Permitido o excluido: la arqueología científica y el mantenimiento de los mitos de legitimación

‘Scientific’ archaeology advocated by mainstream American archaeologists since the 1960s has tended to narrow ‘science’ to what Kuhn termed normal science, that is, research constrained by a ruling paradigm. This paradigm is based on the Myth of Columbus legitimating European invasions, conquests, and dispossessions of American nations by asserting that until October 1492, the Americas were a wilderness inhabited by savages. European international law held that Christians had the right to invade non-Christian nations and convert them by force if necessary. American schools teach that American Indians lacked the arts of civilization, and this early socialization persists in archaeologists’ models of pre-contact American nations. The paper looks at the “Core system” of the discipline, a recent interest in ‘historicizing’ the pre-contact American past, and the issue of transoceanic contacts before Columbus.La arqueología ‘científica’ defendida por los principales arqueólogos americanos desde los años sesenta ha tendido a limitar su definición de ciencia a lo que Kuhn denomina ‘ciencia normal’, es decir, a la investigación realizada bajo el paradigma dominante. Dicho paradigma está basado en ‘el mito de Colón’, un mito que legitima las invasiones europeas y el expolio de las naciones americanas asegurando que, hasta 1492, América era un territorio inhóspito habitado por salvajes. Dicho mito tiene su origen en la legislación europea internacional que establecía que los cristianos tenían el derecho de invadir las naciones no cristianas y convertirlas por la fuerza. Las escuelas americanas han contribuido a perpetuar el ‘mito de Colón’ al insistir en que los ‘indios’ americanos carecían de civilización. Dicha mito ha persistido también en los modelos desarrollados por los arqueólogos a propósito del periodo de pre-contacto con las naciones americanas. Este artículo examina las convicciones fundamentales de la disciplina, el reciente interés por historizar la fase del ‘pre-contacto’ y la cuestión de los contactos transoceánicos antes de Colón

Arsenic and Old Pelts: An Update on Deadly Pesticides in Museum Collections

The use of toxic chemicals within museums is an issue only recently addressed by anthropologists and scholars in related fields. A case of arsenic poisoning in an anthropologist during the 1960s is reviewed for what it may tell us about a mysterious ailment that afflicted Clark Wissler 50 years earlier. While no conclusive diagnosis can be made, Wissler’s case reminds us that we have come a long way in protecting against one of the lesser known dangers confronting anthropologists. All museums use pesticides and preservatives of some form, though the health impact of these agents is not always known. This necessary evil in the preservation of ethnographic collections can thus pose a health risk to people who work with or come in contact with treated objects. Here we open one cold case file, in which we believe a prominent American anthropologist may have directly suffered from the effects of poisons commonly used in the early nineteenth-century. Our own experience and recent inquiries provide one possible answer to the cause of the illness suffered by Clark Wissler

Global Imbalances and Structural Change in the United States

Since the early 1990s, as the United States borrowed heavily from the rest of the world, employment in the US goods-producing sector has fallen.We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with several mechanisms that could generate declining goods-sector employment: foreign borrowing, nonhomothetic preferences, and differential productivity growth across sectors. We find that only 15.1 percent of the decline in goods-sector employment from 1992 to 2012 stems from US trade deficits; most of the decline is due to differential productivity growth. As the United States repays its debt, its trade balance will reverse, but goods-sector employment will continue to fall

Connecting ROS and FIWARE: Concepts and Tutorial

Nowadays, the Cloud technology permeates our daily life, spread in various services and applications used by modern instruments, such as smartphones, computer, and IoT devices. Besides, the robotic field represents one of the future emerging markets. Nevertheless, these two distinct worlds seem to be very far from each other, due to the lack of common strategies and standards. The aim of this tutorial chapter is to provide a walkthrough to build a basic Cloud Robotics application using ROS and the FIWARE Cloud framework. At the beginning, the chapter offers step-by-step instructions to create and manage an Orion Context Broker running on a virtual machine. Then, the firos package is used to integrate the ROS topic communication using publishers and subscribers, providing a clear example. Finally, a more concrete use case is detailed, developing a Cloud Robotics application to control a ROS-based robot through the FIWARE framework. The code of the present tutorial is available at https://github.com/Raffa87/ROS_FIWARE_Tutorial, tested using ROS Indigo