Book Review of: The Prehistoric Archaeology of Norfolk Island, Southwest Pacific

Records of the Australian Museum Supplement [extra title information]

Thorium-230 coral chronology of a late prehistoric Hawaiian chiefdom

Documenting the history of settlement in Hawaii during the last few Centuries before European contact, is crucial to charting the evolution of the most complex chiefdom in Polynesia. It is precisely this period that Hawaii. and many Polynesian Societies, Underwent their most rapid changes in political, economic and social organisation. The last similar to 500 to 300 years in the C-14 calibration curve is problematic with wide fluctuations Often rendering large age spans that do not precisely date single events, especially troubling with a culture-historical record of similar to 1000 years duration. Here we present in extremely high precision Th-230 chronology for archaeologically constrained coral samples from a range of occupancy sites. Our high precision dates allow the time of site use to be clearly demonstrated. They also provide the first dates for habitation sites in Hawaii that clearly show contemporaneous occupation-the major problem in settlement pattern archaeology. We demonstrate that two sites were occupied within the same year. Our refined chronology, provides new and exciting oppurtunities for tracking sociopolitical and economic developments during the last few centuries-the crucial period in the evolution and transformation of Polynesian societies. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Developing relational navigation to effectively understand software

Effective comprehension of complex software systems requires understanding of both the individual documents that represent software and the complex relationships that exist within and between documents. Relationships of all kinds play a vital role in a software engineer's comprehension of, and navigation within and between, software documents. User-determined relationships have the additional role of enabling the engineer to create and maintain relational documentation that cannot be generated by tools or derived from other relationships. We argue that for a software development environment to effectively support the understanding of complex software systems, relational navigation must be supported at both the document-focused (intra-document) and relation-focused (inter-document) levels. The need for a relation-focused approach is highlighted by an evaluation of an existing document-focused relational interface. We conclude with the requirements for a relation-focused approach to relational navigation. These requirements focus on the user's perspective when interacting with a collection of related documents. We define the requirements for a software development environment that effectively supports the understanding of the software documents and relationships that define a complex software system.