Formalizing the Informal Sector: Barriers and Costs

This article uses material from a series of case studies conducted in Latin America to analyse various aspects of the formalization of the informal sector. In particular, it examines the legal and bureaucratic barriers confronting informal sector micro-enterprises which seek to become part of the formal, legal circuit, and assesses the costs in time and money which are involved in the formalization process. The process itself is seen as consisting of two elements — achieving legality and retaining that status over time — each of which involves certain bureaucratic and financial demands. While recognizing that the requirements for formalization can represent a burden in some cases, the main finding of the article is that the procedures and related costs vary between countries to such a degree that it is impossible to claim, as some earlier studies have done, that disproportionate regulation and bureaucracy constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the legalization of informal sector enterprises.     

Searching for Ancient Shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea: the Discovery of Chios and Kythnos Hellenistic Wrecks with the Use of Marine Geological-Geophysical Methods

This paper presents the results of two deep-water archaeological surveys recently conducted in the Aegean Sea, and the advantages of using conventional marine geological techniques in deep-water archaeology. Two Hellenistic wrecks were discovered: one in the Chios-Oinousses strait at 70 m, was a concentration of over 400 amphoras in a 1.5-m-high, high-backscattering, morphological high; the second, west of Kythnos island, at 495 m, consisted of a few amphoras scattered in a 20 × 20-m-wide area. Side-scan sonar was integrated with high-resolution sub-bottom profiling, and the integration of the two data-sets proved to contribute significantly to realistic interpretation of the sonar targets.
© 2007 The Authors     

Seamen on Land? A Preliminary Analysis of Medieval Ship Graffiti on Cyprus

This article reports on the results of a research project entitled ‘KARAVOI. The Ship Graffiti on the Medieval Monuments of Cyprus: Mapping, Documentation and Digitisation’, during which 233 ship graffiti were recorded in 44 different monuments on the island, dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries. Innovative recording techniques have been used to mitigate the effects of the subjective or partial recording of graffiti lines on tracing paper. Apart from the study of ship graffiti as iconographic sources, particular emphasis has been given to their geographical and social context through a comprehensive analysis of the graffiti types and their spatial distribution in the monuments as well as the monuments location on the island.     

Neural Network Modeling of Constrained Spatial Interaction Flows: Design, Estimation, and Performance Issues

In this paper a novel modular product unit neural network architecture is presented to model singly constrained spatial interaction flows. The efficacy of the model approach is demonstrated for the origin constrained case of spatial interaction using Austrian interregional telecommunication traffic data. The model requires a global search procedure for parameter estimation, such as the Alopex procedure. A benchmark comparison against the standard origin constrained gravity model and the two–stage neural network approach, suggested by Openshaw (1998), illustrates the superiority of the proposed model in terms of the generalization performance measured by ARV and SRMSE.     

The Origins of the Bronze Age of Southeast Asia

White and Hamilton (J World Prehist 22: 357–97, 2009) have proposed a model for the origin of the Southeast Asian Bronze Age founded on seven AMS radiocarbon determinations from the Northeast Thai site of Ban Chiang, which would date the initial Bronze Age there to about 2000 BC. Since this date is too early for the derivation of a bronze industry from the documented exchange that linked Southeast Asia with Chinese states during the 2nd millennium BC, they have identified the Seima-Turbino 3rd millennium BC forest-steppe technology of the area between the Urals and the Altai as the source of the Southeast Asian Bronze Age. We challenge this model by presenting a new chronological framework for Ban Chiang, which supports our model that the knowledge of bronze metallurgy reached Southeast Asia only in the late 2nd millennium BC, through contact with the states of the Yellow and Yangtze valleys.     

The Greek-Norwegian Deep-Water Archaeological Survey

From 1999 to 2003 the project surveyed the sea-bed in selected areas in Greece in order to locate marine cultural remains in depths below 50 m that have not been explored by divers. The project has shown that it is possible to perform systematic large-area surveys in deeper waters using off-the-shelf equipment from available small ships, at relatively low cost with good results.
© 2006 The Authors     

Extraction and sequencing of human and Neanderthal mature enamel proteins using MALDI-TOF/TOF MS

We report here the first results of a method to extract and sequence mature enamel proteins from modern human and Neanderthal tooth enamel. Using MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometry and a combination of direct sequencing and peptide mass mapping we have sequenced a peptide from the tyrosine-rich amelogenin peptide (TRAP) of the X isoform of the amelogenin protein for modern and recent human samples. We also report our results from two Neanderthal enamel samples where we were also able to recover fragments of the TRAP protein, which had a similar sequence to the modern human samples.     

Response to Nowell and Horstwood (2009)

Here we respond to the comment by Nowell and Horstwood (2009) written in response to our 2008 paper where we presented the first results of the application of laser ablation strontium isotope analysis to a fossil hominin. Although we are pleased that the paper has attracted so much interest, including from researchers outside the field such as Nowell and Horstwood, we completely disagree with the two main arguments of their comment. Namely, we reject the notion that they can recalibrate our data using different methods and (non matrix-matched) standards determined in a different laboratory, and that is simply irresponsible to advocate the further development of this method for rare and important hominin samples through drilling rather than the almost non-destructive method of laser ablation that we presented in our paper.