This article explores the Maroon landscape of the Caribbean island of Dominica (Wai'tukubuli) by creating a geographic information system (GIS) model to determine the reasons behind settlement location choices. For more than 50 years, hundreds of self-emancipated Africans inhabited the mountainous interior of Dominica, where they formed various communities that actively resisted European colonialism and slavery not only to maintain their freedom but to assist in liberating enslaved Africans throughout the island. Contemporary Dominican communities maintain connections to these revolutionary ancestors through the landscape and continuing cultural practices. None of the Maroon encampments, however, have been studied archaeologically. This study uses geospatial methods to understand the visibility, defensibility, and spatial accessibility of nine Maroon camps. The results of the viewshed and least cost path analysis allows us to map Dominican Maroon social networks and reimagine the possible routes that the Maroons took to maintain their freedom.

One of the most pronounced features of the war in Ukraine has been the heavy reliance of the Russian forces on convict-soldiers, most notably by the private military and security company (PMSC) the Wagner Group. In this essay, I explore the ethical problems with using convict-soldiers and assess how using them compares to other military arrangements, such as conscription or an all-volunteer force. Overall, I argue that the central issue with using prisoners to fight wars is their perceived expendability. To do this, I present three arguments. First, although many prisoners have been under major duress, using convict-soldiers may be somewhat preferable to using conscripts in this regard. Second, convict-soldiers are more likely to be subject to human rights abuses than other types of soldiers and this should be seen as the main problem with their use. Third, convict-soldiers’ liability to lethal force for fighting in an unjust war does not render it permissible to treat them as expendable.

The Dark Forest Theory of the universe applies a pessimistic view of humanity to alien civilizations. While many look to space with hope and optimism, the Dark Forest Theory suggests that humanity should be fearful and cautious when expanding beyond Earth and that interaction with aliens could spell humanity's doom. This article will briefly examine the theory and present some arguments against the pessimistic view offered by the Dark Forest Theory.

This article stems from the encounter of ancestral stories and archaeological knowledge for Africans in Amazonia. Against colonial fragmentation and anti-Blackness, these theoretical reflections are rooted in Black Archaeology as a praxis of redress. The continuing struggles of ancestral and contemporary Black Amazonian communities, who insist on anti-colonial modes of existence, connect with the need to indigenize the archaeological mode of knowledge through otherwise world-senses as ontoepistemological references. These questions emerged during the first steps of the ongoing collaborative archaeological project Pitit'Latè. The founding story of Mana, an Amazonian village built in 1836 by the hands, heads, spirits, and technologies of more than 400 West Africans captured in the illegal transatlantic trade, serves as the epistemological bones of this research about Black Amazonian territorialities and materialities that remain erased in dominant colonial discourses.

This article presents an exomusicologically informed response to the theme of alienation through encounter in Oli Jan's Three Singers on Planet M, in which actors execute apparently ritualistic sounds and actions. Their activities signal aesthetic intentionality but do so through an unfamiliar cultural display that defies the rules of our own lived experience of embodiment and environment. The conceit sets up an interesting question related to the somatic imaginary: how can and how do we relate to the imagination of non-human bodies?

In this collaborative account of Iddon's Sapindales, the authors recount how their experiences of live and virtual clarinet sounds and environmental sounds combine in varied ways. By focusing on relationships among sonic layers, the authors emphasise the dynamic interplay of live and recorded performance, music and environment, the real and the virtual, the abstract and the concrete. Each relationship involves mediation and ambiguity, with elements that alternatively split apart or join together. The listening outcomes that we describe repeatedly highlight a positional swing between subject and object, as the authors reach across explanatory modes, drawing on phenomenology, musicology, psychoanalysis and ecological psychology, among others. We aim to capture the process of aesthetic listening, a process that is live, interactive, constructive, imaginative.

This paper examines the materialization of trauma as both a narrative and embodied phenomenon in Hassan Bani Ameri's 2006 novel, Gonjeshkha Behesht ra Mifahmand, using contemporary narrative and trauma theory. The postmodernist narrative, told from the perspective of a photojournalist, reconstructs events surrounding the death of a celebrated Iran-Iraq War commander. I argue that traumatic truths resist full integration into conventional frameworks of understanding, evident in the novel's non-linear, fragmented narrative and its shift from visual realism to confessional surrealism in an ending that challenges traditional storytelling and historical documentation. By vividly simulating the sensory processing of traumatic memories, the novel emphasizes the material reality of trauma that demands to be seen, heard, and physically felt, thus negating celebratory institutional narratives around the culture of war and martyrdom.

The Early Mississippian site of Willie's Hole in south-eastern Scotland hosts some of the earliest terrestrial tetrapods. This study reports on the palaeoenvironment, micropalaeontology and palaeoecology of this important locality. The 8 m thick section comprises saline–hypersaline lake facies (dolostones, evaporites), fluvial facies (conglomerate lags, rippled, planar-laminated, and cross-bedded sandstones and siltstones) and overbank facies (laminated grey siltstones, sandy siltstones, very fine sandstones and palaeosols). Numerous exposure surfaces characterised by rooting, desiccation or brecciation indicate the repeated wetting and drying of the floodplain. Vertebrate, invertebrate and plant fossils are concentrated in the overbank facies association, particularly in sandy siltstones. Macro- and microfossils present are tetrapods, rhizodonts, actinopterygians, gyracanthids, dipnoans, chondrichthyans (Ageleodus), bivalve molluscs, eumalacostracans, myriapods (diplopods), eurypterids, scorpions, branchiopods, ostracods, Spirorbis, Serpula, Calcitarcha, Monocraterion trace fossils, plant stems, arborescent lycopsids (Stigmaria, Lepidodendron) and megaspores of the creeping lycopsid Oxroadia conferta. Various palaeoenvironments coexisted on a tropical, coastal, low-lying floodplain: evaporitic saline lakes, small meandering river channels, brackish salinity temporary lakes, wet marshes and sub-aerial dry land with scrubby vegetation and trees. Tetrapods inhabited waterlogged floodplain marshes and were transported post-mortem by meteoric flooding events into brackish lakes and pools. The abundance of tetrapod and other fossils is attributed to taphonomic concentration and preferential preservation during rapid burial. The Willie's Hole succession gives a window into the rich ecology and habitats on coastal floodplains after life recovered from the end-Devonian extinction and tetrapods walked on land.