Molding maize: the shaping of a crop diversity landscape in the western highlands of Guatemala

Today's domesticated plants not only embody past human–nature interactions, but also reflect social history. Human seed exchange, replacement and loss are important forces in shaping crop diversity. This essay explores regional history in relation to the shaping of maize diversity in the western highlands of Guatemala. This is an area of exceptional maize heterogeneity and a peripheral part of the region where maize was domesticated. Maize diversity seems to have developed through geographic isolation in networks of seed exchange that were generally very local in scope. However, recent studies on Mexican maize suggest otherwise. However, few studies have examined crop diversity or seed exchange from a historical perspective. A closer examination of regional history suggests which processes might be important for shaping the present geographical distribution of maize diversity. Seeds were occasionally transported over longer distances. As a consequence, maize diversity is geographically not characterised by sharp differences between farming communities; the main differences are to be found in regional occurrences. This challenges antimodern ideas of closed, local native ecologies. Consequently, the conservation of maize genetic resources is a challenge, but not entirely contradictory with its transforming socio-economic context.     

World Heritage Cultural Landscapes

The concept of cultural landscapes has a long and varied lineage, including antecedents in geography and ecomuseums, and can be applied at all scales. In the 1990s, the World Heritage Committee adopted cultural landscapes as an additional category of property as part of its strategy to broaden the scope of World Heritage listings. By July 2006, there were 53 properties inscribed on the World Heritage List and officially recognised as being cultural landscapes. Such recognition is an acknowledgement of the importance of human–environment interactions, especially those of a more traditional type. Not surprisingly, cultural landscapes have their own particular management issues, as well as sharing others with World Heritage properties in general. These properties, however, also present many opportunities to increase people’s understanding of both cultural and environmental values important to the future of humankind on a global level.     

Pliocene corals from the Togopi Formation of the Dent Peninsula,Sabah, northeastern Borneo,Malaysia

Saw, J.V.M., Hunter, A.W., Johnson, K.G. & Abdul Rahman, A.H.B., November 2018. Pliocene corals from the Togopi Formation of the Dent Peninsula, Sabah, northeastern Borneo, Malaysia. Alcheringa 43, 291–319. ISSN 0311-5518

The palaeobiology of the Malay Archipelago region remains poorly documented, despite its present-day significance as a modern global marine biodiversity hotspot. The Togopi Formation of the Dent Peninsula, situated in Borneo on the western Sulu Sea and eastern coast of Sabah, Malaysia, preserves Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequences interpreted to represent localized transgressive episodes, and which have a relatively high coral diversity. Fossil corals were sampled from three available quarries on the Dent Peninsula, the sediments of which have been previously dated as 4.5–3.4?Ma in age based on foraminiferal data and radiometric analyses. These Pliocene corals are identified here based on their macromorphology, micromorphology and microstructural characteristics. In total, this study describes 28 fossil coral taxa, with 16 genera recognized and 22 taxa identified to species level, 21 of which can be confidently assigned to extant species. These new data have resulted in revised stratigraphic ranges for eight of these species. As the most comprehensive systematic survey of corals from the Pliocene of the Indo-Pacific to date, this study indicates a high diversity of corals on the margin of the Sabah Sea, Borneo, at this time, including taxa found today, thus casting doubt on the local impact of the Plio-Pleistocene extinction previously reported from faunal analyses of the central Indo-Pacific.

Jasmin V.M. Saw [varnmay@yahoo.com] Department of Petroleum Geosciences, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 32610 Seri Iskandar, Perak, Malaysia; Aaron W. Hunter* [awh31@cam.ac.uk] Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK; Kenneth G. Johnson [k.johnson@nhm.ac.uk] Department of Earth Sciences, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, UK; Abdul Hadi B Abdul Rahman [hadi_rahman@utp.edu.my] Department of Petroleum Geosciences, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 32610 Seri Iskandar, Perak, Malaysia. *Also affiliated with: School of Earth Sciences, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia.