bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Male and Female Genital Modifications in Anthropological Perspective
Authors: Gruenbaum Ellen , Blanton IV Thomas R. , Spieser Cathie
Published: February 2025

The chapter discusses the origins, dissemination, and contemporary global distribution of cultural, heritage-based genital modification practices of females and males. These are performed as rites of passage; religious obligations; safeguards to virginity, chastity, and marriageability of girls; or group and gender identity. Male genital modification practices are unevenly distributed globally and originated multiple times in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. Detailed accounts of the history of male circumcision in ancient Egypt and the Levant are provided as examples of the variations in practices and multiple origins, and male circumcision among Muslims in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere is covered. Female genital modifications were also known in antiquity and similarly originated multiple times in Africa, Asia, and possibly elsewhere, probably along with or following the establishment of male modifications. Female genital cutting is practiced by followers of several religions, and some Muslims believe it to be required or at least desirable in their faith. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the spread of male circumcision was further accelerated by medical promotion, in the belief that it contributed to disease prevention and morality. The World Health Organization’s current support for male infant circumcisions while at the same time promoting abolition of female genital cutting (with some exceptions) is discussed. The contentious ethical issue of whether it violates human rights to surgically alter the genitalia of infants or children, who are unable to provide informed consent, is also discussed.
Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Body Modification
Authors: Manni Franz , d’Errico Francesco
Published: February 2025

Body modifications, including tattooing, body piercing, and cosmetic surgery, are pervasive in the so-called WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) societies, reflecting cultural, social, and personal motivations. The book explores the historical and evolutionary aspects of these practices, emphasizing their role in shaping identity and social structures. In this introduction, the editors of the handbook provide an analysis of the individual chapters, offering readers insight into all aspects of body modification across different cultures and time periods. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective based on available archeological and anthropological evidence, the handbook seeks to understand the global and diachronic dimension of body modification.
Section VI: Cultural Survival and Sustainable Futures
Authors: Smith Claire , May Sally
Published: February 2025

This chapter introduces Section VI of this handbook. This section examines the concept of cultural survival, emphasizing the preservation of Indigenous cultural practices and identity amidst external pressures such as colonization, globalization, and environmental challenges. It highlights how cultural survival intersects with sustainable futures, exploring themes of autonomy, empowerment, and economic development through Indigenous-led initiatives and archaeological projects. Case studies include the Naga burial sites in India, the Kalinago heritage in Dominica, and the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which demonstrate how community-driven efforts foster cultural continuity while addressing global challenges. It analyzes heritage tourism projects in Mexico and Guatemala for perpetuating neocolonial agendas. It also discusses the urgency of safeguarding cultural heritage in Kiribati against rising seas. Finally, this section underscores the ongoing need for decolonization, representation, and collaboration in supporting Indigenous resilience and sustainable development.
Salt Exploitation in the Carpathian Area
Authors: Kavruk Valerii , Harding Anthony
Published: February 2025

The Carpathian area is rich in salt sources, including north of the mountains in Poland and Ukraine; in the foothills in Muntenia, Moldavia, and Bukovina; and in many parts of Transylvania, including the Maramureş. The best-known sources are those in Little Poland, at Wieliczka and Bochnia, where excavation has produced pottery believed to be connected with the boiling of brine (briquetage). The most important archaeological evidence, however, comes from Transylvania and Moldavia, where a series of sites have produced wattle fences and other constructions on or near salt wells. This chapter describes the nature of these sites and concentrates especially on a number of places where a unique technology was utilized involving large wooden troughs, perforated in the base, the perforations filled with pegs that were themselves pierced. These pegs could be manipulated to control the flow of water onto rock salt below. Experimental work has shown that this technology was highly efficient, with significant quantities of salt able to be produced with relatively little effort. The quantities involved suggest that such sites must have served to produce salt intended for export to saltless areas in the surrounding territories, rather than simply supplying local domestic needs.
Biocultural Heritage and Rewilding Mountainous Landscapes
Authors: Bartolini Nadia
Published: February 2025

This chapter explores the notion of biocultural heritage as expressed in recent policy documents and academic literature, and compares it with what occurs in the field. The analysis is located in the mountainous rewilding landscape of the Côa Valley in northeastern Portugal. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter recounts the ways that human-environment relations stretch back to deep time. In the geographic specificity of a mountainous landscape, the rewilding initiative shines a light on how agricultural practices, rural identities, and rock art are bound together, yet co-exist in tension. Continuous engagement between rewilding managers and local communities is required to work towards a shared vision for biocultural heritage futures.
Orality and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte
Authors: Henke Robert
Published: February 2025

The commedia dell’arte in its Italian heyday (1560–1630) fused the forms, practices, and rhythms of oral performance culture with the literary habits of mind developed in the new, scripted, humanist theater that emerged from the late fifteenth century. Organized companies depended on the often anarchic energies encapsulated in the piazza performer, but in the face of ecclesiastical and municipal attacks increasingly justified their art according to literary criteria. The new actress was especially showcased as a figure of high culture. Still, a large body of cheap print in this period attests to the creative symbiosis of popular literature, piazza performance, and organized company production.
Making the Italians
Authors: Romani Gabriella
Published: February 2025

The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of several social questions, such as the emancipation of women, the emancipation of Jews, serfdom, slavery, and so forth, which sought longed-for solutions and entailed the creation of a whole “new man and woman.” Using as a case study two literary works by Ippolito Nievo (1831–61), Emanuele (1852) and Confessioni d’un Italiano (1867), this chapter investigates the way in which Risorgimento literature portrayed two emancipatory movements—Jewish and women’s emancipation—and reflected national and international debates on modernizing and democratizing society. With these two texts, Nievo expresses his utopic vision of Italy, as a pluralistic and egalitarian nation, and his artistic and ideological responses to issues, such as gender roles and multiculturalism, that during the Risorgimento and beyond deeply affected the discourse on “making” Italians.
The Dangerous Belpaese: Literature and Ecology in Modern Italy
Authors: Malvestio Marco
Published: February 2025

This chapter discusses the intertwining between literature and ecology in Italian modernity. After providing an overview of recent developments in the environmental humanities applied to Italian studies, the chapter takes into account the peculiar relationship between Italian culture and the often antagonistic landscape of the country, a relationship resulting in a persistently ecophobic attitude toward the environment. The chapter then moves to discussing Italian ecophobia in relation to apocalyptic imagery, most notably in Giacomo Leopardi’s La ginestra (The Wild Broom), which is discussed for its representation of the effects of a volcanic eruption, and in a variety of post-apocalyptic novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Finally, the chapter considers the ambivalent relationship of Italians with the landscape as something that has, and yet refuses, to be tamed, by discussing two short stories: “Malaria” by Giovanni Verga and “Eppure battono alla porta” (“Yet They Knock”) by Dino Buzzati. In the latter, a ghost story, the element of water is especially relevant, in an uncanny rendition of what Piero Bevilacqua has called the Italian “war on water.”
Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Resistance
Authors: Bonsaver Guido
Published: February 2025

In order to explore the complex interaction between literature and politics generated by Italy’s Fascist dictatorship, this chapter is divided into four complementary sections. The first one looks at the literature that genuinely welcomed Mussolini’s seizure of power. The second section, borrowing Primo Levi’s notion of “gray zone,” looks at works by a number of authors who thrived during the Fascist years but not necessarily because of any formal allegiance with the regime. The third section dwells on a selection of authors whose opposition to the regime did inform their literary work, regardless of whether they were militant anti-Fascists in a political manner. The fourth and final one discusses the critical discourse in the postwar years, in Italy and abroad. It also unpacks a controversial interpretation that became commonplace in early postwar years: that the popularity of—and many translations from—American literature somehow indicated undercover opposition to the regime. These final considerations take us into the twenty-first century in an attempt to gauge the fictional presence of the Fascist years in contemporary Italian literature.
The Inauguration of Black Horror
Authors: Quick Tony
Published: February 2025

For Black actors in the twentieth century, negotiating parts often involved infusing their roles with nuances absent in screenplays. Black performers had to use their limited agency to advocate for their preferred depictions of Blackness while maintaining the goodwill of the industry’s power brokers. Duane Jones, the star of George A. Romero’s horror classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), negotiated similar tensions in his portrayal of Ben, a truck driver who becomes trapped in a farmhouse alongside white locals. Dead is recognized as the first horror film to feature a Black lead. Jones managed a series of successes in guiding his on-screen portrayal but also lost some creative battles. This chapter examines Jones’s efforts to shape the representation of Black men in the horror genre. It also connects these efforts to prior Black actors’ cautious attempts to push the constraints of their roles.
Visible Blackness in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Horror Cinema
Authors: Harris Mark H.
Published: February 2025

Like the United States, Brazil has had a long and tumultuous history with race, from slavery to sanctioned prejudicial policies to informal discrimination. While the many designations within Brazil’s multi-tiered racial categorization system have been disputed by its citizenry, what is indisputable is that the inequity among the races consistently finds white Brazilians at the top and Black Brazilians at the bottom. This disparity has found its way into the nation’s horror cinema. A selection of Brazilian horror movies—O Anjo da Noite (The Angel of the Night) (1974), Los Inocentes (The Innocents) (2015), O Diabo Mora Aqui (The Devil Lives Here) (2016), As Boas Maneiras (Good Manners) (2018), and O Nó do Diabo (The Devil’s Knot) (2018)—lays bare the plight of Black Brazilians’ struggle for social and economic equality, their increasing prominence in the country’s horror films reflective of the rise of twenty-first-century Afrocentrism and movements against systemic racism. Also explored is the work of filmmaker and “Coffin Joe” creator José Mojica Marins, the most renowned figure in Brazilian horror cinema, whose less racially pointed fare serves as a comparison to modern genre films.
Memory Work and Rhetorical Activism
Authors: VanderHaagen Sara C.
Published: February 2025

African American women have a long tradition of using both the spoken and the written word to preserve, represent, and promote Black public memories. Two main paths of public memory work by African American women can be identified: first, community memory work focused on providing more representative and Black-centered histories for Black communities; and, second, critical memory work oriented toward correcting whitewashed historical accounts in mainstream White US culture. Historically, because Black women have been largely excluded from White male–dominated public discourse in the United States, they have worked at the margins of what might be considered public. They have therefore most often crafted public memories from places vital to Black American communities but not as visible to White publics—places such as schools, libraries, and Black churches. This essay explores how African American women from varied social and professional positions—from lecturer Maria W. Stewart to editor Hallie Quinn Brown to librarian Augusta Baker to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones—have employed pen and podium to advocate for ethical and just visions of the past.
Looking Beyond Capitalism When Analyzing India-Africa Flows
Authors: Nair Manjusha
Published: February 2025

Critics have interpreted the rising investments of India and China in the African continent through the lens of a neocolonial scramble for Africa. If one looks at Asian investments and flows from Africa in extraction and dumping of manufactured goods, and use of even cheaper labor than in Asia, these criticisms seem very valid. It will appear that Asia and Africa have been inserted into global circuits of capitalism. Yet, this chapter argues that instead of giving capitalism as the definite and only narrative that drives this interaction, one should see how it is tempered and even ebbed by other relationships and legacies. The chapter, in particular, points to the legacies of the connections forged through the oceanic networks, and the political imaginations built around the perception of the temporal co-evalness of India and Africa. The chapter draws on the author’s research on recent engagements of Ethiopia and India, which can only be understood through the enduring historical legacies and ideas of co-evalness.
Feminism, Embodiment, and the Politics of Emotions
Authors: Åhäll Linda
Published: February 2025

This chapter outlines several layers of the relationship between feminism and the politics of emotions. It starts by discussing “the emotional politics of feminism.” From the feminist epistemological standpoint of “being as a mode of knowing,” it explains that feminists know how gender works because the emotional politics of gender is personally felt. In short, there is no feminism without emotions; feminism is an affective practice. The second part specifically focuses on feminist international relations (IR) and the politics of emotions. By tracing affective manifestations in early feminist IR publications that engaged with the positivist mainstream of IR, the chapter demonstrates how doing feminist work in/as IR clearly was (and still is) an emotional endeavor. Finally, the chapter discusses feminist IR scholarship that has engaged with and centered emotions in research. Overall, the chapter demonstrates that the politics of emotions is, in some shape or form, anywhere and everywhere feminism is.
The International Staff
Authors: Mayer Sebastian
Published: February 2025

The International Staff (IS), the civilian bureaucracy constituting one part of NATO Headquarters in Brussels, is an understudied and poorly understood aspect of the Alliance. The IS essentially supports the national delegations and facilitates NATO’s decision-making and implementation. This chapter outlines the establishment and evolution of the IS up until 1989 and depicts how it was transformed after the Cold War. The purpose, functions, and influence of the IS are also considered. The post-Cold War IS has been delegated further responsibilities in the initiation and facilitation of joint agreements. This has had visible effects upon NATO policy, and reflects a rising degree of bureaucratic agency. As a consequence, NATO has moved up (if only gradually) the organizational scale from collective actor, in which the allies act purely upon their (sometimes converging) national interests, toward autonomous actor, characterized by more hierarchical modes of decision-making.
Cybrid Warfare
Authors: Lindley-French Julian
Published: February 2025

Cybrid warfare is the first real example of total twenty-first century warfare in which the spectrum of coercion and aggression is so great and so complex that it represents a ‘mosaic’ of cyber, hybrid, and hyper warfare in which there is little room for politics in any conventional sense. That mosaic shows the need for new thinking about deterrence and defence because ‘defeat’ would not simply be the destruction of one’s forces or even the physical occupation of one’s territory, but rather the seizure of all the digital and information domains and spaces essential to any state and society in the twenty-first century. This chapter considers the growing importance of cyber, space, and hybrid warfare and the use of emerging and disruptive technologies. Its focus is the impact such warfare might have on NATO’s ability to ensure deterrence and, if need be, conduct defence. As such, the chapter is about the interaction of strategy, policy, technology, capability, and, critically, affordability, and what the Alliance is doing to protect and defend the citizens of its nations in this context.
Counterterrorism and Projecting Stability
Authors: Tardy Thierry
Published: February 2025

The attacks of 9/11 ushered in two parallel NATO policies—counterterrorism (CT) and projecting stability (PS). This chapter undertakes three tasks. First, it explores how CT activities have shaped NATO as a military alliance. Second, it looks at the rise and fall of PS (and, by extension, the idea of crisis management) in NATO. The term all but disappeared from NATO policy statements following the Alliance’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In that light, the chapter also looks at how PS and, to a lesser extent, CT have been questioned and marginalized in NATO to be replaced by a renewed focus on traditional collective defence and deterrence.
The United States
Authors: Goldgeier James
Published: February 2025

Despite a historical aversion to permanent overseas entanglements, in 1949 the United States joined Canada and ten European countries in signing the North Atlantic Treaty. Seventy-five years later, the United States remains committed to a transatlantic alliance that now extends across most of the European continent. Despite a political consensus in Washington. that America’s national security priorities lie in countering China, the United States has continued in its role as guarantor of European security, particularly in the face of Russian aggression. The Russia–Ukraine war is a reminder that two of the core purposes of NATO in Europe—‘keeping the Russians out’ and ‘keeping the Americans in’—still matter even as calls for Europeans to do more for their own defence grow louder.
Russia
Authors: Dannreuther Roland
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the development of the NATO–Russia relationship from its inception at the end of the Cold War up to the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Different theoretical positions provide context for the relationship’s evolution. The relationship itself is seen as falling into five distinct phases. Despite many sources of tension, the relationship was resilient up until the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. It fell into mutual antagonism thereafter. When and if conditions allow for a return to cooperation between the West and Russia (a possibility linked to the course of the war in Ukraine), NATO will be central to that process.
Conclusion
Authors: Moens Alexander , Richards Alexandra
Published: February 2025

The transatlantic bargain between the United States and the NATO allies is a useful lens for exploring the history of the Alliance and positing the course of its future development. That bargain is encapsulated in the 2022 Strategic Concept. At the point of that document’s adoption NATO faced four main challenges: responding to the war in Ukraine and the increasingly adversarial relationship with Russia; calibrating a strategic approach toward China; maintaining political cohesion among the allies; and managing intra-Alliance burden-sharing in the face of technological change. A consideration of these four challenges suggests that NATO (as during much of its history) faces profound policy choices.
Whither NATO? A History of NATO’s Futures
Authors: Sloan Stanley R.
Published: February 2025

NATO has survived many transatlantic and intra-European controversies. During the Cold War, external developments (the Suez crisis and the war in Vietnam) and internal disagreements (Euromissiles, European defence autonomy, and the standing of France) meant NATO was often seen as crisis prone. The end of the Cold War (arguably NATO’s finest hour) was the occasion for further soul-searching. Having survived that historic turning point, NATO would go on to confront new crises. These too were often seen as existential. US President Donald Trump’s attack on NATO solidarity lunged the Alliance into a period of profound uncertainty. NATO survived Trump’s term of office (2017–2021) but reliance on American leadership and military might continue to make NATO vulnerable to the vicissitudes of US politics. Alongside this long-standing problem, the NATO allies have also had to confront a resurgent Russia and the latent threat of China. Adapting to these challenges, along with those of disruptive technological advance, political cohesion, and economic resourcing will (as in the past) continue to test NATO’s staying power.
Southeast Europe (The Balkans and the Danube)
Authors: Bonsall Clive , Boroneanț Adina , Mărgărit Monica
Published: February 2025

The Balkan Mesolithic was a regional manifestation of indigenous hunter-gatherers’ adaptations to profound ecological change between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the establishment of Neolithic farming systems across Europe. Mesolithic sites are unevenly distributed across the peninsula. In the Dinaric-Pindus mountains in the west, evidence of Mesolithic settlement comes mainly from excavations in caves and rock shelters. Further east, the record is sporadic, with large areas lacking Mesolithic finds. The Iron Gates section of the Danube Valley at the border between Romania and Serbia is exceptional. There, archaeological investigations prompted by dam construction projects led to the discovery of cave- and open-air sites along the Danube banks, which provide a detailed record of Mesolithic culture and economy spanning almost seven millennia. The Mesolithic way of life in the Balkans came to an end as immigrant farmers from Anatolia gradually colonized the peninsula during the seventh millennium bc, introducing new methods of food production based on southwest Asian domesticated plants and animals, along with distinctive forms of architecture, funerary customs, art, and technology, including fired pottery. The agricultural frontier had reached the Danube by the end of the millennium. Individual burials at Lepenski Vir in Serbia dating to the period between c. 6,200 and 6,000 cal bc contain the remains of people of differing genetic ancestries—of Anatolian, indigenous, or mixed descent—signalling the beginning of the end of the Mesolithic in the Iron Gates and the wider Balkan peninsula, even if the processes of the transition are still debated.
Mesolithic Landscapes and Niche Construction
Authors: Rowley-Conwy Peter
Published: February 2025

Niche construction (NC) is the manipulation of resources to increase their availability to humans. It has been insufficiently emphasized in Mesolithic Europe. Traditionally, hunter-gatherers were assumed to be incapable of environmental modification. Ethnographic work on NC has recently seen massive strides, particularly in Australia. Early British settlers did not, however, grasp that they were seeing a heavily modified landscape, because they were conditioned by the British eighteenth-century ‘Four Stages Theory’ and the landscape parks constructed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to believe that Australia could only be a pristine Arcadian wilderness. Mesolithic European forests were assumed to be similarly unmodified. Recently Europe has begun to catch up and various forms of NC are identified. Fine-Resolution Pollen Analysis has revealed repeated local forest clearances to encourage grazing for wild animals. Numerous large fish weirs were made of coppiced hazel, demanding extensive forest management. Animals and plants were likely translocated to areas where they were lacking. Managed plants were probably used for the manufacture of bows, arrows, birch tar glue, nets, baskets, cordage, and textiles.
Fishing
Authors: Robson Harry K. , Boethius Adam , Ritchie Kenneth
Published: February 2025

Fish played a vital role in the development of the European Mesolithic; from their colonization of the continent during the Upper Palaeolithic to ongoing debates regarding their importance across the Neolithic transition, they are central to many discussions. Here, we focus on the European Mesolithic zooarchaeological fish dataset, in which we have collated >640,000 identified fish remains from 358 sites. We aim to document the development of fishing from the Early-through-Middle Holocene across the continent. While acknowledging certain limitations—for instance preservation and recovery biases, research histories, and language constraints—by assembling this comprehensive dataset it is possible to begin to evaluate how fishing developed during the Mesolithic. Importantly, it is possible to compare the trajectories evidenced from different areas. The transition from freshwater to marine-focused fisheries and the development of distinctive local traditions are highlights of the research.
Art and Symbolism
Authors: Kashina Ekaterina
Published: February 2025

This chapter briefly presents the analysis of northeastern European Prehistoric Holocene hunters’ portable art as a part of the European culture, both material and spiritual, during the period of seventh–third millennia bc. The items’ morphology, raw material/technology, archaeological context, function, and semantic/symbolic meaning are studied. More than 600 pieces are subdivided into three groups: moulded clay pieces, carved (of bone, antler, amber, and wood), and retouched (flint) pieces. The images represent humans, birds, mammals, snakes, and fish. The large number and wide distribution of pieces are the markers of social networks: marriage alliances and gift exchange. Ceramic pieces (sculptures and vessels) reflect some domestic rituals and simultaneously the marital ties between regions via the anthropomorphic sculptures’ face decoration patterns (tattoos?). Carved sculpted pendants were probably connected with personalized beliefs in human ancestors and ancestral totemic animals, among which birds were the most abundant zoomorphic images. Flint pendants probably had the same function and meaning. Elk-headed staffs were an integral part of man-the-hunter’s spirituality. Tools and household items with sculpted finials were probably used in special occasions according to their purpose. All the analysed items suggest that Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer-fishers beliefs were highly complex and comprised at least ancestral and totemic components. Generally, variations in portable art morphology, design, quantity, and application probably reflect the changing world-view between generations.
From the Treatment of the Body to the Places of the Dead
Authors: Tõrv Mari , Peyroteo Stjerna Rita
Published: February 2025

This chapter gives an overview of the hunter-gatherer landscapes—river and lake shores, caves, and rock shelters, etc.—where death was encountered. Hand-in-hand with the acknowledgement of a variety of practices—ranging from the primary inhumations to multi-episodic burials—the study of Mesolithic mortuary remains reveals a diverse array of burial sites influenced by local geography and worldviews. Forager societies, adapting to various environments, buried their kin into ‘proper cemeteries’ for single communities, meeting places for multiple forager groups preforming various rituals, and settlement sites where death was integrated into everyday activities. The significance of these sites in structuring the landscapes of hunter-gatherers remains debated, but a nuanced study of forager burial sites allows a more comprehensive insight into the realms of daily and ritual life of these ancient societies.
Metamorphosis
Authors: Conneller Chantal , Elliott Ben
Published: February 2025

Whilst metamorphosis might not be considered a conventional or common focus for Mesolithic research, technologies of metamorphosis do feature within narratives of the period, in a range of different contexts. This chapter explores research centred on Mesolithic material culture: masks, clothing, and artwork, and the potential that this holds for redefining our understandings of disguise, concealment, and transformation within Mesolithic ontologies. Context emerges as the key to both determining and realizing this potential. Mortuary practice and burial environments help to frame the different forms of life/death transformation, often involving materials that also occur in prosaic settings. Conversely, human remains transformed into material culture, and subsequently deposited in line with traditions of object disposal, illustrate the transformation of people into things. Broader patterns of consumption and predation shape the role that animal body parts play in therianthropic transformation and the making of material culture. In all these examples, an attention to the specifics of human action in the production and use of materials involved within metamorphosis are key in understanding the character of change, and the broader ontological framework within which this change sits.
Northern Scandinavia
Authors: Knutsson Kjel
Published: February 2025

Northern Scandinavia in this chapter comprises Norway, the northern half of Sweden, and Finland. The attempt to follow large-scale cultural processes transcending national borders 10,000 cal bc—c. 4,000 cal bc as the last part of the Weichelian ice slowly melted in this area, illustrates the importance of an over-regional perspective. Evaluating the archaeological evidence from three main periods, Early, Middle, and Late Mesolithic shows that the cultural change related to these generalized periods happened more or less simultaneously over this vast area, indicating communication between hunter-gatherers in large scale networks including southern Scandinavia and areas far east of Fennoscandia. It is also shown that the spatial structure and change of the different cultural traditions related to spatial arrangements shaped during the pioneer settlement. The change was partly the result of adaptation to variation in climate but also processes of large-scale migrations and historical circumstances. In the chapter, we will follow pioneers migrating into virgin land, adapting to the gradual introduction of new flora and fauna from an initial postglacial reindeer dominance and open tundra-like environment, to the development of a forested landscape and whereby fauna becomes more varied as the post glacial warming continued.
Doggerland
Authors: Walker James , Gaffney Vincent , Fitch Simon , Fraser Andy
Published: February 2025

The disappearance of Doggerland beneath the waves of the southern North Sea was the most notable landscape change to affect northwest Europe in the early Holocene. This submerged palaeolandscape has captured the imaginations of archaeologists and the public for over a century, but it is only in recent decades that our knowledge of it has begun to come into focus. Although often presumed as significant culturally, the area of Doggerland remains something of a geographical gap within our knowledge of Mesolithic northwest Europe. In part this reflects the fact that the archaeology of this area is largely restricted to finds made by chance discovery and sites located just off the current shore. Nevertheless, we are rapidly approaching a point where the targeted prospection of deeper waters may be possible. This chapter reviews our current knowledge regarding Mesolithic Doggerland, how it changed over time, and how these changes may have affected both the people who lived there and on the lands it once connected.
Orwell, Leo Tolstoy, and H. G. Wells
Authors: Parrinder Patrick
Published: February 2025

Orwell’s essays on Wells and Tolstoy are devastating and largely unforgiving analyses of authors who had greatly influenced him but whom he came to regard as failed prophets. Tolstoy, he argued, pursued a false ideal of sainthood, while Wells was a liberal pacifist blind to the appeal of militarism and war. Yet Orwell had much else to say about these two predecessors, and his impulse to debunk their utopianism reveals his own contradictions. Did he perhaps see in Tolstoy and Wells two possible ageing versions of himself? Finally, this chapter contrasts their impacts on Orwell the novelist. If Wells, he thought, was Dickens’s nearest modern analogue, Tolstoy had a more universal appeal than Dickens. Wells’s presence is strongest behind Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four, while Orwell’s abandoned project for a family saga reflects his lifelong admiration for War and Peace.
Orwell and Modernism
Authors: Morrell Sascha
Published: February 2025

To consider how Orwell himself perceived, evaluated, and was influenced by those ‘highbrow’ writers who epitomized formal experimentalism in his lifetime, and to account for how and why critics continue to differ over Orwell’s modernist credentials, this chapter situates Orwell’s writing in relation to changing definitions of literary modernism, and puts Orwell’s explicit commentaries on what he called ‘the Joyce-Eliot school’ into dialogue with tendencies apparent in Orwell’s fiction. With a focus on Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), it aims to show how, both expressly and through narrative technique, the fiction challenges some of the dichotomies on which Orwell’s critical commentary relies, including the presumed separation of modernism from mass culture, and the supposed opposition between formal experiment and political engagement. In this, Orwell anticipates recent trends in the broader field of modernism studies.
Orwell the Reader
Authors: Tyson Helen
Published: February 2025

Beginning with an exploration of Orwell’s accounts of childhood reading, this chapter explores how Orwell channelled his life as a reader into both his novels and essays. Contrary to the enduring image of Orwell as a stern critic, this chapter traces Orwell’s writing about the pleasures of reading, from his recollections of childhood reading, to the pleasures of ‘good bad books’, reading and solitude, and what he described in 1946 as the ‘joy of mere words’. And yet, as this chapter shows, Orwell also worried in the 1930s and 1940s about the fascistic leanings of popular culture, fearful of the ways that the ‘ordinary reader’ might be co-opted by totalitarian politics. Concluding with a close reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four, this chapter considers how we might read Orwell today, not as a lesson in moral sympathy, but as a reminder to think seriously about our own roles as Orwell’s readers.
Orwell, Progress, and the Intellectuals
Authors: Tripathi Ameya
Published: February 2025

In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell sceptically regards mechanization, technologyv, and industry as part of ‘the swindle of progress’, a phrase he often repeats. Yet Orwell knew his socialist economic convictions would require a degree of centralization, planning, and technological advancement. For Hayekian economists, Orwell’s advocating for a planned economy showed a deficit in understanding anti-totalitarian economic liberalism, much as they admired his civic and political liberalism. Yet, as this chapter discusses, Orwell’s experiences in colonial Burma and Spain were what enabled him to have a deep and linked understanding of socialist economics and liberal politics. His contacts with Arturo Barea, among others, led him to see markets in dictatorships and colonies as just as, if not more, totalitarian than forms of rationing and central planning imposed by governments. Placing Orwell in relation to political thought from Hayek to Arendt and Fanon, this chapter explores Orwell’s deep ambivalence and conflict towards both ‘progress’ and ‘intellectuals’.
Orwell and the Absurd
Authors: Masud Noreen
Published: February 2025

This chapter discusses absurdity in George Orwell’s writing. The first section argues that Orwell’s political project depends on flagging up what he calls ‘the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies’, to bring the absurdity of the country’s social organization to public attention. The implicit hope is that exposure will lead to social change. But the absurd redoubles when—against all logic—life simply goes on as before in the face of these revelations. The second section traces Orwell’s ambivalence about absurdity—an uncertainty about where to indulge it and where to rein it in—and argues that one reason why his protagonists (who register and complain about life’s absurdity) ultimately fail to force change is that they themselves succumb to absurdity, and therefore unhearability. The last section explores how the absurd might offer, if not hope, at least a skeleton of mental support to hold one up through an unacceptable life.
Orwell the Stylist
Authors: Mullen Lisa
Published: February 2025

Orwell made a number of pronouncements about the importance of ‘plain’ style, yet in his own writing he never adhered strictly to these rules himself. This chapter argues that his ruminations on style were shaped and coloured by twin anxieties about the relationship between literature and politics, and the relationship between words and truth. Key moments in three early novels—Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)—are examined, alongside detailed analysis of the style of a late essay, ‘A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray’ (1946), and Orwell’s engagement with style and politics in his final masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The chapter argues that style, for Orwell, was never a fixed formula, but an active encounter: the transit between interior and exterior world did not entail a delivery of plain and direct thought-manifestation, but was a fluid process of dynamic intermediation.
Orwell and the ‘Auden Generation’
Authors: Kohlmann Benjamin
Published: February 2025

This chapter pursues a dual aim: it reconstructs Orwell’s canonical attacks on the leading lights of the Auden Generation, but it also offers a more nuanced picture by tracing the complex lines of repulsion and attraction that connected Orwell to the literary and cultural milieu associated with the label of the ‘Auden Generation’. Orwell’s vitriol, the chapter suggests, was directed not so much against individual writers but rather against a particular kind of middle-class artistic milieu that he despised for its detachment from the political realities of the decade. The chapter argues that Orwell’s conflicted views of the Auden Generation helped to mould his own writerly style. It also shows that Orwell contributed to the cementing and perpetuating of the myth of the Auden Generation at the same time that he was trying to consign it to the dustbin of literary history.
Orwell and Margaret Atwood
Authors: Davies Madeleine
Published: February 2025

Following the novelist’s own statements, the argument of this essay suggests that Atwood constructs in her dystopian writing both an homage to and a critique of Orwell’s interpretation of power in Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular. Focusing mainly on The Handmaid’s Tale, though referring also to The Testaments and to Oryx and Crake, the argument initially traces the connections between Orwell’s bleak ‘masterpiece’ and Atwood’s apparent ‘debt’ to it, but then moves on to assess the impact of gendered ways of seeing. Where Nineteen Eighty-Four traces male relationships, The Handmaid’s Tale offers the ‘world according to Julia’, a female-centred perspective which amplifies the banal yet brutal workings of gendered power. The essay proceeds to assess Orwell’s and Atwood’s writing of sex, authorship, and the human principle, each reinterpreted by Atwood in her female-centred narrative, and argues that Atwood’s ‘homage’ to Orwell is thus tempered by an attitude of ‘Yes, but’.
Orwell the Journalist
Authors: Murphy Jaron
Published: February 2025

This chapter provides a fresh assessment of Orwell’s stature and achievements as a journalist, from the vantage point of the twenty-first-century digital age. In this up-to-date context, and for the first time in international scholarship, a number of Orwell’s impressive strengths and influential contributions alongside a range of his shortcomings and oddities as a journalist are foregrounded and explored. Pioneeringly, Orwell’s journalistic oeuvre is refracted into literary journalism broadly to show specific forms of feature writing in which he excelled, such as reviews, reportage, and columns; the enduring influence of his obsession with politics and the English language, as well as his vigorous criticism of the popular press, are connected to contemporary mainstream journalism; his book-length journalistic works are problematized as transgressing genres, while classification of his news and feature writing—and even applicability of the term ‘journalist’ to him—are also demonstrated to be quite tricky; and his journalistic knowledge is shown to be integral to his two iconic works, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This chapter argues, paradoxically, that, despite his political partisanship, expressed largely in the ‘alternative’ media sphere, Orwell is part of the DNA, as it were, of contemporary mainstream journalism and that, ultimately, he could be seen as a better journalist than novelist.
Normativities, Normative Orders, and Pluralism
Authors: Kettemann Matthias C. , Tiedeke Anna Sophia
Published: February 2025

This chapter discusses Digital Constitutionalism from the perspective of normativities. A brief genealogy of the idea of constitutionalism traces the evolution of different variations of constitutionalism thinking. Continuing from this vantage point the chapter highlights and examines three persistent and perpetuating problems connected to constitutionalism thinking which are of pivotal relevance for Digital Constitutionalism thinking. First, the problem of petrifying effects of decontextualized conceptual transplants. Second, the problem of conflation of descriptive, conceptual, and analytical dimensions. And third, the problem of excluding effects with a view to norms generally and normative interrelations more specifically. Against this backdrop the chapter traces the roots of these problems back to a striking silence of scholars working in that field about their underlying assumptions about law and normativity. In light of the radical plurality of normativities which are making and governing the digital sphere, the chapter argues, this situation is not tenable anymore, if it ever was. Moving beyond narrow solutionism it shows that Digital Constitutionalism, understood as a field of studying meta-norms emerging within, in between and across different normativities and normative orders can offer more productive trajectories for future and more in-depth studies of power and (legitimate) authority in digital spaces.
Ultrafast entropy production in non-equilibrium magnets
Authors: Tietjen Finja , Geilhufe R Matthias
Published: February 2025

We present an ultrafast thermodynamics framework to model heat generation and entropy production in laser-driven ferromagnetic systems. By establishing a connection between the magnetic field strength of the laser pulse and magnetization dynamics we model time-dependent entropy production rates and deduce the associated heat dissipation in epitaxial and polycrystalline FeNi and CoFeB thin films. Our theoretical predictions are validated by comparison to experimental magnetization dynamics data, shedding light on thermodynamic processes on picosecond timescales. Crucially, we incorporate recently observed inertial spin dynamics, to describe their impact on heat generation in pump-probe experiments. As such, this formalism provides novel insights into controlling heat production in magnetic systems, and contributes to advancing the understanding of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in magnetic systems, with implications for future experimental protocols in spintronics and nanotechnology.
Amino acid metabolism in breast cancer: Pathogenic drivers and therapeutic opportunities
Authors: Liu Yawen , Zong Xiangyun , Altea-Manzano Patricia , Fu Jie
Published: February 2025

Amino acid metabolism plays a critical role in the progression and development of breast cancer. Cancer cells, including those in breast cancer, reprogram amino acid metabolism to meet the demands of rapid proliferation, survival, and immune evasion. This includes alterations in the uptake and utilization of amino acids such as glutamine, serine, glycine, and arginine, which provide essential building blocks for biosynthesis, energy production, and redox homeostasis. Notably, the metabolic phenotypes of breast cancer cells vary across molecular subtypes and disease stages, emphasizing the need for patient stratification and personalized therapeutic strategies. Advances in multi-level diagnostics, including phenotyping and predictive tools such as AI-based analysis and body fluid profiling, have highlighted the potential for tailoring treatments to individual metabolic profiles. Enzymes such as glutaminase and serine hydroxymethyltransferase, often upregulated in breast cancer, represent promising therapeutic targets. Understanding the interplay between amino acid metabolism and breast cancer biology, alongside the integration of personalized medicine approaches, can uncover novel insights into tumor progression and guide the development of precision therapies. This review explores the metabolic pathways of amino acids in breast cancer, with a focus on their implications for personalized treatment strategies.