In the 1960s, the optimal size of integrated steel plants significantly increased, while small steel mills known as minimills were gaining ground in the sector. Based on the use of scrap and electricity, these small plants became an alternative technological model to blast furnace steelmaking. Among the major European steel nations, Italy and Spain stood out for the early adoption and significant participation of electric furnaces in total steel production. The article explains the factors that led to the proliferation of small independent steel mills and their subsequent transformation into minimills in these Mediterranean countries. The conclusion is that, despite the different institutional frameworks, the Italian and Spanish response to the steel shortage of the 1950s was similar. This led to the emergence of many small producers, which based their development on low installation costs. In Italy, these businesses leveraged the opportunities of the postwar economic miracle, had access to a favorable supply of raw materials due to the policy of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and were able to resiliently face the restructuring process of the 1980s led by the Commission of the European Communities (EC). In Spain, they took advantage of strong state intervention.

Datos históricos, lingüísticos y etnográficos muestran que, cuando se utilizan para apoyar la existencia de mercados durante la época prehispánica en el área maya, demandan una interpretación más cautelosa y crítica. En este trabajo se argumenta que fue hasta finales del período posclásico cuando las plazas funcionaron exclusivamente como lugares de mercado de forma cotidiana, ya que antes de ese período las plazas fueron los espacios donde se celebraron numerosos eventos sociales donde también ocurrió un intercambio de mercado, aunque de manera periódica. Además, ciertos términos económicos del lenguaje maya sugieren que transacciones de compra y venta, así como el intercambio por trueque, canje o permuta, pudieron haberse utilizado desde el período preclásico en esos acuerdos económicos. Ambos tipos de transacción forman parte de los intercambios de mercado y, en este artículo, se profundiza en la explicación de cómo pudo haber operado el trueque o canje, tomando en cuenta que, hasta hoy día, la permuta de bienes y/o servicios continúa jugando un papel importantísimo en las transacciones económicas que se realizan en diferentes mercados de México. Un tercer tema analizado en el presente artículo se enfoca en mercaderes quienes concurrían o reunían con otros mercaderes en “puertos francos” o centros de comercio o trasbordo para el intercambio de mercancías, ya sea por trueque o por compra y venta. Estos mercaderes parecen haber sido proveedores de productos que pudieron haber vendido al por mayor a otros mercaderes, o bien, los vendieron a otros comerciantes quienes a su vez realizaron ventas al por menor.

This article presents the preliminary results of investigations at the site of Qach Rresh on the Erbil Plain of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, conducted by the Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia project (RLIIM). The site of Qach Rresh is estimated to have been founded in the mid–eighth century B.C.E., at the height of the Assyrian Empire, and continued to be utilised in varying capacity until the onset of the Hellenistic period (c. 320 B.C.E.). Magnetic gradiometry survey and excavations currently suggest that Qach Rresh served as a rural administrative/storage center during the Assyrian Empire, which fell into disrepair following the empire’s collapse. The following post-Assyrian/Iron Age III period then saw several of its large buildings repurposed as refuse areas containing debris from largely domestic contexts. Qach Rresh is the first rural settlement investigated within the Assyrian imperial heartland. The results from this project seem to indicate a high degree of Assyrian state or elite involvement in the countryside, serving as a critical first foray into assessing the relationship between urban governing centers and their “hinterlands”.

Lowrider culture in Southern California and within Chicana/o social relations is a powerful example of minoritarian cultural production and an important yet undertheorized aesthetic, political, and gendered cultural object. Linking the lowrider enthusiast’s body and this cultural object—their vehicle—as a continuous signifying spectrum of self-inscription reifıes an alternative understanding of lowrider identities.

In recent years, scholars have drawn particular attention to the existence in the ancient world of permanent, specialized market buildings, macella or μάκɛλλοι, which offered dedicated facilities for the processing and sale of luxury commodities such as fish and meat. However, important questions remain about the typologies, architecture, and “end-users” of these structures. Here, I outline a basic model for how the total and average wealth and traffic of settlements increases with estimated populations, before exploring the relationships between the total footprints and wider architectural characteristics of macella and estimated populations of sites. This reveals that there is a series of relationships between these measures that are not only consistent with wider theoretical and empirical expectations, but also have the potential to alter dramatically our understanding of macella by revealing the connections between the sizes and capacities of these structures and the wealth, connectivity, and integration of settlements.

This article investigates honour and recognition dynamics involving babies. By drawing on modern theories and experimental studies of infants’ psychology, selected case studies from Classical Greek literature and philosophical accounts will be interpreted in terms of basic intersubjective mechanisms. Case studies from Herodotus and Menander show that babies were intuitively perceived as agents capable of putting forth implicit demands to recognition and respect. Passages from Plato reveal that babies were regarded as possessing embryonic forms of a sense of dignity and entitlement. The article thus demonstrates that babies were involved in basic dynamics of honour and recognition. Overall, these mechanisms can be seen as the psychological and social foundation of the fully fledged version of timê, the Greek notion that captures the range of bidirectional dynamics of honour, recognition and respect which stand at the basis of human interaction and sociality.

The paucity of existing baseline data for understanding neurologic health and the effects of injury on people from Indigenous populations is causally related to the limited representation of communities in neuroimaging research to date. In this paper, we explore ways to change this trend in the context of portable MRI, where portability has opened up imaging to communities that have been neglected or inaccessible in the past. We discuss pathways to engage local leadership, foster the participation of communities for this unprecedented opportunity, and empower field-based researchers to bring the holistic worldview embraced by Indigenous communities to neuroimaging research.