In 2016, a rescue excavation at the Jičín Natural Sciences Centre and Observatory uncovered a mass grave containing multiple commingled individuals buried in several layers. Zinc buttons and clothing remnants possibly related to eighteenth–nineteenth-century military uniforms found in the grave suggest that these individuals were soldiers. During this period, the Jičín region experienced numerous battles and was the location of several military barracks, hospitals, and transport routes, in addition to supporting civilian populations. To contextualize this burial site, bioarchaeological analyses including assessments of age-at-death, sex, and stature, and recording the presence of injury or medical intervention were conducted. A high frequency of young adult males suggests that the grave was related to military activity. The presence of infants, limited evidence of perimortem trauma, and absence of signs of medical treatment could indicate that this mass grave was related to military encampments rather than battlefield contexts.

After 1917 the word ‘jazz’ disseminated rapidly throughout the world attaining, along the way, a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes related to musical practices from the United States, but often associated with a diverse array of things, objects, ideas, and situations in the worlds of music entertainment, dance, leisure, and fashion. In the Caribbean, this process entailed not only the constitution of jazz as a symbol of social modernity but also revealed a long history of exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean – not to mention the Afrodiasporic origins of jazz. By examining jazz as a by-product and an expression of Caribbean modernity, this article disentangles some of the cultural meanings of the word ‘jazz’ in the Caribbean between 1917 and 1920, considering, ultimately, how imagining jazz as Caribbean was inevitably intertwined with imagining it as modern.

It has been argued that Prioritarianism violates Risky Non-Antiegalitarianism, a condition stating roughly that an alternative is socially better than another if it both makes everyone better off in expectation and leads to more equality. I show that Risky Non-Antiegalitarianism is in fact compatible with Prioritarianism as ordinarily defined, but that it violates some other conditions that may be attractive to prioritarians. While I argue that the latter conditions are not core principles of Prioritarianism, the choice between these conditions and Risky Non-Antiegalitarianism nonetheless constitutes an important intramural debate for prioritarians.

In Tyrer v. United Kingdom (1978), the European Court of Human of Human Rights ruled that judicial corporal punishment contravened Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which proscribed “degrading treatment or punishment.” The case unfolded at a formative moment in British legal activism, as left-wing civil-liberties lawyers who had been wary of human rights discourse began taking cases to Strasbourg. The case also involved tactical challenges for British politicians and government lawyers. The case originated on the Isle of Man, which is close to the British mainland but constitutionally not part of the United Kingdom: it is a “crown dependency” with its own executive, legislature, and judiciary, and it persisted with judicial corporal punishment long after the practice had been abolished in Great Britain. By convention, the British government respected the island's laws and criminal-justice policies, but Britain was responsible for the island's compliance with international agreements—including the European Convention on Human Rights. How the British government dealt with the Isle of Man during and after the litigation had direct implications for a host of other small territories in what remained of the British empire—in particular, Britain's remaining Caribbean territories. The Tyrer case's protracted endgame was an object lesson in how much Britain's “unwritten” constitution depends on negotiation, manipulation, and avoiding the overt exercise of powers that might crumble upon use.

This paper analyzes the reuse of ancient tuff blocks in early medieval architecture in Rome, in both papal and private structures. The blocks are a well-known phenomenon, but they have not yet received any focused study. Short discussions in earlier scholarship have typically described them in utilitarian terms. I first identify a pattern of targeted reuse in papal building projects. I then argue that they would also have had symbolic value for an independent papacy wanting to display power. For later private builders, I propose that the blocks became prestige materials displayed on the houses of an ever-tightening aristocracy eager to be seen within some of the city's most important monumental spaces. I consider how the city's ancient monuments and their pieces were viewed in the early medieval period and how the blocks’ ancient contexts contributed to the symbolic value that I identify in them.

In this article, I consider the cases of religious Moorean propositions of the form ‘d, but I don't believe that d’ and ‘d, but I believe that ~d’, where d is a religious dogma, proposition, or part of a creed. I argue that such propositions can be genuinely and rationally asserted and that this fact poses a problem for traditional analysis of religious assertion as an expression of faith and of religious faith as entailing belief. In the article, I explore the possibility of undermining these commonly held assumptions and argue that the assertability of religious Moorean propositions can be justified by an account of faith as an intention to form religious beliefs. In the end, I also consider the consequences of such a stance, especially concerning the debate on the ethics of religious belief and doxastic voluntarism.

Why do oil-dependent developing countries exhibit divergent responses to oil crises? This study employs a comparative case study approach and utilizes a ‘most similar system design’ to examine the varying state responses to the 1973 oil shock in Turkey and South Korea. While the former refrained from implementing radical short-term adjustment policies and reforms, the latter adopted proactive measures to mitigate the worsening impact of escalating oil prices. This research contends that the existing literature, which emphasizes distinctions in industrialization strategies and fiscal policies among developing nations, offers an incomplete explanation for the divergent reactions of states to external price shocks. Instead, the study proposes a sociological perspective, focusing on the influence of varying degrees of state autonomy and the characteristics of bureaucratic systems on the decision-making processes of states. The key finding suggests that while pre-crisis economic policies and industrialization strategies may limit the array of policy tools available to counteract the adverse effects of an oil crisis, the extent of state autonomy and the organization of the bureaucracy – whether adhering to Weberian or non-Weberian principles – impact the efficacy of these policy tools and the determination of decision-makers to act in the best interests of the long-term public good.

Defensive infrastructure in the hinterland of the late Roman province of Germania Secunda hinged upon the widespread use of burgi. These defended settlements played a role in transforming villa estates, depopulated zones, and the expansion of the military footprint. They are common in the late third- and fourth-century landscape, spread throughout the loess belt of Belgium, Dutch Limburg, and the Rhineland, yet little has been done to quantify them. This article is dedicated to the chronology, morphology, and functional aspects of burgi, primarily in the loess plain of the Lower Rhine region. The author assembles data from a wide variety of burgi, to characterize them and reach meaningful conclusions about what they represent within the landscape, in the hope that it will act as a pilot project for future work in the field.