Although archaeological studies focusing on 19th-century sealing have been performed over the past 30 years, its history and sites have traditionally had low visibility in Antarctic narratives and the Antarctic Treaty System policymaking on heritage. Researchers face the challenge of increasing the visibility of sealers’ history and public awareness of the importance of conserving the oldest sites of Antarctica. In this paper, we propose that identifying patterns of tourism activity in the South Shetland Islands, specifically in their temporal and spatial dimensions, could help protect these sites and engage visitors with the early history of Antarctica. Data collected by the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators were used to calculate landing point usage trends over time and the frequency of passenger landings from 2003–2004 to 2015–2016. We defined six different visitation patterns with temporal tendencies of passenger landings that varied from increasing, constant, or decreasing trends over time, differing in the magnitude and intensity of visitation. This information was used to assess the situation of particular sites located in the vicinity of tourism landing points. We set priorities for their conservation and management decisions and highlighted their relative potential to engage visitors with the stories of 19th-century sealing in Antarctica.

Reporting on scientific research from Antarctica faces familiar tensions between journalism and science. Among the particular obstacles are the mainstream media’s focus on novelty and the constant need for new angles and new voices. While science journalism has been gaining recognition, many media organisations continue to view it as secondary to more traditional areas of reporting such as politics, business and sports. At a time when we face several environmental crises, that is arguably no longer representative of reality. Coverage of Antarctic issues, including science, could improve if editorial teams were more cross-disciplinary to extend beyond each individual’s boundaries of expertise.

In the 1970s, a commune movement emerged in West German cities. The article explores this movement as an attempt to create spaces for feeling ‘at home’ in cities that many people perceived to be alienating. After providing a brief overview of the development of the commune movement, the article explores the new domesticity that emerged in communes. It first discusses the emotional and political ambitions that motivated mostly left-leaning students to move into communes, and then explores the practical attempts to create such spaces for feelings, how such attempts succeeded but also encountered many difficulties. The article thereby contributes to an understanding of what it takes for people to feel at home in cities.

The names of dozens of artists from the tenth century have come down to us, for the most part with very little information about their lives and scarcely more about their art. Fortunately, the life and professional career of Guo Zhongshu 郭忠恕 (928–977) can be reconstructed in enough detail to give a sense of the personality of the artist and the world that he experienced. Indeed, we are doubly fortunate because Guo, it turns out, had no ordinary life. Known to art historians today primarily as one of the great painters of architectural subjects in Chinese history, Guo entered adult life in a different guise, as a brilliant young paleographer and calligrapher. This aspect of his career, no less important than his painting, is the subject of the present study. Although specialists have recognized his scholarly and calligraphic achievements, we still lack a contextualized account that incorporates what can be known of his biography and social circumstances. More important for the theme of this special issue, the material dimension of Guo's paleographic and calligraphic activities also remains to be explored. Any discussion can only be very partial, however, since no manuscripts or autograph calligraphies survive, only stone steles; fortunately, Guo's engagement with stele production is in itself of the highest historical interest. The chronologically organized text that follows tells a biographical story, with as much detail as the available sources allow, which eventually opens out onto the material world of steles, before returning to biography to recount the last chapter of Guo Zongshu's life. Rather than offering a conclusion, I end with a reflection on the materialities of transmission of paleographic and calligraphic knowledge. For the purposes of this article I have not thought it necessary to choose between the very different lenses of biography and material culture, since my goal is not to prove a thesis but to reconstruct an unfamiliar world. As I hope to show, the understanding of one person's life can enrich the understanding of artifacts associated directly and indirectly with the person, and vice versa.

Bog bodies are among the best-known archaeological finds worldwide. Much of the work on these often extremely well-preserved human remains has focused on forensics, whereas the environmental setting of the finds has been largely overlooked. This applies to both the ‘physical’ and ‘cultural’ landscape and constitutes a significant problem since the vast spatial and temporal scales over which the practice appeared demonstrate that contextual assessments are of the utmost importance for our explanatory frameworks. In this article we develop best practice guidelines for the contextual analysis of bog bodies, after assessing the current state of research and presenting the results of three recent case studies including the well-known finds of Lindow Man in the United Kingdom, Bjældskovdal (Tollund Man and Elling Woman) in Denmark, and Yde Girl in the Netherlands. Three spatial and chronological scales are distinguished and linked to specific research questions and methods. This provides a basis for further discussion and a starting point for developing approaches to bog body finds and future discoveries, while facilitating and optimizing the re-analysis of previous studies, making it possible to compare deposition sites across time and space.

This commentary considers the intellectual property (IP) system from a global environmental law perspective by exploring the extent to which patent-related treaties, such as the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the World Intellectual Property Organization Patent Cooperation Treaty, can facilitate implementation of global environmental standards in the field of biodiversity law. It provides practical guidance to countries that wish to introduce patent disclosure-related mechanisms into their legal systems with a view to mainstreaming instances of global justice, fairness and equity, and raises awareness of the limitations arising from their extant IP obligations. Global environmental law standards have exercised an undeniable influence on the political discourse in international IP policy making in the field of patent disclosure. Still, many patent disclosure requirements that pre-date the Nagoya Protocol apply only to genetic resources the provenance of which is the same country that established the requirement. However, if a country designates its patent or IP office as a compliance checkpoint under the Nagoya Protocol, then the disclosure requirement should encompass at least the genetic resources originating from all countries that are contracting parties to this instrument. This could allow the fulfilment of a core monitoring obligation of the latter, while enabling wider synergies and transparency within the IP system.

Legal scholars rely heavily on vocabularies of ‘actors’, ‘agents’, and ‘experts’ to account for the fact that law does not develop by itself. However, the identities, idiosyncrasies, and individual professional contributions of law's people are rarely illuminated. This article suggests that the relative absence of people in transnational legal scholarship helps to explain some of its gaps. The task of bringing ‘human actors back on stage’ creates some new opportunities for transnational environmental law scholarship. It invites attention to both dominant and excluded voices. It offers a way of bridging the gap between the bureaucratic language of law and its lived reality. It also provides an understanding of why, despite ferocious attempts to roll back the advances of environmental law in some places, many scholars and practitioners find reason to be optimistic about the future of environmental law.

Throughout his career the geographer, and first reader in the ‘new’ geography at the University of Oxford, Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) described his discipline as a branch of physics. This essay explores this feature of Mackinder's thought and presents the connections between him and the Royal Institution professor of natural philosophy John Tyndall (1820–1893). My reframing of Mackinder's geography demonstrates that the academic professionalization of geography owed as much to the methods and instruments of popular natural philosophy and physics as it did to theories of Darwinian natural selection. In tracing the parallels between Tyndall and Mackinder, and their shared emphasis upon the technology of the magic lantern and the imagination as tools of scientific investigation and education, the article elucidates their common pedagogical practices. Mackinder's disciplinary vision was expressed in practices of visualization, and in metaphors inspired by physics, to audiences of geographers and geography teachers in the early twentieth century. Together, these features of Mackinder's geography demonstrate his role as a popularizer of science and extend the temporal and spatial resonance of Tyndall's natural philosophy.

The Low Countries' Early Iron Age is marked by the emergence of lavish burials known as chieftains’ graves or princely burials. These extraordinary elite burials of the Hallstatt C/D period contain weaponry, bronze vessels as well as decorated wagons and horse-gear imported from the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe, where the same objects are found in the famous Fürstengräber. While the connection between these regions has long been recognized, the nature of this contact remains poorly understood. Here we present the preliminary results of an on-going re-examination of elite funerary practices in both regions and the likely direct long-distance interactions reflected in them. Similarities and differences in the treatment of objects and the dead in funerary rituals indicate that, to a certain extent at least, these geographically separated social groups were integrated in a specific elite burial practice, indicating frequent contact across hundreds of kilometres.

This article tracks the historical processes that shaped human waste management practices in Majunga, Madagascar from the city's founding in the mid-eighteenth century to contemporary times. Moving beyond colonial urban histories of sanitation, this article charts the meanings, strategies, and work practices Majunga residents employed to deal with predicaments of waste in everyday life. I argue that the particular material configuration of the colonial sanitation infrastructure in Majunga required new forms of labor — especially maintenance work — which city dwellers evaluated through existing moral norms. With the construction of French colonial sanitation infrastructures and the new labor regimes they necessitated, waste management became a key vector through which notions of difference were negotiated over the early- to mid-twentieth century. Shifting emphasis away from colonial infrastructure as disparity and onto moments of reception can contribute fresh insights not only on the histories of African cities, but also to histories of technology in the Global South.