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During the Late Pleistocene and Holocene (over the past c. 100,000 years), Homo sapiens dispersed into a wide array of novel, challenging environments. Remarkable adaptive flexibility encouraged humans to improvise social and technical behaviours, while niche constructing tendencies enabled them to reshape their ecologies. However, the rate and scale at which humans could transform their behaviours and environments in the deep past remains unclear. This thesis explores how humans came to frequent one particularly challenging environment — small-island rainforests — for the first time. The research examines the peopling of Wallacea and the circum-New Guinea Islands, with new evidence from the Raja Ampat Islands, which lie at the interface of these two biogeographic regions known as Lydekker’s Line. The thesis first introduces adaptive flexibility and niche construction theory, plus provides an overview of the Raja Ampat Archaeological Project. It critically analyses literature on the ecological implications of islands and tropical forests for human occupation, and emphasises how these environments fluctuate through time and stimulate behavioural flexibility. It then provides a novel reappraisal of the linguistic, genetic, and archaeological evidence for human dispersals through Wallacea and New Guinea, as different human populations passed back and forth across a major biogeographic line. Next, it examines how settlement behaviours have changed in the northern Raja Ampats, particularly in the recent past, drawing on historical and ethnographic evidence; it also examines how site distributions are patterned, building on original site reconnaissance survey. Chronostratigraphic and palaeoecological data from new cave excavations in the northern Raja Ampats are presented to examine how their use has fluctuated across c. 50,000 years of occupation, alongside environmental changes including marine transgressions and shifting forest cover. This is followed by exploration of how foraging practices transformed through the millennia, drawing principally upon zooarchaeological analyses. How people’s technological behaviours changed through time is then addressed primarily through bone tool, lithic, and ceramic analyses, particularly during the Holocene. A synthesis of the new evidence discusses how it can be understood within the regional context of Wallacea and New Guinea, and in a global comparative framework. A conclusion highlights the contribution made to understanding how humans transformed their behaviours and the insular forest ecologies they inhabited, and considers how we can model the temporal dynamics of human behaviour over the longue durée. Gates Cambridge

Working for the Crown: German Migrants and Britain's Commercial Success in the Early Eighteenth-century American Colonies Relaxation in the movement of foreigners into Britain and the origins of the Foreign Protestants Naturalization Act of 1708 (7 Ann c 5) have been seen to lie in the arrival of religious refugees in England and the unsuitability of existing legislation to accommodate large numbers of foreigners. This paper proposes that trade and commercial interests in the American colonies promoted the cause of naturalisation by inciting German migration, causing Parliament to relax access to the domestic labour market and crucially allow German labour to be trafficked to the colonies. Reform was dictated by the needs of commerce and colonial enterprise, not just by politicians, courtiers and bureaucrats in London. The passing of the Naturalization Act (1708) and the subsequent General Naturalization Act (1709) both took advantage of European warfare and economic destruction, and were a direct response to the colonial needs to source continental labour. The Acts owed much to colonial Americans like Carolina Governor John Archdale who, like his co-religionist neighbour William Penn, acted in the interest of commerce and the colonial classes, broadening the base of non-Anglican access to the colonies. Opportunities afforded to German migrants in the American colonies, in particular, grew from this signal legislative change. This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Verlag C.H.Beck.

Indigeneity is a complex social construct that can be defined in multiple ways using diverse markerstraditionally based on the characteristics of individuals. Survey-based studies have used language,self-identification or location information to operationalise Indigeneity. Yet, as suggested by Walterand Andersen (2013), Gillborn et al. (2018) and others, few scholars reflect on how the Indigeneityvariable is specified and whether this operationalisation may impact results. This article examinesthis issue empirically using the case of Indigeneity in Peru. First, survey-based empirical studies areidentified to explore the ways in which Indigeneity has been operationalised. Then, using the YoungLives study, we present diverse operationalisations of Indigeneity and outline how these may lead to different educational outcomes for children. We show that quantitative researchers using surveybased data should engage more deeply with different operationalisations of Indigeneity as these can lead to different educational outcomes for children categorised as Indigenous.

Understanding ‘counter archaeologies’ as taking a counterpoint and challenging normative perspectives, this paper considers infancy in Iron-Age Scandinavia through an examination of children deposited in settlements and wetlands. The paper reports on a data set of child deposition from Scandinavia in the first millennium CE, and compares the practices with cases from other Germanic areas. While a complex phenomenon where cause of death is mostly unknown, textual sources indicate that neither limited emotional responses to child loss nor infanticide was uncommon in the first millennium CE. Infanticide is widespread cross-culturally, yet is foreign to many researchers because it counters deep-held contemporary, Western perceptions of universal maternal instinct. The paper questions whether infant loss within Scandinavian and Germanic societies prompted emotional responses akin to Western, contemporary reactions. Were infants more closely related to animate objects than human beings? And did this ontological logic provoke the use of infant remains in ritual deposition?

In the last decade, macro religious institutions have undergone a process of digitalization that enabled them to incorporate Internet Communication Technologies in their organizational infrastructure. Stemming from digital religion scholarship, the research presented in this paper relate to a study of the philosophy and functioning of an innovative Catholic media enterprise called Christian Media Center (CMC). Based in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the CMC was established through the cooperation between the long-standing Franciscan Order and the technology-savvy Brazilian community of Canção Nova. Accordingly, this paper asks: which forms of interdenominational negotiation are involved in the functioning of the CMC? Drawing on interviews conducted during three years, this research will outline the process of internal negotiation required by the development of this Catholic new media project and propose possible directions for future research. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837727

Questions about the evolution of material culture are widespread in the humanities and social sciences. Statistical modeling of long-term changes in material culture is less common due to a lack of appropriate frameworks. Our goal is to close this gap and provide robust statistical methods for examining changes in the diversity of material culture. We provide an open-source and quantitative workflow for estimating rates of origination, extinction, and preservation, as well as identifying key shift points in the diversification histories of material culture. We demonstrate our approach using two distinct kinds of data: age ranges for the production of American car models, and radiocarbon dates associated with archaeological cultures of the European Neolithic. Our approach improves on existing frameworks by disentangling the relative contributions of origination and extinction to diversification. Our method also permits rigorous statistical testing of competing hypotheses to explain changes in diversity. Finally, we stress the value of a flexible approach that can be applied to data in various forms; this flexibility allows scholars to explore commonalities between forms of material culture and ask questions about the general properties of cultural change.

The idea of citizenship (politeuma) was a useful way for the Cappadocian Fathers to talk about identity, and thus about belonging. A prestigious and long-running discourse in Christian and non-Christian culture, it was connected to notions of loyalty to a homeland (patris) or city (polis), and to membership in a community (politeia). These could be both temporal and local on the one hand, and spiritual and universal on the other. Both implied certain differing relationships between the individual and the community, and thus could be causes of tension. In the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers, these concepts assumed markedly antagonistic aspects. Although the phenomenon of martyr cults went some way towards marrying these two concepts of citizenship, they could also throw up tensions between local and universal themselves, indicating that this divergence remained a significant tension for the Cappadocians, and within fourth-century Greek Christianity more generally.

Kant’s theory of international politics and his right of hospitality are commonly associated with expansive projects of securing human rights or cosmopolitan governance beyond state borders. This article shows how this view misunderstands Kant’s criticism of the law of nations ( ius gentium) tradition as handed down into the eighteenth century as well as the logic of his radical alternative, which was designed to explain the conditions of possibility of global peace as a solution to the Hobbesian problem of a war of all against all in the state of nature. I resolve longstanding confusion over the meaning and justification of Kant’s right of “hospitality” by showing how it functions not as a freestanding positive claim demanding enforcement but as a way of ruling out specious justifications for war against those the traditional law of nations permitted one to label “enemies.” This poses important questions for contemporary theories of global justice.