A multidisciplinary analysis was conducted of numerous surface depressions termed Piscine, exhibiting subcircular morphology. These landforms, which characterized the southern sector of the Pontine Plain (Central Italy), have been documented in historical maps since the eighteenth century, and remain of uncertain origin. To investigate their genesis, bibliographic sources, historical cartography, and geognostic data were integrated to reconstruct the geological and stratigraphic settings in which these depressions developed. These landforms were digitized from pre-reclamation maps and analyzed to explore their distribution patterns and relationships with selected subsurface variables. The results indicate that the depressions are primarily located in areas characterized by outcropping ancient coastal dune sands and display distinct spatial patterns. A consistent spatial correlation was identified between depression density and peat deposit thickness, whereas no clear relationship was observed with fault density. These findings suggest that compaction processes affecting peat-rich sediments, which lead to differential subsidence of overlying deposits, may be a mechanism for depression formation. However, owing to data limitations, alternative processes (piping-related sinkhole activity or dissolution of continental carbonate rocks), cannot be entirely excluded. Further detailed geognostic investigations are required to refine the interpretation and improve the understanding of the subsurface controls governing the development of these landforms.

ABSTRACT At the close of the eighteenth century, the village of Drehberg became the site of an annual local sporting event, classified as a pseudo-Olympics or pre-modern Olympic Games. After a hiatus of nearly 190 years, this tradition has been revived in contemporary times. This article examines both the historical event and the locality within the conceptual framework of cultural and sports heritage tourism, with particular emphasis on the safeguarding and preservation of cultural heritage. Employing a methodological triangulation – including archival research, expert and standardized interviews, field visits, and content analysis of tourist guidebooks – it explores both the tangible and intangible dimensions of this heritage phenomenon. The findings reveal a pronounced discrepancy between the cultural significance attributed to the Drehberg Olympic Games and their marginal representation within the tourism discourse of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The article contends that Drehberg, through its unique integration of sport, education, historical tradition, and local identity, possesses considerable – yet largely untapped – potential as a heritage tourism destination. In light of this, the article underscores the imperative to reassess existing promotional strategies and to develop new narrative frameworks that would reposition Drehberg within the cultural and touristic landscape of the Dessau-Wörlitz region.

ABSTRACT The Russian Empire sought to control the Caucasus from the eighteenth century as part of its expansionist policy in Asia and Europe. However, this effort resulted in significant human, economic and temporal losses, delaying Russia's expansion. Scholars have since examined the prolonged war and heavy casualties in the region. The Caucasian struggle for independence has generally been portrayed in the literature as the Muridism movement or a mystical-fanatical ideology, a characterization that has persisted to the present day. However, this approach overshadows the military and political achievements of the Caucasians. Moreover, this widely accepted yet scientifically unsubstantiated notion has led to research being built on a weak and unfounded basis. This study examines primary sources chronologically and comparatively using document and content analysis. As a result, no evidence was found to support the claim that a radical or fanatical movement emerged during the nineteenth-century Caucasian struggle against the Russian Empire.

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the historical fusions among Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and criollo populations through cimarronaje in eighteenth-century eastern Venezuela. It examines the spatial overlap between missionised Indigenous communities and other non-Indigenous and mixed populations situated within colonial hierarchies. First, it situates colonisation within the region’s multi-ethnic Indigenous organisations. Second, it analyses interactions between Indigenous and mixed populations inside the perimeters of colonial control, with particular attention to the legal incorporation of maroons into the generic category of ‘Spaniards’, a juridical construct defined against missionised Indigenous populations. Third, it explores encounters on the margins of colonial authority. Finally, it argues that interethnic alliances helped produce mixed social groups that contributed to the fragmentation of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. In conclusion, cimarrón societies help reveal how the expected colonial correspondence between ethnicity, race, and social space became unstable in this frontier setting.

The impact of prohibited periods on the seasonality of marriage: denominational differences and cultural continuities among English settlers in nineteenth century Tasmania

This study aims to examine changes in the cultural landscape shaped by hidden Christians in Japan since the eighteenth century and to highlight, for the first time, the positive significance of historical transformations in these cultural landscapes. The narrative of cultural landscape change holds lessons for universal issues of persecution and discrimination that humanity has yet to resolve. We have divided the region’s cultural landscape into three periods: before the arrival of hidden Christians, after the arrival, and after the latter half of the twentieth century. Up to the first half of the twentieth century, the cultural landscape was impacted by discrimination and persecution between hidden Christians and the surrounding Buddhist communities. This landscape has evolved into a modern landscape as residents have addressed the region’s negative history. This study seeks to positively evaluate changes, advocating the ‘evolving cultural landscape’ concept as a representation of societal maturity and progress.

ABSTRACT Edmund Burke’s theological opinions have provoked considerable comment, in his own time and since. Although a range of interpretations have been offered, the current consensus amongst serious scholars is that Burke’s religious views could best be described as ‘latitudinarian.’ This article argues that the term ‘latitudinarian’ is too broad to adequately convey an accurate insight into Burke’s religious and ecclesiological doctrines. I seek to articulate what was so idiosyncratic about Burke’s ecclesiological views, and why this provoked comment and criticism then and since. I first analyse the background of the latitude movement, examining the premises behind its arguments in the seventeenth century. I then explain how this became embedded within the eighteenth century Hanoverian State-Church, and how this association modified the latitudinarian legacy. The bulk of the article then analyses Burke’s differing accounts and defences of this inheritance, providing the first coherent account of Burke’s ecclesiology. It argues that Burke was a unique defender of that settlement, and that the premises he applied when defending it were contrary to those of the latitude tradition and led him to endorse different prescriptions for its preservation and improvement. This will consequently reveal the poverty of the term ‘latitude’ when applied to Burke.

ABSTRACT This article proposes a detailed cartographic analysis of the map of Wallachia (Romania) published in 1788 by Ferdinand Joseph Ruhedorf, a cartographic product that has been relatively little discussed in the specialised literature, despite the wide circulation it appears to have enjoyed. Based on systematic georeferencing, cartometric analyses, and the construction of a geospatial database, the study evaluates the map's accuracy, internal geometry, and informational content. The results show that the map was compiled from heterogeneous Austrian sources and constructed without a mathematical projection or coordinate system, relying instead on an empirical planimetric geometry. A detailed analysis of the settlement network, roads, bridges, and natural resources highlights the functional structure of the territory end the close relationship between relief, mobility, and economic organisation at the end of the eighteenth century. The study reconstructs the cartographic lineage of the map and highlights its influence on subsequent Balkan cartography, demonstrating the potential of modern geospatial approaches in the re-evaluation of historical cartographic sources.

The Canary Islands, settled by Berber communities from Northwest Africa during the first millennium CE, offer a privileged window into coastal economies and early maritime adaptations that remain poorly documented on the adjacent mainland. Playa Chica (Sardina, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands) preserves a five-phase Indigenous occupation sequence spanning from the 6th to the 13th centuries CE. This study aims to test the practice of specialized marine exploitation during Phase 5 (11th–13th centuries CE) employing a multiproxy approach. Systematic sampling and processing of sediments has provided a large assemblage dominated by molluscs and echinoids, followed by fish remains and crustaceans. Abundant fish scales indicate intensive on-site processing. The bone industry encompasses worked goat horn cores and hundreds of horn flakes interpreted as scaling tools, along with small hooks crafted from pig canines. Seed remains include crops (barley, durum wheat, fig) and smoke-prone plants used as fuels (Euphorbia sp., rhizomes of Cyperus sp., and elements of Pinus canariensis cones), consistent with fish drying or smoking. Low-intensity, smoke-prone fuels identified through anthracological analyses, and twenty-nine hearths reinforce this interpretation. Pottery is scarce and functionally associated with cooking, while lithics are abundant and largely locally sourced. Collectively, these findings define an activity area dedicated to the processing and preservation of marine resources, suggesting integration within coastal-inland exchange networks. As one of the most extensively sampled coastal contexts in the archipelago, Playa Chica provides critical comparative data for understanding the intensification of marine economies among Northwest African-derived populations during the late Holocene.

One of the most peculiar behaviors of rodents is tail-rattling, a rapid vibration of the tail which can produce a rattling sound when performed against a hard surface. Tail-rattling is widespread across rodents, having been observed in 32 species from 19 genera, including Mus and Rattus. Rodent tail-rattling has been known from the eighteenth century, when it was described as part of the defensive behavior of the crested porcupine. From the 1940s, comparative psychologist John Scott systematically studied tail-rattling in laboratory mice, making it widely popular among laboratory researchers as one of the main components of the mouse agonistic ethogram. Currently, tail-rattling is interpreted almost exclusively as a threat display. However, historically, tail-rattling has been described in a great variety of different contexts, including intraspecies agonism, antipredator behavior, male-to-female courtship, female proceptive behavior, caressing by a human caregiver, social isolation, home-cage change, footshock-induced fear and decisional conflict. This wide range of contexts indicates that tail-rattling is not just a sign of aggressiveness, but can be associated with a set of emotions comprising anger, fear, distress, uncertainty, sexual arousal and physical pleasure. Notably, tail-rattling is expressed by rodents in emotional contexts of both negative and positive affective value. In the present article, firstly we provide a historical overview of rodent tail-rattling observations, starting from porcupines and ending with mice, covering a period from the 1770s to 2026. We then discuss what emotional state tail-rattling may express. Subsequently, we evaluate the possible functions of rodent tail-rattling. Additionally, we present our explanatory model of tail-rattling, the discharge model. Finally, we propose future directions for rodent tail-rattling research, including the employment of tail-rattling as a marker of animal welfare in laboratory and zoo rodents.

ABSTRACT In the early twentieth century in North America, as Philip J. Deloria (Dakota) has observed, non-Indigenous women began to join the men who had been ‘playing Indian’ since the late eighteenth century. This paper considers the Wauneita Society, formed in 1910 as the women students' organization at the University of Alberta in western Canada. Like the young women's organization the Camp Fire Girls, also formed in 1910, the Wauneitas' costumes and performances drew on the figure of the ‘Indian maiden’ that circulated in commercial and popular culture in Canada and the US. This paper draws attention to similarities between the Wauneitas and the Camp Fire Girls, situating both organizations in settler colonial ideologies of eugenic maternalism. It suggests that when white women dressed up as ‘Indian maidens,’ they enacted the ‘logic of elimination’ that Deloria has shown is fundamental to all Indigenous impersonation, while also affirming that the logic of elimination has as its ideological correlative a logic of population. In this register the work of white women as eugenic ‘mothers of the race’ would be central, and the image of the early twentieth-century white ‘Indian maiden’ would index the colonial state's increasing interference with Indigenous women's reproductive bodies.

The historiography of energy and industrialization characterizes the nineteenth century as the age of coal. Wood is rather seen as a pre-modern energy source. In line with this, the historiography on wood and forests focuses on the eighteenth century and the pioneering role of German foresters in determining sustainable management practices. Recently, historians have argued that wood remained a more important staple of industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than is often acknowledged. This raises the question how forestry economists and experts reacted to the rise of coal and industrialization. So far it has not been studied if these changes led to pessimism about the future of forests, new economic ideas or management practices, or changes in ownership structure or tariff policies. Focusing on Germany between 1850 and 1900, this paper uses forestry journals and handbooks to argue that foresters remained optimistic about future demand for timber, but strongly disagreed about economic questions regarding rotation periods, land use and the role of forests in the national economy.

As with furniture, several eighteenth-century keyboard instruments were enhanced and ennobled through the use of ornament, techniques, and diverse materials. This article offers an iconographic and ornamental reading of the case of the spinet MNM 0698, an Italian instrument from the first half of the eighteenth century, preserved in the collection of the Museu Nacional da Música in Mafra (Portugal). Decorated with lacca povera, the case—originally intended to protect and transport the instrument—transcends its utilitarian role to become an object of display and prestige. A clear aesthetic intention is added to its usefulness: the surfaces were designed to be equally appreciated visually. The iconographic program, built from engravings of literary, mythological, naturalistic, and orientalizing inspiration, also reflects the experiences, tastes, and erudition of its owner and the public who experienced it.

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope dataset from Roman sites in Germania inferior (Xanten, Tongeren, and Valkenburg).

ABSTRACT Adding to the existing network of tree-ring chronologies in Scandinavia, Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) trees at ∼750 m a.s.l. in western Norway were used to derive a record, AD 1252–2008, of maximum latewood density by X-ray densitometry. Based on significant correlation to mean April-September temperature, a reconstruction explaining 56% of the variability over the AD 1900–2008 calibration period was made for southern Norway, with correlations >0.7 for the westernmost regions. A drop in inter-series correlation and replication in the early fifteenth century suggests that the reconstruction is most robust from ca AD 1450 onward. On decadal timescales, the warmest reconstructed temperatures are in the last half of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries and cool periods were reconstructed in the mid-to-late fifteenth century, in the early seventeenth century, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the late eighteenth century and in the mid-nineteenth century. When comparing to tree-ring widths from the same site, diverging centennial trends are indicated by ensemble empirical mode decomposition analysis. More samples are needed to investigate this more closely. Annual to multidecadal scale agreement with other tree-ring density temperature reconstructions in Fennoscandia, especially those from central Sweden, indicates that the reconstruction is a reasonable representation of regional temperature variability in large parts of southern Norway.

ABSTRACT This paper illuminates the brahminical nature of Communication Studies scholarship and calls for a critical caste criticism which articulates the ethical, political, and epistemic commitments needed. This method of Critical Caste Criticism is emergent from Ayyathurai's call for Critical Caste Studies and explores beyond to sharpen our critical gaze in practicing a ruthless critique of the ontologizing capacity of caste, one that would be able to articulate the emergent historical formations of the brahminism, and racial capitalism. I illustrate this method by engaging an archival artifact about domestic slavery from the eighteenth century records of the Maratha Empire.

ABSTRACT Inheritance inventories (tereke) of grocers (bakkals), together with records detailing the goods stocked in neighbourhood shops, offer valuable insights into everyday food availability in eighteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. The organisation and spatial distribution of grocery shops suggest that they formed an integral component of the city's provisioning system, particularly by ensuring access to staple foodstuffs at the neighbourhood level. Drawing on an analysis of 104 grocers’ inventories from different districts of Istanbul, this article identifies food items that were widely available across the city as well as those that appeared more selectively. While these sources do not permit precise reconstructions of household consumption, they illuminate the structures of urban provisioning and the range of foodstuffs accessible to urban residents. Through close engagement with archival material, the article demonstrates how grocers’ inventories can enrich Ottoman food historiography by bringing neighbourhood-level provisioning practices and everyday food availability into sharper focus.

The capture and ransom of captives constituted a central element of migratory dynamics in the Luso-Maghrebi space. Beyond voluntary movements driven by politic, religious or economic factors, captivity configured a specific pattern of forced mobility that linked the Christian coasts of the Iberian Peninsula with the corsair ports of the Maghreb. From the conquest of Ceuta (1415) to the peace treaties of the eighteenth century, thousands of individuals were displaced against their will as a result of frontier warfare, privateering and piracy. In this context, the Order of the Most Holy Trinity played a central role as mediator, organising networks for fundraising and negotiating ransoms with Muslim authorities. By examining the evolution of these practices “ from individual rescues to diplomatic exchanges “ this study seeks to understand captivity as a form of coerced migration, distinct from slavery but essential to interpreting Luso-Maghrebi interactions in the early modern period

ABSTRACT The Maldives, an archipelago of some 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, has been a maritime crossroads for centuries. During the Age of European Expansion, the Maldives came to occupy a prominent role in world history. The islands provided vast quantities of cowry shells to European traders, which were used as currency and helped to facilitate the transatlantic slave trade. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the Maldivians' most important European trading partner. After the VOC established itself on the nearby island of Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and the coasts of the Indian subcontinent, the Dutch quickly realized that the Maldives were a significant navigational hazard that needed to be documented and charted to safely navigate to and from nearby outposts and avoid dangerous and costly shipwrecks. Throughout the VOC's existence, its ships experienced numerous mishaps in the Maldivian islands, whereby vessels were wrecked, sailors died, and trade goods were lost. By analyzing the VOC's extant cartographic and documentary records, this study presents a wealth of new information about Maldivian-Dutch interactions, shipwrecks, and the VOC's mapping of the Maldivian archipelago.

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between two Italian evaluative constructions, mezzo X and semi- X, both coming from the expression of half-quantity. The aim is to assess whether a competition-based perspective adequately accounts for their coexistence. To this end, we conduct both a synchronic analysis, focusing on lexical and semantic productivity to uncover differences in usage patterns, and a diachronic analysis, tracing the evolution of each construction’s productivity to identify whether their interaction is characterized by exclusion or inclusion. Synchronically, the productivity of each construction does not appear to be constrained by the presence of the other. Rather, we find overlaps across their domains of application, with frequent violations of isomorphism. Diachronically, the constructions do not replace one another; instead, they show increasing overlap, measured by the growing number of shared fillers. From the eighteenth century onwards, semi- X begins to converge and to overlap with mezzo X in the selection of adjectival fillers. However, mezzo X does not seem to exhibit any decline in productivity, nor a shift in its domain of application. These findings suggest that, in the case of evaluative constructions, coexistence may be more effectively accounted for by complex models of interaction, encompassing also inclusive or neutral relationships.