Inequality is present in all human societies, but building a robust understanding of how that inequality developed and persisted for centuries requires historical and archaeological data. Identifying the degree of inequality (or disparity) in ancient communities can be addressed through a variety of methods. One method becoming standard practice in archaeology evaluates inequality through quantitative analysis of robust settlement data. In this Compact Special Section, we assess household size as a potential reflection of wealth inequality among Classic period (a.d. 250–900) Maya settlements. First, we generate house-size data from both pedestrian and remotely sensed LiDAR surveys. Then we use those data to calculate Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves, which provide measures of variation. Gini coefficients range from 0 to 1, where 0 reflects perfect equality and 1 indicates perfect inequality, regardless of the actual values in the distribution. Both area (m2) and volume (m3) provide different, complementary metrics to investigate residential size as a metric for wealth inequality among Classic Maya Lowland settlements. Proposed mechanisms that generate inequality include the intergenerational transmission of wealth and differential access to resources; however, addressing these and other pathways for how inequality develops and persists, and how it was maintained in the past provides insight into similar processes of systemic inequality worldwide.

There is a tension within social architecture between aims and actions. Emerging in response to the increasingly anti-social nature of the urban, some claim the aim of social architecture is to challenge and build beyond various contemporary urban crises. This aim, however, is at odds with the primarily small scale and contextually grounded nature social architecture operates on. Some proponents avoid this tension by arguing that their aim is to materially improve the communities they are engaged with, however this has been critiqued as limiting social architecture’s potential. Within this paper, I advance previous critiques that have been made of social architecture through an examination of literature fields both inside and outside of architecture, and through a yearlong fieldwork study. Firstly, I explore the definition of the phrase in its use both by proponents and detractors of the movement. Secondly, I situate social architecture's emergence within architecture and use this to further the critiques of the tension between its aims and actions through the lens of reification. Thirdly the fieldwork serves as a contextual basis to manifest these critiques. Finally, with the aims of social architecture brought into question, the paper speculates upon what social architecture’s aim could be. This paper furthers the critiques of social architecture while suggesting that, through reframing its aim, social architecture could be used to demonstrate that alternatives to the present moment are possible.

Historians have long used the archives of major institutions to shed light on medieval society, but in more recent decades the focus has turned towards the proliferation of legal documentation possessed by those lower down the social order and the increasing penetration of legal processes into their everyday lives. Yet, in recapturing this world, there is a danger that we take for granted the immense documentary power of a large institutional repository. This article follows several legal conflicts across the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries involving the monks of Durham Priory to demonstrate the extent of this archival culture, showing how they turned to their vast array of documentary evidence for information about those who had incurred their wrath. Using their archives, they traced the descent of holdings, the offices held by key individuals, and previous payments in account rolls, all in a bid to demonstrate their rights, the ‘abuses’ of officials, and to counter legal opposition. Not content, the monks then compiled this evidence into an alternative narrative of events that questioned previous legal proceedings and ceremonies, constructing an institutional memory that saw contradictory documentation as ‘entirely most falsely forged’.

This article examines the dog-like aspects and associations of two marine monsters of Graeco-Roman antiquity: Scylla and the κῆτος. Both harbour recognizably canine features in their depictions in ancient art, as well as being referenced as dogs or possessing dog-like attributes in ancient texts. The article argues that such distinctly canine elements are related to, and probably an extension of, the conceptualization of certain marine animals, most prominently sharks, as ‘sea dogs’. Accordingly, we should understand these two sea monsters and the sea dogs as being interrelated in the ancient imagination. Such a canine resonance to certain sea creatures offers a valuable insight into the Graeco-Roman imagination of the marine element as being the abode of creatures reminiscent of terrestrial dogs.

Charles Taylor and James K. A. Smith occupy unique terrain among the many genealogists, cartographers, and mission-oriented Christian interpreters of secular modernity. By putting a methodological premium on philosophical(-theological) anthropology and on articulating the conditions—rather than simply the content—of belief in the West today, they approach and elucidate a well-trodden scholarly landscape in new ways. Taylor’s A Secular Age is a monumental, sui generis existential and phenomenological history of the West’s ever-evolving social imaginary, a history whose methodology and anthropological presuppositions merit extensive analysis (undertaken in part 1). In his Cultural Liturgies trilogy, James Smith takes queues from Taylor’s approach and proposes a highly congruous and complementary anthropology to which “liturgy” is the key. His work offers a lexical and hermeneutical toolkit for filling in explanatory gaps in Taylor’s narrative of Latin Christendom’s “secularization”; for further investigation into any particular feature, idea, or practice in said narrative; and for exegeting the numerous ritual and liturgical practices constitutive of every human life, including one’s own (part 2). Despite similar “diagnoses” of secular modernity’s malaise, the two thinkers offer meaningfully disparate remedial “prescriptions.” Part 3 articulates these differences, as they are important for theologians who are discerning the form Christian mission might take in secular modernity. Part 4 considers an apparent asymmetry between Smith’s diagnosis of contemporary Western Christianity’s ills and the correlate prescriptions he suggests the church adopt, as well as issues endemic to Taylor and Smith’s aims to reincarnate the modern, excarnated self. Taylor articulates the otherwise inarticulate and Smith unveils the pedagogical potency of the otherwise ordinary; when read together—especially with Smith as a constructively critical supplement to Taylor—their categories and analyses capacitate a more holistic understanding of what exactly it means to be—and to be the church—in a secular age.

Using hydrodynamic simulations and photoionization calculations, we demonstrate that quasar emission line spectra contain information on the driving mechanism of galaxy-scale outflows. Outflows driven by a hot shocked bubble are expected to exhibit LINER-like optical line ratios, while outflows driven by radiation pressure are expected to exhibit Seyfert-like line ratios. Driving by radiation pressure also has a distinct signature in the narrow UV lines, which is detected in an HST-COS spectrum of a nearby quasar hosting a large-scale wind.

To provide effective care physicians must attend, not just to medical issues, but also to the social determinants of health — racial factors, food insecurity, housing instability, transportation barriers and beyond. Social determinants also include a largely underrecognized dimension: legal vulnerabilities such as rental evictions and debt adjudications. Yet rarely do medical trainees have an opportunity to witness legal vulnerabilities, firsthand.