Recent research into oldowan hominin activities at Kanjera South, Western Kenya

This paper presents the initial results of excavations at Kanjera South, located on the Homa Peninsula in Western Kenya. Since 1995, our exploration of this locality has yielded a combination of artefacts and well preserved faunal remains in a sedimentary context that also allows for environmental reconstruction. Here we examine the history of exploration of Kanjera and its significance in the development of palaeoanthropological research in East Africa. We also summarise our findings from the recently discovered Oldowan site. Taphonomic analyses suggest that the archaeological layers were formed at least partially by hominin activity. Artefacts made from a wide variety of raw materials are abundant, as are animal bones. Results of our first analyses confirm that Oldowan hominins had considerable behavioural flexibility and occupied a range of habitats.Cet article présente des résultats préliminaires de nos fouilles au site de Kanjera South, situé sur la péninsule de Homa au Kenya occidental. Depuis 1995 nos explorations à cette localité ont produit une combinaison des outils lithiques et des restes fossils dans un bon état de conservation venant d’un contexte sédimentaire qui permet également les reconstitutions paleoenvironnementaux. Ici nous examinons l’histoire de l’exploration de Kanjera et de son importance dans le développement de la recherche paleoanthropologique en Afrique de l’Est. Nous récapitulons également nos résultats du gisement récemment découvert d’Oldowan. L’étude taphonomique suggère que les couches archéologiques ont été formées au moins partiellement par l’activité des hominins. Les objets fabriqués faits à partir d’une grande variété de matières lithiques sont abondants, de même que les os animaux. Les résultats de nos premières analyses confirment que les hominins d’Oldowan ont eu une flexibilité de comportement considérable et ont occupé une gamme d’habitats différents.     

Oldowan behavior and raw material transport: perspectives from the Kanjera Formation

The archaeological record of Oldowan hominins represents a diverse behavioral system. It has been suggested that exploitation of lithic resources by Oldowan hominins was simplistic and represented mostly use of local sources of stone. Here we investigate the raw material selection and transport behaviors of Oldowan hominins reflected in the stone artifact assemblages from the Kanjera South Formation, South Rachuonyo District, Kenya. Using geochemical methods (ED-XRF) artifacts are linked to primary and secondary source outcrops throughout southwestern Kenya. These data show that hominins selected raw materials for transport at frequencies that are significantly different from their availability on ancient landscapes. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of the assemblage represents transport over relatively long distances (>10 km). Our study further suggests that in the early stages of stone tool use hominins used a wide variety of raw materials and selected these materials at some distance from their eventual discard locations. Early hominin behavior may have incorporated an understanding of raw material source distributions across a more extensive landscape than has been previously documented. This supports the growing perspective that Oldowan technology represents a more complex behavioral pattern than is usually associated with the beginnings of hominin tool use.     

Raw material quality and Oldowan hominin toolstone preferences: evidence from Kanjera South,Kenya

The role of raw material quality in Oldowan technology has not been fully explored. There are numerous studies suggesting Oldowan hominins preferred certain types of stone for artifact manufacture. Previous studies of the artifact assemblage from the early Pliocene Oldowan locality of Kanjera South (South Rachuonyo District, Kenya) show that raw material selection and transport was an important aspect of Late Pliocene hominin adaptations. Yet the exact properties of stones that hominins were selecting remain enigmatic. Two potentially important features of artifact raw material are durability and fracture predictability. We investigate fracture predictability through mechanical tests of stone and investigations of the affect of stone properties on fracture patterns in archaeological collections. We investigate stone durability with actualistic studies of edge attrition combined with further mechanical tests of various lithologies. Oldowan hominins at Kanjera appear to have selected raw materials based on their durability. The ability for a stone to fracture consistently does not appear to be as important in hominin toolstone preference as previously assumed. Hominins that produced the assemblages at Kanjera South appear to have incorporated an extensive understanding of various attributes of raw material in the transport and production of stone artifacts. When combined with previous research on the transport patterns at Kanjera, the results of this study provide evidence for a more complex raw material acquisition strategy than has previously been suggested for Late Pliocene Oldowan hominins.     

From the Body of Christ to Racial Homogeneity: Carl Schmitt's Mobilization of ‘Life’ against ‘the Spirit of Technicity’

This article traces the semantics of “life” and “vitality” in Carl Schmitt up to the 1930s. It shows that Schmitt deploys these vitalist elements against the modern “spirit of technicity” in his attempt to combat the lack of substantial ideas in modern politics. However, Schmitt himself cannot escape a fundamental political relativism. There remains an unstable tension at the heart of his thought between the quest for substance and the quest for order. The latter is relativist because it is a quest for order as such, any order. Although Schmitt's semantics of life and vitality is not drawn from a biological register, it adopted a völkisch meaning in 1933. Anti-Semitism becomes a form of life and racial homogeneity fills in for substance. The article concludes that, while there are good reasons for criticizing the modern “spirit of technicity,” Schmitt's critical model is fundamentally flawed.     

Political economy and social legislation in Germany,ca 1870–1890

Summary

This article examines the nature of academic political theory in Britain in the post-war period, examining in particular the degree to which theorists were able to mount normative theoretical arguments. Traditionally, commentators such as Brian Barry and Perry Anderson have argued that political theory in this period was largely dead between 1945 and 1970 due to the impact of positivism, but I argue this is mistaken for two main reasons. First, it fails to distinguish between the different forms that positivism took in the post-war era. Thus although it is true many theorists tended to claim that moral and political values could (or should) not be discussed rationally, their reasons for doing so varied considerably. For while theorists such as A. J. Ayer and T. D. Weldon justified their positions theoretically, with arguments drawn from behaviourist social science or innovations made in linguistic philosophy, others, such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Anthony Crosland, argued that it was the perceived success of post-war welfare states or the alleged failure of political ideologies that made traditional political theory irrelevant. Second, following on from this, I argue that delineating more accurately how positivism actually operated helps to explain how political theorists were able to pursue their discipline normatively—albeit that few reacted to all aspects of positivism. Thus if some (such as Karl Popper) were more concerned to insist that political philosophy had something to say in practice, others (such as Michael Oakeshott), reacted more strongly against the proposition that human behaviour can be understood purely causally. Finally, I examine the impact of ordinary language philosophy on post-war political theory, and argue that rather than simply damaging the cause of normative political theory by encouraging a myopic concentration on the linguistic analysis of particular moral and political concepts, over the longer term its effects were much more positive, since it helped to focus attention on the irreducibly normative dimension of political concepts.     

Core Use-Life Distributions in Lithic Assemblages as a Means for Reconstructing Behavioral Patterns

Artifacts with varying use-lives have different discard rates and hence are represented unequally among archaeological assemblages. As such, the ability to gauge the use-lives of artifacts is important for understanding the formation of archaeological assemblage variability. In lithic artifacts, use-life can be expressed as the extraction of utility, or work potential, from existing stone volume. Using experimental data and generalized linear modeling, this study develops models of artifact use-life on cores in the form of reduction intensity. We then apply these models to two archaeological case studies to (a) reconstruct the reduction intensities of archaeological cores and (b) investigate the survivorship curves of these archaeological cores across the reduction continuum using the Weibull function. Results indicate variation in core reduction and maintenance with respect to raw material properties and place use history and implicate evolutionary differences between Early Stone Age hominins and Holocene modern humans.