Small Change: Economics and the British coin-tree

This is the accepted manuscript for the following article: Ceri Houlbrook, “Small Change: Economics and the British coin-tree”, Post Medieval Archaeology, Vol. 49(1), June 2015. The final published version can be found at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/0079423615Z.00000000074 © Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology 2015Throughout the c.2000 year period coins have been circulated in Britain, they have also been ritually employed, most notably as votive deposits. Focusing specifically on the understudied custom of the British coin-tree, whereby coins are ritually embedded into the barks of trees, this paper considers the coin’s role and applicability as a deposit. It aims to demonstrate that our understanding of the coin’s past, present, and future ritual employment is not only aided by a consideration of economics and the coin’s secular function; it would be utterly incomplete without it.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Which interventions offer best value for money in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease?

BackgroundDespite many decades of declining mortality rates in the Western world, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. In this research we evaluate the optimal mix of lifestyle, pharmaceutical and population-wide interventions for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease.Methods and FindingsIn a discrete time Markov model we simulate the ischaemic heart disease and stroke outcomes and cost impacts of intervention over the lifetime of all Australian men and women, aged 35 to 84 years, who have never experienced a heart disease or stroke event. Best value for money is achieved by mandating moderate limits on salt in the manufacture of bread, margarine and cereal. A combination of diuretic, calcium channel blocker, ACE inhibitor and low-cost statin, for everyone with at least 5% five-year risk of cardiovascular disease, is also cost-effective, but lifestyle interventions aiming to change risky dietary and exercise behaviours are extremely poor value for money and have little population health benefit.ConclusionsThere is huge potential for improving efficiency in cardiovascular disease prevention in Australia. A tougher approach from Government to mandating limits on salt in processed foods and reducing excessive statin prices, and a shift away from lifestyle counselling to more efficient absolute risk-based prescription of preventive drugs, could cut health care costs while improving population health.<br /

Cultural geographies of extinction: animal culture amongst Scottish ospreys

This paper explores cultural geographies of extinction. I trace the decline of the Scottish osprey during the nineteenth century, and its enduring, haunting presence in the landscape today. Taking inspiration from the environmental humanities, extinction is framed as an event affecting losses that exceed comprehension in terms merely of biological species numbers and survival rates. Disavowing the ‘species thinking’ of contemporary conservation biopolitics, the osprey’s extinction story pays attention to the worth of ‘animal cultures’. Drawing a hybrid conceptual framework from research in the environmental humanities, ‘speculative’ ethology and more-than-human geographies, I champion an experimental attention to the cultural geographies of animals in terms of historically contingent, communally shared, spatial practices and attachments. In doing so, I propose nonhuman cultural geographies as assemblages that matter, and which are fundamentally at stake in the face of extinction

The discovery of New Brittaine. Began August 27. anno Dom. 1650.

The Brit. mus. Catalogue lists two copies each having a map, but the map appears from the description to be the one engraved for and published in Edward Williams' Virginia in America, London, 1851. It is questionable whether any map was originally included in Bland's work. cf. Huth library catalogue, 1880; also Phillips, Virginia cartography, 1896