The Casas Grandes Regional System: A Late Prehistoric Polity of Northwestern Mexico

Casas Grandes, or Paquimé, is located in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico, although it is one of the pueblo-style cultures that are best known from the adjacent southwestern U.S. At its apogee (ca. A.D. 1200–1450), Casas Grandes has been characterized as the largest and most complex prehistoric community in the puebloan world. It is further famous both as the center of one of the major interaction systems of the region, as well as a link between the cultures of Mesoamerica and those of the U.S. Southwest. Despite its acknowledged status as one of late prehistoric North America's few indigenous complex societies, the Casas Grandes polity has been so little studied that most aspects of its size, structure, level of centralization, and mode of operation remain obscure. The writers' work in Chihuahua has been designed to remedy this situation. In contrast to the original and highly influential interpretation that has prevailed for the last 25 years, the work reported here argues that the Casas Grandes polity, like its Chacoan and Hohokam counterparts of the adjacent southwestern U.S., existed at an intermediate level of sociopolitical complexity, so that it was not able to exert a uniform hegemony even over its near neighbors. Envisioned instead is a less comprehensive, less centralized situation of irregular control in a politically unstable context.     

The Rolt Memorial Lecture 2015: Defining the Vintage Car: L.T.C. Rolt,the Vintage Sports Car Club and the Rise of Motoring Heritage

This paper examines the role played by the engineering historian, biographer and pioneer of canal and railway preservation, L.T.C. Rolt, in the development of an appreciation of motoring heritage. It concentrates on his involvement with the Vintage Sports Car Club in the 1930s, in which he played a key role in defining what a vintage car was. It examines the way in which this helped develop many of the themes that ran throughout his writing and gave him the practical skills needed in his later campaigning for the preservation of industrial heritage.

It also looks at the way in which Rolt's views on the car's impact mirror those held by others, and at the difficulties this posed to someone who was passionate about engineering and yet was horrified by the consequences of industrialisation. His advocacy of the vintage car was the beginning of his lifelong campaign to uphold craftsmanship and skills and to commemorate the role of the engineer and the craftsman in Britain.