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AbstractThe ‘widow’ is a gendered, socially contingent category. Women who experienced spousal bereavement in the early middle ages faced various socio‐economic and legal ramifications; the ‘widow’ was further a rhetorical figure with a defined emotional register. The widower is, by contrast, an anachronistic category. In the absence of developed models of male ‘widowhood’, this article considers the case study of Einhard, whose letter of bereavement appears to offer a rare glimpse into early medieval interiority. Einhard did not experience the same socio‐economic and legal consequences of female widowhood. But was he, in his own rhetorical self‐expression, a male widow?

This paper looks at some of the oldest examples of visual art that show evidence of experiences of altered states of consciousness reported by the last persistence hunters. Persistence hunters relied on endurance and stamina to pursue their prey until it collapsed and was easily killed. Persistence hunting has been studied from viewpoints of paleontology and ethnography, this article offers a psychological connection between persistence hunting hypothesis and origins of symbolic culture. The article outlines the persistence hunting hypothesis describing its significance for future studies of the prehistoric cultures and their achievements. It covers persistence hunting and tracking methodology, its possible origins and how it may explain bigger brains in our species. It also describes the connection between endurance running and altered states of consciousness, and its connections with some shamanic practices. The article presents visual evidence, or fragments, that can be interpreted through persistence hunting and tracking, covering recurring topics such as hoof prints, blood trails, vulva imagery, therianthropes and nasal bleeds. Archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has proposed a shamanic explanation for rock art interpretation. This approach was based on ethnographic studies of Southern African hunter-gatherers. He suggested that African rock art often depicts trance hallucinations experienced by the shamans. This article offers an alternative and additional naturalistic explanation of prehistoric imagery based on the hunting methods used by the prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Combining the main outlines (persistence hunting hypothesis and its visual evidence in prehistoric rock art) this article offers a novel approach to rock art research which involves the history and documented experience of persistence hunting and tracking among the early hunter-gatherer societies. Peer reviewed

Ella Margareta Kivikoski (25 May 1901 in Tammela–27 July 1990 in Helsinki) was the first woman in Finland to defend her Doctoral thesis in Archaeology in 1939. Many duties in the State Archaeological Commission of Finland provided a good basis for her research career. In 1941 she received a docentship (an associate professorship) at the University of Helsinki in the Department of Archaeology of Finland and the Nordic Countries. In 1948 Kivikoski was appointed to the chair of the same department, becoming at the time the only female professor, the second in sequence, at the University of Helsinki and the first female professor in archaeology in the Nordic countries. After the appointment to a professorship, Kivikoski was called to the Finnish Academy of Sciences, becoming its first female member. She retired in 1969. The Finnish Iron Age was Kivikoski’s main speciality. Her published scientific production is wide, consisting of several monographs, articles and edited works. Her major publication is Die Eisenzeit Finnlands, the catalogue of Iron Age artefacts found in Finland, that is still used today. Kivikoski was well networked in the learned societies, internationally active and awarded many foreign distinctions of honour. Kivikoski was demanding, even abrupt, as a professor but many remember her warm interest in her students. She guided students to fieldwork, especially at Iron Age sites on the Åland Islands where she also initiated the study of Iron Age houses in Finland. Kivikoski kept to culture-historical approaches and comparative typological analyses of artefacts and solid remains. Peer reviewed

This paper investigates the syntactic–pragmatic behavior of two expletive-like elements, namely a and chiru, in Fornese and Cilentano, two Romance varieties spoken in Northern and Southern Italy, respectively. We argue that a and chiru are not bona fide expletive subjects but discourse-pragmatic expletives, which mark zero aboutness or the absence of an aboutness referent in an utterance. The investigation of Fornese and Cilentano points towards the existence of a sub-class of null-subject languages where aboutness as a discourse feature must be structurally satisfied by merging an overt or null topic in the syntactic spine of the clause. In the absence of such an element—for example, in thetic clauses—a discourse-pragmatic expletive is externally merged as a last-resort strategy to satisfy [uAboutness]. We argue that, in these null-subject languages, the satisfaction of the discourse feature [uAboutness] is an LF requirement, which is subject to a parametric choice. We show that, in Fornese, “default” [aboutness] is satisfied in SubjP, which is the canonical syntactic position for overt subjects within a cartographic approach. In Cilentano, on the other hand, [aboutness] is satisfied in a higher position within the C-domain, namely ShiftP, the canonical syntactic position that hosts overt aboutness/shift topics.

ABSTRACT Exogamous marriage alliances involving royal women played a prominent role in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity in the seventh century AD. Yet the large number of well-furnished female burials from this period suggests a broader change in the role of women. The authors present the results of isotopic analysis of seventh-century burials, comparing male and female mobility and the mobility of females from well-furnished versus poorly/unfurnished burials. Results suggest increased mobility during the Conversion Period that is, paradoxically, most noticeable among women buried in poorly furnished graves; their well-furnished contemporaries were more likely to have grown up near to their place of burial.

Global grids of geophysical data or properties of the Earth are increasingly being used, perhaps because they are easy to access and make calculations on. Where original data are proprietary, researchers can sometimes obtain a form of those data within these grids, albeit at commonly lower resolution. Examples include gravity fields (Balmino et al., 2011; Sandwell et al., 2014), thicknesses of sediment overlying basement (Whittaker et al., 2013; Straume et al., 2019), Earth's topography (Smith and Sandwell, 1997; Becker et al., 2009; Ryan et al., 2009; Weatherall et al., 2015), crustal thickness (Laske et al., 2013), seafloor spreading history (Müller et al., 1997) and magnetic fields (Maus et al., 2009). However, depending on the type of study, when working with such data, we need to know the distribution of the original measurements that were used to compile those grids, hence which grid nodes contain interpolated values and which nodes are close to measurement sites. Ideally, we should be aware of the noise characteristics and resolution of such data also. The term "grid resolution" is commonly used in the literature but is misleading, as it refers to the spacing of nodes in the grid, not the resolution of the contributing data. Resolution can also be affected by processing steps used to create the grid. The article of Saada et al. (2021) describes important calculations and useful observations, though some parts of the study illustrate issues that can be encountered in analysing global grids. Given the increasing use of global grids, we provide this comment to help engender discussion.

Since the perceptions of communities at risk play a central role in managing future emergencies, contingency plans must consider the appropriate involvement of the perspectives of exposed populations. This article addresses the case of Ensenada (Puerto Varas, Chile), a settlement located in the area of direct influence of the Calbuco and Osorno volcanoes. They respectively rank 2nd and 8th in the list of highest-threat Chilean volcanoes. Here we depict the multiple risk perceptions of the inhabitants of Ensenada and the integration of human perceptions into volcanic emergency management through qualitative research, based on semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. Our results illustrate that Ensenada represents a settlement critically exposed to multiple hazards from both volcanoes, intertwined with a series of social conditions that influence individuals’ self-perception as vulnerable to future eruptions and, simultaneously, as capable of acquiring conditions to strengthen disaster preparedness. Moreover, the locals are eager to participate in future emergency management planning and adopt preventive attitudes at community, household, and individual levels. Based on these results, we highlight the advantages of a better understanding of the causes of perceived risk and its integration into emergency management strategies for future eruptions, in order to visualise how people make sense of daily life and disaster preparedness in the midst of active volcanoes.

It has been argued in forensic science that the empirical validation of a forensic inference system or methodology should be performed by replicating the conditions of the case under investigation and using data relevant to the case. This study demonstrates that the above requirement for validation is also critical in forensic text comparison (FTC); otherwise, the trier-of-fact may be misled for their final decision. Two sets of simulated experiments are performed: one fulfilling the above validation requirement and the other overlooking it, using mismatch in topics as a case study. Likelihood ratios (LRs) are calculated via a Dirichlet-multinomial model, followed by logistic-regression calibration. The derived LRs are assessed by means of the log-likelihood-ratio cost, and they are visualized using Tippett plots. Following the experimental results, this paper also attempts to describe some of the essential research required in FTC by highlighting some central issues and challenges unique to textual evidence. Any deliberations on these issues and challenges will contribute to making a scientifically defensible and demonstrably reliable FTC available.