Wavelength‐dispersive X‐ray fluorescence analysis of ancient glasses*

The application of X‐ray fluorescence to the study of the composition of ancient glasses has been limited by the large amount of material required for samples. In this paper the setting of a reduced sampling XRF method for the analysis of ancient glasses is described. The method involves the preparation of glass beads by melting the sample with lithium tetraborate flux. By means of reference and synthetic samples, the method allows regression curves to be set, covering broad ranges from ppm to high concentrations. By means of a single program, up to 31 elements of interest in the study of ancient glass are analysed. The reproducibility, sensitivity and reliability of the method are discussed. The results demonstrate that 0.2 g of glass is sufficient to obtain accurate and sensitive analyses for most of the elements of interest.     

Coming Through a City Near You: The Transport of Hazardous Wastes

Current figures (compiled in 1995) indicate that hazardous waste transporters (19,567 in number) ship approximately 16 million tons of hazardous waste annually in the United States (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1995). While some state and local governments have enacted hazardous waste transport regulations for the protection of their citizens, the federal government has had primacy in initiating and setting the course of hazardous waste transport regulation. As a result, the predominant perspective on hazardous waste transport has been technical in orientation. This paper identifies and discusses how this technical perspective and the social perspective differ and what the consequences are for government policies and actions regarding hazardous waste transport.     

Looking to the Southeast Antilles: Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra's Geopolitical Thought in his Historia geográfica,civil y natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (1788)

Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra’s Historia geográfica, civil y natural, completed in 1782 and published in 1788, is widely seen as the founding colonial history of Puerto Rico’s national history. This essay examines this imperial and comparative account, which cannot be dissociated from Abbad y Lasierra’s first important writing, his Diario del viaje a América completed in 1781. I argue that his observations and reflections on the condition and prospects of Puerto Rico are deeply influenced by his travel in the Caribbean’s southeastern circuit and, in addition, his readings of Spain’s foreign polemical detractors, in particular Guillaume-Thomas Ábbe Raynal and his Histoire philosophique et politique. This essay also sheds light on Bourbon dynamics in Puerto Rico and Abbad y Lasierra’s appeal to Romantic liberal creoles seeking abolition of slavery and sovereignty from Spain in the nineteenth century. Thus, the basis of Puerto Rican patriotic identity is found in Abbad y Lasierra’s intellectual appropriations sustaining his ideas on rational development and progress for the island.