Considerable evidence survives of the cooking and eating of kebabs as a major form of meat consumption in early China. Not only are there numerous artistic depictions in both painting and low-relief stone sculpture of this practice, but there are also some very early excavated skewers, grills, and indeed preserved meat kebabs, not to mention references in contemporary literature, and this evidence significantly predates any documentation of kebabs in the Middle East. However, in spite of this wealth of documentation, this tradition has gone largely unexplored, partly due to scholars failing to understand the relevant terminology and partly due to an unjustified belief that all kebab cooking must derive from the Middle East. This article explores the indigenous ancient Chinese tradition of kebab cooking, focused on grilling and roasting of smaller (luan) or larger (zi) pieces of meat seasoned with soybean pastes and sauces, which developed independently of other similar culinary practices elsewhere. This analysis is focused on literary evidence of the Chinese kebab, with particular reference to the contents of a recently discovered very early cookbook, dating to the Han Dynasty, excavated from the tomb of Wu Yang, first marquis of Yuanling, who died in 162 BCE.

Given the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to create human clones, it is not surprising that chatbots have been implemented in politics. In a turbulent political context, these AI-driven bots are likely to be used to spread biased information, amplify polarisation, and distort our memories. Large language models (LLMs) lack ‘political memory’ and cannot accurately process political discourses that draw from collective political memory. We refer to research concerning collective political memory and AI to present our observations of a chatbot experiment undertaken during the Presidential Elections in Finland in early 2024. This election took place at a historically crucial moment, as Finland, traditionally an advocate of neutrality and peacefulness, had become a vocal supporter of Ukraine and a new member state of NATO. Our research team developed LLM-driven chatbots for all presidential candidates, and Finnish citizens were afforded the chance to engage with these chatbot–politicians. In our study, human–chatbot discussions related to foreign and security politics were especially interesting. While rhetorically very typical and believable in light of real political speech, chatbots reorganised prevailing discourses generating responses that distorted the collective political memory. In actuality, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had drastically changed Finland’s political positioning. Our AI-driven chatbots, or ‘electobots’, continued to promote constructive dialogue with Russia, thus earning our moniker ‘Finlandised Bots’. Our experiment highlights that training AI for political purposes requires familiarity with the prevailing discourses and attunement to the nuances of the context, showcasing the importance of studying human–machine interactions beyond the typical viewpoint of disinformation.

In 2019 and 2022, Indigenous leaders mobilized rural comunas in general strikes that forced the national government of Ecuador to negotiate the terms of newly introduced fiscal and policy measures. These mobilizations came despite long-term demographic decline in these same rural comunas. Further, the ministries charged with granting this authority to comunas today exercise little oversight. Why, then, has the comuna persisted as the preferred form of local organization amid widespread shifts to postagrarian ways of life? We have approached this problem through field research in over a dozen rural comunas, a review of comuna registrations, interviews with comuna leadership, and intergenerational dialogues among comuna members. In practical terms, we find comuna leadership consolidating an agenda focused on infrastructure development in the place of activism for land or the pursuit of agricultural investments. At the same time, it is through rituals of registration and management that local authorities not only find legitimacy but also secure a measure of “cultural autonomy” insofar as comuna members associate the disciplined fulfillment of procedures with the historical expansion of social rights. As the younger generation pursues nonagrarian careers, older comuna members underscore the mutuality of comuna life and lay out a moral purpose and a pathway that in effect centers state procedure as essential for indigenous autonomy.

We report a new relative sea level curve from Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland, to investigate the transition from maximum to minimum loading across Nares Strait. We sampled marine bivalves and terrestrial macrofossils for radiocarbon dating from raised marine terraces in Rensselaer Valley, Inglefield Land (78.58°N, 70.71°W) to constrain relative sea level through the Holocene. The oldest terrestrial macrofossil of 9010–8650 cal yr BP provides a minimum-limiting constraint for the deglaciation. Sea level fell rapidly from the marine limit at 85 ± 4 m to 37.5 ± 4 m above sea level (m asl) between 9010–8650 and 7970–7790 cal yr BP at a rate of 49 m/ka. The rate of sea -level fall decreased to 11 m/ka between 7970–7790 and 5320–5060 cal yr BP, when it fell from 37.5 ± 4 to 9 ± 4 m asl. After 5,320–5,060 cal yr BP, we estimate sea level fell at a lower rate of 2 m/ka to modern sea level. The period of fastest emergence in Inglefield Land is earlier in time than in Hall Land, reflecting earlier deglaciation, and is steeper than in Hall Land and Washington Land. This sea-level history captures the transition from the style of emergence from Pituffik to Hall Land.

African historiography is most persuasive when it refuses to let the state’s archive dictate the story of the nation. Across the last two decades, historians and historical anthropologists have widened the evidentiary field beyond bureaucratic texts—toward oral histories, ritual grammars, sacred ecologies, newspapers, vernacular maps, and the grainy everyday of rumor and reputation. This scholarly review exemplifies that methodological turn while voicing a shared theoretical wager: African political and social life is not best explained by models of institutional consolidation but by moral economies, spatial counter-imaginaries, and religious idioms through which communities fashion accountability and meaning.