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Abstract: The Mundra Port on the Gulf of Kutch in western India is one of India's largest port projects today. This article takes the port-circulated narrative of the coast being a natural harbor as its starting point, to show how fresh water was central to official maritime projects until the early postcolonial period. Conserving mangroves and freshwater creeks was not antithetical to maritime ports but part of the same administrative project. Political and infrastructural shifts from the river to the tide naturalized the erasure of coastal fresh water and transformed the coast into a singularly tidal space, creating the conditions for the development of a large-scale, high-technology shipping port.

The Holocene (beginning around 12,000 years ago) encompassed some of the most significant changes in human evolution, with far-reaching consequences for the dietary, physical and mental health of present-day populations. Using a dataset of more than 1,600 imputed ancient genomes1, we modelled the selection landscape during the transition from hunting and gathering, to farming and pastoralism across West Eurasia. We identify key selection signals related to metabolism, including that selection at the FADS cluster began earlier than previously reported and that selection near the LCT locus predates the emergence of the lactase persistence allele by thousands of years. We also find strong selection in the HLA region, possibly due to increased exposure to pathogens during the Bronze Age. Using ancient individuals to infer local ancestry tracts in over 400,000 samples from the UK Biobank, we identify widespread differences in the distribution of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestries across Eurasia. By calculating ancestry-specific polygenic risk scores, we show that height differences between Northern and Southern Europe are associated with differential Steppe ancestry, rather than selection, and that risk alleles for mood-related phenotypes are enriched for Neolithic farmer ancestry, whereas risk alleles for diabetes and Alzheimer's disease are enriched for Western hunter-gatherer ancestry. Our results indicate that ancient selection and migration were large contributors to the distribution of phenotypic diversity in present-day Europeans.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neuro-inflammatory and neurodegenerative disease that is most prevalent in Northern Europe. Although it is known that inherited risk for MS is located within or in close proximity to immune-related genes, it is unknown when, where and how this genetic risk originated1. Here, by using a large ancient genome dataset from the Mesolithic period to the Bronze Age2, along with new Medieval and post-Medieval genomes, we show that the genetic risk for MS rose among pastoralists from the Pontic steppe and was brought into Europe by the Yamnaya-related migration approximately 5,000 years ago. We further show that these MS-associated immunogenetic variants underwent positive selection both within the steppe population and later in Europe, probably driven by pathogenic challenges coinciding with changes in diet, lifestyle and population density. This study highlights the critical importance of the Neolithic period and Bronze Age as determinants of modern immune responses and their subsequent effect on the risk of developing MS in a changing environment.

Major migration events in Holocene Eurasia have been characterized genetically at broad regional scales1-4. However, insights into the population dynamics in the contact zones are hampered by a lack of ancient genomic data sampled at high spatiotemporal resolution5-7. Here, to address this, we analysed shotgun-sequenced genomes from 100 skeletons spanning 7,300 years of the Mesolithic period, Neolithic period and Early Bronze Age in Denmark and integrated these with proxies for diet (13C and 15N content), mobility (87Sr/86Sr ratio) and vegetation cover (pollen). We observe that Danish Mesolithic individuals of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures form a distinct genetic cluster related to other Western European hunter-gatherers. Despite shifts in material culture they displayed genetic homogeneity from around 10,500 to 5,900 calibrated years before present, when Neolithic farmers with Anatolian-derived ancestry arrived. Although the Neolithic transition was delayed by more than a millennium relative to Central Europe, it was very abrupt and resulted in a population turnover with limited genetic contribution from local hunter-gatherers. The succeeding Neolithic population, associated with the Funnel Beaker culture, persisted for only about 1,000 years before immigrants with eastern Steppe-derived ancestry arrived. This second and equally rapid population replacement gave rise to the Single Grave culture with an ancestry profile more similar to present-day Danes. In our multiproxy dataset, these major demographic events are manifested as parallel shifts in genotype, phenotype, diet and land use.

Western Eurasia witnessed several large-scale human migrations during the Holocene1-5. Here, to investigate the cross-continental effects of these migrations, we shotgun-sequenced 317 genomes-mainly from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods-from across northern and western Eurasia. These were imputed alongside published data to obtain diploid genotypes from more than 1,600 ancient humans. Our analyses revealed a 'great divide' genomic boundary extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were highly genetically differentiated east and west of this zone, and the effect of the neolithization was equally disparate. Large-scale ancestry shifts occurred in the west as farming was introduced, including near-total replacement of hunter-gatherers in many areas, whereas no substantial ancestry shifts happened east of the zone during the same period. Similarly, relatedness decreased in the west from the Neolithic transition onwards, whereas, east of the Urals, relatedness remained high until around 4,000 BP, consistent with the persistence of localized groups of hunter-gatherers. The boundary dissolved when Yamnaya-related ancestry spread across western Eurasia around 5,000 BP, resulting in a second major turnover that reached most parts of Europe within a 1,000-year span. The genetic origin and fate of the Yamnaya have remained elusive, but we show that hunter-gatherers from the Middle Don region contributed ancestry to them. Yamnaya groups later admixed with individuals associated with the Globular Amphora culture before expanding into Europe. Similar turnovers occurred in western Siberia, where we report new genomic data from a 'Neolithic steppe' cline spanning the Siberian forest steppe to Lake Baikal. These prehistoric migrations had profound and lasting effects on the genetic diversity of Eurasian populations.

Historical and ethnographic sources depict use of portable braced shaft weapons, or pikes, in megafauna hunting and defense during Late Holocene millennia in North and South America, Africa, Eurasia and Southeast Asia. Given the predominance of megafauna in Late Pleistocene North America during the centuries when Clovis points appeared and spread across much of the continent (13,050-12,650 cal BP), braced weapons may have been used in hunting of megaherbivores and defense against megacarnivores. Drawing from historical examples of pike use against lions, jaguars, boars, grizzlies, carabao and warhorses we consider the possibility of a fluted lithic pike. Associated osseous rods have been problematic as Clovis foreshafts due to the bevel angle and the apparent weakness of the splint haft when great strength is needed for deep penetration in megafauna hunting. However our review of Late Holocene pike use in megafauna encounters indicates the sharp tip becomes less important after hide or armor has been pierced because compression is sustained. Thus, foreshaft collapse after hide entry may not limit but rather increase the efficacy of the braced weapon. We conduct preliminary static experiments to model a fluted pike that adjusts during compression such that haft collapse and point detachment (when point jams on impact with bone) preserve the fluted biface, beveled rod and wooden mainshaft tip. In addition to Clovis point attributes and association with osseous rods, potential archaeological correlates of Clovis pike use include the high frequency of Clovis point isolates and concentrations of complete points with unbutchered mammoth remains at sites such as Naco in Arizona.

Abstract: This essay revisits some familiar diplomatic encounters between European nations and China in the decades around 1800. It proceeds from a theoretical distinction between diplomacy within an international society and diplomacy between international societies. The set of ideas, principles, and institutions of diplomatic interaction within an international society may be summarily termed its diplomatic culture. Diplomacy between international societies lacks a shared diplomatic culture, involving instead negotiations between different diplomatic cultures. The European embassies to China around 1800 epitomize diplomacy between international societies. The essay examines in some detail the attempts on both sides to make sense of the diplomatic exchange, in which they were engaged: translating documents, documenting actions, and interpreting the events by poetic means. All these attempts turned out to entrench differences rather than induce agreements. This predicament was to be resolved only by violence.

In this paper I analyze the work on exchange rates and external imbalances by University of Chicago faculty members during the university’s first 100 years, 1892 to 1992. Many people associate Chicago’s views with Milton Friedman’s advocacy for flexible exchange rates. But, of course, there was much more than that, including the work of J. Laurence Laughlin on bimetallism, Jacob Viner on the balance of payments, Lloyd Metzler on transfers, Harry Johnson on trade and currencies, Lloyd Mints on exchange rate regimes, Robert Mundell on optimal currency areas, and Arnold Harberger on shadow exchange rates, among others. The analysis shows that, although different scholars emphasized different issues, there was a common thread in this research, anchored on the role of relative prices’ changes during the adjustment process.

Abstract: Dental data can reveal evidence for a past population's oral health, nutrition, and certain cultural activities. This study aims to explore oral health and dental attrition during the late Bronze Age in order to explore health outcomes in different subgroups as well as aspects of foodways and changes in subsistence strategies during the second millennium BCE in northwest China. To do this, the skeletal remains of adult individuals associated with the Siwa material culture (1400–1100 BC) from the Mogou site (n = 28) were macroscopically assessed and compared with previously published data derived from a subsample of individuals associated with Qijia period material culture complex (1750–1400 BC) from the same site. The results show that the Siwa‐period population experienced a high frequency of carious lesions and antemortem tooth loss associated with advanced attrition (of both molars and nonmolar teeth), which did not vary significantly by sex. Females had a higher prevalence of carious lesions and antemortem tooth loss than did males, while males had a higher prevalence of dental calculus. These male/female health outcomes are also attested during the earlier Qijia period at the Mogou site. The Siwa period differs from the Qijia in that females experienced slightly worse attrition than their predecessors. Overall, oral health does not diverge significantly between the Qijia and Siwa periods, suggesting that the factors that contributed to oral health including dietary practices may have persisted diachronically for individuals buried at this site.

Tristan Alonge, Racine et Euripide: La révolution trahie. « Travaux du Grand Siècle », Genève, Droz, 2017.

Recent scholarship has placed the concept of friendship at the centre of Aristotle's political thought. However, relatively little attention has been given to Aristotle's claim that political friendship is 'based on equality'. This article first explicates this claim as it appears in the Eudemian Ethics, where Aristotle asserts that the paradigmatic form of political friendship is based on 'arithmetic' rather than 'proportional' equality. Second, it shows that this 'egalitarian' conception of political friendship is fully consistent with theNicomachean Ethics and Politics — and in doing so, challenges a recent argument that the Eudemian Ethics was not genuinely written by Aristotle. Third, it argues that Aristotle's 'egalitarian' conception of political friendship motivates his advocacy of various economic arrangements and practices throughout the Politics, including but not limited to the 'common use' of property.

Abstract: “Sustainability” is an increasingly fashionable design criterion for celebrity corporate architects, their clients, and the governmental bodies that regulate urban development. Yet determining if and how a building is actually sustainable remains controversial, with different actors positing qualifications that are often at odds with each other. In this article, the authors explore how the ideal of sustainability is made concrete in contemporary corporate architecture, focusing on the design of one of Google's new corporate campuses in Silicon Valley that has been extensively touted and recognized as admirably green. The article draws attention to how various experts who participated in the design of Google's new campus rendered sustainability differently and argues that the temporal and social structure of the design process worked to compel coordination and compromises among these experts’ different renderings. Ultimately the authors advocate for problematizing the design process as a key site where political questions about sustainability in the built form get settled pragmatically.

Machu Picchu originally functioned as a palace within the estate of the Inca emperor Pachacuti between ~1420 and 1532 CE. Before this study, little was known about the people who lived and died there, where they came from or how they were related to the inhabitants of the Inca capital of Cusco. We generated genome-wide data for 34 individuals buried at Machu Picchu who are believed to have been retainers or attendants assigned to serve the Inca royal family, as well as 34 individuals from Cusco for comparative purposes. When the ancient DNA results are contextualized using historical and archaeological data, we conclude that the retainer population at Machu Picchu was highly heterogeneous with individuals exhibiting genetic ancestries associated with groups from throughout the Inca Empire and Amazonia. The results suggest a diverse retainer community at Machu Picchu in which people of different genetic backgrounds lived, reproduced, and were interred together.

A burial dating to the 1st century BCE was found in 1999 in the Isles of Scilly, south-west England. As well as being the most richly furnished burial in the region, it has grave goods considered to have oppositional gender associations: martial items (sword, shield) plus a bronze mirror. The inability to determine sex from the poorly surviving skeletal remains, using morphological or the available genomic methods at the time of its discovery, has been recognised as a key difficulty in the interpretation of this significant burial for Iron Age studies. Here, we apply high throughput DNA sequencing and analysis of dental enamel peptides to the highly degraded human remains in efforts to determine sex. The former effectively showed that no useable aDNA survived in the remains; the latter identified the sex as female with ca. 96% probability. This demonstrates the value of dental enamel peptide analysis for establishing the sex of ancient remains in circumstances where survival of skeletal remains is marginal and when diagenesis has effectively eliminated aDNA. Understanding symbolism in ancient burial rites, and hence making inferences concerning the social identities of the deceased is very difficult. These difficulties are not resolvable by biomolecular analyses. However, the sex identified from the proteomic work adds to the reconstruction of the biological identity of the interred individual, and helps to provide a firmer basis upon which debates concerning her social identity can be conducted. We discuss the funerary treatment of the interred individual in terms of her possible social persona, especially the meaning of the martial items for her potential role in Iron Age warfare.

Abstract: Drawing on recent research on the intersections of race and atmosphere, this essay considers thermal sensation as a nonrepresentational sensory modality for staging atmospheric racial disparities. I begin with discussions of research on the physical, psychological, and affective consequences of heat exposure and scholarship on the disparities encoded in thermal landscapes—especially “urban heat islands” where Black and Brown communities are disproportionately exposed to extreme temperatures that exacerbate preexisting health vulnerabilities. I consider a range of literary and cultural works by Nella Larsen, Chester Himes, and Spike Lee that represent the physical and affective implications of thermal disparities, and conclude with an extended discussion of the nonrepresentational, embodied affordances of thermal sensation in Rashid Johnson’s restaging of LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman in a Manhattan sauna.What kinds of knowledge and affective involvement might be afforded by a direct, nonrepresentational aesthetics of thermoception? . . . How might an immersive aesthetics of thermoception sensitize audiences to the spatial and atmospheric dynamics of racialization?

Abstract: This essay rethinks writing on “intimate labor” to ethnographically explore the intimacy of labor by attending to how Romani women waste workers in Bulgaria assert workplace friendships to lay claim to public space and cultivate life-sustaining solidarities. Under conditions of racialized and degrading labor, they play with their uniformed hypervisibility, catcall white men on city streets, and temporarily unsettle normative expectations of womanhood. With this disruptive power of workplace intimacy, street sweepers use humor and play to create collective pleasure for themselves and one another. As they explain that they “die so that white Bulgarians can live,” they also use their friendships to generate pleasurable forms of living, what they term “anything else.”

Abstract: This article describes the response of a group of California women prisoners and their allies on the outside to the conditions that radically altered and devastated the lives of people in prison during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Benjamin Weber, African American and African Studies faculty member at the University of California, Davis, reached out to the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), with its over twenty-six years of relationships with incarcerated women in California prisons. CCWP members Pam Fadem and Rachel Leah Klein collaborated to intervene early in the pandemic to facilitate communication among people both on the inside and outside of prison.

Abstract This paper explores the connections between archival research and teaching as an adjunct faculty member and mother. The form of the essay is an example of the “I-Search paper,” a first-person account of the research process. In I-Search papers, authors start with the “search story,” where they explain their initial research questions, then describe their “search results” in detail, including the primary sources they found, and end with a reflection on the research process. This essay is two I-Search papers in one—bringing together the experience of reading about students’ historical research experiences with the author's own version of a research story. The essay is about teaching and research and their intersections, and especially what teaching has taught the author about research. The account of the individual research experience touches on the archival experiences of frustration and boredom, and the tension between wanting to find something in the archives and coming away with something else, and ends with a reflection on how our personal circumstances can impact our research.

Evidence for a reduction in stature between Mesolithic foragers and Neolithic farmers has been interpreted as reflective of declines in health, however, our current understanding of this trend fails to account for the complexity of cultural and dietary transitions or the possible causes of phenotypic change. The agricultural transition was extended in primary centers of domestication and abrupt in regions characterized by demic diffusion. In regions such as Northern Europe where foreign domesticates were difficult to establish, there is strong evidence for natural selection for lactase persistence in relation to dairying. We employ broad-scale analyses of diachronic variation in stature and body mass in the Levant, Europe, the Nile Valley, South Asia, and China, to test three hypotheses about the timing of subsistence shifts and human body size, that: 1) the adoption of agriculture led to a decrease in stature, 2) there were different trajectories in regions of in situ domestication or cultural diffusion of agriculture; and 3) increases in stature and body mass are observed in regions with evidence for selection for lactase persistence. Our results demonstrate that 1) decreases in stature preceded the origins of agriculture in some regions; 2) the Levant and China, regions of in situ domestication of species and an extended period of mixed foraging and agricultural subsistence, had stable stature and body mass over time; and 3) stature and body mass increases in Central and Northern Europe coincide with the timing of selective sweeps for lactase persistence, providing support for the "Lactase Growth Hypothesis."

Pottery recovered from 2012 to 2019 at Nim li Punit, Toledo District, demonstrates that it was occupied from AD 150/250 to AD 830+. We identify long-term changes in the kinds of material produced, used, and discarded over the 600- to 700-year occupation of the site. During the last century of the Classic period, Nim li Punit witnessed a decline in the diversity of ceramic practice. This could reflect a shift in feasting behavior, perhaps due to the political and demographic instability experienced throughout Maya lowlands during the eighth century. Alternatively, this could be the result of new networks of alliance and exchange that arose during this turbulent time. A third possibility is that distinct communities of potters occupied Nim li Punit at different times. To test these different interpretations, we track changes in the ceramic collection at the type: variety level. We discuss similarities and differences seen in the pottery of Nim li Punit and that of other political centers of the Southern Belize Region, and note design and style elements that are shared with other parts of the Maya world.

Abstract: In 1923, Los Angeles teachers protested the state’s biennial budget, a controversial document from newly elected governor Friend Richardson that significantly cut funding to government agencies. The budget was the culmination of more than a decade of fiscal policy reform that reflected a significant shift in anti-tax sentiment. The expansion of state governance in the early twentieth century required the development of fiscal policies to meet the needs of the modern state, and public debates about taxation reflected deep ideological differences about the structure and scope of government and implicated public schooling. This analysis demonstrates two features of fiscal policy reform in California. First, tax reform shaped and was shaped by the political context, demonstrating the dynamic relationship between fiscal policy and state formation. Second, debates about tax reform were ultimately about the scope of government. Anti-tax campaigns that sought a more limited government implicated schooling, the largest item in the state budget, and undermined efforts to achieve educational equity.

This article uses Alexei Yurchak's account of late socialist performance and the deterritorialization of authoritative discourses to discuss the half-Korean identity of Viktor Tsoi, the most prominent rock start emerging from the perestroika period. It uses representations and perceptions of Tsoi from the 1980s to argue that in this period, it was possible to perform the nationalities listed in each Soviet citizen's passport, as well as official slogans like “the friendship of peoples,” in ways that allowed for flexible understandings of group identity—what the article conceptualizes as “deterritorialized nationality” via overviews of Soviet nationalities policy and the history of Soviet Koreans. The article illustrates deterritorialized nationality through readings of the landmark films Assa (1987), which concludes with a performance by Tsoi, and Needle (1988), which stars and features the music of Tsoi. In both films Tsoi's racial difference is evident in ways not possible in his music alone, but race takes on unanticipated meanings—hearkening to radical internationalisms that help us to think beyond our ever more polarized discussions surrounding identity in the west, as well as the renewed polarization of Russia and the west.

In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to the extraction zones or sacrifice zones left behind when commodities of value are withdrawn, tallied, and sold. In Victorian literature, England's coal mines, copper mines, quarries, and other sites of extraction left a hefty footprint, but so did the British extractive industry that was increasingly moving to the colonial frontier. Written in the aftermath of the emergence of the first fossil-fuel-based society, Victorian literature is a crucial archive for understanding extractivism and how it was both normalized and challenged across the British imperial world.

Antiracist commitments—in medieval studies and elsewhere—are incomplete without a commitment to abolitionist principles. These principles involve the dismantling of police, prisons, and many other institutions fostering the interests of carcerality, property protection, and racial capitalism. This essay encourages scholars of medieval dance to explore abolitionist horizons because, it argues, the study of medieval dance requires the development of three capacities also integral to the abolitionist project: 1) an ability to envision what we cannot know; 2) an understanding of how to act collectively even through our estrangement from each other (as medieval dancers did); 3) a willingness to take risks. These characteristics could help scholars of dance confront medieval studies and mobilize it to make not just the field but also the world a place of freedom, thriving, and mutual care.