FACULTY OF SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL SCIENCES

It’s not every day that an Elizabethan shipwreck is driven across middle England and dropped into a lake in Leicestershire, but that’s exactly what’s happening this week.

The UK government has updated the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in response to the EU Privacy Directive. In light of this the Information Commissioner's Office has provided guidance on the EU Cookie Law which came into effect in May 2012.

A new study, involving the Institute's Dorian Fuller, published this month in PNAS, provides evidence that climate change was a key ingredient in the collapse of the great Indus or Harappan Civilisation almost 4000 years ago.

The Institute will host the Archaeology and Economic Development conference (AED2012) on 21-22 September and registration is now open for the event.

Professor Volker Sommer of the Department of Anthropology has been awarded the North of England Zoological Society's highest honour, the Gold Medal, for outstanding lifetime achievement in the fields of natural science, conservation and the environment. Previous recipients have included Sir David Attenborough, Dame Jane Goodall and Dr Richard Leakey. The ceremony is to be held on 06 June at Chester Zoo.

Marcos Martinón-Torres has been describing various aspects of his research on alchemy and metallurical ceramics at recent public lectures in the UK and abroad.

Genoeconomics: the promise and pitfalls of a new research frontier in economics.

Dr Jan-Emmanuel De Neve outlines how and why social scientists have started to integrate genetics into economic models of behavior.

UCL is building on its existing strength in teaching and research on the Americas by establishing the UCL Institute of the Americas. UCL Americas will offer five new

Problems of democracy are magnified in societies divided on ethnic religious lines, particularly where groups are mobilized into parties. Due to majority rule, minorities should be less willing to endorse democratic institutions where they persistently lose elections. These problems should hamper democratization, but Eastern Europe contains several states that navigated these problems during the 1990s. In Romania and Slovakia, sustained protest and contention by ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia brought concessions on policies that they could not achieve through the ballot box. Ethnic protest in these states made each group accustomed to each other’s claims, and aware of the degree to which each could push its own. Ethnic contention became a de facto deliberative process that fostered a moderation of group claims, allowing democratic consolidation to  slowly and organically take root. Such moderation took place even after a violent riot between Hungarians and Romanians in 1990, showing  promise for other democratizing states.

Institute Masters students taking the Interpreting Pottery course recently enjoyed a two-day field trip to Stoke-on-Trent led by Bill Sillar.