bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Yucatec Maya Biocultural Heritage/History Embodied in Ts’ono’oto’ob
Authors: McAnany Patricia A. , Batún Alpuche Adolfo Iván
Published: February 2025

In Yucatán, México, large limestone sinkholes number in the thousands, bear Yucatec Mayan or Spanish names, and contain water year-round. These geomorphic features—commonly called “cenotes”—play(ed) an integral role in sustaining life in the distinctive tropical environment of northern Yucatán that largely is devoid of surface water. Within archaeology, cenotes have long been recognized as places of offering (e.g., the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá) where the rain deity could be encountered. Yucatec Mayan mythic histories plus pre-sixteenth-century codices provide deeper insights into relationality with deities, spirits, and guardians that reside in/near cenotes. This biocultural heritage posed dangers to human frailties that are vividly encoded through accounts of cenotes as home to formidable, feathered serpents (La Tzucán) as well as femme fatales (X’tabay). Conceptions about the interconnectivity of cenotes braid well with current scientific understanding of the Yucatec groundwater aquifer and its vulnerability to pollution. The authors found that middle-school students residing in small communities in eastern Yucatán embrace this biocultural heritage and express deep concerns about cenote pollution.
Section I: Reframing History, Theory, and Practice
Authors: Watkins Joe , Smith Claire
Published: February 2025

This section examines how Indigenous archaeologies challenge colonial narratives, amplify Indigenous voices, and advocate for social justice within the discipline. It builds on foundational works like Bruce Trigger’s 1984 article and analyzes how sociopolitical forces shape archaeological practices and marginalize Indigenous knowledge. This section explores participatory mapping with the Emberá tribe in Panama and reinterpretations of Innu and GunaiKurnai histories, demonstrating how braided approaches integrate Indigenous and Western methodologies. It highlights Indigenous communities reclaiming their heritage and resisting colonial stereotypes, such as those perpetuated in Argentina and the Greater Antilles. Ultimately, this section shows how collaborative archaeology strengthens Indigenous sovereignty, reframes historical perspectives, and fosters equitable partnerships.
Section III: Indigenous Science
Authors: Smith Claire
Published: February 2025

This section examines the interplay between Indigenous sciences and Western sciences, focusing on their philosophical contrasts and potential synergies. Indigenous science integrates place-based, spiritual, and holistic understandings, emphasizing interconnectedness, reciprocity, and a sentient view of nature. This section discusses Western science’s prioritization of reductionism, empiricism, and detached observation, often treating nature as an inert resource. It highlights examples such as Aboriginal ecological knowledge, Sumi Naga climate predictors, and sustainable water and food systems in India, illustrating Indigenous science’s contributions to addressing global challenges. Taken together, the chapters in this section advocate for blending these approaches to broaden the definition of science and to enrich our understandings of both humanity’s past and present.
Mountain Palynology
Authors: Röpke Astrid , Festi Daniela
Published: February 2025

This chapter condenses the findings of many researchers who have used palynology to investigate the historical and prehistorical vegetation and human impacts in the European Alps. The Alpine region’s distinctive altitudinal vegetation zones and abundant archaeological evidence make it an ideal location for examining long-term environmental and cultural dynamics. Through the analysis of pollen spectra from lakes, mires, and soils, the studies collectively trace human-environment interactions from the Mesolithic period to modern times. Early evidence from the Mesolithic indicates minimal but detectable human influence, mainly through controlled use of fire. During the Neolithic and Copper Age, human activities expanded to include agriculture and pastoralism, evidenced by forest clearings for cereal cultivation. The Bronze Age marks a period of intensified land use, with significant deforestation and the development of complex alpine farming systems. These developments are contextualized within climatic changes and socio-economic factors, including population growth and resource exploitation. The synthesis of these studies emphasizes the dynamic nature of mountain ecosystems and highlights the profound impact and adaptability of human on the Alpine landscape over thousands of years.
La Llorona’s Blackness in Latin American Horror Films La Llorona (Mexico, 1960) and La Llorona (Guatemala, 2019)
Authors: Leer Kristen
Published: February 2025

La Llorona’s story has been retold, re-adapted, and remonstrosized in films throughout the decades. Scholars have analyzed depictions of La Llorona through feminist, Chicano/a, cultural, folkloric, and sociological lenses. However, the evaluating of La Llorona’s racialization in Latin American horror films has not yet been holistically analyzed through an interdisciplinary lens. This chapter unveils the function, presence, and cultural meanings of Blackness in two film adaptations of La Llorona’s story: La Llorona (Mexico, 1960) and La Llorona (Guatemala, 2019). Specifically, the films’ utilization of colorism serves as a powerful lens for understanding deep-rooted cultural anxieties. Given Latin American racial formations, these films show that Blackness operates not only for Latin Americans of African descent but also those with darker skin tones, including Indigenous communities. Ultimately, this research contends that examining Blackness in Latin American horror films broadens conversations and understandings of Blackness, especially when it is positioned outside Western and U.S. frameworks.
Historicized Traumas
Authors: Lawrence Novotny , Means Coleman Robin R.
Published: February 2025

Nia Da Costa’s Candyman (2021) exemplifies the ways in which Black filmmakers and artists can use the horror genre to explore important questions about global Blackness, such as, What does it mean when trauma moves across Black lived experiences? and What does it mean for film and art to address trauma across the temporal plane? Using Candyman (2021) and enriched by an interview with Trinidadian-born artist and Northwestern University professor Sherwin Ovid, who created six paintings for Nia DaCosta’s film, this chapter illustrates the vital role that visual culture, specifically art, plays in memorializing and (de)constructing Black traumas. Particularly, his work on the film, and beyond, operates in conjunction with DaCosta’s iteration of the Candyman to illustrate the power of Black arts traditions in meditating on and preserving Black trauma born out of racism.
The Politics of Black Women’s Identity as Monstrous Fetishism in Early Hollywood Horror Cinema
Authors: Subero G. E.
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the ways in which early Hollywood cinema uses Blackness in horror as a trope to portray monstrosity and justify (post)colonial domination of people of African origin in the African-Caribbean diaspora. It argues that early Hollywood horror movies set in the Caribbean (usually on plantations) operate as cultural texts that seek to justify the (post)colonization of racial others while fetishizing Black culture as intrinsically evil and transgressive toward the heteropatriarchy. Black bodies are stereotyped in such films to demonstrate that racism does not reside outside the realm of the ordinary and that the colonial enterprise was necessary to ensure racial harmony among people whose cultural and religious practices were regarded as backward and, in most cases, lethal to those who fell prey to such primitive and monstrous customs. The chapter focuses on George Terwilliger’s Ouanga (1936) and The Devil’s Daughter (1939), and Roy William Neill’s Black Moon (1934), demonstrating how these films conflate white femininity and Black masculinity. In doing so, it illustrates the ambivalent representations of race, gender, and monstrosity in an attempt to reaffirm (post)colonial subjugation of the West over the “monstrous” other.
The Bolshevik Revolution and the Global South
Authors: Djagalov Rossen
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on the Global South on three different levels: (1) its immediate impact on national liberation movements, (2) its longer-term political and intellectual role on articulating anticolonial projects intertwined in different ways with Marxist thought, and (3) its cultural consequences, especially the popularization of both critical/proletarian/socialist realism and the avant-garde. In each case, it focuses on the dialectic between Soviet initiatives and their reception by activists in the colonies, arguing that the latter productively misinterpreted and repurposed the Revolution and the political, social, and cultural experiments that came out of it. Such radical reappropriation was perhaps inevitable: while Soviet anticolonialism was very real, it lacked the resources and knowledge to engage the whole of the postcolonial world. The networks connecting it with most parts of the Global South were simply too weak: not even in the high Stalinist period was it able to dictate its policies let alone aesthetic visions. Leftist anticolonial activists more than made up for that structural weakness with their imagination, taking inspiration from the Soviet experiment but also taking great liberties in applying it to their particular political and aesthetic conditions, liberties that came to account for the innovations of anticolonial Marxism, whether of a Maoist, Guevarist, Fanonist stripe, or the creativity of postcolonial literatures, especially in cases in which they were directly inspired by Soviet culture.
Promises and Limits of Empathy for Global Cooperation
Authors: Bayram A. Burcu
Published: February 2025

What exactly is empathy? Are there different kinds of it? Is it a viable tool for international cooperation and for ameliorating global ills? Drawing from both psychological and neuroscientific perspectives, this chapter defines empathy, explores its promises and limits for global cooperation, and charts future avenues of research that might be useful to international relations scholars with interests in such topics as humanitarianism, global development and justice, and inter-group cooperation. The chapter concludes by calling attention to the normative complexities involved in the study of empathy and encourages international relations scholars to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue with anthropological and sociological perspectives.
Emotions and Ontological Security
Authors: Rumelili Bahar , Togay Batur Ozan
Published: February 2025

This chapter analyzes how emotions have been incorporated into ontological security, theorizing to elucidate the experiences of ontological security and insecurity, to differentiate between their varied degrees, and to explain their varied effects. It focuses on the emotions of anxiety, fear, trust, faith, shame, pride, euphoria, and joy that are dominantly invoked in the literature. The chapter also discusses how the ontological security literature’s growing engagement with the psychoanalytical and existentialist traditions is contributing in turn to the theorizing of emotions in international relations. It highlights the role of affect in the constitution of subjectivity and facilitates the theorization of collective emotions. Overall, it is argued that the nexus between emotions and ontological security in international relations merits further exploration and more explicit theorization.
Securitization, Desecuritization, and Just Securitization
Authors: Floyd Rita
Published: February 2025

Unlike realism, liberalism, and mainstream constructivism, securitization theory is not associated with a well-known explanation of NATO’s continued existence and/or its double enlargement (of geographic area and remit/function). This chapter remedies this lacuna in the literature. It shows that the political construction of new threats after the end of the Cold War served to secure NATO’s existence into the future, but in parallel, that construction was the cause of military insecurity for outsiders (notably Russia). The chapter also articulates the idea of just and mandatory securitization. From this, certain practical policy recommendations follow—namely, that NATO may have a moral and legal obligation to securitize certain issues and so offer its protection as a matter of course to the NATO allies and their populations. These concepts provide a means to reconsider NATO’s Article 5 mutual defence clause. As worded, that commitment is anachronistic and should be revised for the twenty-first century.
Non-Traditional Security Threats
Authors: Shea Jamie
Published: February 2025

NATO has always had more than one challenge to deal with at any given time, even during the Cold War. Threats are rarely one-dimensional and the larger and more powerful the Alliance’s adversaries, the more likely they are to challenge the NATO allies’ collective interests in different geographic regions and in different domains. What is particularly testing for today’s NATO is the large and concurrent number of non-traditional threats it has to grapple with. NATO’s security agenda has embraced domestic resilience alongside the conventional defence of the allies against hostile foreign powers. This chapter considers four critical issues on the non-traditional security agenda: cyber defence, energy security, counterterrorism, and climate change. A number of questions then arise. Are these new threats ‘for real’ or simply a ‘branding exercise’ designed to give NATO continued relevance? Can NATO meet these non-traditional threats by relying on military instruments? What lessons can be drawn from NATO’s efforts so far to meet these challenges?
Global Order
Authors: Flockhart Trine
Published: February 2025

NATO has proved to be an agile and resilient organization that has been able to adapt and renew in response to the evolving global order. NATO’s resilience has been anchored in a dual-track identity—existing simultaneously as a ‘collective defence alliance’ and a ‘community of values’. That dual identity has allowed NATO to perform reflexive self-governance with a significant degree of flexibility. This chapter focuses on three historical phases in the evolution of global order (1949–1991, 1991–2008, and 2008–2022) and demonstrates that the relationship between the Alliance and the global order is co-constitutive, but always tempered by the prevalent role identity of NATO at any given time. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a new phase in the evolution of the global order looks set to bring NATO’s ‘collective defence’ identity to the fore.
Kosovo
Authors: Smith Martin A.
Published: February 2025

NATO’s Kosovo intervention—Operation Allied Force—from March to June 1999 and the follow-on Kosovo Force (KFOR) stabilization mission marked an important point in the operational evolution of the Alliance. Having already undertaken a major operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a NATO intervention in the Serbia–Kosovo dispute was virtually inevitable. NATO’s credibility was widely perceived to be on the line in the face of an apparent campaign of Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In launching a campaign to halt Serbia, the allies adopted a flexible approach to intra-alliance decision-making. They adapted and sometimes bypassed established structures and procedures, so that a small caucus made the big decisions. In its own terms, Operation Allied Force was a success. It paved the way for the KFOR mission to become NATO’s most enduring military operation.
Libya
Authors: Engelbrekt Kjell , Palmer Braxton
Published: February 2025

This chapter critically examines the origins, conduct, and aftermath of Operation Unified Protector (OUP), NATO’s 2011 mission in Libya. Few multilateral military interventions have ever been carried out as expeditiously and effectively, with NATO’s military coalition accomplishing in just seven months the operation’s objective of protecting civilians against Moammar Gaddafi’s regime. All this was done with an express mandate from the United Nations Security Council. However, inconsistencies in coalition members’ interpretations of intent and burden-sharing diminished the value of OUP in the long term. When it comes to the troubling aftermath of OUP, four failures of anticipation are examined. Two of these pertain to the lack of clear ownership of the post-conflict situation; the other two can be ascribed to insufficient attention being paid to the political context within which the intervention was designed and executed. Over a decade after the mission was launched, the negative domestic and regional repercussions continue to reverberate.
Maritime Operations
Authors: Smith-Windsor Brooke A.
Published: February 2025

NATO’s maritime operations and activities in the post-Cold War period have ranged from counter-piracy operations to freedom of navigation operations in response to renewed great-power competition. During the Cold War, NATO maritime operations were restricted to the geopolitical space defined by the North Atlantic Treaty. After 1990, the Alliance’s maritime interests and operations expanded. They now include the North Atlantic and the High North, the Baltic, Black and Mediterranean Seas, the Indian Ocean and Arabian Gulf, the Pacific Ocean, the South Atlantic, and the Caribbean Sea. Ken Booth’s trinity of naval roles—military, diplomatic, and policing/constabulary—is employed to understand the Alliance’s interest in naval power. This approach enriches our understanding of the rationale for the adoption of the 2011 Alliance Maritime Strategy, allied concern with Russian naval capabilities, and the accession of two major European naval powers, Sweden and Finland, to NATO.
Turkey
Authors: Oğuzlu Tarik
Published: February 2025

Turkey is a long-standing NATO ally. It joined the Alliance in 1952 and was crucial to balancing against the Soviet threat on NATO’s southern flank during the Cold War. Turkey has had a troubled relationship with NATO in the post-Cold War era. Two underlying factors explain this. First, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an interest-based approach became more important than an identity-based one in defining Turkey’s foreign policies. It is an open question whether or not Turkey and NATO still share common security perceptions and strategic orientations. Second, Turkey has an acute sense of its regional security problems—bordering Syria and Iraq, straddling the geographic space between the Balkans and the Middle East, and sitting in-between the Black and Mediterranean Seas. This geostrategic location has meant Turkey has developed a particular set of interests on issues of NATO concern. It has concurrently developed a greater sense of national security independence and autonomy. These two dynamics have often set Turkey apart from the majority of NATO members. Strains in relations between Turkey and its fellow NATO allies have been evident for decades but have been especially notable under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Georgia and Ukraine
Authors: German Tracey
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines NATO’s partnership with two important post-Soviet states, Georgia and Ukraine. Practical cooperation developed with both as NATO rolled out its partnership initiatives from the 1990s onwards. The two states have also actively participated in NATO-led operations. Both became NATO Enhanced Opportunity Partners in 2020 in recognition of their efforts. But Russia has put a brake on the aspirations of both countries to join the Alliance. Russia fought a short war with Georgia in 2008 and it has forcibly annexed Crimea and occupied parts of Eastern and Southern Ukraine since 2014. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO collectively and most allies individually have provided extensive support to Ukraine’s efforts at fighting Russian forces. Ukrainian membership of the Alliance, however, remains out of sight.
Liberalisms
Authors: Harnisch Sebastian , Böller Florian
Published: February 2025

How can a liberal perspective on military alliances and defence cooperation be applied to the case of NATO’s establishment, institutionalization, persistence, and evolution? To answer these questions, this chapter first establishes a coherent liberal argument drawing on three variants of liberalism: republican, commercial, and ideational. It then demonstrates with short case vignettes how each of these three strands helps one understand the formation and institutionalization of NATO, the politics of intra-alliance conflict management, and how divergent ideational preferences have impacted alliance cohesion and thus the development of NATO. In conclusion, the chapter considers how liberal approaches are relevant to ‘new’ security and political challenges, such as the rise of populism, cybersecurity, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Black Sea Area
Authors: Biagi Paolo
Published: February 2025

This chapter regards the Early Holocene archaeology of the Black Sea region and its adjacent areas, from the Bosphorus, in the west, to the Caucasus, in the east. From an archaeological and environmental point of view, the territory is very diverse. Some of the areas are reasonably well known, such as the steppe zone of Ukraine and the Crimean mountains, while the data currently available from others, among which are Anatolia and the westernmost Black Sea region, are very poor. This is due to different reasons, including the quality and intensity of the research, the characteristics of the landscape, and the political events that took place during the last decades. From a chrono-cultural point of view, the most interesting region is the Crimean Peninsula, where important caves and rock shelters which were settled during the whole Early Holocene have been discovered and radiocarbon dated. These sites yielded long sequences with knapped stone artefacts of microlithic dimension among which are different types of geometric tools which are represented by variable percentages of lunates, triangles, and trapezoidal arrowheads.
Alpine Region (Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, and Northern Italy)
Authors: Fontana Federica
Published: February 2025

The Mesolithic record of the Alpine region shows an uneven distribution both due to research biases and possible differences in human occupation. Sites are spread from plains and valley-bottoms to highlands, reaching altitudes up to 2,600 m in the Alps, 1,100 m in the Jura, and 1,800 m in the Apennines. Diverse cultural facies have been identified: Beuronian on the northern side, Sauveterrian/Castelnovian on the southern one, and Late Epigravettian of Danubian influence to the southeast. Variability of lithic raw materials shows adaptability to local resources, but also reflects mobility patterns and possible social networks. Ornamental beads on red deer atrophic canines and Columbella rustica shells, along with harpoons on red deer antler (the latter since the late Boreal), represent common traits across the region. Burial rituals, although poorly represented, seem to indicate a higher degree of variability.
The Western Mediterranean Coast and Islands (Spain, Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, France, Italy, Sicily, and North Africa)
Authors: Perrin Thomas
Published: February 2025

The period between the ninth and sixth millennia cal bc is that of the very last hunter-gatherer societies of the western Mediterranean. With shifting shorelines, the development of forest, and abrupt climate changes, these groups had to continually adapt to a changing environment. Long-distance exchanges and synchronous, yet geographically distant, technical and cultural developments show just how dynamic these societies were. The colonization of the islands, particularly Corsica and Sardinia, which had been uninhabited until then, indirectly testifies to the mastery of deep-sea navigation. Cultural developments are mainly based on the evolution of lithic industries, which constitutes the main part of their remains. This Mediterranean Mesolithic can be divided into two main phases, the passage from one to the other perhaps being due to a movement of populations along the coast. The spread of the Neolithic from east to west, however, put an end to this traditional world of hunter-gatherers.
Rivers
Authors: Živaljević Ivana
Published: February 2025

With the global glacier retreat at the onset of the Holocene, unconstrained drainage systems gradually became colonized by a myriad of species, including humans who made their lives along flowing water. While Mesolithic research has been firmly embedded in the study of the environment, it was primarily conceptualized as a passive backdrop to human activity. In more recent times, the paradigm shift known as the Ontological Turn afforded new ways of thinking about actors and material worlds whose properties do not simply exist but emerge through mutually constitutive relationships. With their constant flow and ever-changing form, shaped by human agency and shaping human experience of the world, the rivers quite literally embody the vibrant nature of entanglement. In this chapter, rivers flowing through Mesolithic worlds are considered as socialized landscapes, mediums which afforded specific experiences and interspecies encounters, and as dynamic assemblages of beings and abiotic actors.
The Pioneer Experience
Authors: Fuglestvedt Ingrid
Published: February 2025

This chapter is an attempt to outline the current research status of the pioneer time in Norway (9,500–8,000 cal bc), with an emphasis on the settlement phases of the site complex at Pauler in the Oslofjord region. The nine sites of this complex are used as illustrative examples as they form the outset for descriptions of the wider context. Pauler is representative of the stability in settlement pattern, economy, and technology during the Early Mesolithic 2 and Early Mesolithic 3 sub-phases. This stability stands in contrast to a highly changing environment. Thus, the most intriguing feature of the Early Mesolithic lifeway is its seemingly unchanged character over several centuries. Against the background of this setting, I briefly discuss what could be the contents of ‘pioneer experiences’.
Wetland Landscapes
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: February 2025

This chapter explores the economic and cultural significance of wetlands to the hunter-gatherer communities of Mesolithic Europe. It draws together the archaeological evidence for the economic activities that people undertook in these landscapes, the different forms of settlement and architecture, and the practices of ritual deposition that took place. In doing so, this chapter argues that wetlands were not just economically important environments, but were places that shaped very particular communities during the Mesolithic. Inhabiting wetlands required particular forms of technology, technical skill and knowledge that would have been learnt from childhood, honed through subsequent experience, and passed on to subsequent generations. These related not only to the variety of economic activities that people undertook, but also the ability to navigate the complex geographies of wetlands, and the ontological associations that deemed certain places appropriate for acts of deposition. These forms of skill and knowledge would have been particular to the human communities who inhabited wetlands, forming an integral part of their identity, and making them distinct from groups inhabiting other environments.
Inland/Forest
Authors: Verpoorte Alexander , Scherjon Fulco
Published: February 2025

Forests, defined as vegetation consisting of trees and woody plants, covered large parts of Europe during the Mesolithic. The inland forests of Europe differed regionally in species composition, cover type, openness, and temporal change. We suggest that they consisted of a patchwork of tree and plant resource types. This chapter shows how Mesolithic hunter-gatherers exploited, managed, manipulated, and transformed the forests that they called their home. It argues that the forest was an environment subject to a variety of human niche construction practices including burning. Human-driven fires during the Mesolithic were generally small and mostly with local-scale effects of limited temporal extent. However, the increased frequency of Late Mesolithic fire use may have led to cumulative effects at a regional or even subcontinental scale, a scale previously only attributed to more recent populations.
Violence
Authors: Orschiedt Jörg
Published: February 2025

The Mesolithic is often described as a period when evidence of violence within or between groups is rising. The question whether violence played an important role in Mesolithic life is still difficult to answer. Although observed cases seem to be higher in numbers in comparison to the Palaeolithic, it is more plausible to suggest that the good state of preservation and the much larger number of burials is the reason why the Mesolithic is often described as a violent period. Despite isolated cases were lethal and non-lethal violence is documented, the Late Mesolithic site Ofnet shows the potential for conflicts between groups or even massacres was present. Due to intensified interest and research in the topic of violent behaviour among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, it seems plausible to predict that more cases will be diagnosed in the future.
Shelter and Dwellings
Authors: Grøn Ole
Published: February 2025

The dwellings are key points in hunter-gatherers’ physical landscapes as well as in their ideological and spiritual worlds. Therefore, it is important to better understand the central interface between these worlds that their dwellings constitute. Other cultural features such as sacred places, graves, etc. also function as such interfaces, but the dwellings are those that most directly interface practical daily life with the other worlds. This chapter sums up our present knowledge of Mesolithic dwellings in Europe with regards to superstructure, inner preserved features, indications of inner spatial organization, as well as the social and spatial organization of the households they contained. It represents only a vague first step in the direction of the well-founded understanding of the Mesolithic dwellings, which hopefully can be obtained through further study.
Pottery Production among European Foragers
Authors: Cubas Miriam , Robson Harry K.
Published: February 2025

Pottery played a crucial role in the development of prehistoric societies entailing different human–environmental interactions, new technological knowledge, and the development of a diversity of culinary practices. Their apparition in the archaeological record has contributed to ongoing debates regarding their role in the Neolithization process and the cultural attribution of these findings. Archaeological and biomolecular data suggest that the introduction of ceramics was a complex phenomenon linked to different subsistence practices throughout Europe. In this contribution, we provide an overview of the earliest evidence of pottery among forager groups throughout Europe showing the main technological characteristics and uses linked to different subsistence practices. Current archaeological evidence suggests different trajectories in the adoption processes of this technology in the north, where pottery is well recorded in forager contexts, and the south of Europe, linked to the spread of farming communities. However, archaeological evidence shows several scenarios for its adoption and uses revealing the importance of regional studies.
Human Remains in ‘Non-Burial’ Contexts
Authors: Gray-Jones Amy
Published: February 2025

This chapter reviews human remains from a variety of non-burial contexts (defined principally as those remains that were not inhumed as complete bodies) and explores the contribution that this material can make to our understanding of funerary practice and belief in the European Mesolithic. As well as within burials, human skeletal material has been recorded from occupation deposits, middens, caves, stream channels, and bodies of water, varying from isolated finds of single skeletal elements to the disarticulated remains of partial bodies, assemblages of specific elements (notably skulls), and the commingled remains of multiple individuals. There is also growing evidence for the use of human bone as a material for the manufacture of bone points and pendants. Studies that reconstruct the taphonomic histories of these disarticulated human remains increasingly reveal that this material results from a range of deliberate interactions with the dead body, and that, for some Mesolithic communities, this represented the normative form of mortuary practice. What is more, this chapter argues that these interactions reflect a broader tradition of manipulating bodies that also occurs in more obvious funerary contexts, such as cemeteries, and that this is an important feature of the mortuary practices of Mesolithic Europe more generally.
The Handling of the Dead Body
Authors: Stutz Liv Nilsson
Published: February 2025

The mortuary record of the Mesolithic of Europe presents a significant variability in the treatment of the body. While the most well-known burials are inhumations, often from large formal disposal areas, or cemeteries, many other ways of treating the dead body occurred, including cremation, manipulation, exposure to the elements, submersion in water, and even mummification. This chapter presents this range of treatment in these hunter-gatherer communities with an approach that centres archaeological method and theory with a focus on the ritualized handling of the dead body as a fundamental aspect of the mortuary ritual as a rite of passage. The chapter proposes that, by analysing the ways in which the dead body was treated, we can glean insight into the hunter-gatherer cosmology in which they were an integral part, and the place that death and the dead held within it. This is accomplished by discussing aspects such as the maintenance and dissolution of the individual human body, the framing of different kinds of bodies (human and animal), the significance of place for the dead and the living, and by analysing transformation and violence against the cadaver.
Introduction
Authors: Waddell Nathan
Published: February 2025

This chapter sets up the volume and establishes the broad parameters in Orwell studies within which an Orwell Handbook can be situated. Touching repeatedly on questions to do with myth and legend, over-valuation, and consecration, the chapter thinks through what Orwell studies means now and what Orwell’s life and work can be taken to mean within its terms.
Orwell and Charles Dickens
Authors: Hollington Michael
Published: February 2025

This chapter, a consideration of Dickens’s literary importance to Orwell, falls into four parts. The first considers some biographical evidence of Orwell’s unwavering devotion to Dickens from the beginning to the end of his life. The second scrutinizes the unmistakable stylistic debt Orwell’s novels owe to Dickens’s. The third assesses Orwell’s major 1940 essay on Dickens and its impact on Dickens criticism. The fourth takes the phrase ‘common decency’ as the epitome of what Orwell valued in his favourite author. The chapter begins with minor biographical amplification of Peter Davison’s account of the ubiquity of Dickens in Orwell, looking at some bits of collateral evidence that go back to before the writing career, and forward to after it.
Orwell, Consumption, and Destitution
Authors: Ingle Stephen
Published: February 2025

Poverty and hunger appear like a leitmotiv in Orwell’s fiction, as subjects for study in their own right but also as providing a context for a system of values that he came to understand as democratic socialism, what he also called ‘common decency’. On his return to Europe after serving in the Indian Imperial Police, Orwell embarked on a mission to experience poverty at first hand, in Paris, London, and the north of England. His sympathy for the poor turned into respect for their values. By contrast he disdained the ruling classes who had lost their moral compass—their soul. Orwell likened hedonistic modern man to a wasp on a plate that had been cut in half but unknowingly continued to gorge on jam. Only the ‘common decency’ of ordinary people, embedded in equality, had the resilience to stand against the dreaded threat of totalitarianism.
Orwell and the Politics of Culture
Authors: Taunton Matthew
Published: February 2025

This chapter seeks to position George Orwell’s essays on popular culture as important precursors of the British cultural studies tradition that was institutionalized from the 1950s onwards, under the influence of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall. All three of these central figures in the cultural studies tradition had ambivalent attitudes to Orwell’s work, and the chapter describes those attitudes, seeking to show that political disagreements (stemming largely from Orwell’s canonization as a key anti-communist figure during the Cold War period) did not detract from a genuine admiration for Orwell’s openness to, and critical analyses of, popular culture. Focusing on essays such as ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1940), ‘The Proletarian Writer’ (1940), ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ (1941), and ‘Rudyard Kipling’ (1941), the chapter shows that Orwell produced innovative studies of popular culture while rejecting embattled defences of ‘high’ culture by the likes of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. Against the backdrop of these defensive and conservative arguments, which tied culture to the fate of social elites, Orwell’s essays proposed a genuinely fresh account of the politics of culture, with an alternative social basis.
Orwell the Humorist
Authors: Seaber Luke
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines how Orwell can be considered a humorist, examining not how he analyses humour (which has been explored before) but rather how he himself deploys humour. It begins by looking at how Orwell uses outrageous statements to generate humour in non-fiction before moving to an in-depth case study of the unexpected humour of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), making the argument that the novel is at heart a bitter joke about memory. It will explore how, in his final novel, Orwell used the collective nature of shared jokes and in-jokes to make points about how totalitarianism might be resisted.
Orwell the Essayist
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines George Orwell’s essays, a body of work many critics see as his greatest literary achievement. While recognized as one of the English language’s finest essayists, Orwell’s reputation is largely posthumous, achieved mostly as the result of collections published after his death. This chapter briefly explores the essay as a long-established literary form, noting the centrality of any individual writer’s personal ‘voice’ to the variety and vitality of essays over the centuries. In Orwell’s case, it foregrounds the importance of literary and political periodicals to the initial publication of his views on topics as diverse as shooting an elephant, boys’ magazines, atom bombs, toads, and Charles Dickens. The chapter argues that Orwell’s essays, in the diversity of their subject matter, and in the clarity, vivacity, and power of their expression, graphically illustrate his enduring and compelling qualities as a writer and as a cultural and political critic.
Conceptualizing Authoritarianism
Authors: Ermakoff Ivan
Published: February 2025

Authoritarianism evokes phenomenal realities of different kinds: rules, behaviors, institutional settings, representations, dispositions, and attitudes. Given this lack of fixed meaning, the present chapter addresses conceptual issues by considering designs, tools, and argumentative frameworks centered on authoritarian regimes. This practical lens highlights five modes of conceptualization defined as ways of articulating a type of understanding with an approach and a focus. Cast in ethical terms, the a priori mode relates autocracy to the deprivation of collective choice and capacity. Scale-based approaches measure the degree to which features deemed definitional of democracy are absent or depleted. A typological approach sorts out authoritarian polities by categorizing ways of capturing and managing state power. When we shift to dimensional thinking, the focus is on regime attributes mapping a space of variation. A generic understanding conceptualizes the genus of authoritarian power as unconditional, temporally unbounded and unaccountable. Delineating these five modes of conceptualization brings into relief contrasts, challenges, and complementarities.
L’évaluation et les soins des enfants chez qui on présume un trouble d’apprentissage en pratique communautaire
Authors: Cohen-Silver Justine , van den Heuvel Meta , Freeman Sloane , Ogilvie Jacqueline , Chobotuk Tara
Published: February 2025

Les difficultés d’apprentissage sont courantes chez les enfants d’âge scolaire, puisque de 5 % à 10 % répondent aux critères de trouble spécifique des apprentissages (qu’on appelait auparavant simplement « trouble d’apprentissage »). En pratique communautaire, elles peuvent se manifester par des problèmes de comportement, l’évitement scolaire ou des symptômes de problème de santé mentale. Les problèmes connexes peuvent inclure un trouble de santé mentale, une affection génétique, métabolique ou neurologique ou un retard de développement. Le présent point de pratique fournit des conseils aux professionnels de la santé auprès des enfants eu égard aux manifestations et aux diagnostics de trouble spécifique des apprentissages, y compris de l’information sur les évaluations psychoéducatives, le bilan médical des enfants qui ont des difficultés d’apprentissage, les possibles problèmes comorbides ainsi que les points à améliorer et les prises de position en appui aux familles et aux enfants qui présentent une série de problèmes d’apprentissage.
Spherulites as Recorders of Multi-Batch Felsic Magma Transport and Time Scales: A Case Study from Southeast of China
Authors: Zhu Yulin , Chen Suyu , Bai Changhua
Published: February 2025

Granite, formed by the consolidation of felsic magma, is widely exposed on the surface of the Earth’s continents. However, the physical processes behind the transport of felsic magma from the deep crust to the surface remain poorly understood. Recently, the fracture-dike transfer model has gained widespread acceptance as a comprehensive theory explaining the ascent, transport, and emplacement of felsic magma in the crustal magma plumbing. Observing the magma migration process has been challenging due to the hidden geological evidence. Currently, no geological feature accurately tracks the transport path, composition evolution, and time scale of magma during its ascent. In this paper, we report the discovery of numerous spherulites that developed in two spherulitic rhyolite porphyry dikes. Based on the petrographic and geochemical characteristics of spherulites, we established that the ascent and emplacement processes of the magma were caused by continuous supply from deep magma sources and repeated episodes of ascent. Finally, magma source depletion halted its ascent and stabilization of its location at a depth of about 3 km below the ancient surface. According to the growth rate of the spherulites when the magma resided in the magma chamber, we quantitatively calculated that the magma resided in the three magma chambers for a total residence time of about 90 days. These findings provide valuable insights into the accumulation, ascent, and emplacement of multiple batches of magma into large rock bodies. These insights advance the understanding of the felsic magma plumbing system and provide constrained quantitative data on the dynamics of magma migration in the subsurface magma plumbing systems of volcanoes. Natural spherulites usually occur in rhyolite and obsidian around volcanic institutions. The magma migration path recorded by spherulites in this case study and the established spherulite geochronological method should have general applicability to a larger range of volcanic rock areas with similar geological backgrounds.
S-RNase Evolution in Self-Incompatibility: Phylogenomic Insights into Synteny with Class I T2 RNase Genes
Authors: Liu Yunxiao , Zhang Yangxin , Han Songxue , Guo Bocheng , Liang Jiakai , Yu Ze , Yang Fan , Sun Yaqiang , Xue Jiayu , Lin Zongcheng , Schranz M Eric , Guan Changfei , Ma Fengwang , Zhao Tao
Published: February 2025

S-RNases are essential in the gametophytic self-incompatibility (GSI) system of many flowering plants, where they act as stylar-S determinants. Despite their prominence, the syntenic genomic origin and evolutionary trajectory of S-RNase genes in eudicots have remained largely unclear. Here, we performed large-scale phylogenetic and microsynteny network analyses of T2 RNase genes across 130 angiosperm genomes, encompassing 35 orders and 56 families. S-like RNase genes in Cucurbitaceae species phylogenetically grouped with functionally characterized S-RNases in various species. Additionally, Cucurbitaceae S-like RNase genes showed conserved synteny with Class I T2 RNase genes. From this, we inferred that the well-characterized S-RNase genes (belonging to Class III-A genes) and Class I T2 RNase genes (located on duplicated genomic blocks) likely derived from the gamma triplication event shared by core eudicots. Additionally, we identified frequent lineage-specific gene transpositions of S-RNases and S-like RNases across diverse angiosperm lineages, including Rosaceae, Solanaceae, and Rutaceae families, accompanied by a significant increase in transposable element (TE) activity near these genes. Our findings delineate the genomic origin and evolutionary path of eudicot S-RNase genes, enhancing our understanding of the evolution of the S-RNase-based GSI system.
The transcription factors AdNAC3 and AdMYB19 regulate kiwifruit ripening through brassinosteroid and ethylene signaling networks
Authors: Yang Yaming , Chen Ming , Zhu Qinggang , Lv Yanrong , Liu Cuihua , Wei Yun , Cha Guili , Shi Xiaoyan , Ren Xiaolin , Ding Yuduan
Published: February 2025

The pivotal role of ethylene (ETH) in fruit ripening has been extensively studied; however, the function of brassinosteroids (BRs) in regulating fruit ripening remains poorly understood. Specifically, the mechanism by which BRs interact with ETH to affect kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa) ripening is unclear. Our research showed that two genes encoding transcription factors, AdNAC3 and AdMYB19, and the fruit softening gene AdEXP3 (encoding a cell wall expansion protein, expansin 3) were upregulated by ETH and downregulated by BRs. Furthermore, AdNAC3 and AdMYB19 positively regulated the activity of the AdEXP3 promoter, and AdNAC3 positively regulated the promoter activity of AdMYB19. The physical interaction between AdNAC3 and the B-box-type zinc finger protein AdBBX32 affected fruit ripening. Transient overexpression and silencing experiments revealed that ETH upregulated and BRs downregulated the expression of AdNAC3 and AdMYB19, thereby regulating the expression level of AdEXP3 and participating in pectin degradation. Stable transformation of AdNAC3 in tomato fruits accelerated fruit color change and promoted fruit ripening. These results indicate that AdNAC3 and AdMYB19 are involved in the hormone interaction between BRs and ETH in regulating kiwifruit ripening, providing insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying the crosstalk between BRs and ETH.