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This article is guided by several premises. First, community coalitions fit with a social ecology perspective of health promotion because they work with multiple domains and promote community change. Second, the community context affects the functioning of coalitions. Third, key leaders are an important part of the social fabric of a community and influence the social ecology of a community; therefore a coalition should include key leaders and influence them and their organizations. The purpose of this article is to advance an understanding of the social ecology of coalitions by describing concepts, variables and results from two national studies and by providing anecdotal evidence and a measure of key leaders from our own work. After briefly defining and describing community coalitions, we: (1) review literature on contextual variables and community coalitions, (2) provide examples of contextual variables influencing community coalition development, and (3) discuss the relationship of key leaders in multiple domains and community coalitions. The article concludes with a discussion of the need for a framework of contextual variables and a promising next step.

The use of agent-directed simulation in archaeology has a relatively long tradition. However, these simulations have been always oriented mainly to study spatial processes and resource management and systematically ignore an essential aspect of any society: the use of social and institutional norms as a mechanism to regulate the behaviour of the individuals. In this paper we propose a norm-centric simulation (in contrast to the traditional resource-centric simulation) where the normative system is both the core of the simulation and the subject of study. Ourfinal goal is to set the foundations of a rather general model of social behaviour in a hunter-fisher-gatherer (HFG) society without political institutions but with strict social norms. ; El uso de simulación de agentes dirigida en arqueología tiene, relativamente, una larga tradición. Sin embargo, estas simulaciones han estado orientadas, principalmente, a estudiar los procesos espaciales y la gestión de los recursos y sistemáticamente han hecho caso omiso de un aspecto esencial de toda sociedad: el uso de las normas sociales e institucionales como mecanismo para regular el comportamiento de los individuos. En este artículo se propone una norma centrada en la simulación (en contraste con la simulación tradicional centrada en los recursos) donde el sistema normativo es a la vez el núcleo de la simulación y el objeto de estudio. Nuestro objetivo final es establecer las bases de un modelo general del comportamiento social de una sociedad cazadora-pescadora-recolectora (CPR) sin instituciones políticas, pero con estrictas normas sociales.

The knowledge of the different plant species that make up the feeding diet of animals is highly important to develop more efficient strategies. This research aimed to characterize the food potential available for the Cuban stingless bee livestock of the Matanzas and Mayabeque provinces. Palynological analysis was done using 60 g of pollen from sealed pots and 80 mL of honey from the ten randomly selected beehives (five in each province). The results showed that in the honey collected in Matanzas province, the most represented family was Amaranthaceae, followed by Myrtaceae and Fabaceae. Meanwhile, for Mayabeque, the most represented ones were the families Fabaceae and Myrtaceae. Regarding the stingless bee pollen of Matanzas provenance, the family Fabaceae prevailed, followed by Burseraceae and Myrtaceae. The pollen corresponding to Mayabeque coincided in showing Fabaceae as the most representative. In addition, pollen grains of small size (from 10 to 25 µm) were collected, with a marked representation of the pollen type of Mimosa pudica in the Mayabeque honey. It was concluded that the Cuban stingless bee livestock of the Matanzas and Mayabeque provinces had a specialist feeding behavior because a low number of plant taxa made up its diet.