Algumas analogias das Cerâmicas pré-históricas britânicas com as portuguesas.

60 (1-2) Jan.-Jun. 1950, p. 5-16

Social sustainability in the supply chain: Construct development and measurement validation

Research on social sustainability in developing countries has recently gained importance for both academics and practitioners. Studies in the supply chain management field take either a supplier or a manufacturer perspective that address predominantly corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues referring to the internal stakeholders. Our research integrates the literature on supplier, manufacturer, and customer responsibility and proposes the concept of supply chain social sustainability (SCSS) that refers to addressing social issues within the overall (upstream and downstream) supply chain. Furthermore, we develop and empirically validate scales for measuring SCSS using in-depth interviews and a survey in the Indian manufacturing industry. Our results suggest that SCSS consists of six underlying dimensions, namely equity, safety, health and welfare, philanthropy, ethics, human rights, in a 20-item valid and reliable scale. We discuss the implications of the findings for research and practice and suggest future research avenues

Stochastic model for population migration and the growth of human settlements during the Neolithic transition

We present a stochastic two-population model that describes the migration and growth of semisedentary foragers and sedentary farmers along a river valley during the Neolithic transition. The main idea is that random migration and transition from a sedentary to a foraging way of life, and backwards, is strongly coupled with the local crop production and associated degradation of land. We derive a nonlinear integral equation for the population density coupled with the equations for the density of soil nutrients and crop production. Our model provides a description of the formation of human settlements along the river valley. The numerical results show that the individual farmers have a tendency for aggregation and clustering. We show that the large-scale pattern is a transient phenomenon which eventually disappears due to land degradation

Modeling resilience and sustainability in ancient agricultural systems

The reasons why people adopt unsustainable agricultural practices, and the ultimate environmental implications of those practices, remain incompletely understood in the present world. Archaeology, however, offers unique datasets on coincident cultural and ecological change, and their social and environmental effects. This article applies concepts derived from ecological resilience thinking to assess the sustainability of agricultural practices as a result of long-term interactions between political, economic, and environmental systems. Using the urban center of Gordion, in central Turkey, as a case study, it is possible to identify mismatched social and ecological processes on temporal, spatial, and organizational scales, which help to resolve thresholds of resilience. Results of this analysis implicate temporal and spatial mismatches as a cause for local environmental degradation, and increasing extralocal economic pressures as an ultimate cause for the adoption of unsustainable land-use practices. This analysis suggests that a research approach that integrates environmental archaeology with a resilience perspective has considerable potential for explicating regional patterns of agricultural change and environmental degradation in the past

An introductory view on archaeoastronomy

Archaeoastronomy is still a marginalised topic in academia and is described by the Sophia Centre, the only UK institution offering a broader MA containing this field, as ‘the study of the incorporation of celestial orientation, alignments or symbolism in human monuments and architecture’. By many it is associated with investigating prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge and combining astronomy and archaeology. The following will show that archaeoastronomy is far more than just an interdisciplinary field linking archaeology and astronomy. It merges aspects of anthropology, ethno-astronomy and even educational research, and is possibly better described as cultural astronomy. In the past decades it has stepped away from its quite speculative beginnings that have led to its complete rejection by the archaeology community. Overcoming these challenges it embraced full heartedly solid scientific and statistical methodology and achieved more credibility. However, in recent times the humanistic influences of a cultural context motivate a new generation of archaeoastronomers that are modernising this subject; and humanists might find it better described as post-modern archaeoastronomy embracing the pluralism of today’s academic approach to landscape and ancient people

Learning From Early Attempts to Generalize Darwinian Principles to Social Evolution

Copyright University of Hertfordshire & author.Evolutionary psychology places the human psyche in the context of evolution, and addresses the Darwinian processes involved, particularly at the level of genetic evolution. A logically separate and potentially complementary argument is to consider the application of Darwinian principles not only to genes but also to social entities and processes. This idea of extending Darwinian principles was suggested by Darwin himself. Attempts to do this appeared as early as the 1870s and proliferated until the early twentieth century. But such ideas remained dormant in the social sciences from the 1920s until after the Second World War. Some lessons can be learned from this earlier period, particularly concerning the problem of specifying the social units of selection or replication

A cereal problem? What the current chronology of early cereal domesticates might tell us about changes in late fifth and early fourth millennium cal BC Ireland and Britain

In the years since the last volume on plant domesticates in Ireland and Britain in the fourth millennium[AQ1] cal BC (Fairburn, A., ed. [2000]. Plants in Neolithic Britain and Beyond. Oxford: Oxbow)[AQ2], a number of significant changes have occurred in archaeological practice. These have included the routine application of a range of archaeological science techniques, including Bayesian statistical modelling. During the same period, large-scale sampling strategies in developer-led professional practice, and especially on large infrastructure projects, have increased the available materials for study. This paper will present a new analysis of radiocarbon results from direct measurements on domesticated plant remains from Ireland and Britain to explore what these can tell us about the nature of the changes in the archaeological record at this time. Cereals may appear after the introduction of practices including monuments in the form of causewayed enclosures, tombs and post-and-slot-built structures, in several regions. This approach is new because it unpacks the ‘Neolithic package’, by comparing direct estimates on plant domesticates with the appearance of other forms of material culture and new site types. ‘Unpacking the package’ here (or in other periods critically engaging with culture historic-derived analytical constructs) is important in three ways, which will be discussed in this paper. As well as allowing us to examine the fine-grained nature of changes, developments in chronological modelling should cause us to re-examine how useful our existing terms of engagement are; we need to think not only about the changes we can produce in the sequence of archaeological knowledge, but also in the structure of it