Despite the well-known weakening of the Roman guardianship of women by the early Principate, its final disappearance from Roman law has remained a mystery. In modern scholarship, the proposed dates for the abolishment of tutela have ranged from the late third century to the early fifth, or to the claim that it just fell out of use without ever being formally abrogated. This article combines legal and papyrological sources to show that we can in fact establish the time when tutela was abolished in the reign of Constantine. It further places the disappearance of the guardianship in the broader context of the historical development of Roman law and the legal independence of women in the Roman world.

This research examines the continuity and changes in Igbo thoughts on leprosy by exploring Igbo cosmology and its relationship with Christian and colonial ideas about the disease. The perception of leprosy in precolonial Igboland reveals a shocking similarity with the later Judeo-Christian identity and the perception of leprosy that dominated the area during colonialism. It argues that colonial and Christian missionary ideas did not radically transform the perceptions of leprosy in south-eastern Nigeria. Instead, what happened was merely an adaptation and continuity of prevailing thoughts about the disease. Using oral evidence, archival materials and existing anthropological works on Igbo worldviews and cosmology, this research shows the changes in the colonial socio-cultural knowledge of leprosy. After careful analysis, it concludes that, while colonial medicine and the missionaries’ idea of leprosy healed leprosy sufferers and transformed their identity, most Igbo people continued conceptualizing the disease as an aberration and maintained the stigmatization of sufferers.

A Roman stylus tablet discovered at Vindolanda in 2014 preserves the partial text of a deed-of-sale for an enslaved person, only the second such document from Britain. This article presents the results of multiple techniques used to reveal the almost illegible text and proposes a restoration of the format of the document and its lost content, based on more complete examples from Italy and around the Empire. We examine the late first-century archaeological and historical context and suggest that the purchaser is probably the prefect Iulius Verecundus. We consider other possible evidence for the servi of the commanders at Vindolanda, for example in another hard-to-decipher stylus tablet which may be related to their travel. The deed-of-sale provides a new type of testimony for slavery at Vindolanda and adds to knowledge of enslavement in the Roman military.

This introduction presents the structure and contents of the current issue of Archaeological Reports. It also offers an overview (not meant to be exhaustive) of archaeological activity in Greece over the past 12 months, focusing on major exhibitions and other cultural events as well as on important recent publications.

The present article is a study of Ottoman military recruitment attempts of Circassians in the northwestern Caucasus. It examines the process of realizing a Circassian highlander army and the administration of the Anapa fortress during the time of two different fortress commanders. Focusing on the deeds of these two pashas regarding Circassian recruitment and their social background, this study highlights the Ottoman-Circassian relations and the dynamics of loyalty and pragmatism. Specifically, the role of provincial networks in ruling the border fortresses and regional politics in the Eastern Black Sea have been underlined within the context of the Russian-Ottoman rivalry over the Caucasus. Rebutting the importance of the origins of Ottoman officers for Ottoman borderland politics, this study argues that the contribution of provincial notables to the Ottoman civilizing mission and the Circassian army project in the early nineteenth century has been indispensable to the realization of Ottoman establishment in the Caucasus.

Achmet Borumborad's arrival in Ireland in the 1760s, during which he claimed to be a Turk fleeing political persecution in Istanbul, quickly propelled him to prominence, making him one of the country's most distinguished figures. His published works and the establishment of a Turkish bath in Dublin, supported by the Irish parliament, solidified his reputation. However, Achmet's good fortune proved short-lived upon the discovery that he was, in fact, an Irishman. Consequently, he retreated from the public eye, and his life story has become one of the most widely known tales of corruption that contributed to the dissolution of the Irish parliament. This paper explores the extraordinary account of Achmet through previously unused documents, offering not only fascinating insights into social life in eighteenth-century Ireland but also intriguing revelations regarding perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and ‘Turkish fashion’ during this era.

This article asks why women are ignored in debates about ancient economies and suggests a way forward. It argues that women performed a wide variety of diverse economic activities, though this is not particularly discernible from the scholarly literature, which mostly casts them as patrons or prostitutes and, despite the household being a basic economic unit to which women contributed, generally considers economic actors as male by default. However, by drawing on feminist economics, social history and gender studies, it is possible to reframe women’s varied activities in ways that acknowledge their labour, spotlight female agency, challenge the (gendered) categories of analysis and discourses that are predominantly used within ancient history, and recentre questions relating to the structures of inequality created by ancient economies. Three case studies explore some of the problems and raise new questions: Z3, a building in the Kerameikos the function of which is debated, the contribution of tax-farmers to sacrifices on Kos and the water supply in Athens. That is, this article argues that examining how ancient economies were gendered is a profitable way to think about both economic history and gender history.

Tachikawa's second conjecture for symmetric algebras is shown to be equivalent to indecomposable symmetric algebras not having any nontrivial stratifying ideals. The conjecture is also shown to be equivalent to the supremum of stratified ratios being less than $1$, when taken over all indecomposable symmetric algebras. An explicit construction provides a series of counterexamples to Tachikawa's second conjecture from each (potentially existing) gendo-symmetric algebra that is a counterexample to Nakayama's conjecture. The results are based on establishing recollements of derived categories and on constructing new series of algebras.

Hybrid yoghurts combining dairy and plant-based derivatives present a novel approach to enhancing consumer acceptance of plant-based products, which is increasingly significant due to dietary trends and lactose intolerance. This study investigates the production of hybrid yoghurt blending cow's milk (CM) with soy (C:S) and oat (C:O) drinks in various ratios (90%, 70%, and 50% cow's milk), assessing their acceptability and quality. Notably, the C:S (70:30) and C:O (70:30) ratios resulted improved viscosity over time, although still less than CM. The hybrid yoghurts exhibited a favourable pH gradient, enhancing the acidic environment critical for flavour. Sensory analysis revealed that C:O (70:30) offered more favourable attributes on the just-about-right scale, scoring overall 6.86/10. Importantly, microbial analysis confirmed the safety of all hybrid products for consumption, with no harmful microorganisms detected.

Water-mediated claims in both international law and domestic law are often framed around, or adjudicated based on land-centred principles. In Canada, too, such claims tend to be judicially assessed through land-centric concepts. This approach has significant implications for Indigenous law and related claims to water-mediated spaces. It also has consequences for both international law and domestic law, particularly with respect to how aqua nullius and similar Eurocentric concepts are disguised and used in settler-colonial states like Canada. Accordingly, this article urges a critical engagement with Indigenous law and similar cosmologies on water in a manner that foregrounds the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and in re-reading how the UNDRIP is incorporated and implemented in Canada.

This article explores the trajectories and narratives of people who have exited marginalized urban spaces in Nairobi to move through other social spaces in the city, or abroad. Claiming to belong to the ‘ghetto’, an idiom that refers to both a local space of exclusion and a globalized cultural and political imaginary, our interlocutors embrace the contradictions of this belonging in their everyday experiences. The careers they have built in different fields (art, activism, sport, academia) identify them as figures of social success and make them question their relationships with those around them. Defining their aspirations as intimately linked with the ghetto, but perceiving it as a strong constraint, they are not cutting ties with the place they come from. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork that pays attention to both their self-narratives and their writing, we propose the notion of ‘small boundaries’ to describe how social and spatial mobility from the ghetto produces, for each individual in a different way, an intimate cleavage within the self. We then propose to unpack this specific self as a configuration of three types of distancing (social, spatial and self-distancing) that allow both their aspirations and their obligations to coexist in everyday life.

This research paper describes a test of association of sire with susceptibility to mastitis, using a custom-bred population of dairy cattle. We hypothesised that sire daughters ranked as more resistant to intramammary infections in their first two lactations would be more resistant to an intramammary challenge in their third lactation. Mastitis phenotypes were generated for a Holstein-Friesian × Jersey crossbred research herd of 864 cows, bred from six defined sires and managed as two cohorts in a seasonal calving system in New Zealand. Naturally occurring new intramammary infections (IMI) and clinical mastitis (CM) were monitored in their first two lactations from herd records, milking staff observations and bacteriology of quarter milk samples collected at four time-points during each lactation. The animals retained to their third lactation were then exposed to a single intramammary challenge with Streptococcus uberis. We used a relative risk (RR) analysis to rank performance of sire daughters for pathogen-specific phenotypes for new IMI and CM, and somatic cell count (SCC) traits, and their clinical outcomes to the challenge. Generally, daughters of sire B had the highest RR for new IMI or CM by a major pathogen, whereas daughters of sires A and C had a consistently lower risk. The RR for sires E, D and F were intermediate and inconsistent across major pathogens. Daughters of sire B ranked highest for all CM cases and SCC traits whereas sires A and C ranked lowest. Following intramammary challenge, daughters of sires A and C were more likely to develop CM, whereas daughters of sire B and F were less likely to develop CM. Thus, the hypothesis was rejected. The results revealed strong associations between sire and pathogen-specific mastitis phenotypes, and validated use of SCC and CM traits in sire selection and breeding programmes to improve mastitis resistance.

The ‘waves and ebbs’ model proposed by Huntington in his 1991's The Third Wave has profoundly shaped how scholars interpret global trends of democratization and autocratization, but has also received criticisms, especially concerning its ability to explain regime change in the three decades following the end of the Cold War. I contend that, rather than an alternation between democratization waves and authoritarian ebbs, the post-Cold War period could be more fruitfully described as a phase of ‘regime convergence’ characterized by a tendency of both democracies and autocracies to shift towards hybrid forms of political regime. By showing that between 1990 and 2023 transitions to hybrid regimes significantly exceeded transitions in other directions, I demonstrate the empirical relevance of hybridization as a process affecting both democracies and autocracies, and I encourage renewed attention to this phenomenon distinct from both democratization and autocratization.

Calicium poculatum and Ramboldia canadensis are described as new species occurring on Larix laricina. Calicium poculatum, currently known from four Canadian provinces and the US state of Minnesota, is characterized by its short-stalked black ascomata, short ascospores and occurrence as a parasite on Lecanora caesiorubella subsp. saximontana. Based on DNA sequence data, its nearest relative is the likewise parasitic Calicium episcalaris. Ramboldia canadensis, currently known only from dead wood of Larix laricina snags in Canada, engages in a fully developed lichen symbiosis with Trebouxia simplex and is characterized in statu symbiotico by having a rimose to verrucose-areolate, greyish creamy sorediate thallus with dark brown to blackish soredia that begin on the margins, and the occurrence of a secondary metabolite similar to barbatolic acid. Phylogenetic analysis recovers it as sibling to a clade of the genus heretofore known only from the Southern Hemisphere and the lower latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. We also report Lecidella xylophila as new to North America.