bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Central and South Asia: theWheat/Rice Frontier
Authors: Barker Graeme
Published: November 2020

This chapter intentionally overlaps with Chapter 4 in its geographical scope, as there is no clear boundary between South-West and South Asia. Western Asiatic landforms—mountain ranges, alluvial valleys, semi-arid steppe, and desert—extend eastwards from the Iranian plateau beyond the Caspian Sea into Turkmenistan in Central Asia, and there are similar environments in South Asia from Baluchistan (western Pakistan) and the Indus valley into north-west India as far east as the Aravalli hills (Fig. 5.1). Rainfall increases steadily moving eastwards across the vast and immensely fertile alluvial plains of northern India. The north-east (Bengal, Assam, Bhutan) is tropical, with tropical conditions also extending down the eastern coast of the peninsula and up the west coast as far as Bombay. Today the great majority of the rural population of the region lives by agriculture, though many farmers also hunt game if they have the opportunity. The ‘Eurasian’ farming system predominates in the western part of the region: the cultivation of crops sown in the winter and harvested in the spring (rabi), such as barley, wheat, oats, lentils, chickpeas, jujube, mustard, and grass peas, integrated with animal husbandry based especially on sheep, goats, and cattle. A second system (kharif ) takes advantage of the summer monsoon rains: crops are sown in the late spring at the start of the monsoon and harvested in the autumn. Rice (Oryza sativa) is the main summer or kharif crop (though millets and pulses are also key staples), grown wherever its considerable moisture needs can be met, commonly by rainfall in upland swidden systems and on the lowlands by flooding bunded or dyked fields in paddy systems. The systems are referred to as ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ rice farming respectively. Rice is the primary staple in the eastern or tropical zone receiving the greatest amount of summer monsoon rain. This extends from the Ganges (Ganga) valley eastwards through Assam into Myanmar (Burma) and East Asia. There are something like 100,000 varieties of domesticated Asian rice, but the main one grown in the region is Oryza indica. A wide range of millets is also grown as summer crops in rain-fed systems throughout the semi-arid tropical regions of South Asia, including sorghum or ‘great millet’, finger millet, pearl or bullrush millet, proso or common millet, foxtail millet, bristley foxtail, browntopmillet, kodo millet, littlemillet, and sawamillet.
The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why did Foragers become Farmers?
Authors: Barker Graeme
Published: November 2020

As Chapter 1 described, the origins of agriculture have been debated by archaeologists for most of the discipline’s history. The topic has been a particular focus of archaeological field and laboratory research from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. The number of suggested causes that has been proposed over the years for why prehistoric foragers might have become farmers appears almost endless, with everybody joining the party including the lunatic fringe (Table 10.1)! The main course of scholarly debate, though, has been conditioned partly by changing theoretical currents in archaeological thinking and perceptions of present-day or recent foraging and farming societies (Chapter 2) and partly by the application of improved methodologies (Chapter 3). In the regional studies that form the core of this book, I have concentrated primarily on the archaeological evidence left by prehistoric foragers and farmers, in all its richness, from stones to bones to rock art to starch grains (and more besides), though I have also made reference to the contributions of the several other disciplines that have contributed to the debate, including anthropology, ecology, ethnoarchaeology, genetics, geomorphology, linguistics, and palynology (pollen analysis). The next sections briefly review the principal themes that have emerged from those studies, as the basis for some concluding reflections on whether it is possible or desirable to arrive at an overarching explanation or set of explanations for why foragers became farmers. South-West Asia has probably been the focus of more debate on discussions about the origins of agriculture than anywhere else in the world. On the present evidence what can clearly be recognized as the Eurasian system of mixed farming (the cultivation of wheat and barley and the herding of sheep and goats) seems to have developed in this region very early in the Holocene. It underpinned the dramatic development of PPNB villages in and around the ‘hilly flanks’ of the Fertile Crescent some 1,000 years into the Holocene, c.8500 BC. The parts of South-West Asia where these villages came into being were also places where wild cereals, sheep, and goats were naturally located.
The Construction of Consent
Authors: Harvey David
Published: November 2020

How was neoliberalization accomplished, and by whom? The answer in countries such as Chile and Argentina in the 1970s was as simple as it was swift, brutal, and sure: a military coup backed by the traditional upper classes (as well as by the US government), followed by the fierce repression of all solidarities created within the labour and urban social movements which had so threatened their power. But the neoliberal revolution usually attributed to Thatcher and Reagan after 1979 had to be accomplished by democratic means. For a shift of this magnitude to occur required the prior construction of political consent across a sufficiently large spectrum of the population to win elections. What Gramsci calls ‘common sense’ (defined as ‘the sense held in common’) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as the ‘good sense’ that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or ‘others’) can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word ‘freedom’ resonates so widely within the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes ‘a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses’ to justify almost anything. Thus could Bush retrospectively justify the Iraq war. Gramsci therefore concluded that political questions become ‘insoluble’ when ‘disguised as cultural ones’. In seeking to understand the construction of political consent, we must learn to extract political meanings from their cultural integuments. So how, then, was sufficient popular consent generated to legitimize the neoliberal turn? The channels through which this was done were diverse. Powerful ideological influences circulated through the corporations, the media, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society––such as the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations.
Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’
Authors: Harvey David
Published: November 2020

In December 1978, faced with the dual difficulties of political uncertainty in the wake of Mao’s death in 1976 and several years of economic stagnation, the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping announced a programme of economic reform. We may never know for sure whether Deng was all along a secret ‘capitalist roader’ (as Mao had claimed during the Cultural Revolution) or whether the reforms were simply a desperate move to ensure China’s economic security and bolster its prestige in the face of the rising tide of capitalist development in the rest of East and South- East Asia. The reforms just happened to coincide––and it is very hard to consider this as anything other than a conjunctural accident of world-historical significance––with the turn to neoliberal solutions in Britain and the United States. The outcome in China has been the construction of a particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control. Elsewhere, as in Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the compatability between authoritarianism and the capitalist market had already been clearly established. While egalitarianism as a long-term goal for China was not abandoned, Deng argued that individual and local initiative had to be unleashed in order to increase productivity and spark economic growth. The corollary, that certain levels of inequality would inevitably arise, was well understood as something that would need to be tolerated. Under the slogan of xiaokang––the concept of an ideal society that provides well for all its citizens––Deng focused on ‘four modernizations’: in agriculture, industry, education, and science and defence. The reforms strove to bring market forces to bear internally within the Chinese economy. The idea was to stimulate competition between state-owned firms and thereby spark, it was hoped, innovation and growth. Market pricing was introduced, but this was probably far less significant than the rapid devolution of political-economic power to the regions and to the localities. This last move proved particularly astute. Confrontation with traditional power centres in Beijing was avoided and local initiatives could pioneer the way to a new social order.
Geography and the Division of Labour
Authors: Scott Allen J.
Published: November 2020

The concept of the division of labour in production has a long genealogy stretching back to the seventeenth century and before, and it recurs repeatedly in the writings of economists and other social theorists down to the present time. In economics, the concept plays a major role in studies of industrial organization, productivity, and trade. In sociology, it has been of major significance as the linchpin of the distinction Wrst proposed by Durkheim (1893) between mechanical and organic solidarity in society. More recently, sociologists have also made considerable use of the concept in studies of the ways in which the division of labour is intertwined with phenomena like race, class, and gender (e.g. Mies 1998; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996). Over the last couple of decades, geographers, too, have made numerous forays into questions of the division of labour and much research has been accomplished on how it ramifies with various kinds of spatial and locational outcomes (Massey 1984; Sayer and Walker 1992). In brief, the concept is of much importance in a wide range of investigations of social structure and dynamics, and it appears to be enjoying something of a renaissance at the present time as social scientists discover or rediscover how profoundly it ramifies with all aspects of modern life. For geographers, the division of labour has special interest and meaning because, in its role as a mechanism of economic and social differentiation, it is also a fundamental factor in moulding the economic landscape. A peasant society with only weakly developed divisions of labour is not likely to evince much in the way of spatial differentiation except as a function of dissimilarities from place to place in agricultural potentials (themselves related to such variables as soil, climate, and topography). By contrast, economically advanced societies with deep and wide divisions of labour, as in the case of the United States today, exhibit enormous degrees of spatial variation. With the passage of time, moreover, less and less of this variation seems to bear any relationship whatever to underlying conditions of physical geography.
Creating Form: Architects in the Antonine Age
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

At Miletus we saw a distinction between the workmen contracted to construct the arcades and the architect who designed them. Ancient building projects were usually dominated by architects, who directed a large number of subordinate workmen. Whereas the workmen sometimes challenged an instruction, the architect at the top identified more with the project, and his opportunity for social prestige was greater. Since Aristotle, architects were considered to be both ‘wiser’ and ‘more valued’ than manual workers, because they knew the ‘causes’ of a building project. At Patara it was not only the Velii Proculi as patrons who gained glory from new architectural forms. In the odeion stood a statue to the architect Dionysius of Sardis. He is described as ‘skilled in all works of Athena’, which recalls the mention of this goddess at Miletus; but the ‘future fame’ that his statue commemorated was for a work of architecture and engineering of which any Roman would have been proud: the great roof over the odeion itself. Another who made a professional reputation for himself beyond his home city was Marcus Aurelius Pericles of Mylasa, who was honoured at Rome for his success in architecture, described as ‘the greatest art of countless people’. To understand the monumentality of Roman architecture, then, we need to consider the views of architects. One should bear in mind, however, that the architectural profession in antiquity was very diverse. Indeed, there was no idea of a ‘profession’ at all in the modern sense of recognized qualifications and a relatively stable corporate identity. It is difficult to evaluate the social position of those architects whose names are recorded across the Roman Empire, as the mainly epigraphic evidence for their existence is both diffuse and varied, coming from areas as heterogeneous in social structure as imperial Rome, cities in Asia Minor, villages in late Roman Syria, and military settlements on the north-western frontier. In Greece and Asia Minor an individual called an architektōn might have been either a civic magistrate, with no professional activity in the design process, though sometimes involved with public building; a religious official, with responsibility for the buildings of a sanctuary; or a practising architect, either employed by a city or working independently.
Preserving the Monuments of the Past
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

As old as the human instinct to build is the desire to preserve a building as one’s own memorial. The intention of passing on something of oneself to posterity as a memory makes a building a ‘monument’, an artefact which can endure into the potentially infinite future. But, as Alois Riegl observed, much greater social importance is attached to buildings that are ‘monuments’ in a second sense, those valued by subsequent generations as traces of the past. Although Riegl believed that the ancient world recognized only ‘intentional monuments’, interest in ‘unintentional monuments’ is also widely attested in antiquity. But the two conceptions are clearly interdependent. Different cultures have varied considerably in their commemorative ambitions and their acceptance of the potential of buildings to commemorate. This chapter will examine some of these differences and the contribution made in the age of the Antonines towards attitudes to monuments. Monuments commemorate many things. Most obviously, they perpetuate the memory of individuals. Mortal human beings can be given a form of immortality by establishing a link between them and posterity, either on a private level, as family ancestors, or on a public level, as models for a nation or community. Such monuments serve as moral examples for the future: what is commemorated is both the personal memory of the deceased and the abstract ideal or virtue that they symbolize. Linked to this kind of commemoration of persons is a second object of commemoration, the record of an event, especially a military encounter or a decisive political occurrence; here too, the monuments present a connection between the present and the past. However, these human meanings with which one associates monuments today have not always been the only or most important object of monumentality. In classical antiquity the most impressive and ‘monumental’ structures were those situated in the dimension furthest removed from the world of human experience, the realm of the divine. The great temples of the prehistoric Aegean, regarded as the gods’ permanent, terrestrial homes, reflected not simply the religious loyalty of their builders and worshippers, but a profound sense of the monumental.
Experiencing and Responding to Architecture
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

Up to now, this book has been concerned with the attitudes of builders and architects towards architecture, and with the political, religious, social, and cultural factors that helped to form those attitudes. The desire to present a political or family identity through architectural form led builders to create monuments which were intended to have an effect on those who used or observed them. To achieve this effect, however, the forms of buildings had to have meaning for the individuals who experienced them. ‘Monumentality’ in architecture required the possession of certain qualities that appealed to the viewer. To study this concept fully, we therefore need to take into account, not only the intended meanings of buildings, but also their aesthetic impact. In the Roman world, response was an important component of ‘monumentality’ in two respects: first, the monumentality of large public spaces such as baths and theatres lay in their celebritas, or ‘density of use’, which means that they required a substantial audience; second, each separate monument invited ‘contemplation’ by individual viewers; its monumentality depended on their reactions. The final two chapters, therefore, will ask how individuals experienced and responded to Roman buildings. Archaeologists rarely address such questions, perhaps because to discuss the character of buildings as aesthetic experiences seems to introduce an unwanted subjectivity. But Roman monuments had a strong aesthetic pull, and, if we are to understand what they meant to ancient viewers, we must look at them also from this perspective. How an individual in ancient Ephesus or Carthage perceived a building, and the particular emotions generated by those perceptions, can no longer be recovered today. Viewers, no doubt, articulated their sensations to others and discussed their reactions, but such ancient conversations have vanished without trace. To reconstruct ancient experience of architecture, therefore, the historian has to rely either on anecdotal evidence or on those explicit reports of the experience of a building which have survived in literary texts. These written sources are problematic, and cannot be taken as direct accounts of what an ancient person saw.
VeriWcation of the Age of the Palaeolithic Cave Art at Creswell Crags
Authors: Pike Alistair W. G. , Gilmour Mabs
Published: November 2020

Upon discovery of the Creswell cave art in April 2003, and a systematic survey and study of known images in June of the same year, it was believed on several grounds that the art was clearly of Pleistocene antiquity (Pettitt 2003). The reasoning was as follows: . The sharp line and bright colour of engraved graffiti dating to the 1940s stand in clear contrast to the eroded and dulled nature of the genuine art. Clearly, on the grounds of weathering the art is not a modern forgery. . In several places, thin flowstone crusts clearly overlay engravings, demonstrating a degree of antiquity for the art. . The location of almost all of the art at heights considerably above the reach of an adult’s arm span, given the current level of the floor in Church Hole Cave, indicates that if the engravings were made after 1876 (when the sediments were excavated down to their current levels) a ladder would have been necessary. While this cannot be ruled out, it would imply considerable effort in forging the art, certainly to avoid drawing attention to the perpetrator. . Several images bear clear resemblances to known Upper Palaeolithic art, particularly that of the Magdalenian, both in terms of style and subject matter. By contrast, none of the art can be said to have Holocene parallels, that is, if it were Mesolithic or later, it would be unique. On the grounds of parsimony it seems that the closest estimate of antiquity therefore was Pleistocene. . At least one of the images (the large bovid) represents a species known to be extinct in Europe, either since the seventeenth century (if identified as Bos primigenius) or the Late Pleistocene (if Bison priscus). The discovery team were therefore confident from the first that genuine Upper Palaeolithic cave art had been discovered. This having been said, a critical reason for the ‘Creswell Art in European Context’ conference was to expose the art to the scrutiny of international experts in Palaeolithic archaeology and rock art, and the clear consensus of the conference delegates was that the art is genuine.
The Engravings of Gouy: France’s Northernmost Decorated Cave
Authors: Martin Yves
Published: November 2020

For almost half a century the cave of Gouy, discovered in 1956, was the northernmost Palaeolithic decorated cave known in western Europe. Because of its originality and its geographical location, it overturned our knowledge, as has, today, in its turn, the magnificent discovery of the first British parietal Palaeolithic art which has at last been revealed in Church Hole, at Creswell Crags, in Nottinghamshire (Bahn et al. 2003). This revelation extends the distribution of Palaeolithic parietal art further to the north and the west. Following this major event, the possibilities of similar explorations have been reinforced. Even more than before, other discoveries can today be foreseen, not only in the neighbouring regions but very probably also some day soon in Belgium and Germany. Before the authenticity of its decoration was accepted unanimously, Gouy, like Church Hole, was not exempt from scepticism. This attitude inevitably accompanies discoveries which call into question our knowledge in all fields of research. However, doubt is necessary and, in some ways, it is obviously very useful. In particular, it incites one to gather together all the elements that support the accuracy of any new thing. Where Gouy is concerned, there were two principal objections which counted against it and perplexed researchers. The most frequently used negative argument from the very start was its geographical location. From 1946 to 1956 the Grotte du Cheval, at Arcysur- Cure in Bourgogne (Bailloud 1946), was the northernmost decorated cave. Even this cave appeared very eccentric at this latitude. Consequently, far away from the great regions of parietal art, Gouy could not be attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic. Moreover, the (recognized) open-air occupations of the Upper Palaeolithic and Final Upper Palaeolithic were thought to be virtually non-existent (in the regions close to Gouy). This view already ignored the proximity of the rockshelters of Métreville, near Saint-Pierre d’Autils, where there had been a ‘Magdalenian’ industry associated with mammoth bones (Poulain 1904, 1905). In reply to this opinion, which was still widespread in recent times, Gerhard Bosinski proclaimed in public, ‘it is . . . (the Final Upper Palaeolithic), look for it . . . in your region . . .
Missing Links
Authors: Dasgupta Subrata
Published: November 2020

In Chapter 2, I suggested that Babbage’s place in the history of computing was twofold: first, because his Analytical Engine represented, for the first time, the idea of automatic universal computing and how this idea might be implemented, and second, because some of his design ideas—the store, mill, control, user interface via punched cards—anticipated some fundamental principles of the electronic universal computer that would be created some 75 years after his death. There is a modernity to his idea that makes us pause. Indeed, it led Babbage scholar Allan Bromley to admit that he was “bothered” by the architectural similarity of the Analytical Engine to the modern computer, and he wondered whether there is an inevitability to this architecture: Is this the only way a computer could be organized internally? Thus, Babbage’s creativity lay not only in conceiving a machine that had no antecedent, but also it lay in his envisioning an idea of universal computing that disappeared and then reappeared many decades later, and came to be the dominant architectural principle in computing. This observation is, of course, present-centered; we might be perilously close to what Herbert Butterfield had called the “Whig interpretation of history” (see Prologue, section VII ), for we seem to be extolling Babbage’s achievement because of its resonance with the achievements of our own time. But were there any direct consequences of his idea? What happened after Babbage? Did he have any influence on those who came after? And, if not, what took place in the development of what we have come to call computer science? In fact, there is a view that between Babbage’s mechanical world of computing and the electronic age, nothing really happened—that the time in between represented the Dark Ages in the history of computing. This is, of course, as misguided a view as another held by historians at one time that Europe, between the end of the Roman Empire (circa fifth century) and the Renaissance (the 15th–16th centuries)—the Middle Ages—was in a state of intellectual and creative backwardness.
Finasteride: The Gary and Jerry Show
Authors: Cordes Eugene H.
Published: November 2020

Way back in chapter 1, I told the story of how I jumped from the world of academic science, which I understood, to that of drug discovery and development, which I did not. So I knew there was a lot of learning to do on my part if I was to contribute anything to Merck Research (and continue to find a way to feed my family), although I underestimated the extent of my ignorance. Here is the way it started. I showed up for work at Merck Research on January 3, 1979, and met with Ralph Hirschmann, my boss, in his office to get a sense of his expectations and my marching orders. Among other things, he informed me that the benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) project was among my responsibilities. At that point, I began to understand just how much I needed to learn. The BPH project had been under way for some years at the time I joined Merck. Coming in, I knew a lot of general biochemistry and physical organic chemistry. I knew less about human physiology and less than that about human diseases and medicine. Among areas of my ignorance was the disease BPH, for which I was now responsible on the biology side. Later, I became the BPH preclinical team leader. BPH is medicine’s shorthand for benign prostatic hyperplasia, the benign growth of the prostate gland in aging men. Hyperplasia refers to an increased number of cells in an organ, with consequent increase in organ size, as a result of too-frequent cell division. BPH stands in contrast to the malignant growth of the prostate gland—prostatic carcinoma—a potentially life-threatening cancer. BPH is not life-threatening, but it is surely a condition that compromises the quality of life of men who have it. Lets get started by having a look at what goes wrong. In normal young men, the prostate gland has a volume of about 20 mL and is roughly the size of a walnut.
Dynamiting Glaciers
Authors: Taillant Jorge Daniel
Published: November 2020

The following plan describes the method and management disposition of the glacier sectors that must be removed during the life of Pascua Lama, as the open pit area is extended towards the position of the glaciers in the Rio El Toro river basin. It is estimated that 10 hectares [25 acres] of glaciers must be removed and adequately managed to avoid the instability of slopes and environmental impacts. The thickness of the glacier sectors that must be removed is estimated at 3 to 5 meters [10–16 ft]. … mining equipment shall be employed as needed for each glacier sector to be managed (basically bulldozers and/or front loaders). … If necessary, controlled explosives shall be used, of small size, to remove the ice. . . . —From Barrick Gold’s “Glacier Management Plan” —the Pascua Lama Mining Project (Argentine-Chilean border; Environmental Impact Study, Annex B, 2001; unofficial translation from the original text in Spanish). . . On September 6, 2006, Romina Picolotti, Argentina’s Secretary of Environment and a career environmentalist, sat reviewing briefing documents to prepare for a meeting regarding the world’s first binational gold mining project straddling the border between Argentina and Chile. Barrick Gold, the world’s largest gold mining corporation, had discovered a massive gold and silver reserve in one of the highest, coldest, most desolate and remote areas of the Americas, the Central Andes mountain range, running from Venezuela, through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and down to the southernmost tip of the Americas shared by Argentina and Chile. The Andes are among the highest mountains in the world, with the tallest peaks in both the Southern and Western Hemispheres. Peru’s ranges surpass well above 6,000 meters above sea level (nearly 20,000 ft), whereas the highest mountain of the Americas (the Aconcagua) in Argentina towers at nearly 7,000 m (nearly 23,000 ft). At 6,960 meters (22,835 ft), the Aconcagua, which means “stone sentinel” in the precolonial Quechan native tongue, is covered in snow in the winter and surrounded by massive glaciers year round, some of which are up to 8 km (5 mi) long.
Implementation
Authors: Taillant Jorge Daniel
Published: November 2020

This chapter looks at the context and circumstances surrounding the implementation of Argentina’s glacier protection law. We also examine the gaps that exist in the implementation of the law and activities that groups like the Center for Human Rights and Environment (CEDHA)—an Argentine nonprofit environmental organization—have carried out to push for this implementation. It’s a long chapter with lots of different activity and so I’ve divided it up into sections that group sets of issues. The first section will look at the context for implementation, the legal attacks by the mining sector and the provinces against the glacier law and how, in this case, CEDHA organized to address these challenges. The second section looks at how, in the absence of information from the state, CEDHA went about carrying out unofficial glacier inventories to draw attention to the risks glaciers and periglacial areas face from industrial activity. The third section looks at analytical work to assess mining impacts to glaciers, as well as complaint actions presented in specific cases where glaciers have been or are being impacted. The passage in the Argentine Senate of the Minimum Standards Regime for the Preservation of Glaciers and Periglacial Environments (law 26.639) on September 30, 2010, was an important stepping stone to achieve a framework and a guiding path for glacier protection in Argentina, but glacier protection was far from a done deal. The glacier law would still have to be regulated and implemented, the key actors responsible for its implementation would have to carry out their responsibilities effectively, and the law would also have to confront systemic legal and political attacks from key detractors, the first two of which had publicly declared themselves strongly against the law and were ready to wage battle: namely Barrick Gold, the mining company that had the most to lose from the implementation of the glacier protection law, and the executive branch of the Province of San Juan who had bet heavily on a development model based on the promotion of mining activity much of which happened to be in glacier and periglacial environments.
Networking: From the Long-Term Ecological Research Program to the National Ecological Observatory Network
Authors: Hayden Bruce P.
Published: November 2020

As a scientist, the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has been on my mind for more than three decades. As an educator, I have served in the classroom for 41 years. The merger of the physical and the ecological sciences was at the core of my teaching philosophy. As a science communicator, I informed the general public on issues of climate and climate change. As a collaborator, I found that understanding strengths and weaknesses in collaborative partnerships best ensures success. As a science leader, I served at the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the Director of the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB), established the Schoolyard LTER Program, and launched the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). My disciplinary background includes formal graduate education at the University of Wisconsin in meteorology, climatology, and paleoclimatology, as well as in oceanography and biology (mycology, botany, zoology, and genecology). As a postdoctoral fellow, my scientific identity was on track to culminate as a paleoclimatologist. As an assistant and associate professor, my identity morphed to include coastal geomorphology (Hayden et al. 1995). Finally, my experiences in the LTER program have vectored my career toward the interactions of climate and vegetation (Hayden 1998). My affiliation is with the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) site in the LTER program (1986–2014). As one of the founding principal investigators of the VCR site, I have served in subsequent renewals as its principal or co-principal investigator. Our site-based research plan focused on the Virginia Coast Reserve on Virginia’s eastern shore with a focus on the dynamics of the chain of 14 barrier islands, bounded by the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay to the south and Assateague Barrier Island to the north. This peninsula is 100 km in length by 20 km in width. Only the islands fronting the Mississippi delta are more dynamic in both the temporal and spatial domains. Prior to joining the LTER program, my research was hemispheric to regional in scope, and it focused on the environmental dynamics of the Atlantic Coast from Florida to Cape Cod at 50-m intervals (Fenster and Hayden 2007).
Long-Term Ecological Research Over the Long Term: A Historian’s Perspective
Authors: Hamlin Christopher
Published: November 2020

There are many precedents for long-term research in the history of science. Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program’s current identity reflects significant change—intended and accidental, both consensual and conflictual—from research concerns that were prevalent in the 1980s. LTER program has pioneered modes of research organization and professional norms that are increasingly prominent in many areas of research and that belong to a significant transformation in the social relations of scientific research. The essays in this volume explore the impact of the LTER program, a generation after its founding, on both the practice of ecological science and the careers of scientists. The authors have applied the agenda of long- term scrutiny to their own careers as LTER researchers. They have recognized the LTER program as distinct, even perhaps unique, both in the ways that it creates knowledge and in the ways that it shapes careers. They have reflected on how they have taught (and were taught) in LTER settings, on how they interact with one another and with the public, and on how research in the LTER program has affected them “as persons.” A rationale for this volume is LTER’s distinctiveness. In many of the chapters, and in other general treatments of the LTER program, beginning with Callahan (1984), one finds a tone of defensiveness. Sometimes the concerns are explicit: authors (e.g., Stafford, Knapp, Lugo, Morris; Chapters 5, 22, 25, 33, respectively) bemoan colleagues who dismiss LTER as mere monitoring instead of serious science or who resent LTER’s independent funding stream. But more broadly, there is concern that various groups, ranging from other bioscientists to the public at large, may not appreciate the importance of long-term, site-specific environmental research. Accordingly, my hope here is to put LTER into several broader contexts. I do so in three ways. First, to mainstream LTER within the history of science, I show that the LTER program is not a new and odd way of doing science but rather exemplifies research agendas that have been recognized at least since the seventeenth century in the biosciences and beyond.
The Sunghir Human Hands
Authors: Trinkaus Erik , Buzhilova Alexandra P. , Mednikova Maria B. , Dobrovolskaya Maria V.
Published: November 2020

As the interface between the body and technology, in all of its myriad forms, the skeletal hand morphology of Late Pleistocene humans has received increasing attention since the work of Sarasin (1932) and especially Musgrave (1970, 1971, 1973), as paleoanthropologists have documented a series of contrasts between archaic Homo and recent human hand bones (e.g., Vlček 1975; Trinkaus 1983b; Vandermeersch 1991; Niewoehner et al. 1997; Niewoehner 2001, 2008; Crevecoeur 2008; Lorenzo 2007; Trinkaus in press). However, since there were major changes in human technology between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, and especially with the Mid Upper Paleolithic (MUP), the comparisons of concern should be between late archaic humans and early modern humans. For the Early Upper Paleolithic, the latter include relatively complete hand remains from Nazlet Khater 2 and scattered hand bones from Tianyuan 1 and Brassempouy (Henry-Gambier et al. 2004; Crevecoeur 2008; Shang and Trinkaus 2010). There are then relatively abundant hand remains from the MUP (Verneau 1906; Matiegka 1938; Mallegni et al. 1999; Sládek et al. 2000; Trinkaus 2006c; Trinkaus et al. 2010, 2014), including some immature ones (Mallegni and Parenti 1973; Sergi et al. 1974; Trinkaus et al. 2002b). Yet few of them have been described in detail. In this context, the Sunghir manual remains are described and select aspects are compared across Late Pleistocene samples (principally features that appear to change with the emergence of modern humans). For these descriptions and comparisons, the Sunghir 1 hand bones are paleontologically well preserved. Of the 54 bones potentially present for Sunghir 1 (not counting pollical sesamoid bones), 49 are known, and none sustained more than minor marginal erosion. The originally missing bones include one pisiform bone and four distal phalanges from the ulnar digits. During and after excavation, the right and left hands were mixed, so that the bones have been sorted based on morphology and (for the ulnar middle and distal phalanges) size.
The Paleobiology of the Sunghir People
Authors: Trinkaus Erik , Buzhilova Alexandra P. , Mednikova Maria B. , Dobrovolskaya Maria V.
Published: November 2020

The preceding chapters provide extensive information on the context, mortuary rituals, skeletal and dental morphology and morphometrics, dental wear, functional anatomy, paleopathology, and paleochemistry of the human remains from the northern Russian site of Sunghir. The three associated skeletons from Graves 1 and 2 provide the overwhelming volume of data and inferences on the Pleistocene people of Sunghir. Yet the other elements help to fill out a few aspects of the sample. It would be possible, if arduous, to summarize here the various aspects of these human remains that are detailed in the preceding chapters. However, many of the aspects relate to the interpretation of a specific anatomical unit or functional complex. As such, they provide insight into the evolution of these complexes through the Late Pleistocene, as well as inferences regarding their configurations at Sunghir and other Early/Mid Upper Paleolithic (E/MUP) sites. To review each one here would be unnecessarily redundant. Of more interest at this point is to try to fit these people into their Mid Upper Paleolithic (MUP) context and to assess degrees to which the Sunghir human remains might contribute to some of the more general issues relating to last interpleniglacial human populations. In this context, there are aspects of population dynamics, for which the Sunghir humans have some bearing. These aspects involve, in particular, issues of consanguinity and population stability. It has been suggested, based on shared unusual anatomical features, that several of the MUP human skeletal samples (particularly those from multiple burials) include closely related individuals. This has been suggested in particular for the samples from Barma Grande (Formicola 1990), Bausu da Ture (Villotte et al. 2011), Dolní Věstonice II (Vlček 1991; but see data in Fu et al. 2013), and Fanciulli (Grotte des Enfants; Vlček 1965), as well as the El Sidrón Neandertal site (Lalueza-Fox et al. 2011). Moreover, it seems likely that most of these contemporaneous groups of individuals were closely related, if one provides an even generous estimate of the human population densities on the European MUP landscape and the need for individuals to find appropriate mates for reproduction (cf. Wobst 1976).
The Beginning of a Long Series of Scientific Blunders
Authors: Fontani Marco , Costa Mariagrazia , Orna Mary Virginia
Published: November 2020

The Beginning of a Long Series of Scientific Blunders The enthusiasm that oft en characterizes researchers can at times distort certain preconceived convictions and deceive the scientist into believing that a controlled experiment has produced the correct result when, in fact, it is erroneous due to insufficient or incorrect data. This is the case for the discovery of a mysterious terra nobilis made by the chemist Torbern Olof Bergman. Bergman was born on March 20, 1735, in Katrineberg, Sweden. He was a chemist and mineralogist who became famous in 1775 for printing the most extensive tables of chemical affinity ever published at that time, and he was the first chemist to use letters of the alphabet as a notation system for chemical species. He took his doctorate at the University of Uppsala in 1758. After initially holding the professorship of physics and mathematics, he later took the chair in chemistry, which he retained for the rest of his life. Bergman made significant contributions to progress in quantitative analysis and metallurgy, and he developed a classification scheme of minerals based on their chemical characteristics. In 1777, Bergman confidently announced the result of an extremely expensive investigation. He studied the behavior of diamond with a blowpipe, and, aside from the presence of silicon, he seemed to have generated an unknown compound. He extracted the oxide of a metal from the diamonds, which, according to the custom of the time, he called terra nobilis. His discovery was quickly forgotten, not least because his life soon took a tragic turn. After marrying Margareta Catharina Trast in 1771, he enthusiastically continued his activities as a synthetic and analytical chemist, 3 but on July 8, 1784, at the age of only 49, he died in Medevi, Sweden. It is believed that he fell victim to poisoning from the chemical substances he used in his research. At the time of his death, he had been a member of the Royal Society of London and the Swedish Royal Academy for many years, and he was certainly one of the most famous chemists of his time.
Inorganic Evolution: From Proto-Elements to Extinct Elements
Authors: Fontani Marco , Costa Mariagrazia , Orna Mary Virginia
Published: November 2020

Pyotr Nikolaevich Chirvinsky (1880–1955), the eminent Russian geologist, is best known as the founder of the science of meteorology. In the 1920s, Chirvinsky became the director of the Donskoi Polytechnic at Novochercassk. He spent a great deal of time as a consultant for the mines scattered throughout the Russian empire: along the Donets Basin, on the Kola and Crimean peninsulas, on the northeastern slopes of the Caucasus, and in the enormously rich mineral deposits of the Urals. His major objective in this work was to establish connections between the chemical composition of terrestrial minerals and meteorites by studying the quantity of a mineral present in a given sample of rock and the physicochemical conditions leading to its formation. He insisted that meteorites be considered legitimate objects of study in petrology, and because they had been formed in heavenly bodies and not on earth, they might provide clues regarding the formation of elements from primal material. Chirvinsky had predecessors in this way of thinking, as we shall see. The concept of prime matter is very old, coming before the definition of a chemical element, but connected to the idea of the elements. Raymond Lull (ca. 1235–1315), in his book, De Materia, defined the concept of prime matter as an element in potentia in all possible substances. The idea was very acceptable to many alchemists up until the end of the 19th century. In 1800, Jakob Joseph Winterl (1732?–1809) was a famous physician and professor at the University of Nagyszombat, in present-day Hungary. He developed a vitalistic and dualistic concept that was, from a certain point of view, anti-Enlightenment, according to which all of the chemical elements would have originated from two immaterial principles: one male, andronia, and the other female, thelyke. Although Winterl’s speculations may have been based on doubtful or misinterpreted experimental evidence, many German chemists accepted his theory. The physicist Heinrich Pfaff (1773–1852) embraced Winterl’s theory with enthusiasm, as did the pharmacist Johann Friedrich Westrumb (1751–1819) who propagated the concepts of thelyke and andronia. The first problems occurred when Winterl was unsuccessful in experimentally proving his theory.
Introduction: From Sustainability to Surveillance
Authors: Chiles Robert M.
Published: November 2020

At Stanford University, a long-standing tradition is for undergraduate students to identify themselves as “techies” or “fuzzies.” Techie students study math, engineering, physics, biology, and related fields in the natural sciences, and most of their coursework revolves around solving problem sets. Fuzzy students study art, history, communications, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and most of their coursework involves writing term papers. When asked to explain the difference between the two, one student offered a very simple, quotidian explanation: Techies study questions that have right or wrong answers, while fuzzies study questions where acceptable answers can be multiple and ambiguous. While the techie/fuzzy distinction is largely intended to be humorous, there is nonetheless something to it; it reflects multiple historical cleavages: fact versus opinion, natural versus social world, and science versus non-science. The existence of scientific and technological controversies illustrates the woeful inadequacy of these dualistic categories for two reasons. First, the acquisition of scientific knowledge is not a simple matter of factfinding, whereby scientists go out and discover The Truth, straight-forwardly reading off of nature. Scientific knowledge reflects the historical, political, economic, cultural, and institutional environments in which it is embedded (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Pinch and Bijker 1984). Favored methods of investigation, what levels of uncertainty are acceptable, and error type preferences (false positive versus false negative), among other factors that shape how science is done, reflect human history and values. In this context, science and technology are neither above nor immune from controversy. Second, social problems that are intrinsically related to certain technologies (for instance, the environmental consequences of fossil-based energy production) are arguably becoming increasingly acute. In the face of these kinds of challenges, it is no longer sufficient for scientific and technological controversies to be left solely in the hands of scientists and other experts. Scientific claims are becoming increasingly politicized by citizen groups, public officials, and others, many of whom are actively challenging traditional notions of what constitutes valid and acceptable knowledge. The “black box” of scientific expertise has been cracked open, and it is only likely to open wider.