Peat, pine stumps and people: interactions behind climate, vegetation change and human activity in wetland archaeology at Loch Farlary, Northern Scotland

First paragraph: In 1993, a peat-cutter, Bruce Field, working on the blanket peat bank he rented from the Sutherland Estate by Loch Farlary, above Golspie in Sutherland (fig 1), reported to Scottish Natural Heritage and Historic Scotland several pieces of pine wood bearing axe marks. Their depth in the peat suggested the cut marks to be prehistoric. This paper summarizes the work undertaken to understand the age and archaeological significance of this find (see also Tipping et al 2001 in press). The pine trees were initially thought to be part of a population that flourished briefly across northern Scotland in the middle of the Holocene period from c 4800 cal BP (Huntley, Daniell & Allen 1997). The subsequent collapse across northernmost Scotland of this population, the pine decline, at around 4200-4000 cal BP is unexplained: climate change has been widely assumed (Dubois & Ferguson 1985; Bridge, Haggart & Lowe 1990; Gear & Huntley 1991) but anthropogenic activity has not been disproved (Birks 1975; Bennett 1995). It was hypothesized that the Farlary find would allow for the first time the direct link between human woodland clearance and the Early Bronze Age pine decline.

Typical reggaeton in Morocco: forms of female political affirmation throught dance

Through an ethnographic account, this text analyses how social dance may become a discourse involving the cultural affirmation of a subordinate group. It describes how a group of girls faced with a complex of outlooks that construed them as Moroccan, Muslim or unattractive —or as objects of education and intervention— responded by affirming their own culture with an unanticipated corporal discourse. The way in which looking construes bodies is explored through metaphors: a hand that touches, a chisel that sculpts, a whip that lashes and a cobweb that controls and traps bodies. Owing to this political dimension of dance, workshops can also be an oppressive and silencing tool; to prevent this, the article concludes with a series of recommendations to implement dance in social intervention processes.

Intercultural competence in the area of drug dependencies

This article takes a multidimensional or biopsychosocial conception of drug dependency as its starting point. Within this analytical framework, we advocate making the intercultural dimension more visible, since it is essential for the design and implementation of integral intervention processes. We propose intercultural competence as a working model that can increase the capacities of institutions and professionals —a particularly important consideration in the case of social work— in order to effectively address the aforementioned cultural dimension. After an extensive review of the scientific literature, we have defined five processes that can contribute to strengthening an institution’s intercultural competence and four processes that can do the same for a professional’s intercultural competence. Though selected for application in the area of drug dependencies, all these processes can also prove useful in improving attention to any other kind of culturally diverse group or person.

The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing

To what extent do bestselling travel books, such as those by Paul
Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Michael Palin, tell us as
much about world politics as newspaper articles, policy documents and
press releases? Debbie Lisle argues that the formulations of genre,
identity, geopolitics and history at work in contemporary travel writing
are increasingly at odds with a cosmopolitan and multicultural world in
which ‘everybody travels’. Despite the forces of globalisation, common
stereotypes about ‘foreignness’ continue to shape the experience of
modern travel. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing is
concerned with the way contemporary travelogues engage with, and try
to resolve, familiar struggles in global politics such as the protection of
human rights, the promotion of democracy, the management of
equality within multiculturalism and the reduction of inequality. This is
a thoroughly interdisciplinary book that draws from international
relations, literary theory, political theory, geography, anthropology and
history.

Pinus and Prostomis: a dendrochronological and palaeoentomological study of a study of a mid-Holocene woodland in Eastern England

Tree-ring analysis of sub-fossil Pinus sylvestris L. and Quercus sp. and their associated sub-fossil insect assemblages from tree rot holes have been used to study a prehistoric forest buried in the basal peats at Tyrham Hall Quarry, Hatfield Moors SSSI, in the Humberhead Levels, eastern England. The site provided a rare opportunity to examine the date, composition, age structure and entomological biodiversity of a mid-Holocene Pinus-dominated forest. The combined approaches of dendrochronology and palaeoentomology have enabled a detailed picture of the forest to be reconstructed, within a precise time frame. The Pinus chronology has been precisely dated to 2921- 2445 BC against the English Quercus master curve and represents the first English Pinus chronology to be dendrochronologically dated. A suite of important xylophilous (wood-loving) beetles that are today very rare and four species that no longer live within the British Isles were also recovered, their disappearance associated with the decline in woodland habitats as well as possible climate change. The sub-fossil insects indicate that the characteristic species of the site's modern-day fauna were already in place 4000 years ago. These findings have important implications in terms of maintaining long-term invertebrate biodiversity of mire sites.