The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Traditional understandings of the development of the medieval English longbow and its role in the fourteenth-century ‘infantry revolution’ have recently been challenged by historians. This article responds to the revisionists, arguing based on archaeological, iconographic and textual evidence that the proper longbow was a weapon of extraordinary power, and was qualitatively different from – and more effective than – the shorter self-bows that were the norm in England (and western Europe generally) before the fourteenth century. It is further argued that acknowledging the importance of the weapon as a necessary element of any credible explanation of English military successes in the era of the Hundred Years War does not constitute ‘technological determinism’.     

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.     

Island Biocultural Assemblages — The Case of Kinmen Island

ABSTRACT A growing mass of research contributes to our understanding of how biological and cultural diversity are related in complex and important ways. This paper presents an assembling process of biodiversity and cultural diversity on an island, Kin‐men (Quemoy), based on 1600 years of its environmental history. The study shows that the island's biocultural assemblages are a result both of external relations with the island's surrounding environment and internal relations within the island's changing human ecology. Distant political powers and economic forces are the two major external influences that have affected the flow of natural and cultural elements to and from the island, while ‘screening effects’ and ‘isolation effects’ are two factors that explain internal interactions. The island's biocultural assembling processes reveal that the openness of the island facilitates increase in the diversity of biocultural elements, while its less disturbed isolated condition fosters natural succession and co‐evolution. The study suggests that biocultural assemblages and the associated processes of co‐evolution and nature–society interactions are accomplished through the intermittent opportunities purposively provided by or inadvertently found in the openings and closures of boundaries, setting the scene for both boundary crossings and bounded shelter, by intent or chance.     

MORE THAN MEETS THE FACT: THE UNIVERSALITY OF HISTORY AND THE COLONIAL MEDIATION

This article examines how mediation is not just limited to the format that's selected to convey the findings of previously conducted research that supposedly followed the conventional protocols of the historical discipline. Rather, it considers mediation as a fundamental part of building historical knowledge, for it assumes that every part of the historiographical operation can be defined as “mediation.” Specifically, it deals with colonial historical mediation, a concept that refers to the combination of an overt or concealed agenda, intentional or unnoticed bias, commonsense assumptions, inherited academic and political traditions, conceptual constellations, and more or less informed theoretical beliefs that configure the subtext upon which historical explanation is built, particularly in Latin America.     

Rediscovering regional science: Positioning the field's evolving location in science and society

This study aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the evolution of regional science, a scholarly domain in the social sciences that applies analytical and quantitative approaches and methods to understand and address urban, rural, or regional problems. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of 8509 articles published in six regional science flagship journals (including the Journal of Regional Science, Annals of Regional Science, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Papers in Regional Science, Regional Science Policy and Practice, and International Regional Science Review) from 1958 to 2021. The analysis presents an objective data-driven and unprecedented visualization of the field's intellectual, social, and conceptual structure and trends from the beginning to the present. It also provides a rich portrayal of the epistemology of regional science and illuminates matters related to regional science education and training. We find that regional science has moved well beyond its origins, shifting away from a heavy focus on theory and abstraction to modeling/simulation, empirical analysis, and policy research. We also find that there has been increasing attention to “people” in regions and the spatial characteristics of social problems, and some important shifts in the regional science community itself, particularly in terms of patterns of collaboration and the geography of scholarship. The findings of this paper provide implications for future directions of research and education for regional science.     

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.     

Current archaeological research in the Middle Atlantic region of the eastern united states

A major theme of current archaeological research in the Middle Atlantic region of Eastern North America is the recognition of cultural variability across space and through time. The most significant culture change experienced during the entire time frame of regional prehistory occurred ca. 5000 B.P., when there were major changes in regional environments. Before 5000 B.P., adaptations were characterized by small groups of mobile hunters and gatherers. After 5000 B.P., there were continued growth in regional populations and increases in sedentism, intensive use of a limited range of food resources, social group size, and social complexity.     

The coming of age of the history of archaeology

Publications and organizational developments relating to the history of archaeology from 1989 until June 1993 are critically examined. Attention is paid to the changing motivations for producing such publications, their shifting intellectual orientation, controversies, especially as they relate to internal vs external approaches and the epistemological status of explanations, problems of verification, and the status of these studies as a subfield within archaeology.     

Cultivation History Beyond the Periphery: Early Agriculture in the North European Boreal Forest

We have investigated the environmental history of human occupation and the development of agriculture in the eastern interior Lake District of Finland. The material consists of archaeological data, which is reviewed in topographical and agrogeological context, and pollen analytical evidence of agricultural indices from eight precisely dated (varved) lake sediment sequences. Before the Viking Age, archaeological evidence, consisting of stray finds, dwelling sites, and graves, is very scarce. Iron Age finds are clearly confined to the lowland environs with silty and clayey soils. During the Viking Age, the number of stray finds multiplies and the first cemeteries are established. Comparison between Viking and Crusade Period finds reveals a topographic shift toward higher locations and morainic soils. Most of the cup-stones are located on upland sites—that is, not in connection with known Iron Age sites. These are interpreted as medieval indicators of slash-and-burn farming of the fertile but stony supraaquatic morainic soils. There is pollen analytical evidence of sporadic cultivation in the area from the Bronze Age onward. Afterca. AD 700, the occurrence of cereal pollen grains becomes regular but remains discontinuous at each site until after the turn of the millennium. There is then an exponential rise in the cereal pollen rain, indicating a fully agricultural population.