THE CHRONOLOGY OF GROUPS OF DIES FOR LARGE ISSUES OF ANCIENT COINS USING MAHALANOBIS DISTANCES*

Discriminant analyses of distances and angles obtained from 25 coins struck by P. Crepusius in 82 BC permitted the correct chronology for five groups of closely-related dies to be obtained by the method of Carter and Frurip. Twenty distances and 15 angles were measured on 10 x projections of the coins which represented five groups of dies separated in time from each other. The use of all or many variables gave poorer results than the use of five to ten variables having a high ‘figure of merit’, defined as the maximum range of mean values for a given variable in the five groups of dies divided by the mean standard deviation of the variable in the five groups. It is recommended that chronologies of ancient coins be determined from Mahalanobis distances by using only variables of relatively high figure of merit.     

Development Imperative,Terrae Incognitae: a Pioneer Soil Scientist 1912–1951

James Arthur Prescott was a prominent soil scientist whose career responded to an increasingly complex, recognisably Australian web of interpenetrating spatial scales, served to promote revolutionary global advances in his chosen field, and in the process negotiated the blurred boundaries between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research. Encounters with this instructive life suggest that, while resolutions of pivotal anxieties might turn on ineluctably personal qualities, they also reflect a dynamic interplay between international, imperial, national and state contexts. Prescott's innovative contributions to soil science, fruits of a tenaciously consolidated career, influenced resource appraisal and environmental management across a prodigious continental expanse. A sustained focus on local and regional development brought him into contact with a wide range of contemporaries, including pioneering geographers, and culminated in his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society.