The well of Junia Rufina has long been one of the main features of the archaeology of Roman Butrint. This paper aims at offering a chronological and cultural context for its dedication by inserting it into contemporary urban and historical developments. The monumentalization of the well in the 2nd c. CE illustrates how increased access to and architectural display of water was a main aspect of urban policy in the newly founded province of Epirus, in line with the rest of the Greek world. The role of Rufina, on the other hand, can be understood in the light of the cultural policies of the time, and as a manifestation of the power and prestige attached to female patronage in highly networked families throughout the Empire at the time of Hadrian.

The consumption of food is simultaneously one of humanity’s most basic necessities and one of its greatest luxuries. It has, appropriately, both inspired and reflected cultural activities, from agricultural rituals and ascetic practices to epicurean banquets and poetry. At the present moment, we seem to be living in an era of peak food obsession, fueled by extremely popular food culture, the rapid rise of “foodie” life on social media, and heated debates over the authenticity and identity of cuisine in a multicultural context. Chinese societies have been equally obsessed, with food being a central theme of ancient bronzes, Confucian classics, religious practices, and literary works. For this reason, the study of Chinese food culture naturally brings one through a wide array of disciplines, including cultural studies, history, religion, medicine, and aesthetics. However, with a few notable exceptions, major research in humanistic food studies has tended to emphasize recent time periods, European and American cultures, or both (the “modern west”). The result has been a strong emphasis on “cultural studies” approaches, usually adopting structuralist, culturalist, or Gramscian critiques of power brokers in the past century.1 This special issue shows how attention to Chinese food history may bring to light many new questions and methods in the study of food culture.

Handheld firearms have been little studied in the military history of the Portuguese in Asia. Historians have centered on naval and siege warfare, in which cannons feature extensively. The way artillery was used in ships and sieges has been depicted as an important innovation of European origin, which gave the Portuguese a decisive advantage over their Asian opponents. Yet, this approach has confined harquebuses and muskets to a secondary role. We reconsider this historiographical imbalance using Jeremy Black’s idea that fitness-for-purpose is the best standard to measure military effectiveness. We argue that even if handheld firearms were not used by the Portuguese in a particularly “innovative” way, they were important and effective at the time.

High-frequency mortality data have attracted growing attention, but their use has largely been confined to specific applications rather than general modeling and forecasting. Such data pose new challenges to traditional mortality models due to pronounced seasonal patterns and short-term fluctuations. To address these challenges and produce more accurate forecasts with the high-frequency mortality data, this paper introduces a novel integration of gradient boosting techniques into traditional stochastic mortality models under a multi-population setting. Our key innovation lies in using the Li and Lee model as the weak learner within the gradient boosting framework, replacing conventional decision trees. Empirical studies are conducted using weekly mortality data from 30 countries (Human Mortality Database, 2015–2019). Empirical evidence highlights that the proposed methodology not only enhances model fit by accurately capturing underlying mortality trends and seasonal patterns but also achieves superior forecast accuracy, compared to the benchmark models. We also investigate a key challenge in multi-population mortality modeling: how to select appropriate subpopulations with sufficiently similar mortality experiences. A comprehensive clustering exercise is conducted based on mortality improvement rates and seasonal strength. The empirical results demonstrate that our proposed model maintains strong forecast accuracy across different clustering configurations, thereby reducing the need for extensive data preprocessing.

We investigate the aggregate effects of household debt on a monetary policy easing shock using a smooth transition vector autoregression model. Using generalized impulse response functions, we measure whether the effect of a reduction in interest rate on output is conditioned by different levels of household debt in Australia, Sweden and Norway, three developed economies with high levels of household indebtedness, and in the world’s seven largest economies. Our findings show that the short-term effects of a reduction in interest rates are generally stronger during periods of high household debt. On average, the monetary stimulus (on impact) is 0.06% (percent of GDP) larger in Norway and the United States during periods of high household debt. Our findings also suggest high levels of household debt may diminish the persistence of monetary policy shocks in the medium term (4–8 quarters).

This article examines whether formal and informal workers in Argentina and Chile hold different attitudes toward labor unions. Engaging debates on labor-market dualism and union revitalization, we assess the representation gap hypothesis—which expects weaker union support among outsiders—against the class solidarity hypothesis, which anticipates broadly similar orientations across labor-market positions. Using original 2025 survey data from both countries, we find limited evidence of a systematic insider–outsider divide. Although informal self-employed workers sometimes express more skeptical views, most attitudes among informal workers are statistically indistinguishable from—and in some cases more favorable than—those of formal workers. Cross-nationally, Argentine workers tend to assign greater importance to unions, while Chilean workers report higher willingness to unionize. Taken together, these findings suggest that the representation gap thesis may not fully capture workers’ orientations and point to the potential relevance of solidaristic dynamics shaped by national institutional and political contexts.