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Palynology provides a record of past environmental change in the Maya Lowlands. The underlying principles are simple, but, as with all proxies, there are limitations. During the late glacial period, environmental change was governed by climate, which was cooler and much drier and supported sparse temperate vegetation. The early Holocene epoch was warmer and very wet in the southern Lowlands when mesic tropical forests predominated, while the northern Yucatan Peninsula was edaphically dry until eustatic sea level rose. The modern distributions of plant associations and climatic gradients were established at the end of the early Holocene. Climatic variability continued throughout the Holocene. However, the ability of palynology to identify climatic events is hindered after the Maya became numerous in the Lowlands. Then, multidisciplinary studies provide a better interpretation of events, especially during the late Holocene. Pollen records poorly reflect cyclical droughts seen in isotopic records, as natural vegetation has adapted to these fluctuations.

The study of place naming, or toponymy, has recently undergone a critical reformulation as scholars have moved beyond the traditional focus on etymology and taxonomy by examining the politics of place-naming practices. In this article, we provide a selective genealogy of the ‘critical turn’ in place-name studies and consider three complementary approaches to analyzing spatial inscription as a toponymic practice: political semiotics, governmentality studies, and normative theories of social justice and symbolic resistance. We conclude by proposing that future scholarship should explore the political economy of toponymic practices as a step toward expanding the conceptual horizon of critical place-name studies.

Place-making — the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live — is an important but oft-neglected part of political theory. Place-making is an inherently networked process, constituted by the socio-spatial relationships that link individuals together through a common place-frame. While place-oriented scholars have long acknowledged the importance of interaction and communication in place-making, the mutual integration of network concepts, political theorisations and place conceptualisations has been relatively weak. We use case studies in Bolivia's forests and Athens, USA to explore how integrating these concepts can guide empirical research. This article argues that a more robust and explicit notion of 'relational place-making' — the networked, political processes of place-framing — positions the concept of place in a way that offers new analytical utility for political and urban geographic scholars.

We investigate the relationship between a thousand-year history of violent conflict in Europe and various reconstructions of temperature and precipitation. We find that conflict was more intense during colder period, just like Zhang et al. (Clim Change 76:459-477, 2006) found for China. This relationship weakens in the industrialized era, and is not robust to the details of the climate reconstruction or to the sample period. As the correlation is negative and weakening, it appears that global warming would not lead to an increase in violent conflict in temperature climates.

This is a narrative essay, the animating purpose of which is stylistic as much as analytic. It is a story; and, unusually for academic geography, the story is primary. The essay has no deferred object; it is not 'about' something more academic but nor does it abrogate the work of analysis. It narrates the story of the Scottish archaeologist Erskine Beveridge and his family, as told through a prolonged encounter with the ruins of his house situated on the Hebridean island of North Uist. A discussion of ruins, archives and fieldwork runs parallel with, but always subsidiary to, the main narrative.

Theorists within and beyond the discipline of geography increasingly realize that boundaries are not simply lines that enclose and define territories. Boundaries also regulate and are reproduced by acts of movement. Movement, beyond and across, as well as within a bounded territory, serves to reproduce the territory that is being bounded. It follows that to understand the history of a territorial entity one must go beyond tracing the spatially fixed activities that occur within that territory or the discursive strategies through which the territory is made to appear natural. One must also trace the acts of movement that occur within, across, and outside the territory's boundaries and the designation of specific spaces of movement as beyond territorial control. In short, one cannot understand the construction of \"inside\" space as a series of territories of fixity, society, modernization, and development without simultaneously understanding the construction of \"outside\" space as an arena of mobility that is deemed unsuitable for territorial control. In this article, this perspective is applied to the preeminent normative territory of modernity-the sovereign state-and attention is directed specifically to the designation of the world-ocean as a space of mobility outside the boundaries of the state-society units that purportedly constitute the modern world. Through an analysis of representations of marine space on 591 world maps printed in Europe and the Americas between 1501 and 1800, this article traces the construction of the ocean as an external space of mobility, antithetical to the norm of the territorial state that also was emerging during this era.

Entrepreneurship is an important process in regional economic development. Especially the growth of new firms is of major significance to the commercialization of new ideas and employment growth. These growing new firms are transforming structurally like caterpillars turning into butterflies. However, like butterflies, they are at risk of leaving their region of origin for better places. This article analyzes how and why the spatial organization of firms develops subsequent to their start-up. A new conceptual framework and an empirical study of the life course of entrepreneurial firms are used to construct a theory on the firms' locational behavior that explains that behavior as the outcome of a process of initiatives by entrepreneurs, enabled and constrained by resources, capabilities, and relations with stakeholders within and outside the firms. The study shows that entrepreneurs decide whether to move their firms outside their region of origin for different reasons in distinct phases of the firms' life course. Being embedded in social networks, for example, is an important constraint on locational behavior during the early life course of a firm, but over time it becomes less important, and other mechanisms, such as sunk costs, increasingly determine a firm's locational behavior. The development of spatial organization is also of major importance: when a multilocational spatial organization has been realized, it is much easier to move the headquarters to another region. The spatial organization of entrepreneurial firms co-evolves with the accumulation of the firms' capabilities. A developmental approach that incorporates evolutionary mechanisms and recognizes human agency provides new insights into the age-old study of the location of firms.

This paper examines the relationships between authorship and editing in the production of narratives of travel and exploration. The context to the paper is the widespread interest in exploration and travel writing in geography and related fields, and the materialist hermeneutic apparent in the conjunction of geography, book history and the history of science. Through assessment of archival and printed evidence relating to the authorship and editing of books of travel and exploration published by the leading British publisher, John Murray, the paper examines the redactive relationships between writer and editor-publisher, illustrates the means by which authors sought status in their words and explores how Murray authorised explorers' words and works. In addressing the complex connections between author and editor, manuscript and print, private correspondence and public audience, the paper has implications for researchers in geography interested in the specific relationships between writing and print, and in the general connections between geography, book history and the history of science.

This paper presents initial findings from longer-term transdisciplinary research concerning the social dynamics of urban neighbourhoods. It examines the spatial clustering of ethnicity and class in neighbourhoods over urban history, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to contemporary cities. Fourteen distinct drivers of social clustering are identified, grouped under the headers of macro-structural forces, the state, local regimes and institutions, and bottom-up processes. The operation of these processes is examined through three historical and three archaeological case studies of clustering. It is concluded that: clustering is a common, but not universal, attribute of cities; there is much variation in clustering patterns, both within and between cities and urban traditions; and, consideration of a wide variety of drivers is required to understand historical and modern residential dynamics.

There is a lack of knowledge about effective implementation of intensification policies. The paper concentrates on the intensification experience of Sydney, Australia, and Toronto, Canada. Historical narratives, which document intensification efforts and outcomes since the 1950s, paint different pictures. For much of the period, Sydney adopted a medium-density strategy sustained by public-sector incentives and regulations. In Toronto, in contrast, the focus has been on high-density developments driven mostly by market trends. Lately, however, the Sydney intensification strategy has shifted to high-density projects. The paper concludes by drawing out findings that are relevant to intensification policies in the selected metropolitan regions and elsewhere: the ubiquity of NIMBY reactions; the importance of senior government involvement because less sensitive to anti-density NIMBY reactions; the possibility of framing intensification strategies in ways that avoid political party confrontation; and the role of major environmental movements in raising public opinion support to intensification.