Book Notes

Race Mathews, David Bennett — a Memoir, Melbourne, Australian Fabian Society (Pamphlet 44), 1985, pp. v + 59. $3.00 (paper)

S. Graubard (ed.), Australia: the Daedalus Symposium, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1985, pp.441. $9.95 (paper)

Senate Standing Committee on Constitutional and Legal Affairs, A Bill of Rights for Australia? An Exposure Report, Canberra, AGPS, 1985, pp.128. $7.60 (paper)

Dean Jaensch, An Introduction to Australian Politics, 2nd edition, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1984, pp.318. $11.95 (paper)     

Surviving the belt shop blues: Women miners and critical acts

As concept, policy and practice, affirmative action in Australia has continued to be the subject of political dissension. Currently, Liberal Party policy promises to dismantle the Affirmative Action Agency, while the Labor Government has recently added contract compliance guidelines to the 1986 Act Effective analysis of this institution requires that the political contingencies of policy‐framing and implementation be related to the micropolitics of the workplace. This article begins such an analysis. I argue that the current shape of the legislation enforces its projection as a top‐down ‘policy of persuasion’, a move which reflects and enhances the rhetoric and practices that serve relative advantages to men. Nevertheless, my critique of a ‘best practice’ organisation suggests something more: a dissonance between their expectations and their hostile reception in the workplace can prompt women to mobilise against the imposition of that advantage.     

Ancestral pueblo population aggregation and abandonment in the North American Southwest

After over a century of archaeological research in the American Southwest, questions focusing on population aggregation and abandonment continue to preoccupy much of Pueblo archaeology. This article presents a historical overview of the present range of explanatory approaches to these two processes, with a primary focus on population aggregation in those regions occupied by historic and prehistoric Pueblo peoples. We stress the necessarily complementary nature of most of these explanations of residential abandonment and aggregation. Case studies from the northern Southwest illustrate the continuous nature of these processes across time and space. We suggest that additional explanatory potential will be gained by the use of well-defined theoretical units to frame our current approaches. We extend the use of the local community concept as a theoretical unit of organization that, along with explicit archaeological correlates, should help advance our research into population aggregation and abandonment in this and other regions of the world.     

The naming of orphans in France during World War One: A study of a nationwide cohort of pupilles de la Nation

The investigation of a simple behavior, child naming, can provide insights into the varying reactions of families confronted by the extraordinary war losses of the First World War. The current study analyses names given in a large cohort of French orphans born 1914–1916, constructed thanks to the linkage of civil registers with a nationwide database of soldiers who died during the War. It shows that a prenatal loss of father was associated with a strong increase in father's name transmission. The phenomenon was twice as intense in officers' offspring. Regression analysis suggests the precise timing of the father's death controlled this change in naming behavior: father's name transmission was at a maximum when the father died at the very beginning of pregnancy.     

Chronicle of an early demise,surname extinction in the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries

It has been amply demonstrated that individuals' reproductive capability is the key explanatory phenomenon for understanding onomastic disappearance during the early modern period. This article analyzes the evolution and consequences of surname extinction in a specific population: Catalonia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this article two aspects are examined. First, the observed disappearance of surnames is estimated through historical data collected in the Llibres d'Esposalles (Marriage Books) from 1481 to 1600 at Barcelona Cathedral. Second, the estimated natural extinction of those surnames registered in 1481 is forecast by applying a statistical branching process.     

A Cost-Based Ripley’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">K</Emphasis> Function to Assess Social Strategies in Settlement Patterning

Most quantitative approaches to distributional analysis in archaeology assume a homogeneous study surface that is amenable to easy generalisations. This framework has been widely used to describe settlement processes, disregarding the spatial heterogeneity inherent to geographic reality. In other words, researchers have often assumed that the correlation between the elements of a spatial distribution is a function of the Euclidean distance (i.e. straight line distance) between them. Other archaeological studies have tested alternative measures to Euclidean distances, such as cost-based ones, both to describe optimal routes and to assess spatial autocorrelation in a point pattern. Nevertheless, until now there has been no suitable model to introduce these measures into spatial statistical equations. In order to overcome this obstacle, we approach the implementation problem inversely by embedding the spatial pattern under study into a Euclidean frame of reference based on its cost-distance pairwise matrix. This paper describes the application of this methodology on one of the main tools used by archaeologists to assess settlement patterns: Ripley’s K function. We present two case studies, covering both macroscale and mesoscale, with significant variations in the results depending on the use of the Euclidean or cost-based approach. Data, functions and results have been R-packaged for the sake of reproducibility and reusability, allowing other researchers to build upon our methods.