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From the Author: Visualizing Race Virtually with Dr. David Sterling Brown  

Dr. David Sterling Brown is an award-winning author and a tenured Associate Professor of English at Trinity College, Connecticut. His book, Shakespeare’s White Others, published by Cambridge University Press, examines the racially white ‘others’ whom Shakespeare portrays in characters like Richard III, Hamlet and Tamora – figures who are never quite ‘white enough’.…

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Still Exhausted

As 2024 begins, AI feels simultaneously inescapable and invisible. Newspaper editorials, Davos panels, and countless advertisements tout the epochal event that is “AI.”…

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Ancient Maya Inequality – Compact Section

How unequal were ancient Maya societies and what lessons can we learn from them about our own unequal world? Modern inequality metrics often focus on monetary wealth and financial statements, but other methods exist and inequality can manifest itself in multiple forms.…

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Multimedia at Minoan Myrtos–Pyrgos, Crete

It is rare in the scholarship of Bronze Age Crete, during a period as old as the third and second millennia BCE, to present an inclusive account and analysis of all the seals, seal impressions and sealing practices, together with tablets and inscriptions in Linear A, from the whole life of a settlement.

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William Petty’s survey of Ireland and the role of natural history in the development of statistics

William Petty (1623-1687) is well known as a pioneer of political economy and statistics. He has been often celebrated as an ingenious thinker who was among the first to grasp that certain information, like data on different categories of landowners or the number of births and deaths, could be used to describe trends and tendencies occurring on the level of what he called the ‘political body’ – or what we would nowadays call ‘population phenomena’.…

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Greyhounds of Late Iron Age Sweden

In Late Iron Age Scandinavia, roughly 500-1100 CE, increasing numbers of people started going to the grave with animal companions. As a general rule, the higher a person’s station in society, the more animals they were likely to take with them, and in a higher diversity of species.…

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What Makes a Good Book Review?

Classical Review publishes hundreds of reviews every year. The books reviewed in our journal run the full range of topics related to antiquity and its reception; and the reviewers who write them are similarly diverse in their approaches.…

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World War in the Library: How the burning of the Leuven library in the First World War continues to resonate today

A burned library in a ruined city, civilian victims of shelling by a ruthless invader, a policy of occupation including linguistic censorship, the deportation and internment of professors teaching in the vernacular, condemnations by the international community: today all this might sound like the description of Russia’s war against Ukraine, or perhaps Nazi Germany’s policies in the General government of occupied Poland during the Second World War.

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Why Objects Speak

This text is identified as my own by the name placed above it, which seems sensible enough. Marking ownership was one of the earliest uses to which the ancient Greeks put their alphabet—which was to spawn among others the alphabet in which this text is written—but they had a strikingly different way of doing so. ‘I am the kylix of Korax’, declares an eighth-century BCE wine-drinking cup from Rhodes; ‘I am the lekythos of Tataie—whosoever steals me will go blind’, threatens a seventh-century oil flask from Cumae; ‘I am the remembrance of Ergotimos’, announces a shelf of Attic rock from the sixth century.

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Why Try to be Important?

At least in certain cultures, many people seem to value being important. It is supposed to be a good thing if you become a U.S. President who ends a war or a Nobel-winning novelist who reimagines literature or a scientist who cures a terrible disease.

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Looking Forward to the End of ‘Digital Archaeology’

Part of a series of blog posts celebrating the 10th anniversary of the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice. It may come as somewhat of a surprise that the Digital Reviews Editor for Advances in Archaeological Practice is calling for an end to the concept of ‘Digital Archaeology’.…

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Monico Origins, a Bayesian Story

The acknowledgments section of the Monico Bayesian paper expresses gratitude to “Deb Nichols, John Watanabe, Sophie Nichols-Watanabe, Robert (Bob) L. Kelly, and the Dartmouth Coach for inspiring and facilitating the development of some concepts in this paper.”

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World Crime Fiction

At the end of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin, the prototype of the analytical detective, offers a disparaging verdict on the Parisian Prefect of Police.…

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A Spanish Civil War Scrapbook

All I hoped as I embarked on my doctorate devoted to cross-cultural encounters between the International Brigades and the Spaniards who hosted them in the course of the Spanish Civil War was that those cross-cultural encounters had actually taken place.

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Teaching Data Reuse

In the spring semester of 2020, I developed and taught a class on archaeological data reuse and digital literacy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.…

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Cambridge to publish a new flagship journal in the fast-growing field of Pakistan studies

Critical Pakistan Studies will be the first international journal devoted to the study of Pakistan and its peopleJournal will be interdisciplinary and open accessAims to give the widest possible understanding of Pakistan, past, and present Cambridge University Press is to publish the world’s first international journal devoted to the study of Pakistan and its people.…

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Embedding science scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament

At times during the past few years, evidence sessions of the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee have made headline news, for example Dominic Cummings’ account of his time advising the Prime Minister during the COVID-19 pandemic, or controversial witness statements about diversity and inclusion in STEM careers.…

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Beyond When and Why: North Korea’s Reluctant Embracing of “Peaceful” Nuclear Power

Nobody knows when and why did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) begin its nuclear weapon program. Our current state of knowledge regarding these simple questions is at best partial; scholars point to different periods as its origin such as 1950 (when the Korean War broke out), 1958 (when the United Stated brought nuclear weapons to South Korea), 1964 (when the People’s Republic of China tested its first bomb), or 1979 (when South Korea started its undeclared enrichment activities that were revealed only in 2014).…

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Circe’s Etruscan Drugs

When only four words of a poet’s entire output in a specific genre survive to the present day, is there really anything of substance that we can say about this poetry on the basis of such slender remains?…

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The Loss of Fear as Civic Performance

Antiwar activists carve “no to war” in frozen rivers, spray-paint slogans of peace in the snow. They scrawl on banknotes, putting their opposition into circulation. Despite the looming threat of 15-year prison sentences, artists and activists in Russia continue to protest Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

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The “other side” of history: archaeological heritage and memory processes

“I found my identity because of pottery,” says Amalia, who runs an Indigenous pottery workshop in General Paz, a city in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. Amalia and her family found archaeological pottery fragments by chance. These findings encouraged them to experiment and learn based on their observations of the techniques and designs of the ancient pottery.

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