Plant-food preparation area on an Upper Paleolithic brush hut floor at Ohalo II,Israel

While a division of domestic space into separate sectors dedicated to different activities has been suggested for a number of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer sites, it has never been demonstrated based on plant remains from this period. Moreover, due to the usual scarcity of plant macrofossils in archaeological deposits, only animal food preparation activities associated with hearths have been reported in the literature on Near Eastern prehistory. Ohalo II (Israel) is the first Upper Paleolithic site where such a patterned use of interior space and plant processing are evidenced by the distribution of plant remains on a sealed floor of a brush hut. This paper describes and interprets the distribution of almost 60,000 identified seeds and other plant remains on that floor, proposing a reconstruction of three activity areas in the interior of the 12-m² hut: processing of food centered on a grinding stone; a flint knapping area; and an access area in between. Finally, it is suggested that these activity areas might represent male-female division of labor.     

Forming a Collective Identity: The Debate over the Proposed Constitution, 1948–1950

Previous studies have placed great emphasis on the power-political arguments that led to the failure to adopt a constitution in Israel. This article argues that the picture was more complex and that the question of collective identity was one of the main factors behind the debates on the proposal for a constitution during Israel's early years of statehood. One of the arguments raised by the opponents of a constitution was that the identity-forming aspect of the constitution was liable to ignite a cultural controversy and even a Kulturkampf. Although researchers have often seen this argument as a camouflage for other reasons, an examination of speeches and writings of those participating in the debate on the constitution reveals one of the basic weaknesses of early Israeli republicanism: the profound disagreement over the contours of a common Israeli identity and the way to shape it.     

The Puzzle of the Diffusion of Central-Bank Independence Reforms: Insights from an Agent-Based Simulation

The emergence of an ever‐widening sphere of global public policy is a new reality in a world characterized by the blurring of boundaries between the national and the global; by flows of ideas, people, and commodities; and by new global risks and opportunities. In this context, this article explores the empirical puzzle of the sudden outbreak of reforms leading to central‐bank independence. How can we best understand the outbreak of reforms in the 1990s? It is suggested here that the reforms were diffused in a contagious and uncoordinated manner in a global policy process that may best be captured by Kingdon's policy stream model. We develop an agent‐based model to evaluate the effects of three little‐explored aspects of the diffusion process. These are (i) the likelihood of the outbreak of reform, (ii) the rate of adoption of the reform, and (iii) the time to outbreak. We find that the likelihood of outbreak depends on the saliency of a problem, in conjunction with the length of time that a problem has been on the public agenda. We also find that an increase in the size of the environment surveyed before a decision is made increases the rate of adoption but also the time to outbreak. The more global the information available for agents, the longer is the time to outbreak, but outbreaks unfold much faster.