Human Response to Climate Change during the Umm an‐Nar/Wadi Suq Transition in the United Arab Emirates

Stable oxygen isotope ratios in archaeological human dental enamel represent an under‐utilised tool in the examination of changing climatic patterns in the ancient world. In the Oman Peninsula at the end of the third millennium bc , rapid aridification was accompanied by a breakdown in interregional trade relations; however, the human response to these changes is poorly understood. At the Bronze Age necropolis at Shimal in the United Arab Emirates, dental enamel from individuals interred in both Umm an‐Nar (ca 2700–2000 bc ) and Wadi Suq (ca 2000–1300 bc ) tombs underwent oxygen, strontium and carbon isotope analyses to examine how local inhabitants of southeastern Arabia responded to both environmental and socioeconomic change. While individuals from Shimal exhibit a clear shift in mean δ¹⁸O_c(VPDB) values from the Umm an‐Nar (−3.5 ± 0.6‰, 1σ) to the Wadi Suq (−2.4 ± 0.9‰, 1σ), corresponding ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr and δ¹³C_ap signatures display homogeneity indicative of continuity in Bronze Age lifeways. Together, these data highlight the ability of local communities to successfully adapt to their changing environs (in lieu of societal collapse or a shift to a more mobile lifestyle) in an effort to maintain their way of life. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exposure to Cadmium and Lead in an Agropastoral Iron Age Population

Metals present in the environment (soil, water and atmosphere) can affect food safety and human health through bio‐accumulation and bio‐magnification phenomena. Human exposure to the metals may take place through the environment and by ingesting contaminated food (including water), determining harmful effects usually detectable over the long term. Starting with the Industrial Revolution, local occurrence and concentration of metallic contaminants in the environment have been exponentially increasing: it has been assessed that, nowadays, daily absorption of lead, by North American people, is noticeably greater than that during prehistoric times. In this study, we measured concentrations of cadmium, lead and zinc in 153 bone samples (femurs) of Iron Age inhabitants of Central Italy (Abruzzo): the Samnites from the Alfedena Necropolis (2600–2400 bp ). The data found are in agreement with the results of similar published studies. Heavy metal concentrations varied widely among samples with the exception of zinc. A significant difference (p same Mann–Whitney test <0.05) in cadmium bone levels was found between male (0.08–1.8 mg/kg, median 0.31 mg/kg) and female samples (0.05–1.3 mg/kg, median 0.53 mg/kg). Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Turning International: Foundations of Modern International Thought and New Paradigms for Intellectual History

Summary

This essay provides an overview of the disciplinary and analytical significance of David Armitage's Foundations of Modern International Thought in the context of the new international history, and the so-called ‘international turn’. It then goes on to discuss the significance of the absence of women in this new sub-field of intellectual history.     

2. SOME KEYWORDS TOWARD DECOLONIAL METHODS: STUDYING SETTLER COLONIAL HISTORIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE FROM TKARONTO

This article provides keywords and reflections for decolonial methods, drawing on insights from the Indigenous-led Land and the Refinery project, which concerns the history of Canada's Chemical Valley. This project is crucially organized as Indigenous people co-researching the Imperial Oil Refinery, not as academics studying Aamjiwnaang, and asks how Indigenous and decolonial methods might reorient the use of archives toward other futures. Together, the keywords begin to outline a particular place-based theory of change within decolonial historical practice.     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

Microclimates of Urban Reproduction: The Limits of Automating Environmental Control

Enclosed, controlled environments, stretching from sites of luxury consumption to urban food production, are proliferating in cities around the world, utilising increasingly advanced techniques for (re)creating and optimising microclimatic conditions for different purposes. However, the role of automated control systems—to filter, reprocess and reassemble atmospheric and metabolic flows with growing precision—remains under-researched. In this article, we explore the phenomenon of automated environmental control at three sites in the UK city of Sheffield: a botanical glasshouse, a luxury hotel and a university plant growth research lab. In doing so, we first show how controlled environments are constituted through specific relations between the inside and outside, which are embedded in inherently political urban contexts and processes. Second, we identify the technical and ecological tensions and limits of indoor environmental control at each site which limit the scope of automation, and the considerable amount of hidden labour and energy required to maintain and restabilise desired conditions. Drawing on these more established examples of ecological interiorisation in a key moment of transition, we raise urgent questions for critical urban and environmental geographers about the possible futures of controlled environments, their practical or selective scalability, and who and what will be left “outside”, when they are emerging as a strategic form of urban adaptation and immunisation in the face of converging ecological pressures.     

Evaluating Stakeholder Participation and Influence on State-Level Rulemaking

Despite sustained attention to the role of stakeholders in policymaking—both in legislative and regulatory venues—we lack a systematic understanding of whether and when stakeholders wield influence over decisions. This is particularly true regarding state-level rulemaking in the United States, which has become an important venue of policy action as federal policymaking is increasingly stymied. Although the specifics of the rulemaking process vary to some degree across states, determining whether common patterns of stakeholder influence exist across states and issue areas can advance our understanding of regulatory institutions more broadly. This study contributes to the growing body of scholarship on state-level rulemaking by analyzing the ways in which stakeholders participate in rulemaking processes and the effects on rulemaking decisions of such participation in three policy domains across five states. We find that while industry may be influential during rulemaking across cases, consequential opportunities for non-industry stakeholders to influence regulatory decisions also exist.     

Compared to What? Changes in Interest Group Resources and the Proposal and Adoption of State Teacher Policy

What is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state policy? Using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative and absolute resource strength, I estimate a series of within-state fixed effects models that gain identification from changes in interest group resources and teacher policy over time. I find that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers' unions in states where teachers' union opposition interest groups are expending more election (but not lobbying) resources over time. Further, I find that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers' union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. Expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing interest group resource dynamics over time.