The study of the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium is a dynamic and exciting field, in which scholarship, especially from within the Indian Ocean region itself, is expanding rapidly. It is experiencing a period of major, but not necessarily disruptive, change, to its core questions, terminology and periodisation. This article offers an overview of the study of Roman trade with the Western Indian Ocean (sometimes termed ‘Indo-Roman studies’) from the early 2000s to the present. It examines key developments in the field, including the changing scope of analysis in terms of period, region and evidence; the impact in the field of an increasingly global focus and efforts to decolonise a subject historically deeply rooted in colonial processes; and specifically the effort to provincialise or decentre Rome in historical narratives. It then suggests directions in which the field appears to be developing and makes tentative suggestions for future work.

Washington, DC was littered with fliers that promoted shows happening within the local punk scene during the 1980s. Often posted on poles, walls, and bulletin boards around the city, these fliers included which bands were playing, the date of the show, entry cost, and the name and location of the performance space. For shows that occurred in the homes, community centers, and schools of suburban Maryland and Virginia, the flier maker often included an address as well as directions. Sometimes these directions took the form of a hand-drawn map. More often, they were written in prose.

This article studies the directions included on such fliers and asks, “where do flier makers assume attendees will begin their travels?” To answer this question, it adopts a methodology from geographic information systems (GIS) and follows the directions backwards from the venue to the unspoken and assumed starting point. Such methods show how directions typically began in the suburbs themselves or in and around Georgetown, one of DC's more affluent neighborhoods.

The individuals that made these fliers functioned as popular cartographers who, via their directions or maps, articulated their identity and worldview. By focusing on the unassumed, unspoken, and default “starting point” of punk audiences, this article argues that punk fliers created a view of DC that articulated and engrained a segregationist, classist, exclusionary logic, even within a progressive, integrated musical scene that existed in the city during the 1980s.

Digital-era music videos are a crucial part of singers’ mediatic performances. Lip-synching is often central to such products, supplying situations in which singers can mouth their voices while dislodging themselves from the struggles of singing. Looking into music videos by focusing on their lip-synching practices, this paper aims to understand the part voice takes on in the medium while also investigating how gestural lip-sync performances work as accounts of oneself that produce a musical subject, sometimes updating or overcoming social regulations. In this sense, lip-synching is theorized as a way of framing music videos’ gestural labour.

I’m sat at my office desk writing this review when I receive a notification on my phone. An alert of this kind would usually be unworthy of comment. Yet, this notification informs me of a recent BBC News article on sperm whale vocalization. Intrigued, I read the story, which explains how a team of Cetacean Translation Initiative (Ceti) researchers, led by PhD student Pratyusha Sharma at MIT, are using AI technology to analyse large bioacoustics datasets of sperm whale clicks. Their analysis shows that the combining of clicks in sperm whale communication appears to parallel the grouping of phonemes to create words in human languages. What the whales’ different rhythmic sequences of clicks — called ‘codas’ — mean, however, is still unknown. Scientists have, so far, only caught a glimpse of the lives of sperm whales, and so it is impossible to know at this stage what information is carried by particular combinations of codas.1

In the early 2000s, a video of Nina Simone's 1960 performance of “Love Me Or Leave Me” on The Ed Sullivan Show resurfaced online. The song's original piano solo, rife with references to the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach, clearly displays Simone's training as a classical pianist. Several inaccurate claims on the solo circulate in scholarship, magazines, and social media—some describe the solo as a fugue; others incorrectly attribute it to Bach himself. This article unpacks the racial and gendered implications of the Ed Sullivan clip's reception. The misreadings of Simone's performance, I argue, are rooted in a possessive investment in whiteness and classical music. By exaggerating Bach's influence on Simone, various media erase her musical agency to advance a romanticized view of classical music as a universal art form. These narratives obscure the way her stylistic heterogeneity emerged as a response to the racial and gendered structures that shaped her performing career. Through an analysis of Simone's four renditions of “Love Me Or Leave Me,” I demonstrate how she strategically inserts textural, melodic, and harmonic allusions to Bachian counterpoint within the structure of the song. Her performances therefore showcase a form of stylistic hybridity in which she draws on her classical piano training to synthesize the conventions of fugue and popular song. By challenging narratives that incorrectly label Simone's solos as quotations or imitations rather than original compositions, I draw attention to the inner workings of her stylistic heterogeneity at the piano.

This article discusses the activities of the Sino-Japanese Society of the Study of Esoteric Buddhism, which was active in North China from the early 1930s until the end of the Second World War. The organization was founded by Yoshii Hōjun, a young priest of the Japanese Shingon sect. It attracted the support of a wide range of actors, including a range of former Beiyang government politicians, Japanese diplomats, as well as prominent members of the Japanese community in North China. It had contacts in the Japanese military that have garnered the Society the reputation of having been a front for Japanese intelligence operations. This article critically investigates these claims and seeks to understand the relationship between religion and politics manifested in the Study Society for Esoteric Buddhism. Its history reflects the fraught relations between the two nations as well as between the various interest groups on both sides and thus provides a window into the complexities of pre-war North China in the 1930s.

This article examines Irish nationalist girl scouts in the period 1911‒23 with a particular focus on the organisation Clan na Gael (or Clann na nGaedheal). It illuminates the involvement of girls in Irish nationalist youth organisations in the early twentieth century and situates them in the wider contexts of uniformed youth groups and the Irish nationalist movement during this period. Like their male counterparts in Na Fianna Éireann, Irish nationalist girl scouts received forms of military training and provided military support services to their adult colleagues in the Irish independence movement. Thus, these Irish girls challenged the gender conventions of the time more overtly than members of the international Girl Guide movement. Participation in these groups could also serve as a conduit to future membership and activism in Cumann na mBan or the Irish Citizen Army. The contributions of Clan na Gael and other girl scouts to the Irish nationalist movement demonstrate that girls, as well as boys, sought to further the struggle for Irish independence. Yet, these adolescent female activists have received far less recognition for their efforts. This may be due to their relatively small numbers, dismissive preconceptions of their contribution, and the sparsity of primary source material.

Famars (ancient Fanum Martis) is situated in northern Gaul, in the south of the Nervian territory. Large-scale investigations undertaken over the last ten years have enabled in-depth analyses of archaeobotanical, archaeozoological and ceramic data, alongside other artefacts. These analyses have demonstrated the town's management of raw materials yielded by its territory, as well as the processing and redistribution of the finished products on a local and regional scale, and across the whole of northern Gaul. Such settlements were part of the Empire's system for supplying troops and inhabitants with food and materials of all kinds. Although data from perishable or otherwise ephemeral materials are limited, ceramics can act as proxy evidence of the production and distribution of other products. This paper provides an overview of these recent discoveries and places them in the broader context of Roman-period supply networks.

How do the tools of musical composition shape the cognitive processes of composition in absentia? In exploring the role of these absent tools, can progress be made towards an extended understanding of imagination and memory? This article posits the conceptual framework of ‘Integrated Tool Competency’ as a way of reconciling the powerful insights of externalist accounts of cognition with the fact that so much of the process of musical composition can take place without directly interacting with compositional tools. Effectively, this concept extends the integration of tools into a composer’s cognition beyond the moment of their use, including both unconscious competencies such as audiation and conscious actions such as imagining using a certain tool. This article proposes the concept of Integrated Tool Competency and discusses its potential ramifications for understanding the tools of composition.

To my mother, Penelope.

This paper offers an overview of the published material of the Epirotic sanctuaries. The presentation will be limited to the geographical area of modern Epirus (prefectures of Arta, Ioannina, Preveza, and Thesprotia) and it will cover the period from the Early Iron Age (eighth century BC) to the beginning of the Roman conquest (second to early first century BC). Areas of ritual character in Epirus range from shrines to organized sanctuaries. It is not always easy to identify the deity/deities worshipped at the ritual places presented.