Humanities

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The death jar: uncovering a lost mortuary tradition in Laos

For over a century, the giant stone jars of northern Laos have remained one of Southeast Asia’s great archaeological mysteries. Scattered across remote ridgelines and forests on the Plain of Jars, these massive megalithic vessels have sparked debate over their true purpose: storage containers, symbolic monuments, or part of a complex mortuary tradition?…

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May Releases from Cambridge Aspire

Fully revised and updated, the new edition of Engineering Dynamics provides a comprehensive, self-contained and accessible treatment of classical dynamics. All chapters have been reworked to enhance student understanding, and new features include a stronger emphasis on computational methods, including rich examples using both Matlab and Python; new capstone computational examples extend student understanding, including modelling the flight of a rocket and the unsteady rolling of a disk.…

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Photogrammetry in Three Acts

In “Without a Roadmap: Reflections on the Emergent Methods of Community-Based Archaeology,” I examine the ways that working with community can shape and transform research design over the course of a project.…

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Manhood, Money and Survival: Rethinking Child Soldiers in Somalia

Why understanding contemporary youth militancy demands history Al-Shabaab fighters patrolling Afgooye-Mogadishu road (2025) In civil war-era Somalia in the early 1990s, global media headlines about ‘stoned teenagers’ cruising Mogadishu on jeeps mounted with machine guns became synonymous with the construction of Somalia as a ‘chaotic African country’ in which one could be killed for nothing more than ‘the clothes on your back’ (New York Times, 1992).…

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Zoological colour on HMS Beagle: Charles Darwin’s chromatic language

On 25 April 1832 the Royal Navy vessel HMS Beagle was anchored in the blue waters of Botafogo Bay, Brazil. The naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was leaving the Beagle in a small boat, en route to a temporary residence on the mainland, when a series of waves swamped the vessel and scattered his ‘most useful’ possessions into the sea.…

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Representation Matters in Archaeology

In January, my husband and I (Sam) took our six-year-old daughter to get a flu shot at a local pharmacy. As she became increasingly bored in the waiting room, she began to offer commentary, asking the closed door, “Doctor, when are you coming out?”…

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Re-imagining Landscapes through Indigenous Literature

Maize Landscapes in Indigenous Literatures: Toward Alternative Cartographic Imaginaries discusses the work of four 21st century poets who write bilingually in Spanish and their Indigenous language: Ethel Xochitiotzin Pérez (Nahuatl), María Dolores Dzul Barboza (Yucatec Maya), César Vargas Arce (Central Peruvian Quechua), and Emilio Corrales (Bolivian Quechua).…

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Rural Scotland and the Kapp Putsch

The Scottish Farm Servant is not a well-known journal. Established in 1913, amongst the wider maelstrom of the ‘Labour Unrest’, the journal served as the official organ of the Scottish Farm Servants Union (SFSU) and was explicitly aimed towards Scotland’s agricultural labour force.…

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Forging a Bronze Age City: The Next Chapter at Semiyarka

Our recent Antiquity Project Gallery article introduced Semiyarka as one of the most extensive and carefully planned Bronze Age settlements yet identified on the Kazakh steppe — a 140-hectare landscape including rectilinear compounds, a larger central structure, and unmistakable evidence of organised tin-bronze production.…

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Kant on language, culture and politics

We live in a world of great cultural and linguistic diversity, and even greater diversity of opinion. It’s often unclear what role this diversity should play in the formation and application of philosophical principles.…

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The IVF Pioneers: Who Really Wrote Their Autobiography?

This blog post is about the author’s recent paper in Medical History, The ghostwriter and the test-tube baby: a medical breakthrough story For 45 years A Matter of Life has provided the standard account of the science and medicine behind the sensational birth of the first ‘test-tube baby’.…

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Rhapsody in Maya Blue

Visitors to many of the archaeological sites in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras are often struck by the bright blue paint on architectural sculptures and frescoed murals at these sites.…

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Pensar los 30.000 Que sabíamos sobre los desaparecidos durante la dictadura y lo que ignoramos todavía

The 1970s remain a minefield in Argentina. Nothing underscores this more than the discussion about who is responsible for the cycle of political violence and the number of missing persons, a topic that recurs time and again, dividing those who openly hold denialist positions on the one hand and those who uphold the symbol of the 30,000 on the other.…

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Performance, Prefiguration, and Politics at Attica

How do we define success in radical politics? This is a question I have asked myself throughout my research and writing on what many historians, politicians, and colleagues deem a sensational, unequivocal failure. The Attica Prison Uprising began with a flash of possibility yet ended with dozens killed and even more wounded, setting off a slew of pro-carceral propaganda from the Nixon and Rockefeller administrations amid intensifying mass incarceration. What does it mean to recognize the Attica Prison Uprising as a success, and what tools might we find in the language of performance for making this kind of political assessment?

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Transplanting kingship

Once upon a time in Paphos, so tells Plutarch (Mor. 340d), Alexander the Great decided that  the reigning king was unjust and wicked, and removed him from his throne.…

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A History of Archaeology at Sparta

The Annual of the British School at Athens (ABSA) has long been a preferred repository of research on Sparta. This introduction provides a brief history of research in the region and an account of further developments in archaeological and historical research.…

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Military Intimacies: Peruvian Veterans and Narratives about Sex and Violence

Many researchers and writers have considered the question why soldiers in conflict situations rape civilian and enemy populations. Few works have been able to research motivations of soldiers directly with them. We carried out in-depth interviews with ex-combatants (recruits) of the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict, to examine the complex dynamics in which sexual violence became a widespread practice among soldiers—how did ordinary young men become perpetrators of sexual atrocity?

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PMLA Articles in the College Classroom

Many years ago, while still in graduate school, I was helping a group of undergraduates understand a scholarly essay about translation, when one student asked me (with all good intentions): “Why do we need to know this?”…

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From Brexit to Environmental Destruction: Understanding Modern Britain with James Vernon

What inspired you to write a book on the history of Modern Britain? There were two motivations. I was interested in rescuing national histories from the nativism of the right. Of course, in Britain that virulent type of nationalism swept the country with Brexit, but across the world authoritarian populists have also evoked nativist histories that they promise will make their country great again.

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