Does size of local labour markets affect wage inequality? a rank-size rule of income distribution

The questions addressed in this paper are: (i) does wage inequalityincrease with local population size, and if so, (ii) what arepossible factors behind this increase? In a cross-section analysisof Swedish local labour markets using unique full populationdata, the article shows that urban scale, i.e. size of localpopulation, has significant positive effects on wage inequality.Testing for potential explanations, labour market diversification,human capital, migration, age structure and employment are shownto be significantly associated with inequality. Given theseeffects, the article raises the question of how to understandand incorporate scale effects into models of long-term changein wage inequality.     

Persistence of the cultural landscape in Campania (Southern Italy) before the AD 472 Vesuvius eruption: archaeoenvironmental data

Cultural landscapes were prominent during the Early Roman period when agronomic knowledge allowed the spread of intensive land exploitation in most of the available land. The aim of this contribution is to explore whether for the Campania region (Southern Italy) archaeoenvironmental data would support continuity or change in the cultural landscape of Roman tradition in the 4th and 5th centuries. To do so, new data from two sites located on the northern slopes of the Vesuvius, both buried by the AD 472 eruption have been investigated. Charcoal analysis, ¹⁴C dating, and chemical analysis of organic residues were carried out in order to study the landscape and the food production at these sites. The results suggest the persistence of the Roman cultural landscape until the 4th and 5th centuries in this area. The landscape is in fact strongly marked both in agriculture and woodland exploitation and management, being characterized by managed chestnut forests as well as valuable cultivations of walnut, large vineyards, olive groves, and probably orchards and crops. The integrated approach with archaeobotanical and archaeometric analyses proves to be a powerful method for the study of the past landscapes, providing a good insight into the environment. Furthermore, this study provided the most ancient evidence of chestnut silviculture for wood.     

Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg und die Anfänge des Universitätsfaches Kunstgeschichte in Großbritannien

Aby M. Warburg (1866- 1929) the famous art historian, critic and great promoter of cultural history collected a unique research library which became a semiofficial part of the newly founded University of Hamburg called ?Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg”? in 1920. At the end of 1933 this library and its staff left Germany in order to prevent the Nazis from destroying this Jewish foundation. Great Britain gave home to it and at the end of 1944 London University incorporated the library now named The Warburg Institute. The Warburg Institute efficiently helped to promote art history as an academic discipline in Great Britain though its actual aims are of interdisciplinary nature and go far beyond art history as it has been the case since the days of Warburg.     

MAGNETIC SUSCEPTIBILITY THICKNESS CORRECTIONS FOR SMALL ARTEFACTS AND COMMENTS ON THE EFFECTS OF‘BACKGROUND’MATERIALS*

Correction factors for magnetic susceptibility measurements on thin (<c. 50 mm thick > artefacts have been determined experimentally for a KT‐5 Exploranium G S. instrument using prepared blocks of Whin Sill dolerite. The cor rection factor is large (> 1.4) for samples less than 10mm thick, and reduces to 1 01 for samples of 50mm thickness. Measurements on thin samples can also be affected by the backing or substrate material on which they are measured. ‘Background’material, for example, soil or plaster, can contribute significantly to recorded measurements on artefacts, particularly for thin artefacts with low susceptibilities     

Rebellious Tigers,a Patriotic Elephant and an Urdu-Speaking Cockatoo: Animals in ‘Mutiny’ Fiction

British fictional representations of the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’ are consistently drawn to tigers. These charismatic animals function as an aspect of a romanticized colonial exotic and perform a symbolic role as embodiments of the limits of imperial power. Tigers often featured as a metaphor for Indian revolutionary activities so that the suppression of the rebellion becomes encoded as a hunt. Taking tiger symbolism as a starting point, this essay explores the relationship of images of animals to imperial authority in late nineteenth-century ‘Mutiny’ fiction. Following a discussion of tigers in G.A. Henty's militaristic accounts of the ‘Mutiny’, I examine G.M. Fenn's tale of an elephant's loyalty to the crown, Begumbagh (1879) and Flora Annie Steel's magnum opus On the Face of the Waters (1896). While Henty and Fenn endeavour to encode a narrative of British superiority in representations of authority over animals, Steel's novel by contrast displays a more ambivalent approach to the nonhuman, evoked most strikingly in the figure of an Urdu-speaking cockatoo that consistently evades the allocation of an over-determined imperial symbolism of power. Tensions between the animal and the human and between the wild and the domestic emerge centrally, therefore, to the key question of political authority in imaginings of this historical crux.     

The “indignant” pilgrim: Cultural narratives of crisis and renewal in the 15M movement in Spain

ABSTRACT

On Saturday July 23, 2011, Guillermo, a young student from Lleida (Catalonia, Spain), who had been camping out since the beginning of the 15M movement, arrived in Madrid after walking over 450 kilometers, in one of the six columns that had crossed the Iberian Peninsula during the previous weeks. The “Popular Indignant March” had been conceived as an original way of rounding off the occupations of hundreds of squares throughout Spain, their objective being Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the first square to be occupied. On the way, which was from the urban periphery toward the center, passing by the rural Spanish plateau, the population's claims and complaints were to be gathered and taken to the agora of the participatory democracy. The experience of having groups of people walking from different origins with a common destination evokes the classical anthropological experience of the religious pilgrimage. Spain's best example is the Camino de Santiago, which has attracted thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe since the Middle Ages. When we ask Guillermo about this parallelism, he denies any spiritual content, although his account of Camino de Sol is like the fulfillment of a civic promise, the ritualization of a festive and revindicative appropriation of the territory, the colonization of a terra incognita that they had taken over two months before, on 15M, when the hashtag #spanishrevolution became a trending topic within the social networks. The article relates this experience to the narratives of the 15M movement and to the situation of young people in Spain in times of crisis.