank have slowly broken down his paradigm. Studies of maritime China are increasingly showing a broad, integrated maritime East Asian region comprising the seas and their littoral from the Sea of Japan to the Strait of Melaka. This article surveys the historiographical development of the field. It also highlights my work-in-progress on autonomous overseas Chinese polities along the Gulf of Siam littoral in mainland Southeast Asia during the eighteenth century as one possible future path for the study of maritime Chinese history.     

Neurocranial Trauma in the Late Archaic Human Remains from Xujiayao,Northern China

The early Late Pleistocene late archaic human remains from Xujiayao, northern China, reveal several abnormalities of the neurocranial vault. The Xujiayao site is located on the northwestern boundary of the Nihewan Basin, and on the basis of various indicators, it dates to the early Late Pleistocene. Among the 15 human neurocranial elements found at Xujiayao in the 1970s, three elements show minor traumatic lesions of the external table: the largely complete Xujiayao 5a immature parietal bone, the Xujiayao 8 small piece of anterior right parietal bone and the Xujiayao 12 partial occipital bone. The lesions are all superior to the temporal or nuchal lines and hence were subcutaneous, covered only by the pericranium, the galea aponeurotica and the overlying skin. The external tables are variably concave with irregular bone within the bony depressions, and the diploë show varying degrees of involvement. The Xujiayao abnormalities join a series of minor neurocranial healed lesions among Pleistocene humans, as well as more pronounced healed neurocranial and facial trauma. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.