In many areas of the world, archaeological research relies on workers without formal training in archaeology or apparent direct input into archaeological knowledge production. While these workers may appear to have little agency within the excavation process, and no direct participation in research outcomes, their role is more complex. Examples of local and international archaeological teams working in Türkiye in the mid-twentieth century and today are used here to explore the articulation of worker roles in field archaeology, as portrayed in field reports. The author assesses the language associated with team members in acknowledgements of their presence and status and examines how relationships are developed and maintained. Awareness of knowledge accumulation among local archaeological workers was articulated in the 1960s and proved advantageous to both workers and directors. Recent reports show little acknowledgement of worker presence, showing that multivocality has had no significant impact in this area of archaeological knowledge production.

Microbial processing of soil organic matter is a significant driver of C cycling, yet we lack an understanding of what shapes the turnover of this large terrestrial pool. In part, this is due to limited options for accurately identifying the source of C assimilated by microbial communities. Laboratory incubations are the most common method for this; however, they can introduce artifacts due to sample disruption and processing and can take months to produce sufficient CO2 for analysis. We present a biomass extraction method which allows for the direct 14C analysis of microbial biomolecules and compare the results to laboratory incubations. In the upper 50 cm soil depths, the Δ14C from incubations was indistinguishable from that of extracted microbial biomass. Below 50 cm, the Δ14C of the biomass was more depleted than that of the incubations, either due to the stimulation of labile C decomposition in the incubations, the inclusion of biomolecules from non-living cells in the biomass extractions, or differences in C used for assimilation versus respiration. Our results suggest that measurement of Δ14C of microbial biomass extracts can be a useful alternative to soil incubations.

A summary of the chronology for the key paleontological and archaeological site of Volchia Griva in the southern part of the West Siberian Plain is presented. Currently, 42 reliable 14C values have been generated on animal bones (37 14C dates) and charcoal (5 14C dates). Three stratigraphic levels of animal bones are established. The 14C ages of the fossils are as follows: the upper level—ca. 10,620–12,520 BP; the middle level—ca. 13,700–17,800 BP; and the lower level—ca. 18,230–19,790 BP. The majority of animal fossils and artifacts are associated with the lower level. Based on the results obtained, we suggest that Upper Paleolithic people occupied the Volchia Griva site during the second part of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), ca. 18,200–19,800 BP, and perhaps occasionally afterwards. It is obvious that these humans were well adapted to the cold and dry climate of the LGM, as well as numerous other populations in Siberia south of 58°N. It is noteworthy that the youngest 14C values on woolly mammoth are of ca. 10,620–11,815 BP, and this makes the Volchia Griva one of the latest mammoth refugia in northern Eurasia outside of the Arctic.

We construct finitely generated torsion-free solvable groups G that have infinite rank, but such that all finitely generated torsion-free metabelian subquotients of G are virtually abelian. In particular all finitely generated metabelian subgroups of G are virtually abelian. The existence of such groups shows that there is no “torsion-free version” of P. Kropholler’s theorem, which characterises solvable groups of infinite rank via their metabelian subquotients.

We revisit tensor algebras of subproduct systems with Hilbert space fibers, resolving some open questions in the case of infinite-dimensional fibers. We characterize when a tensor algebra can be identified as the algebra of uniformly continuous noncommutative functions on a noncommutative homogeneous variety or, equivalently, when it is residually finite-dimensional: this happens precisely when the closed homogeneous ideal associated with the subproduct system satisfies a Nullstellensatz with respect to the algebra of uniformly continuous noncommutative functions on the noncommutative closed unit ball. We show that – in contrast to the finite-dimensional case – in the case of infinite-dimensional fibers, this Nullstellensatz may fail. Finally, we also resolve the isomorphism problem for tensor algebras of subproduct systems: two such tensor algebras are (isometrically) isomorphic if and only if their subproduct systems are isomorphic in an appropriate sense.

In the past decades, numerous publications have been addressing questions of national and European Identity on the micro level. Only few shed light on the contents that constitute these identities in the minds of Europeans. As different meanings of national and European identity are connected to different consequences such as hostile attitudes toward immigrants or Euroskepticism, reviewing attempts to measure these contents in existing cross-national surveys seems to be promising. This research note summarizes relevant literature on whether and which different forms of national and European identity have been found empirically, which specific contents constitute them, and which determinants and consequences of them are relevant. By comparing articles relying on cross-national survey data since 1995, it will be shown that the field of forms of national and European identity involves different operationalizations and numerous methodological concerns. This leads to considerations for further research in the field.

This paper analyzes the training process of generative adversarial networks (GANs) via stochastic differential equations (SDEs). It first establishes SDE approximations for the training of GANs under stochastic gradient algorithms, with precise error bound analysis. It then describes the long-run behavior of GAN training via the invariant measures of its SDE approximations under proper conditions. This work builds a theoretical foundation for GAN training and provides analytical tools to study its evolution and stability.

This article considers the question of what constitutes item-based morphology, with a specific look at grammatical tone. Numerous case studies of grammatical tone are examined in light of the debate on whether morphology is item-based or process-based. In each case, tonal alternations are an exponent, sometimes the sole exponent, of some grammatical feature. Two of the case studies are examples of grammatical tone that can straightforwardly be analysed as involving concatenated morphophonological forms; however, in other cases, the grammatical tone cannot be reduced to the concatenation of a tonal affix or phonological feature with some stem. The latter type cannot straightforwardly be analysed as item-based, but if still phonologically predictable and productive, is not satisfactorily analysed as suppletive. This article suggests a set of diagnostics that can be used to determine whether a given phenomenon is best analysed as item-based, process-based or suppletive. Then, an analysis is presented in Cophonologies by Phase (CbP), where morphosyntactic features can be mapped not only to underlying phonological items, but also to morpheme-specific constraint weight adjustments. CbP allows for what may have been traditionally called item-based and process-based morphology to co-exist in a single framework.

Undergraduate research assistants (URAs) perform important roles in many political scientists’ research projects. They serve as coauthors, survey respondents, and data collectors. Despite these roles, there is relatively little discussion about how best to train and manage URAs who are working on a common task: content coding. Drawing on insights from psychology, text analysis, and business management, as well as my own experience in managing a team of nine URAs, this article argues that supervisors should train URAs by pushing them to engage with their own mistakes. Via a series of simulation exercises, I also argue that supervisors—especially supervisors of small teams—should be concerned about the effects of errant post-training coding on data quality. Therefore, I contend that supervisors should utilize computational tools to monitor URA reliability in real time. I provide researchers with a new R package, ura, and a web-based application to implement these suggestions.

The Black Sea is a substantial inland sea and has a very fascinating border on the east and west. It reaches into the Mediterranean through the straits, into Europe via rivers, and toward Asia via the Caucasus. The human relations developed through this network has led to the emergence of cultural landscape elements in the region. The natural landscape elements that have developed inherently in the natural beauty of the region have also become one of the most important pieces of heritage in the region. In this region, many uncontrolled practices that have taken place in recent years have rapidly degraded the cultural and natural landscape. The purpose of this study is to emphasize the beauty of nature, which makes the Eastern Black Sea region one of the most significant cultural and natural heritage areas of the world, and to explore its impact on human life in the context of water heritage as well as to address the dynamic risks of losing this beauty. In this study, the recognition of water as a heritage component is conceptually discussed in the context of the inherent cultural heritage and natural heritage. The unifying and integrative power of the multicultural water heritage that the region possesses is explicated.

The human gut microbiota can biosynthesize essential micronutrients such as B-vitamins and is also known for its metabolic cooperative behaviour. The present study characterises such B-vitamin biosynthesizers, their biosynthetic pathways, explores their prevalence and abundance, examines how lifestyle or diet affects them in multiple Indian cohorts and compares it with the Chinese cohort. To achieve this, publicly available faecal metagenome data of healthy individuals from multiple Indian (two urban and three tribal populations) and a Chinese cohort were analysed. The distribution of prevalence and abundance of B-vitamin biosynthesizers showed similar profiles to that of the entire gut community of the Indian cohort, and there were 28 B-vitamin biosynthesizers that had modest or higher prevalence and abundance. The omnivorous diet affected only the prevalence of a few B-vitamin biosynthesizers; however, lifestyle and/or location affected both prevalence and abundance. A comparison with the Chinese cohort showed that fourteen B-vitamin biosynthesizers were significantly more prevalent and abundant in Chinese as compared with Indian samples (False Discovery Rate (FDR) <= 0·05). The metabolic potential of the entire gut community for B-vitamin production showed that within India, the tribal cohort has a higher abundance of B-vitamin biosynthesis pathways as compared with two urban cohorts namely, Bhopal and Kasargod, and comparison with the Chinese cohort revealed a higher abundance in the latter group. Potential metabolic cooperative behaviour of the Indian gut microbiome for biosynthesis of the B-vitamins showed multiple pairs of species showed theoretical complementarity for complete biosynthetic pathways genes of thiamine, riboflavin, niacin and pantothenate.