Economic Stress and the Great Recession in Ireland: Polarization, Individualization or ‘Middle Class Squeeze’?

Following an unprecedented boom, since 2008 Ireland has experienced a severe economic crisis. Considerable debate persists as to where the heaviest burden of the recession has fallen. Conventional measures of income poverty and inequality have a limited capacity to answer this question. Our analysis, which focuses on economic stress and the mediating role of material deprivation, provides no evidence for individualization or class polarization. Instead we find that while economic stress level are highly stratified in income class and social class terms in both boom and bust periods, the changing impact of class is contingent on life course stage. The affluent income class remained largely insulated from the experience of economic stress. However, it saw its relative advantage overthe income poor class decline at the earlier stage of the life-course. At the other end of the hierarchy, the income poor experienced a relative improvement in their situation in the early life course phases. The precarious income class experienced some improvement in its situation at the earlier life course stages while the outcomes for the middle classes remain unchanged. In the mid-life course stages the precarious and lower middle classes experienced disproportionate increase in their stress levels while at the later life-cycle stage it is the combined middle classes that lost out. Additional effects over time relating to social class are restricted to the deteriorating situation of the petit bourgeoisie at the middle stage of the life-course. The pattern is clearly a good deal more complex that suggested by conventional notions of ‘middle class squeeze’ and points to the distinctive challenges relating to welfare and taxation policy faced by governments in the Great Recession.

Ethnic Segregation, Moral Panics and Social Class: A Comparative Study of the Experiences and Perspectives of Working Class and Middle Class Children in Belfast

This paper begins by describing the moral panics that have tended to emerge sporadically in Northern Ireland over the last few years with regard to young people’s involvement in sectarian violence in Belfast. Within this, while these young people have been cast in the traditional role of folk devils, the paper will show how younger children also tend to be explicitly identified and named in an ambiguous way through such moral panics; playing a deviant role as participators, and sometimes instigators, of sectarian violence but also carrying the symbolic responsibility of representing Belfast’s future. It will be shown that it is because of this ambiguous position that it is adults rather than the children themselves that tend to be held responsible for their actions; either as rioters using the children as political pawns or as parents guilty of neglect. With this as a starting point the paper then explores the perspectives and experiences of two groups of 10-11 year old children living in Belfast and the impact of these moral panics on them. One group of children, living in affluent middle class areas were found to be appropriating and re-working these broader moral panics into more general discourses of derision that tended to pathologize working class children and communities more generally. For the other group of children, living in economically deprived areas with high levels of sectarian tensions and violence, their experiences of such violence and their participation in it are discussed. It will be shown that for these children, the broader moral panics that exist tend to have the effect of reinforcing the processes that tend to segregate and exclude them.

Meta-analysis of the influence of experimental design on effect size in peer tutoring outcomes in elementary, middle and high school settings.

A meta-analysis was undertaken on a form of cooperative learning, peer tutoring. The effects of experimental design on outcomes were explored, as measured by Effect Size (ES). 185 studies were included in the meta-analysis. Highest ES were reported for quasi-experimental studies. ES reduced as experimental design moved from single pre-test factor matched, to multiple-factor matched randomized controlled trials. ES reduced when designs used standardised, rather than self-designed measures, The implications for future meta-analyses and research in cooperative learning are explored.

Inland shell midden site-formation:Investigation into a late Pleistocene to early Holocene midden from Trang An, Northern Vietnam

Over the course of the past two decades there has been growing research interest in the site formation processes of shell middens. This stands along-side and is being used to inform cultural, dietary and palaeo-environmental reconstructions. Just as midden site formation processes have turned out to be many and varied, however, the kinds of shell-bearing sites that past human communities created are likely to have been no less diverse. Subsuming such sites under a single category - shell middens - normalises that variation and may lead to the misinterpretation of site function. The greater part of research in this field also continues to focus on coastal shell middens; comparatively little attention has been paid to middens containing freshwater and especially terrestrial molluscs from hinterland locations. As a result, much of the current understanding about shell-midden sites carries a spatial as well as a functional bias. This paper hopes to contribute towards discussion on both fronts. It presents a detailed examination of the formation processes that went into the creation of a land snail-dominated late- to post-glacial midden from northern Vietnam, and considers the role that it may have played in the early settlement of this area. The data presented comes from ongoing archaeological excavations at Hang Boi, a cave located in the sub-coastal karstic uplands of Trang An park, in the Vietnamese Province of Ninh Binh. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved.

Composite hunting technologies from the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene, Niah Cave, Borneo

Renewed archaeological investigation of the West Mouth of Niah Cave, Borneo has demonstrated that even within lowland equatorial environments depositional conditions do exist where organic remains of late glacial and early post-glacial age can be preserved. Excavations by the Niah Cave Research Project (NCP) (2000-2003) towards the rear of the archaeological reserve produced several bone points and worked stingray spines, which exhibit evidence of hafting mastic and fibrous binding still adhering to their shafts. The position of both gives strong indication of how these cartilaginous points were hafted and gives insight into their potential function. These artefacts were recovered from secure and (14)C dated stratigraphic horizons. The results of this study have implications for our understanding the function of the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene bone tools recovered from other regions of Island Southeast Asia. They demonstrate that by the end the Pleistocene rainforest foragers in Borneo were producing composite technologies that probably included fishing leisters and potentially the bow and arrow. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Hunting in a Tropical Rainforest:Evidence from the Terminal Pleistocene at Lobang Hangus, Niah Caves, Sarawak

The Terminal Pleistocene zooarchaeological evidence from Lobang Hangus, an east-facing entrance to the Niah Cave complex, provides unique insights into the hunting habits of the human inhabitants of this cave. The composition and structure of the vertebrate accumulation indicates that a variety of locally available terrestrial, arboreal and aquatic taxa were being exploited, The age structure of the principal predated species, the presence of bone points and evidence from modern rainforest hunting combine to suggest that some form of projectile weaponry as well as trapping technologies were probably being employed by the hunters at Niah before the end of the Pleistocene. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Distinguishing Species of Geoemyclid and Trionychid Turtles from Shell Fragments:Evidence from the Pleistocene at Niah Caves, Sarawak

Fragments of chelonian carapace and plastral dermal plates are well-represented from archaeological sites in the world's dry and wet tropics. However, although these bones are easily identified at an element level, few archaeological reports have explored the potential of using features of form and surface sculpturing as a way to refine that identification to genus or species. The ability to achieve such a refinement would benefit environmental and human subsistence strategy models alike. The objective of the current paper was to isolate recurrent and readily visible surface characteristics on the dermal plates from a selection of commonly occurring Southeast Asian hard- and soft-shelled turtles. Using these criteria, analysis is made of the chelonian assemblage from pre- and post-Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) cultural deposits in the West Mouth of Niah Cave. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Discussion and debate: Reflections on Pleistocene Island Occupation

Editorial Note: Within a 48-hour period during January 2014, the JMA co-editors received two papers—those of Curtis Runnels and Thomas P. Leppard printed above—that, quite fortuitously, each addressed the topic of Mediterranean island colonization by archaic hominins, albeit from radically different perspectives. Neither author was aware of the other’s paper, nor has either article subsequently been revised to take account of the other. Realizing the widespread current interest in this subject and the possibility for productive debate prompted by such variant approaches, we commissioned three sets of comments and invited Runnels and Leppard to respond. We are pleased to publish this discussion around questions of great importance for our understanding of the earliest insular prehistory of the Mediterranean, and with significant implications reaching well beyond it.

Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 27.2 (2014) 255-278

The emergence of bone technologies at the end of the pleistocene in Southeast Asia:Regional and evolutionary implications

For many decades Palaeolithic research viewed the development of early modern human behaviour as largely one of progress down a path towards the modernity of the present. The European Palaeolithic sequence the most extensively studied was for a long time the yard-stick against which records from other regions were judged. Recent work undertaken in Africa and increasingly Asia, however, now suggests that the European evidence may tell a story that is more parochial and less universal than previously thought. While tracking developments at the large scale (the grand narrative) remains important, there is growing appreciation that to achieve a comprehensive understanding of human behavioural evolution requires an archaeologically regional perspective to balance this. One of the apparent markers of human modernity that has been sought in the global Palaeolithic record, prompted by finds in the European sequence, is innovation in bonebased technologies. As one step in the process of re-evaluating and contextualizing such innovations, in this article we explore the role of prehistoric bone technologies within the Southeast Asian sequence, where they have at least comparable antiquity to Europe and other parts of Asia. We observe a shift in the technological usage of bone from a minor component to a medium of choice during the second half of the Last Termination and into the Holocene. We suggest that this is consistent with it becoming a focus of the kinds of inventive behaviour demanded of foraging communities as they adapted to the far-reaching environmental and demographic changes that were reshaping this region at that time. This record represents one small element of a much wider, much longerterm adaptive process, which we would argue is not confined to the earliest instances of a particular technology or behaviour, but which forms part of an on-going story of our behavioural evolution. © 2012 The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.