Connecting to food: cultivating children in the school garden

School gardens are widely celebrated as spaces to promote health and sustainability by connecting children with their food. While scholars have assessed the effects of gardening in practice, media discourses play a key role in constituting this site. This paper examines how the school garden is discursively constituted within American and Canadian newspaper coverage. The analysis reveals specific forms of connection that are said to flourish in the school garden: between food production and consumption, between bodies and knowledge, and between the urban child and nature. While all children are said to benefit from connecting with their food, these connections are articulated differently in relation to particular bodies and spaces, evident in racialized and classed narratives of stewardship and salvation. As children’s relationship to food is invested with the hopes and fears of collective futures, the discursive construction of the school garden provides crucial insights into contemporary understandings of childhood.     

Methods and Challenges for the Seismic Assessment of Historic Masonry Structures

ABSTRACT

Despite the high vulnerability of historic structures to earthquakes, the approaches for evaluating seismic demand and capacity still appear inadequate and there is little consensus on the most appropriate assessment methods to use. To develop an improved knowledge on the seismic behavior of masonry structures and the reliability of analysis tools, two real-scale specimens were tested on a shake table, and several experts were invited to foresee failure mechanism and seismic capacity within a blind prediction test. Once unveiled, experimental results were simulated using multi-block dynamics, finite elements, or discrete elements. This article gathers the lessons learned and identifies issues requiring further attention. A combination of engineering judgment and numerical models may help to identify the collapse mechanism, which is as essential as it is challenging for the seismic assessment. To this purpose, discrete modeling approaches may lead to more reliable results than continuous ones. Even when the correct mechanism is identified, estimating the seismic capacity remains difficult, due to the complexity and randomness of the seismic response, and to the sensitivity of numerical tools to input variables. Simplified approaches based on rigid body dynamics, despite the considerable experience and engineering judgment required, provide as good results as do advanced simulations.     

Frequencies of Rare Incisor Variations Reflect Factors Influencing Precontact Population Relationships in Mexico and the American Southwest

Mexican prehistory is characterized by migration and population isolation in its earliest phase, followed by later inter‐population cultural interactions, such as politics and trade. While shared, common morphological variants are often informative about recent population events, rare trait variants have not been widely investigated to see whether they might be informative about earlier events. Here, we consider populations that show several rare variants at frequencies high enough to warrant such an investigation. Examining past population structure can help us understand population interactions across different periods of time, levels of migration, and population isolation/drift. Multiple‐origin populations may have more variation, including more and higher rates of rare traits. We examined maxillary lateral incisors in 1117 dentitions from 76 samples of Preclassic/Classic and Postclassic pre‐European contact Mexico and the American Southwest for the prevalence of rare lateral incisor variants. Variants observed included barrel, congenital absence, interruption groove, mesial marginal bending, peg, reduced, supernumerary, and talon teeth. The most common variant overall is interruption groove. Central Mexico, Huasteca, and the Lowland Yucatan region samples present the highest overall number of incisor variants. Higher frequencies of single unusual traits are commonly found in samples from smaller populations, while samples from larger population centres show a greater range of these rare variants. We investigated to see whether the pattern of rare incisor variant frequencies reflected early or later population history by comparing similarity/distance matrices and factor model matrices using Mantel tests and Generalized Procrustes analysis. Results show a weak relationship with the Postclassic period and shared migration/language and trade interaction models. We suggest that later cultural interactions have acted to mask earlier population history. Research on serial founder effects should be approached multiregionally and across time, to avoid missing inter‐region biological relationships. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

邻里环境感知对中国城市居民自评健康影响研究——以武汉市为例

邻里作为城市居民的重要日常生活场所，对健康的影响引起广泛关注。本文选取武汉市南湖街道这一典型住区，运用多元回归分析，针对商品房和保障房邻里展开对比研究，解析不同类型邻里中居民的邻里环境感知对自评健康的影响差异。研究发现，控制个人因素后，体育休闲设施感知、归属感和安全感显示出对自评健康独立且显著的影响。而在对比研究中，商品房邻里的居民自评健康受邻里环境感知的影响较显著，而保障房邻里的居民自评健康受个体层面特征的影响较显著。因此，宜针对不同类型邻里制定差异化的社区健康提升策略。     

The Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia Project: New Data and Method from the Insular Mediterranean

Sardinia has played a vital integrative role in the Holocene Mediterranean, most notably—although not only—as a key locus in emergent maritime “Mediterraneanization” and as an object of contestation among mainland polities over the last three millennia. Yet, despite the florescence of Mediterranean survey archaeology, this standard method has only been sparsely employed in Sardinia, with a pronounced focus on large, urban, coastal sites. Accordingly, we have little understanding of the ebb and flow of human settlement in the Sardinian interior. This represents a significant lacuna in the study of Mediterranean archaeology and history. Here, we report data from the first two seasons of the Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia (LASS) Project, a multidisciplinary project designed to correct this bias and to investigate how episodic integration into—but also disintegration from—larger economic and political structures drove sociocultural and socioeconomic change in southwestern Sardinia over the Mid-Late Holocene.     

THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR DATA-BANK

Several countries have made large investments in building historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) databases containing census and other quantitative statistics over long periods of time. Making good use of these databases requires approaches that explore spatial and temporal change. The authors use a variety of visualization and spatial analysis techniques to explore population change in Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the late 1840s. Importantly, the techniques allow differences over space and time to be explored, thus stressing the diversity between places, rather than making all places appear the same, a common criticism of many statistical approaches. The authors demonstrate the potential of these techniques to explore geographical and temporal variations in large quantitative GIS datasets.     

Quantifying the Family Frailty Effect in Infant and Child Mortality by Using Median Hazard Ratio (MHR)

Abstract

Most microlevel studies in the social sciences have focused on the impact of different measured variables. While some studies have also dealt with unobserved variation, it has usually only been controlled for to perfect the estimates of the observables. In this article, the authors applied a modified version of a recently developed method designed to quantify the effect of unobserved variation in continuous time multilevel models, called a median hazard ratio. It allows a direct comparison of the effect of unobserved heterogeneity with standard relative risks. The method is used in an analysis of infant and child mortality in southern Sweden during the period 1766–1895. The empirical findings indicate that unmeasured differences between families were more important than either socioeconomic status or gender throughout this period.     

Early Olmec obsidian trade and economic organization at San Lorenzo

The Olmec were the first complex society to develop in Mesoamerica between 1800 and 600 cal B.C. The earliest large Olmec center during this period was the archaeological site of San Lorenzo which emerged as Mesoamerica's first large ritual and political center between 1400 and 1000 cal B.C. San Lorenzo's growth as a prominent center included the development of long distance trade relationships with adjacent areas of Guatemala and highland Mexico. High precision chemical analysis of obsidian imported for use in the fabrication of cutting tools is used to reconstruct the growth, size and extent of San Lorenzo's interregional exchange networks with areas of Mexico and Guatemala where obsidian occurs as raw material. A total of 852 obsidian artifacts were analyzed to reconstruct changes in obsidian procurement between 1800 and 800 cal B.C. This represents one of the largest samples of sourced obsidian from a Mesoamerican site and it provides a comprehensive picture for the development of interregional trade networks for Mesoamerica's first large Olmec center.     

A 3D morphometric analysis of surface geometry in Levallois cores: patterns of stability and variability across regions and their implications

Levallois cores and products were manufactured by hominin populations distributed across wide regions of Africa and Eurasia. Levallois technology remains an important focus for research in Palaeolithic archaeology, yet quantitative morphological comparisons of Levallois core morphology from different regions remain rare. Here, utilizing Levallois cores from Africa, the Near East, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent, patterns of morphological variability in the shape of the Levallois flaking surface and core outline (margin) shape were examined for patterns of variability and stability across regions using 3D geometric morphometrics. The multivariate statistical shape analyses undertaken revealed a clear pattern: that is, the greatest levels of shape variability in Levallois cores is evident in the form of their outline (planform) shape. Conversely, the geometrical relationship between the margin of the Levallois cores and their topological surface morphology was relatively uniform. This pattern of variability was evident in terms of variation both across regions and between cores from the same locality. These results indicate that the outline form of such cores was a less important variable than the geometric/topological properties of the surface morphology and, in particular, the relationship between the margin of the core and those variables. These results have implications for why it has been reported that replicating such cores in modern experiments is a particularly difficult task. The specific interrelationship between the geometric properties of the core and the core margin provide further evidence that Levallois core technology would be unlikely to emerge from the context of opportunistic migrating platform reduction strategies (such as those seen in many Mode 1 industries). If, as is widely suggested, Levallois cores were deliberate products in Pleistocene contexts, these results also hint that relatively sophisticated means of social transmission (i.e. teaching) may have been required to sustain their production over time and space.     

Corporate kin-groups,social memory,and “history houses”? A quantitative test of recent reconstructions of social organization and building function at Çatalhöyük during the PPNB

It has been argued that the corporate kin-group was the main form of socioeconomic organization at the Turkish site of Çatalhöyük during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). This hypothesis is linked to a claim of long-term repetitive patterning in the use of household space. Çatalhöyük's corporate kin-groups, it is suggested, would have been maintained by social memory, and social memory would have been created by the repeated rebuilding of houses with the same floor plan and by the burial of important members of the corporate kin-groups under house floors. This hypothesis been taken up by a number of authors in recent years. However, it is not clear how much confidence should be invested in the hypothesis as the use of household space at Çatalhöyük during the PPNB has not been subject to formal evaluation. With this in mind, we carried out a study in which we examined the relationship between continuity in house floor plans and the percentage of houses that contain burials. To assess the co-variation between these variables, we developed a GIS-based method of quantifying house wall continuity, and then subjected the resulting index and a number of other variables, including the percentage of houses that contain burials, to factor analysis. The results of the analyses do not support the hypothesis. The house-wall continuity index and the percentage of houses that contains burials load on different factors, which indicates that they do not co-vary through time. This is contrary to the predictions of the corporate kin-group hypothesis. Thus, claims that during the PPNB Çatalhöyük's occupants formed corporate kin groups that were maintained by social memory and “history houses” should be curtailed and interpretations built on this hypothesis should be viewed with suspicion.