Archaeology and Archaeobotany at the Land‐Sea Boundary in Pohnpei State, Micronesia

Edges occur between varying uses in human settlements, just as in nature between ecosystems. In either setting, the edges can be obvious and abrupt or allow a more gradual transition. In Ecology, the transitional area is known as an ecotone. The ecotone represents the meeting of two different systems and, regardless of size, serves as a rich and diverse habitat itself. Edges help define the form of what lies in between, within the ecotone or the liminal space. Liminality is an anthropological concept that refers to the transition between two distinct states of being and is typically more theoretical than physical. Liminal space in the built environment is visual and experiential, but it can also create that same temporary tension often felt between states of mind. Our physical development and treatment of edges are not always sustainable in a world that is never static. But what if liminal space in the built environment was maximized and approached more like ecotones in nature for flexibility or interaction that encourages connections? This research presents a method of analysis that considers liminal space in the built environment at varying scales. These liminal settings represent not only an opportunity for new categories of space but also for co-creation among various disciplines. Through four case study examples of design at the edges, we can broadly interpret approaches that expand the boundaries of design form and practice and identify characteristics of public space made for a diverse and ever-changing world.

Future sea-level rise is expected to affect coastal aquifers and environments and have significant impacts on coastal communities. Here, we describe the impact of early to late Holocene sea-level variations on the coastal environment and human settlements of the Carmel Coast, Israel. One of these ancient communities, Tel Dor, was settled initially during the Late Pottery Neolithic (ca. 7 ka) on a wetland surface and then abandoned for ca. 1.5 ka before resettlement occurred on the adjacent aeolianite ridge from the Middle Bronze Age to the Crusader period (4.3–0.9 cal Ka BP). For the first time, high resolution chrono-bio-chemo-stratigraphy of sediment cores collected landward of the current shoreline at Dor are presented capturing a record of poorly sorted sand mixed with marine shells, well sorted aeolian sand and silty clay deposits. The record represents a series of brackish-freshwater wetlands formed in the coastal area of Dor between ca. 15 to 7 ka in response to relative sea-level rise and resulting rise of the coastal aquifers. After 7 ka, due to rising sea level and a transgressing shoreline, sand largely derived from the Nile Delta, reached the coast including the coastal wetland. Landward from the current shoreline, the period between ca. 7 to 4 ka is represented by alternating sand-silt facies consisting of reworked marine shells and brackish-fresh water biota. These lithological cycles reflect fluctuations between coastal and wetland environments governed by the response of the coastal aquifer to sea-level rise. Rapid sea-level rise led to a rise in the groundwater table and inundation of the area around Tel Dor, while periods with slower rates of sea-level rise resulted in coastal sand deposition. The settlement gap at Dor between 7 and 5.6 ka possibly reflects the behavioral response of the coastal settlers to sea-level fluctuation, and sediment depositional variation instigating aquifer inundation coastal marsh development and mobilization of sand bodies. This study provides a record of beach profile build-up along the Mediterranean coast of Israel and serves as an example of how sea-level rise affect unconfined coastal aquifers and the formation of wetlands due to rising water tables in low elevation coasts. Coastal inundation is a long-term risk factor for densely populated low-lying coastal regions that require a proactive approach for solving cascading impacts of sea-level rise.

Slope instability and mass movements on volcanic islands may generate large magnitude tsunamis. During the Quaternary, tsunamis originating from volcanic islands have significantly impacted the world’s coastlines. However, research has only recently begun to analyse the effects of tsunamis in coastal environments. This paper overviews the distribution, magnitude, recurrence interval, and age of large submarine slides on volcanic islands and their potential for the generation of mega-tsunamis during the Quaternary.

Buried oil residues in selected beaches that were heavily contaminated by the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) continue to leach oil-contaminated suspended particulate material (SPM) and dissolved-phase polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) into interstitial- and near-shore waters. Both are bioavailable forms of hydrocarbons that can be absorbed or consumed. On selected intertidal beaches in Prince William Sound (PWS) during June 2002, nearshore- and interstitial-water samples were collected during outgoing tides, first from a water depth of 10–15 cm above undisturbed sediments at water's edge and then from pits dug just above the waterline. At the time of collection, all samples were vacuum-filtered through 0.7-µm pore-size, glass-fiber filters using a Portable Large Volume Water Sampling System (PLVWSS) to separate dissolved- and oil-contaminated SPM fractions for detailed hydrocarbon analyses and fingerprinting. From intertidal pits at oil-impacted sites, interstitial water and SPM displayed strong oil signatures and elevated (albeit variable) PAH and n-alkane levels compared to the trivial non-petrogenic signatures seen at the reference sites. The dissolved-phase samples at the oil-impacted sites were typically characterized by water-soluble, lower-molecular-weight PAH, while the SPM/oil-phase contained the relatively-insoluble, higher-molecular-weight PAH and n-alkanes. Water's-edge samples (collected before any pits were excavated) typically showed a diluted- and degraded-compositional signature traceable to the interstitial water from higher tide levels. Interstitial-water dissolved-phase concentrations (average 1,200 ng/L.; 76–4,600 ng/L vs. 18–27 ng/L for reference sites) were above those reported to cause impacts to herring and salmon eggs (<1,000 ng/L; Rice et al., 2001). At reference sites, the water's edge samples matched the interstitial water with very low, non-petrogenic signatures. A recent diesel spill at a nearby site showed dissolved-phase patterns similar to those at the current EVOS sites.

Evaluation of human thermal comfort near urban waterbody during summer

The geomorphology of small islands in the eastern and western parts of Halmahera Island encompasses diversities of geological processes, island forms and types, and topography. The typology of the small islands to the west of Halmahera Island is volcanic and are categorized as hilly islands. To the east, there are coral islands classified as flat islands with smaller area contrast to volcanic ones. This study aims to analyze the land mass elevation of the small islands and the sub-bottom profiles in the eastern and western Halmahera waters. Island elevation data was obtained from Sentinel-2B imagery, whereas seafloor topographic data was acquired from direct field measurements using a GPS sounder. First, the image data underwent atmospheric, radiometric, and sunlight corrections, while the actual depth was estimated through bathymetry correction using tidal data. Then, QGIS version 3.16.6 and ArcGIS version 10.8 were used to analyze the data. The results show that the slope degree of volcanic islands is higher and their seafloor topography is steeper than that of coral islands. The slope degree of Ternate, Maitara, Tidore, and Hiri Islands, abbreviated as Termadoreh, is more than 30o with elevation of more than 100 meters, characterizing hilly islands. While there is only Pakal Island in Buli Bay that has a slope of 33o and the highest elevation of only 100 meters, it is nevertheless considered a flat island. Significantly, the different typologies indicate different morphogenesis and sub-bottom topography; i.e., volcanic islands have higher slope degrees and steeper seafloor profiles compared to coral islands.

During Spring 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, I taught a section of Architectural Design 2, the final foundation-level undergraduate studio course at Texas A&M University. Occupying an “in-between” position within the curriculum sequence—itis studio four of eight—I wrestled with how much the course reinforce conventions, abstract formal experimentation,part-to-whole relationships, and other common concerns of beginning design, versus tackle more advanced topics and andworkflows, theoretical and practical. The studio undoubtedly lives within a liminal space, a middle ground, and so it seems appropriate to craft and situate the design problem within a complimentary framework, both in concept and in bringing to the table some very immediate challenges that exist in micropolitan and metropolitan parts of the Texas Triangle.

Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes. By James Joseph Buss. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Pp. 328. Cloth: $35.00.)Reviewed by Edward WattsJames Joseph Buss's Winning the West with Words unabashedly builds upon Richard White's two-decades-old thesis, and rather uncritically. It opens with an epigram from White, and even the Introduction's title, Clearing the Middle Ground for American Pioneers, alludes to White's assertion that the pre-1815 Great Lakes region was a liminal space in which races, trade systems, tribes, politics, and religions interacted on a complex local level with none attempting or achieving regional dominance or dominion. For White, all that changed when Anglo Americans won the War of 1812 and, asserting their rights from the Treaty of Paris, erased the middle ground and imposed a hegemony of Protestantism, private property, raced citizenship, and clear-cut agriculture.Buss tells the story of that erasure, mostly as it occurred in northern Indiana between 1810 and 1840. But erasure - as opposed to annihilation - is by definition a metaphor for incompletion, as anyone who works with a pencil knows. Whether or not you buy in to White's thesis, Buss's work merits serious consideration for redirecting the conversation about precisely how Anglo American culture imposed itself on this region by telling the stories about the vanishing of Indians, squatters, and other nonconforming groups. For Buss, these were enacted through a series of acts of cultural coercion and selective historiography as well as through more direct interventions and removals. As such, Buss's methodology owes very little to White's: Its narrative of erasure is built through the rhetorical analysis of how the story was told. For Buss, the facts of the story were subsumed as an intrinsic part of the process of erasure. He begins from the retrospective perspective of the early twentieth century when the process of erasure, purportedly complete, was in fact ongoing.The cover of Winning the West with Words re-creates a poster from the Decatur County (Indiana) 1916 celebration of Indiana's centennial as a state. It foregrounds an Indian in a canoe being removed by a soldier in back of whom is a Conestoga wagon, and behind whom, up among the clouds and the sunbeams, emerges a clocktower, an implicit narrative sequence Buss re-creates in the book's chapters: Indians, removal, settlers, and then towns. As the book progresses each older symbol is effaced and then replaced by the next, or so went the official narrative of erasure. The book's greatest value, however, is in its tracing of the transgressive, apparently unerasable, middle-ground leftovers whose intractability made the repetition of a narrative that started in 1816 still seem necessary in 1916.Moreover, borrowing from postcolonial theorist Mary Louise Pratt, Buss demonstrates time and again how Anglo American settlers, pioneers, and, finally, townsfolk, impose a narrative of anti-conquest on the region to secure their innocence as the passive agents of an ineluctable historical inevitability: The early nineteenth-century west, by this telling, was not conquered and colonized - as had been the eastern seaboard states and the other dominion settler colonies - but rather was transitioned to appropriate Anglo American control through the careful management of an inevitable process, absolving the tellers of the tale from the messy sins of colonialism and granting the nation exceptionalist absolution.Each of Buss's chapters moves the narrative through an exchange between the erased and the erasers. In each succeeding chapter, those doing the erasing are in turn erased - as the Indian gives way to the squatter, the squatter to the settler, the settler to the townsman, and so on. …

Modeling the contributions of phytoplankton and non-algal particles to spectral scattering properties in near-shore and lagoon waters

A Tasmanian tidalflat receiving differing amounts of vehicle traffic associated with the servicing of oyster farm leases was sampled for sediment properties and benthic community structure. There was a gradient of vehicle usage in both the littoral zone (LZ) and the intertidal zone (IZ), with the highest usage in the intertidal zone equating to the lowest usage in the littoral zone (IZ2=LZ1). Results indicate that the littoral sediments were less compacted where vehicles were present. Species richness and diversity were reduced in the littoral sites (70%) and one intertidal site (50%) where there was vehicle traffic. Multivariate analyses confirmed the univariate findings. Large bivalves and epibenthic snails were generally less abundant where there was vehicle traffic. However, in the intertidal zone one snail showed the opposite pattern. There was less change in the community structure at sites where vehicles spread out across the foreshore than at sites where all vehicles travelled in a narrow lane, but this reduction in impact was offset by a greater area being affected. This study provides preliminary evidence of a measurable impact on sediment and community composition at 16 vehicle trips per day and suggests that management needs to consider the tradeoff between magnitude of impact and area affected.

The article provides a brief overview of approaches to classifying the degree of danger of natural phenomena and the types of possible hazards for coastal territories. It is shown that some approaches are universal and can be applied to almost any category of the coast to improve decision-making tools when planning the development and modernization of coastal infrastructure, including in Russia. Such approaches can be considered as a methodological basis for a simple assessment of the hazards inherent in the coastal environment in a changing climate. The paper also considers the system of comprehensive classification of coastal areas, which uses as a basis a geological classification, which is superimposed on the main dynamic forces and processes acting in the coastal environment and on the geological framework itself. Using this methodology, a total of 113 typical coastal environments were identified, and attempts were made to keep the number of typical environments as low as possible, while maintaining the usefulness of the classification system considered from the point of view of decision support. This system allows for practical classification by collecting data on the ground and using remote sensing of the Earth, or mainly using remote means. The system includes the following components: geological and chemical structure, wave parameters, tidal characteristics, flora/fauna, sediment balance and storm climate. Each common coastal system has a specific combination of these variables. The geological plan includes the following categories: coastal plain; barrier; islands; rocky coast; coral islands; tidal inlet / spit / estuary.

ABSTRACTLafcadio Hearn, one of the first writers to introduce Buddhist ideas into Western consciousness, was a perpetual wanderer, in search of “home”. Cast out of his childhood home in Dublin, he lived as an outcast in London, and later worked as a journalist in America. He spent the final years of his life in Japan, where he married into a samurai family and wrote about Japanese life and thought, with an emphasis on the Buddhist ideas evident in these. Not surprisingly, one of the central concerns of his writings – both journalistic and literary – was his search for “home”. That is the subject of this article. Hearn's search for a sense of belonging is seen in many aspects of his biography: he was drawn to subjects that were odd or outlandish, like himself; he wrote extensively about the liminal spaces in society and in consciousness – the borderlands between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, the known and the unknown. This obsession is given expression in his ghost stories, which typically destabilise ideas and discourses of home, re-visioning the “known” as a place of intersecting worlds, a littoral zone between the past and the present, the dead and the living. This article touches on these tendencies in his thought, demonstrating them in quotations from selected texts. I argue that Hearn retreats more and more into a meditation on the possibilities inherent in Buddhist notions of impermanence, towards the paradoxical idea of “home”, of consolation, as acceptance of “homelessness” and the emptiness of the phenomenal world. My article shows, finally, the unique solution he proposes to the problem of being and belonging in a world of perpetual suffering, desire, and death.

The Pacific region is comprised of 22 island countries and territories - featuring some 7,500 islands of which around 500 are inhabited-spread over an area of 30 million square kilometres and stretching from the Northern Marianas Islands in the north-west Pacific Ocean to Pitcairn in the south-east. Representing an enormous diversity in physical geography and culture, languages and socio-political organization, size and resources endowment, some countries and areas such as Nauru and Niue, consist just of one coral island, whereas others, like Papua New Guinea and the Federated States of Micronesia comprise literally of hundreds of islands. Melanesia comprise large, mountainous and mainly volcanic islands, endowed with natural resources, rich soil and an abundant marine life. Micronesia and Polynesia, by contrast, comprise of much smaller islands and their natural resources are limited to the ocean; they mostly comprise of small atolls with poor soil, with elevations usually between one and two metres (Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Tokelau and Tuvalu). There are also some islands of volcanic origin with more fertile lands (such as Samoa, Tonga, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Cook Islands).

Volcanic oceanic islands are of special interest because they furnish direct evidence as to the material that forms the ocean‐floors.The Pacific volcanic islands are arranged in linear groups, with a common general trend of about west‐northwest and east‐southeast. There are many active volcanoes in the Pacific. The Intra‐Pacific lavas are mostly basalts, but with small amounts of trachytes and other alkaline lavas at almost all the groups. There are many coral islands in the Pacific, which are probably built on sinking volcano‐pedestals. The Pacific is surrounded by folded mountain ranges and island “festoons,” on which are many volcanoes, some of them active. These Circum‐Pacific lavas are chiefly andesitic and very different from those of the Intra‐Pacific islands.

There are some environmental variations between volcanic islands and coral islands in the Pacific. When the Austronesian population dispersed into Oceania around 1600B.C., they brought a set of cultural complexes which included a wide range of material cultures. Various efforts were made to retain these cultural complexes by making efforts in looking for similar materials or importing unobtainable materials from remote islands. The early settlers also took similar colonization strategies at various islands. These are: exploring a new environment to look for useful resources; hunting birds, shell fishing and gathering wild plants; and land clearing by fire in order to cultivate plants brought from Southeast Asia. About several hundred years after colonization, many activities employed during this early period have changed: more reliance on domesticated plants and animals; replacing resources imported from remote islands with ones from nearer islands; development of sophisticated agricultural systems adapted to each island environment, etc. These adaptive changes have developed differently, corresponding to each island environment as well as to cultural preferences of each population group. After such adaptive changes made in many islands, the similar cultural complex possessed by early populations has become divergent as a whole.