•Hunters occupied high latitude Tasmanian valleys from c. 40,000BP to 12,000BP.•Hunters targeted the mid-size Bennett’s wallaby.•Faunal remains inform on seasonality, butchering patterns and ...transport.•Ecosystem resilience maintained a predator-prey equilibrium for 25,000years.•Optimality models have utility but limitations when applied to Pleistocene sites.
The application of behavioural ecology models to deep time archaeological sites in Australia is often rendered difficult by the poor resolution of the archaeological record coupled with the imprecision in reconstructing past environments at regional levels. Here we report on a series of high latitude late Pleistocene sites in south-west Tasmania, where the conjunction of cultural activities and long term environmental change have preserved rich deposits in a number of cave sites. These data are used to test the utility of several models within optimal foraging theory. The data indicate the intensive and selective pursuit of two mid-size mammals, the Bennett’s wallaby and the wombat, at the expense of other prey species that were also likely present. Hunting patterns involved the scheduled seasonal use of lowland and upland valley sites underwriting a regional strategy of moving between focal hunting locations to maximise returns. This strategy continued with little change from c. 40,000BP to 15,000BP, providing a stable, predictable and secure food source for people through a period of extreme climatic change. The benefits and limitations of the behavioural ecology models used in this study indicate their utility where the data are sufficiently robust.
The chance recovery of a large pottery sherd from a flat‐bottomed dish with dentate‐stamped decoration in Galley Reach, about 50 km northwest of Port Moresby, raises interesting questions concerning ...interactions between Lapita arrivals and the established Melanesian communities of mainland Papua New Guinea. While the geographical proximity of the find to the Caution Bay Lapita sites would suggest some connection, an analysis of the sherd indicates that it may be older than Lapita at Caution Bay. Comparisons with Island Melanesian Lapita sites indicate that the sherd is mid‐ to late Lapita in age, both in its form and decoration. As such, it joins the corpus of chance PNG mainland and near mainland Lapita finds of similar age. This developing pattern may have a different genesis to the Lapita dispersal into Remote Oceania and instead reflect trade‐based connections between island and mainland communities in the first millennium BC. The data remain ambiguous on this point.
Résumé
La découverte fortuite dans l'estuaire de Galley Reach à environ 50km au nord‐ouest de Port Moresby, d'un tesson de poterie de grande dimension provenant d'une assiette à fond plat et comportant un décor pointillé, soulève d'intéressantes questions sur les relations entre des groupes Lapita et les communautés mélanésiennes établies sur la grande île de Papouasie Nouvelle‐Guinée. Bien que la proximité géographique de cette découverte avec les sites Lapita de Caution Bay permette d'envisager un lien général, une analyse du tesson indique que celui‐ci est probablement plus ancien que les vestiges Lapita de Caution Bay. Les comparaisons avec des sites Lapita de Mélanésie insulaire montrent que le tesson est, dans sa forme autant que par son décor, de tradition Lapita classique à tardive. Il intègre ainsi le corpus des découvertes Lapita fortuites de même époque réalisées sur l’île continentale et les îles proches. Un modèle différent de celui à l'origine de la dispersion vers l'Océanie lointaine pourrait être associé à ces vestiges, reflétant plutôt des relations d’échanges entre des communautés insulaires et de la grande île au cours du premier millénaire avant J.C. Les données restent ambigües sur ce point.
Educational mismatches and skills Levels, Mark; Velden, Rolf van der; Allen, Jim
Oxford economic papers,
10/2014, Letnik:
66, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article empirically explores how the often reported relationship between educational mismatches and wages can best be understood. Exploiting the newly published Programme for International ...Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data, we are able to achieve a better estimation of the classical Duncan and Hoffman ORU model than previous papers by controlling for heterogeneity of observable skills. Our findings suggest that (i) a considerable part of the effect of educational mismatches can be attributed to skills heterogeneity, and (ii) that the extent to which skills explain educational mismatches varies by institutional contexts, particularly the extent to which collective wage bargaining is regulated. These observations suggest that skills matter for explaining wage effects of education and educational mismatches, but also that the extent to which this is the case depends on collective wage bargaining.
The level of intentionality in the behaviour of early modern humans is a continuing debate that we have had with Atholl over the years. For our part, we argue that the cognitive abilities of early ...modern humans, reflected in the patterns of the late Pleistocene archaeological records, are qualitatively different from their predecessors and not vastly different from our own. This being the case, we feel able to assume purpose in past human behaviour that Atholl does not. Presented with evidence that is often meagre, indirect or ambiguous, Atholl counters with explanations that require little or no intent on the
Bend Road is an open site covering c. 12 hectares on a sand sheet formation in southeast Melbourne, now bisected by the new Mitcham-Frankston tollway. Results from earlier salvage archaeology ...suggesting this was a significant scientific site were subsequently questioned on geomorphological grounds that indicated post-depositional disturbance. In 2006 the authors carried out extensive and detailed excavations and analyses that indicated that while both large-scale aeolian deflation events and smaller-scale bioturbation could be demonstrated, paradoxically the archaeology relates to the backed artefact period – the site has now yielded hundreds of asymmetric points and geometric microlith forms from the late Holocene – an earlier sequence extends back to 30–35,000 BP, putting Bend Road amongst the oldest known sites in Victoria. This paper summarises the methodological procedures and results that reflect both the natural disturbances to the site and the data that demonstrate its archaeological integrity, and points to a growing imbalance between increasingly sophisticated dating techniques available to the archaeologist and the levels of scale and resolution that usually pertain in archaeological sites.
Policy measures to combat low literacy are often targeted at municipalities or regions with low levels of literacy. However, current surveys on literacy do not contain enough observations at this ...level to allow for reliable estimates when using only direct estimation techniques. To provide more reliable results at a detailed regional level, alternative methods must be used.
The aim of this article is to obtain literacy estimates at the municipality level using model-based small area estimation techniques in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. To do so, we link Dutch Labour Force Survey data to the most recent literacy survey available, that of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). We estimate the average literacy score, as well as the percentage of people with a low literacy level. Variance estimators for our small area predictions explicitly account for the imputation uncertainty in the PIAAC estimates. The proposed estimation method improves the precision of the area estimates, making it possible to break down the national figures by municipality.
"In this article, we analyse whether technological change induces skill obsolescence and early labour market exit, and to what extent training participation and on the job learning reduce these ...risks. Using panel data on older workers, we find that workers report skill obsolescence more often when learning is a structural characteristic of the job. This perceived skill obsolescence is not related to a higher probability of losing employment. Instead, workers who experience skill obsolescence appear to learn more on the job and participate more often in training, which decreases the risk of losing employment. These results are consistent with the dynamic model of skill obsolescence and employment loss we develop in this article. Moreover, we find that when workers with long job tenures decrease their training participation, this is an early indicator of future job loss." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: Theoriebildung; Grundlagenforschung; empirisch; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1992 bis 2000.
Current research in public management reports a positive effect of agency network activity in the interorganizational network on its performance (degree centrality hypothesis). This study presents a ...different hypothesis: The embeddedness of agency network relations in cohesive subgroups in the interorganizational network positively affects its performance ("cohesive subgroup" hypothesis). The dependent variable in the present study is organizational performance and measured in terms of individual client satisfaction. The hypotheses are tested using data on the interorganizational network of Dutch colleges for the training of primary education teachers (n = 28). These data are combined with college-level performance and contextual data for 2002-2005 (n = 90), and with the evaluations of college graduates in a large sample of graduates for the same period (n = 7,119). Multilevel logistic regression analyses show that colleges' cohesive subgroup membership rather than college degree centrality significantly contributes to a positive evaluation by graduates. These analyses control for various control variables at the college level and the graduate level.
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