European conquest, Indian subjection and the conflicts of colonization: Brazil in the early modern era

This paper discusses the questions that emerged from the contact established by Europeans and Indians during the early modern era in what is today Brazil. It aims at demonstrating that dual structuralist models, which overemphasize material arguments of economic expansion and place conquerors and conquered in opposite ends, fail to grasp the rich cultural history embedded in the encounters that took place in that period. Colonization was a multifarious process that involved dealing with incompatible world views and often resulted in a complex history of temporary alliances, of conflict and strife, of negotiation and dialogue. The conquest and appropriation of the Brazilian territory, and the questions that they provoked, did not always put Europeans and Indians one against the other: not rarely, colonization demanded that the Europeans allied themselves to the natives against other Europeans, and that the natives allied themselves to Europeans against other natives. Even the control of the colony by the mother country should not be understood as a top-down movement, for metropolitan policies did not always have the expected answer from the colony or had differentiated social and spatial impacts there. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Construction of a historical Water Pollution Index for the Mersey Basin

The Mersey Basin has been significantly polluted for over 200 years. However, there is a lack of quantitative historical water quality data as effective water quality monitoring and data recording only began 30–40 years ago. This paper assesses water pollution in the Mersey Basin using a Water Pollution Index constructed from social and economic data. Methodology, output and the difficulties involved with validation are discussed. With the limited data input available the index approximately reproduces historical water quality. The paper illustrates how historical studies of environmental water quality may provide valuable identification of factors responsible for pollution and a marker set for contemporary and future water quality issues in the context of the past. This is an issue of growing research interest.     

The historical geography of prostitution in Perth,Western Australia

This paper charts major changes in the locational distribution of female prostitution in the Perth metropolitan area during the twentieth century, and aims to explain why these changes took place. The study confirmed that there is a positive relationship between changes to law enforcement policy and changes to the spatial distribution of the sex industry. Factors that affect law enforcement policy (and thus the location of prostitution) include the social stigma associated with prostitution, economic forces that compete for urban space and political pressures to contain and occasionally relocate the trade. At the same time, and despite a number of major spatial redistributions caused by changes to law enforcement policy in Perth, the central city area has remained the sex industry's geographical focus throughout the twentieth century. This strong preference to be centrally located is related to the sex industry's primary locational imperatives, being access to major client catchments and availability of appropriate operational premises. The paper argues that a complex set of endogenous and exogenous factors contribute to the locational behaviour of prostitution, and that these forces and their associated dynamics need to be understood in order to successfully integrate the sex industry into an equitable and orderly town planning process.     

Telegraph Messenger Boys: Crossing the Borders between History of Technology and Human Geography*

Historians of telegraphy have traditionally focused on the system‐builders who invented wire communications technologies and incorporated them into profit‐making enterprises. Geographers of communications have traditionally traced the changes that the telegraph network wrought on the rank‐size of cities and the speed of business. Both have ignored the history of the telegraph messenger boys and the “lived geography” of the telegraph network. This article summarizes a study of telegraph messengers as both active components of technological systems and laboring agents within produced urban spaces, bringing together the fields of both history of technology and human geography.     

历史时期莱州湾沿海平原湖沼的变迁*

莱州湾沿海平原地区,古代曾有许多湖沼,其中以巨淀湖最大。根据历史文献和考古资料,查明了随着历史的发展,巨淀湖发生空间转移,并查明大部分湖沼最后逐渐消失的过程,阐述了这些湖沼空间分布特点以及导致变迁的因素,探讨它们消失的环境后果,并尝试提出吸取历史教训改善环境的建议。     

Seismic analysis of the Asinelli Tower and earthquakes in Bologna

The existence of a valuable historical heritage of the Medieval age in Bologna has motivated a deeper study on the seismic behaviour of the Asinelli Tower, which, beyond being the town symbol, has a structural configuration prone to seismic damage. Accordingly, in the present paper, the seismicity of Bologna is reviewed and a synthesis of the damage observed in the urban area, based on an accurate historical research, is given, with the objective of evaluating the behavior of the Asinelli Tower within the framework of the effects localized in the municipality. An assessment of the tower's stability with respect to compatible seismic events, at least qualitatively, with the region seismicity is then carried out by means of a non-linear dynamic analysis on a simplified model.     

Seismogenic Origin of the Ancient Avdat Ruins,Negev Desert,Israel

The present communication addresses the potential use of damage features, observed in the ancient ruins of the Avdat archeological site (Negev Desert, Israel) as a tool to identify the seismic origin of the destruction there and roughly to determine the direction of seismic wave propagation. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Inference and Assumption in Historical Seismology

The principal aim in studies of historical earthquakes is usually to be able to derive parameters for past earthquakes from macroseismic or other data and thus extend back in time parametric earthquake catalogues, often with improved seismic hazard studies as the ultimate goal. In cases of relatively recent historical earthquakes, for example, those of the 18th and 19th centuries, it is often the case that there is such an abundance of available macroseismic data that estimating earthquake parameters is relatively straightforward. For earlier historical periods, especially medieval and earlier, and also for areas where settlement or documentation are sparse, the situation is much harder. The seismologist often finds that he has only a few data points (or even one) for an earthquake that nevertheless appears to be regionally significant.In such cases, it is natural that the investigator will attempt to make the most of the available data, expanding it by making working assumptions, and from these deriving conclusions by inference (i.e. the process of proceeding logically from some premise). This can be seen in a number of existing studies; in some cases extremely slight data are so magnified by the use of inference that one must regard the results as tentative in the extreme. Two main types of inference can be distinguished. The first type is inference from documentation. This is where assumptions are made such as: the absence of a report of the earthquake from this monastic chronicle indicates that at this locality the earthquake was not felt. The second type is inference from seismicity. Here one deals with arguments such as all recent earthquakes felt at town X are events occurring in seismic zone Y, therefore this ancient earthquake which is only reported at town X probably also occurred in this zone.While in many cases such assumptions may very well be correct, they are usually not testable – or at least untested. Furthermore, it is possible to produce numerous contrary examples. It is concluded that the use of inference to amplify poor data must be made very transparent to the end user of the results, to avoid misleading appearances of accuracy. In many cases it may be best to abandon the quest for parameters altogether and admit that the data are inadequate.