Storage Structures of the Late Early Bronze I in the Southern Levant and the Urbanisation Process

Nearing the end of the Early Bronze (EB) I period (3350–2950 bce) the southern Levant underwent a transition from a village-oriented to an urban-centred society. An outstanding phenomenon of this period throughout the region is the proliferation of rounded circular structures, usually interpreted as storage facilities, often found in proximity to domestic buildings. These imply increased food production of individual households and a greater need for storage of food surpluses. The agricultural prosperity and resulting surpluses suggested by these storage structures reflect the changes affecting local society and may have been one of the catalysts for urbanisation and the formation of ruling elites during this period.     

丙烯酸树脂B72丙酮溶液在陶瓷文物修复中应用比例研究

作为加固剂和封护剂,丙烯酸树脂B72(简称B72)是国内外应用极其广泛的文物保护修复材料,但作为黏接剂在陶瓷修复粘接、补全、涂层饰色流程中的应用比例及范围几乎未见相关研究实例。文章梳理了B72材料性能和配制方式,通过不同比例B72丙酮溶液固化及作业时间和应用状态实验,提出其作为黏接剂在陶瓷文物粘接、补全、涂层饰色修复流程中的应用比例标准、适用范围和配方比例。研究结果可为文物保护者提供B72简便高效的应用甄选方案。     

The Bakau wreck: an early example of Chinese shipping in Southeast Asia

Very few early Chinese shipwrecks have been discovered in Southeast Asia, despite the enormous volume of trade with China. This article describes the surprising hull features of one such wreck, and its diverse ceramic cargo. The Bakau Wreck dates to the early 15th century, and was bound from southern China to Indonesia via a Thai entrepot port.     

The importance of communal forests in carbon storage: Using and destabilizing carbon measurement in understanding Guatemala's payments for ecosystem services

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are a conservation initiative that offer payments to people who own or manage lands that provide desired ecosystem services. Utilizing mixed methods, I examine how PES in the form of government-issued forestry incentives interact with land tenure to affect carbon storage in Guatemala's Western Highlands. Land tenure is a larger determining factor for carbon storage than payments, as communal forests managed by Indigenous Maya K'iche' communities have significantly higher carbon stocks than private landholdings in these same communities. No statistically significant differences were found in carbon stocks between incentivized and non-incentivized plots, and participants enrolled only a fraction of their land, likely prioritizing enrollment of degraded plots. These results indicate the importance of using both social and physical science methods to understand the physical outcomes and social context of forest management. I also reflect on why carbon storage is often prioritized, drawing on a critical physical geography framework to analyze carbon accounting methods. Measuring carbon storage gives us the tools to describe the success of communal forest management, yet I also caution relying on the quantification of ecosystem services as a method for landscape valuation and suggest avoiding prioritizing carbon storage and sequestration.     

Managing flood risk in the UK: towards an integration of social and technical perspectives

In recent years, an apparent increase in the frequency and severity of floods in the UK has led to growing concerns about societal exposure and vulnerability to flooding, particularly in the context of climate change, floodplain development and changing insurance practices. Despite the important link between assessments of exposure to flooding (hazard assessments) and issues of societal vulnerability, this link has rarely been explored in detail and has often been reflected in policy terms by a highly technocratic approach to flood risk management. Indeed, more comprehensive studies have usually favoured rigid and deterministic definitions of vulnerability, in keeping with the wider technocratic paradigm pervading management institutions. In an attempt to redress the balance, this paper considers the role of hazard assessment and issues of societal vulnerability as mutually informative debates and advocates a movement away from the technocratic ideals currently favoured in the UK.     

“釜底之水”: 明清时期文安洼的水患与治理

河北文安、大城两县境内的文安洼,地处大清河、子牙河水系下游,地势低洼,“形如釜底”,导致积水难以泄出,历史时期常发生严重的洪涝灾害。明清时期文安县通过修筑堤防、开凿引河、营田种稻等多种措施治理文安洼,但水患仍频。文安洼水患难以治理的原因,既包括文安洼区域本身低洼的地形与大清河、子牙河下游流域淤高等环境因素,也包括文安县与周边州县之间治水利益的矛盾及文安县自身的治理乏术、乏力等社会因素。     

CONTESTED GROWTH: THE DEVELOPMENT OF NORWAY'S TEMPORARY STAFFING INDUSTRY

In this article we mobilize a variegated capitalism approach to understand the development of the Norwegian temporary staffing industry. From this perspective, national temporary staffing industries are understood as contested multi‐actor and multi‐scalar institutional fields. The analysis explores the key actors and regulatory conditions that have interactively produced this field in the Norwegian context since initial deregulation in 2000, paying particular attention to the active role played by agencies and their collective organizations. In our account, the tight regulatory conditions for temporary staffing in Norway emerge as the main mobilizing issue for the agencies, as well as other political actors such as trade unions. It is argued that the nature of national labour laws, and struggles thereon, are defining characteristics which set the Norwegian market apart from the neighbouring Swedish staffing market. The Norwegian case enables us to contribute to the wider economic geography literature on temporary staffing markets by demonstrating the fundamental importance of national regulatory processes and the contested political processes that underlie regulatory change. It also demonstrates how national distinctiveness is actively produced in relation to extra‐national dynamics in terms of both regulatory imperatives (e.g. via the EU's Temporary Workers Directive) and processes of migration. Overall, we demonstrate how national staffing markets are highly dynamic, multi‐scalar institutional configurations whose particularities and complexities defy attempts to generalize across groups of seemingly “similar” national economies.