Java's forgotten pearls: the history and disappearance of pearl fishing in the Segara Anakan lagoon, South Java, Indonesia

Pearls have been a valued resource in most cultures that had access to them. A number of historically important pearling grounds were situated in the waters around today's Indonesia. One of these areas, now largely forgotten, was the Segara Anakan lagoon in South Java. In the seventeenth century, Dutch colonists exploited the lagoon's pearls. Afterwards, the lagoon's oysters were locally exploited as a food item until the late 1970s. While the pearl fishery attracted considerable attention in the colonial literature, its disappearance, by contrast, went largely undocumented. Nowadays, the oysters no longer are found in the lagoon as a result of extensive sedimentation processes. Their former existence is only preserved in the memory of local people. This article examines the history and fate of the pearls of Segara Anakan, providing an example of a formerly valued species whose existence simply became forgotten outside the area.     

Aztecs Before and After the Conquest

Aztecs: An Interpretation. By INGA CLENDINNEN. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii, 398.

The Slippery Earth: Nahua‐christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth‐century Mexico. By LOUISE M. BURKHART. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1989. Pp. xii, 242.     

Nationalism,patriotism, or national reference? A response to Jacopo Custodi

Jacop Custodi elaborated recently a response to our article “A nationalist party with non-nationalistic voters? Discussing the limits of nationalism in party categorisation” published in the journal Nations & Nationalism. We consider the work of Custodi is an important and original contribution to the study of left politics and nationalism. This being said, we reflect on the negative consequences of overstretching the category nationalism, both referring to parties and to political discourse. The aim of this reply is unpacking and explaining these negative consequences and offering an alternative as well as responding to some specific points raised by Custodi in his reply.     

The Santa María pottery of El Bolsón valley (Catamarca,Argentina): Compositional characterization and implications on the elaboration processes,ca. 1000–1600 ce

The results obtained from the multi-analytic compositional characterization of ceramic pastes and paints of the Santa María style, from the El Bolsón valley (Belén Department, Catamarca Province, Argentina), are presented here. This pottery style had a wide regional distribution in Northwestern Argentina between ca. 1000 and1600 ce and is characterized by its complex iconography painted in black, cream and red. The analyses show that the containers correspond to the technical tradition of using grog temper and suggest that its manufacture involved a double firing process. This reveals a new practice for the time.     

Gastrointestinal parasites in ancient South American camelid feces from the Atacama Desert (Pampa del Tamarugal,Tarapacá, northern Chile)

Faunal remains from archeological sites worldwide, especially feces and regurgitated pellets, are usually subjected to paleoparasitological examination, allowing the identification of past animal parasites. In this study, we analyzed 10 samples of South American camelid dung, which played an important role for the ancient human groups in the South-Central Andes, dated between 341 and 1635 calCE, from the Iluga Túmulos site (Pampa del Tamarugal, Tarapacá region, Atacama Desert, Chile). Microscopy examination revealed parasite remains in seven samples, in which oocysts of Eimeria macusaniensis and eggs of Lamanema chavezi/Nematodirus lamae, Trichuris sp., Moniezia sp., capillariids, strongylids, and unidentified nematodes were found. Although some of these species pose a potential health risk to camelids, most are not considered to be of major zoonotic importance, which could explain the absence of these parasites on human coprolites from this site analyzed previously. This first paleoparasitological study on camelid fecal remains from northern Chile sheds light on the occurrence of gastrointestinal parasites and its relationship with Andean ancient human populations and the environment.     

Evidence on economies of scale in local public service provision: A meta-analysis

The standard theory of optimal jurisdictional size hinges on the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods and services. However, despite its relevance for forced local amalgamation programs and related policies, the empirical evidence on the existence of such economies of scale remains elusive. The main goal of this paper is to produce an updated and comprehensive quantitative review of the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods using a meta-analysis approach to systematize the wide range of empirical approaches and modeling frameworks found in the previous literature. Our analysis confirms the presence of moderately increasing to constant returns to scale in the provision of local services with no reduction in the average costs of production in the delivery of most local public services beyond a certain, modest jurisdictional size, which many studies have estimated at 10,000 residents. Also, the potential for economies of scale differs at least across three traditional services: education, water and sanitation, and garbage collection, being highest for education and lowest for garbage collection. Our analysis also offers guidelines for future empirical research in this area. Physical output and production cost data should be used, together with translog specifications for the modeling of cost functions. Last, we find evidence that the determinants of output cost elasticity include bidirectional publication bias and population density but do not include the presence or absence of modern “lean” production technologies or the (perceived) capital intensity of the sector, contrary to conventional wisdom. These findings have significant policy implications for countries considering jurisdictional consolidation programs.     

Inter- and intraregional inequality in a spatial economy

In this paper, we develop a three-region economic geography model with workers of heterogeneous skills and mobility rates to consider how first-nature, regional differences impact both inter- and intraregional inequality. In our model, the skill premium within a region summarizes both the degree of intraregional inequality between mobile, skilled workers and immobile, unskilled workers and the interregional inequality through differences in the welfare of unskilled workers across regions. Regions with the highest skill premium have the greatest degree of intraregional inequality and provide the lowest level of welfare to unskilled workers, relative to other regions. We find that the skill premium will be higher in regions with a greater supply of unskilled labor, lower supply of housing, or are more remote. An increase in a region's housing supply or centrality will lower intraregional inequality and raise the welfare of the local, unskilled workforce. However, the magnitude of these changes are declining in the initial number of skilled workers in the region. The model is extended to consider imperfectly elastic housing supply. The larger the price elasticity of housing, the larger the range of values, such that more populated regions will host a disproportionate share of skilled workers, have lower levels of intraregional inequality, and provide higher levels of welfare for unskilled workers.