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This dissertation will focus on several land use strategies utilized during the Late and Terminal Classic periods at the archaeological site of Actuncan, Belize (a Late Preclassic and Early Classic regional center), including terracing, water channeling, agricultural plots, and chich cobble mounds. Excavations in commoner settlement zone of the site exposed three terracing and water management system methods: 1) terraforming, in which earthen berms were created to facilitate water drainage, 2) low plastered walls utilized for water channeling, and 3) two small agricultural plot systems filled with a large amount of redeposited domestic trash. These features are representative of household-level land transformation, as well as localized land use based on microenvironments and specific social and political contexts. In addition, GIS flooding models indicate a number of linear cobble mounds to the east of the Actuncan site core, along the Mopan River floodplain, may have been used as a cacao orchard, thus creating an economic opportunity or tribute system that could have benefitted the entire community. Together, these systems reflect how the ancient Maya at Actuncan managed water and agricultural production based on site-level environmental knowledge, and the scale at which these technologies were administered. In addition, while the Late and Terminal Classic period was a time of elite loss of power at the site of Actuncan, the agricultural plot systems and chich cobble mounds created and utilized during these periods denote commoner endurance in the face of political turbulence.

Erosion of soils due to human activities such as deforestation, pastoralism, and agriculture is a problem that has been recognized since Antiquity. Greece, like much of the of the Mediterranean world, is particularly susceptible to soil loss due to the arid climate and steep, rocky terrain, and many previous studies have sought to date and attribute the aggradation of soil to human activity, climatic changes, or a combination of the two. This study uses near-shore sediment cores from Antikyra Bay in the Gulf of Corinth, Greece, to understand the sources and timing of erosional events in the study area of the Kastrouli–Antikyra Bay Land and Sea Project. Sedimentological analysis and radiocarbon dating of foraminifera and twigs show that there are two major periods of soil aggradation in this record: the first occurred in the Hellenistic and/or Roman period (ca. 1900 – 2100 BP), and the second starts in the Ottoman Period (ca. 350 BP) and persists until present day. In addition to documentation of soil aggradation, two paleo-shorelines were identified during the geophysical survey. A local relative sea level curve constructed for this study suggests the shallower of the two is between ~7.7 and 8.7 thousand years old, while the deeper feature formed around 8.9 to 9.7 thousand years ago.

The paper set out to demonstrate the opportunities and critical issues arising from the dematerialisation of cultural heritage, also in the light of the novelties of PNRR

The availability of digitised cultural heritage content held by archives and other memory institutions improves their visibility, facilitate and increases access to information, allowing new kinds of research of digital heritage, namely Digital Humanities. This study intends to report how Municipal Archives of mainland Portugal are ensuring access to their digitized cultural heritage content. For this purpose, an analysis was held to collect data about online catalogues with digital objects linked to the archival description in 278 Municipal Archives of mainland Portugal. The data revealed that the openness of the primary information sources preserved by the municipal archives, which can be reused by all those who need them and particularly by digital humanists, is still in infancy.

Halfling is a feature length screenplay following Azra, a young girl who embarks on a journey across a dystopian future-land to protect her people and ask for help from the Grim, a people she has been taught are monsters.

There are many environments on Earth that are so remote that they are inhospitable to humans and conventional sensing equipment. Yet, these environments can hold information of ecological and cultural significance that cannot be gathered anywhere else. Current methods of gathering information in these environments give an important window, but utilizing modern sensors to capture 3D information can allow us to interpret existing data and understand the environments in new and unique ways. This thesis will demonstrate how 3D capture can improve data collection and interpretation in three separate remote environments. First, I will show how Synthetic Aperture Sonar on autonomous underwater vehicles paired with optimized feature detectors can improve target detection and seafloor recognition. Next, I will show how RGBD cameras, photogrammetry, and LIDAR can be used in isolated Guatemalan archaeological excavations to visualize and contextualize ancient sites in relation to each other and to our broader understanding of Mayan history. Finally, I will demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of RGBD cameras for fish stock assessment through detection and length and biomass measurement in open waters and in aquaculture.

This document has been produced by the World Bank to support the Government of Guatemala as it improves its transport and logistics sector management in pursuit of enhanced country competitiveness. It identifies and defines elements of a National Transport and Logistics Strategy (NTLS) through the development of a methodology which analyzes bottlenecks and related costs along the main logistics corridors. It does so with a view to (a) mobilizing support in the trading community (essentially private sector) for logistic service improvements, (b) identifying the need for broader public-sector reforms in transport which indirectly impact logistics performance, and (c) helping the Government to set sector priorities and hence to prioritize public investment. At the same time, it points out where improved data and monitoring of performance are needed in order to better quantify economic costs, diagnose key logistics issues, and track improved performance. It thereby proposes, as part of the set of recommended activities, to build the Government of Guatemala s capacity to measure performance and take action. While the document is based on sound analysis of some aspects of the country s logistics system, it must be considered primarily a starting point which is subject to broad country dissemination and debate by public and private stakeholders.

This project examines the response of policymakers, rural people, and social scientists to the major economic and demographic changes transforming the rural United States after 1945. Farm land concentrated increasingly in fewer hands, competitive markets and low prices for farm products strained small farmers, and many farm jobs mechanized. Rural jobs beyond the farm, particularly in mining and timber, began to disappear as well. These changes were not necessarily new but were deeper and far more wrenching following World War II. The population loss, community decline, and unemployment they caused posed the more general question of rural America’s future. My project aims to understand not just how these changes were understood and addressed, but more importantly how policymakers, experts, and rural people envisioned the place of rural America in a changing society. Examining major and in some cases pathbreaking rural development initiatives in California, Missouri, and Georgia, my research ranges across the broad diversity of rural America to analyze the emergence of three distinct approaches to solving the rural crisis. One, focused primarily on what was referred to as “nonfarm” development, saw the era of the small farm as finished, and aimed to replace disappearing farm jobs with federal loans and grants that funded infrastructure projects, industrial development, and rural tourism. Another solution found its fullest expression in the land reform efforts of small, African American-led farm cooperatives, who blended calls for civil rights and economic justice in their attempt to build a cooperative farm economy. Finally, Mexican American farmworkers allied with activist lawyers to regulate California’s large farms and fight for collective bargaining rights. Taken together, these two efforts at farm reform suggested that rural America could be revived only through a dramatic reorganization of agriculture. Delving into the assumptions, legislative and administrative politics, and the federal and local power dynamics that shaped the practice of rural development, my project tells the story of a deepening rural crisis, and the effort to solve that crisis and in the process redefine rural America.

This special issue of the journal Photography & Culture (volume 14, issue 3) calls for the development of research into the various local and global political circumstances that have influenced the absorption of historical photographs into the realm of digital heritage, alongside the study of the digital photographic heritagization practices triggered by this very process. Presenting case studies from Australia, Britain, Israel, Palestine, Russia and South Africa, it analyses how historical photographs, digital heritage, and cultural conflicts have become interlocked in multiple countries around the globe since the post-Cold War rising prevalence of digital technology, global interconnectedness, and liberal democracy. These related conditions, it is suggested, have informed the growing digital heritagization of historical photographs and the methods used for their digitization, safeguarding and dissemination. Therefore, as a whole, the special issue argues that the confluence of historical photographs and digital heritage must not be understood as a mere response to technological progress but as an articulation of politically-charged aspirations to capitalize on the common association of photographs with the past, to administer approaches to differing cultural values in a time of imposing liberal-democratic politics of consensus.

The agricultural drought inventory for the UK is a subset of data from the UK Drought Inventory. This dataset contains qualitative drought data related to UK agriculture based on an extensive review of two weekly farming magazines in the UK: Farmers Weekly and Farmers Guardian for the 2018 summer drought. This inventory is a complement of the existing Historic droughts inventory of references from agricultural media 1975-2012 (Rey et al., 2019), also available in ReShare (see Related Resources). This dataset contains a total of 1,098 references. The inventory follows a standard format (based on the European Drought Impact Report Inventory, EDII), common to the other sectoral collection of references, that allows their combination for drought analysis and characterisation. Thus, it stores information on the start and end dates of the event and their location (local and regional based on NUTS regions) to characterise the temporal and spatial extents of the cited event. The events/entries are categorised as drivers, impacts, responses and includes a sample of text from the source. Entries for years different from 2018 are related to content about a previous drought (e.g., 1976) that is mentioned in 2018.Historic Droughts was a four year (2014-2018), £1.5m project funded by the UK Research Councils, aiming to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of past drought episodes that have affected the United Kingdom (UK), with a view to developing improved tools for managing droughts in future. Drought and water scarcity (DWS) events are significant threats to livelihoods and wellbeing in many countries, including the UK. Parts of the UK are already water-stressed and are facing a wide range of pressures, including an expanding population and intensifying exploitation of increasingly limited water resources. In addition, many regions may become significantly drier in future due to environmental changes, all of which implies major challenges to water resource management. However, DWS events are not simply natural hazards. There are also a range of socio-economic and regulatory factors that may influence the course of droughts, such as water consumption practices and abstraction licensing regimes. Consequently, if DWS events are to be better managed, there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the links between hydrometeorological and social systems during droughts. With this research gap in mind, the Historic Droughts project aimed to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of drought from a range of different perspectives. Based on an analysis of information from a wide range of sectors (hydrometeorological, environmental, agricultural, regulatory, social and cultural), the project characterised and quantified the history of drought and water scarcity events since the late 19th century. The Historic Droughts project involved eight institutions across the UK: the British Geological Survey the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Cranfield University, the University of Exeter, HR Wallingford, Lancaster University, the Met Office, and the University of Oxford. Extensive review of two weekly farming magazines in the UK: Farmers Weekly and Farmers Guardian for 2018. The issues are in electronic format (in ProQuest, accessed via Cranfield University Library website). The search terms were: drought, dry weather/spell, rainfall/precipitation, soil moisture, water scarcity/stress/deficit. After all the references containing one or more of these terms were collected, the content was screening and only the relevant ones were included in the inventory (spreadsheet format).