Out of tune: the dangers of aligning proxy archives

Tuning is a widespread technique to combine, date and interpret multiple fossil proxy archives through aligning supposedly synchronous events between the archives. The approach will be reviewed by discussing a number of literature examples, ranging from peat and tephra layers to orbital tuning and d¹⁸O series from marine and ice deposits. Potential problems will be highlighted such as the dangers of circular reasoning and unrecognised chronological uncertainties, and some solutions suggested. Fossil proxy research could become enhanced if tuning were approached in a more quantitative, reliable and objective way, and especially if individual proxy archives were non-tuned and kept on independent time-scales.

High-resolution 14C dating of a 25,000-year lake-sediment record from equatorial East Africa

We dated a continuous, ~22-m long sediment sequence from Lake Challa (Mt. Kilimanjaro area, Kenya/Tanzania) to produce a solid chronological framework for multi-proxy reconstructions of climate and environmental change in equatorial East Africa over the past 25,000 years. The age model is based on a total of 168 AMS 14C dates on bulk-organic matter, combined with a 210Pb chronology for recent sediments and corrected for a variable old-carbon age offset. This offset was estimated by i) pairing bulk-organic 14C dates with either 210Pb-derived time markers or 14C dates on grass charcoal, and ii) wiggle-matching high-density series of bulk-organic 14C dates. Variation in the old-carbon age offset through time is relatively modest, ranging from ~450 yr during glacial and late glacial time to ~200 yr during the early and mid-Holocene, and increasing again to ~250 yr today. The screened and corrected 14C dates were calibrated sequentially, statistically constrained by their stratigraphical order. As a result their constrained calendar-age distributions are much narrower, and the calibrated dates more precise, than if each 14C date had been calibrated on its own. The smooth-spline age-depth model has 95% age uncertainty ranges of ~50–230 yr during the Holocene and ~250–550 yr in the glacial section of the record. The d13C values of paired bulk-organic and grass-charcoal samples, and additional 14C dating on selected turbidite horizons, indicates that the old-carbon age offset in Lake Challa is caused by a variable contribution of old terrestrial organic matter eroded from soils, and controlled mainly by changes in vegetation cover within the crater basin.

River definitions in Roman technical literature

Definitions of rivers and their use by Roman land surveyors and lawyers.

The anonymity of the hunt: A critique of hunting as sharing

Hunter-gatherers are often ascribed a “monistic” worldview at odds with the nature-society dichotomy. The centerpiece of this claim is that they view hunting as similar to sharing within the band and prey animals as part of a common sphere of sociality. This article challenges this thesis. An examination of the work of its main proponents shows that it conflates two different senses of “animal”—the flesh-and-blood animals of the hunt and the animal Spirit that is said to control the animals. The sharing motif in hunting makes sense with respect to the anthropomorphic Spirit but not to the animals hunted. The conditions of the hunt as a spatiotemporal event provide further grounds for skepticism toward the idea of hunting-as-sharing. Drawing on biologist Robert Hinde’s model of relationships, I argue that hunting represents an anonymous one-off interaction that cannot develop into a personal relationship, in stark contrast to the durable forms of personalized sociality associated with the hunter-gatherer band. This is not to deny the possibility of human-animal cosociality in the form of personal relationships but rather to redirect the search away from the hunt to the interface with domesticated animals.

The Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU A New Panopticism

The Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union (FRA) is the EU’s newest, and only, human rights institution. The FRA represents a new way of speaking about rights in the EU, using ‘governance’ language. It was not conceived as a traditional human rights monitoring body and the monitoring mission was actively abandoned in favour of an advisory one. This article examines how the FRA’s governance-related role actually reveals a type of monitoring best understood as ‘surveillance’ in a critical, Foucauldian sense. In exercising surveillance tactics, the FRA represents a model of panopticism which allows it to carry out a new form of government. This is an interesting observation not only because of the implications it has for an EU that is striving to move away from government towards governance, but also because it challenges the assumption of the FRA as a ‘beacon on fundamental rights’ and a model of apolitical progress.