This paper presents the palaeoecological analysis of five latest Pleistocene (17,500–13,500 cal yr BP) Arctic ground squirrel (Urocitellus parryii) middens from three sites in the Klondike goldfields of central Yukon Territory. Plant and invertebrate macrofossil records were represented by 24 and 20 taxa, respectively, providing a record of the local environment and the earliest known occurrences in Yukon Territory for several taxa (e.g., the robber fly [Lasiopogon sp.] and marsh yellowcress [Rorippa cf. palustris]). The plant and invertebrate assemblages indicate the persistence of steppe-tundra to at least 13,680 cal yr BP by the preservation of taxa typically occupying dry sites, many of which remain components of grasslands and south-facing azonal steppe communities in present-day Yukon Territory. In the context of shrub expansion that is documented to have occurred by 14,000 cal yr BP in interior Alaska, we consider the taphonomic biases associated with Arctic ground squirrel middens that may lead to the lack of shrub macrofossils preserved at the sites. Our study provides an ecologically unique and chronologically constrained perspective on the local persistence of steppe-tundra in easternmost Beringia despite the regional expansion of shrubs.

This study reconstructs the fluvial dynamics of the Bras de Fer distributary in the Rhône Delta (France) during the Little Ice Age (LIA) in response to short-term climatic forcing. A multiproxy approach combining historical cartography, sedimentology, geochemistry, magnetic susceptibility, and hydrological archives reveals accelerated meander migration and extensive overbank accretion between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries CE. Increased flood frequency, coinciding with positive phases of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO+), promoted rapid lateral channel shifts and the formation of crevasse splay complexes along the outside bank of the Grande Ponche meander. The results demonstrate that, despite stable relative sea levels, deltaic morphology remained highly sensitive to decadal-scale climatic variability, highlighting the dominant role of hydrological extremes in shaping fluvial-deltaic environments of Rhône delta during the late LIA.

Este artículo analiza los impactos de la expansión de grandes empresas forestales en el Alto Paraná, área central de esta producción en Argentina. Desde fines del siglo XX, el ingreso de capitales concentrados transformó la actividad, aumentando la integración vertical, desplazando productores y reorganizando regímenes laborales. El foco está en las condiciones de reproducción social de trabajadores sin tierra y pequeños productores con acceso limitado a medios de producción. En base a un estudio de caso en Puerto Piray (Misiones), se exploran sus estrategias laborales desde la categoría de “clases de trabajo”. Se argumenta que la diversidad de formas de trabajo y de actividades desplegadas para la reproducción de estas clases l encuentra un eje estructurador en la explotación del trabajo de las mujeres, en tanto son ellas quienes abarcan el continuo entre el trabajo reproductivo y el productivo.

This article explores the transformational potential of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI (genAI) – large language models (LLMs), chatbots, and AI-driven smart assistants yet to emerge – to reshape human cognition, memory, and creativity. First, the paper investigates the potential of genAI tools to enable a new form of human-computer co-remembering, based on prompting rather than traditional recollection. Second, it examines the individual, cultural, and social implications of co-creating with genAI for human creativity. These phenomena are explored through the concept of Homo Promptus, a figure whose cognitive processes are shaped by engagement with AI. Two speculative scenarios illustrate these dynamics. The first, ‘prompting to remember’, analyses genAI tools as cognitive extensions that offload memory work to machines. The second scenario, ‘prompting to create’, explores changes in creativity when performing together with genAI tools as co-creators. By mobilising concepts from cognitive psychology, media and memory studies, together with Huizinga’s exploration of play, and Rancière’s intellectual emancipation, this study argues that genAI tools are not only reshaping how humans remember and create but also redefining cultural and social norms. It concludes by calling for ‘critical’ engagement with the societal and intellectual implications of AI, advocating for research that fosters adaptive and independent (meta)cognitive practices to reconcile digital innovation with human agency.

Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—is an archive of displacement, containing the imprint of overlooked, erased, or forgotten (often violent) pasts stored in everyday things like trees, trash, talk, and translations. Uniting all these unintended archival deposits are the dead—especially the uncommemorated, forgotten, or abandoned dead—and the urban spaces they co-inhabit with the most marginalized of the living. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper centers on urban cemeteries as archival nodes that gather together impressions—physically and psycho-semiotically—of uncommemorated pasts that nevertheless have left their mark on the urban fabric and people’s lives. This material “documentation” embedded in the built environment provides a vernacular alternative to the “fantasy” of official, national archives, foregrounding the blurry colonial-postcolonial divide in ordinary people’s historical imaginaries. Urban traces of displaced people and pasts show how complex semiotic residues get carried across otherwise disparate urban spaces where the postcolonial present has yet to reckon fully with colonialism’s mortal remains.

Left-populist narratives of hydrocarbon extraction in the postcolonial world, including the twentieth-century Middle East, often construe it as a process whereby multinational fossil capital encloses and commodifies land held in common. Although such narratives may capture the experience of communities along certain oil and gas frontiers, they do not account for the social terrains and political trajectories of extractive land grabs in areas where private property in land already underpins commercial agriculture. How do energy companies engage with an existing market in land, and reorient a commodity frontier around extractive rather than agrarian capitalism? This article explores that question by examining property struggles in southern Iraq in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the multinational Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) sought to acquire land still devoted to cash crop agriculture. Drawing on business records and material from Iraqi archives entirely new to Anglophone scholarship, I show how land conflicts on the Basra oil frontier came to revolve less around the IPC as such than the Iraqi state. The latter’s expanding remit entailed both the revival of older powers of sovereign landlordism and the deployment of novel capacities, as the state sought to mediate conflicting legal claims on land and its value and manage the social consequences of territorial dispossession. Ultimately, this article historicizes the political-legal status of postcolonial landlord states like Iraq in an era of hydrocarbon extraction, locating the origin of their powers as much in the material assemblage of oil infrastructures as in the monopoly over oil rents.

Stories of fallen Kurdish revolutionaries who return to the living in dreams, and of Druze souls who circulate across securitized borders gesture at forms of vitality and animation that persist beyond biological death. In this article, we have put forward the concept of “insurgent immortality” to make sense of the political potency of revolutionary martyrs and past lives among Kurdish communities from Turkey and Syrian Druze communities in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. By insisting on the immortality of their dead, we argue, these stateless communities articulate a claim to counter-sovereignty. What makes these communities’ practices aimed at mastering and transcending death different from the sovereignty claimed by nation-states is that apparitions of dead martyrs and past lives work as expansive, boundary-crossing mechanisms, rather than the territorializing logics of enclosure and containment that mark state sovereignty. The immortality we describe in this article is insurgent because it relies on the recognition and cultivation of long-term exchange relations between the living and the dead, through which debt becomes a modality of generative expansion across both this and otherworldly times and spaces. The resulting sense of generalized indebtedness opens up spaces of liminality in which the dead come alive as both inspiring and unsettling figures. We develop insurgent immortality as a comparative concept that emerges from the specific ethnography of each case yet reaches across their contextual boundedness. In this way, we hope to inspire renewed conversation about shared trajectories of resistance, including its ambivalences, that arise in contexts of statelessness, occupation, and disenfranchisement.