Living on the Edge? Transformation of a Marginal Pleistocene Landscape Into a Settlement Area in the Northeastern Part of the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This paper will examine settlement location during the Iron Age in the northeast part of the Netherlands, an area shaped by Pleistocene geology. In recent years, a number of Late Iron Age/Early Roman settlements situated on the low lying slopes of sand ridges and nearby stream ridges revealed traces of an earlier Iron Age occupation. Palynological data revealed that this part of the landscape was used by humans before it was transformed into an area of settlement. An analysis of excavation data from two key sites at Denekamp-De Borchert and Groningen-Helpermaar, as well as other known sites, lead to the conclusion that the transformation of ‘peripheral landscapes’ into permanent settlement locations was preceded by a phase of arable cultivation which left no trace of permanent habitation. It is also suggested that the impact of human behaviour on the natural landscape in the Early and Middle Iron Age was much bigger than previously anticipated. When excavating this type of settlement areas dating to the Late Iron Age, archaeologists must be aware that only of a small group of archaeological features exist. The proposed model for the choice of settlement location may be more widespread, because of similarities in landscape between the study area presented here and other landscapes in Northwest-Europe (e.g. parts of Germany and Denmark).     

Idealistisch geprägte Axiomatik des Selbstorganisationsparadigmas

The essay shows that the axiomatics of the systemic‐cybernetic‐biological theory of self‐organization by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have their roots in the philosophy of German Idealism. Especially the completely subject‐centered philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte already contains the central axiomatics of Maturana and Varela.     

“Who can play this game?” The lived experiences of doctoral candidates and early career women in the neoliberal university

Work intensification is a characteristic of the current neoliberal trend in academia. Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers (PhD candidates and ECRs) in geography are no strangers to this development but are rarely the focus of publications or dialogue on the (gendered) outcomes of the academy’s neoliberal agenda. Encouraged by the recent emotional turn in the social sciences and humanities, this article seeks to unveil some of the everyday particulars of life in academia for PhD candidates and ECRs under the tide of financial cuts and increased competition for funding. We explore the question: “Who can – and indeed wants to – play this game?” As three early and one mid-career academic women in four different institutions in the Global North, we make use of reflexivity, autobiographical writing, and reflection, to analyze increasingly stressful and demanding working conditions. Through the depiction of our lived experiences, we contend that the push for ever increasing outputs attends most of our time and represents a distinctly different form of scholarship than has been traditionally considered as the pathway into academia, not seldom jeopardizing well-being of young academics, one that needs to be interrogated by geographers.     

Geschlecht und Gesellschaft: Die ersten Ärztinnen und sozialpolitische Vorurteile

The objective mode of scientific inquiry has increasingly been called into question especially within feminist theory. I have tried to introduce two methodological approaches in examing a small area of medical opinion-making in the medical press at a period in which the question of women doctors was being discussed, but very few women doctors were actually practicing in Germany. Methodologically feminist history sees gender as a structural component used to ascribe sexual division of labour and to form concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” in a society. It does not define “women's history” as a separate sphere additive to other traditional areas of historical writing including history of science. The second methodological approach is that of deconstruction: “objective” statements in medicine and the biological sciences are part of social and cultural preconceptions. I have examined the pattern of unreflected scientific statements about women's claims to want to become doctors. The pattern is one of preventive prejudice: representative doctors wrote about women in physiological and biological terms of being “weak” and “unfit”. This was an effective strategy for maintaining a status quo of dequalification. The historical examination of women entering the professions has not so much to do with their own capacities, but rather with socially conceived forms of argumentation indirectly applied: preventive statements in medicine about biological function, the “weaker” sex, intellectual denigration, physiological determinism. Some of the statements I found are amusing, but the humour becomes bitter when the consequences enter our social consciousness.     

Legitimacy and Efficiency in Planning Processes—(How) Does Wind Power Change the Situation?

Abstract

In land-use planning processes there often exists a tension between, on the one hand, making efforts to increase the democratic legitimacy of the process and, on the other, ensuring efficiency in the procedures. This is not least relevant in the case of large-scale wind power where development decisions balance between the need to safe-guard local self-determination and the urgency of mitigating climate change. This paper investigates how the issue of legitimacy versus efficiency is managed within the national planning systems of Finland, Norway and Sweden when faced with the expansion of wind power and how the national strategies for wind power planning are perceived by different stakeholders. As the EU Renewable Energy Directives set the conditions for national policy in the field, the empirical work starts with an examination of these documents before moving on to a comparison of the national planning and permitting processes. The results show that the development of wind power has been moving planning procedures away from more inclusive planning methods in favour of more top-down and streamlined ones.     

Trauma and pathology of a buried dog from San Nicolas Island,California, U.S.A.

To date more intact dog remains have been found on San Nicolas than on any of the other seven California Channel Islands. However, little is known about them. During the 2007 summer field season we excavated a medium sized young male dog in a flexed burial position from a pit at CA-SNI-25, a large Native American village site. The dog exhibits hypodontia, noticeable tooth attrition, severe scapular trauma, and vertebral, rib, and phalanx pathologies. Most of the injuries appear to have resulted from a severe blunt force trauma of unknown origin and it is likely the dog would not have survived without human care. The results of our analysis contribute to the, somewhat limited, published data on archaeological dogs in California. In this paper we describe the biological characteristics of the dog especially his anomalies and pathologies and compare them with published reports of other North American archaeological dogs with similar conditions.     

AI. malimlu- und malimluca-

Ohne Zusammenfassung