Statistically robust representation and comparison of mortality profiles in archaeozoology

Archaeozoological mortality profiles have been used to infer site-specific subsistence strategies. There is however no common agreement on the best way to present these profiles and confidence intervals around age class proportions. In order to deal with these issues, we propose the use of the Dirichlet distribution and present a new approach to perform age-at-death multivariate graphical comparisons. We demonstrate the efficiency of this approach using domestic sheep/goat dental remains from 10 Cardial sites (Early Neolithic) located in South France and the Iberian Peninsula. We show that the Dirichlet distribution in age-at-death analysis can be used: (i) to generate Bayesian credible intervals around each age class of a mortality profile, even when not all age classes are observed; and (ii) to create 95% kernel density contours around each age-at-death frequency distribution when multiple sites are compared using correspondence analysis. The statistical procedure we present is applicable to the analysis of any categorical count data and particularly well-suited to archaeological data (e.g. potsherds, arrow heads) where sample sizes are typically small

Togo: Thorny transition and misguided aid at the roots of economic misery

The parliamentary elections of October 2007, the first free Togolese elections since decades, were meant to correct at least partially the rigged presidential elections of 2005. Western donors considered it as a litmus test of despotic African regimes’ propensity to change towards democratization and economic prosperity. They took Togo as model to test their approach of political conditionality of aid, which had been emphasised also as corner stone of the joint EU-Africa strategy. Empirical findings on the linkage between democratization and economic performance are challenged in this paper because of its basic data deficiencies. It is open to question, whether Togo’s expected economic consolidation and growth will be due to democratization of its institutions or to the improved external environment, notably the growing competition between global players for African natural resources

Francophone African Literary Prizes and the ‘Empire of the French Language’

International audienceDiscussions surrounding the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Nobel committee’s apparent neglect of Africa both defend and challenge the role of prizes in a global literary marketplace. While encouraging new writing in the continent and among its diaspora, the steep growth in literary prizes in the latter half of the twentieth century is bound up with the increased commercialisation and mediatisation of art. Prize culture can reinforce normative ideas of literary value, innovation and creative expression in response to pressure from politics and commerce. This chapter will consider the colonial heritage of the main literary prize specific to African writing in French: the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire, awarded by the Association des écrivains de langue française (ADELF). The history of this association, active from 1924 to the present day under several different names, is that of contact and exchange between writers who might be assumed to occupy very different areas of colonial and postcolonial literary space. As we will argue, in the French-language context, the longer-term history of prize culture for African literature illustrates significant structures of recognition and reception in the literary field. These structures reveal the ambivalent role of this prize — and of metropolitan literary judgement more broadly — in the construction of France’s postcolonial cultural narratives