House of cards: cultural taxonomy and the study of the European Upper Palaeolithic

International audienceA fundamental element of Upper Palaeolithic archaeological practice is cultural taxonomy—the definition and description of taxonomic units that group assemblages according to their material culture and geographic and chronological distributions. The derived taxonomies, such as Aurignacian, Gravettian and Magdalenian, are used as units of analysis in many research questions and interpretations. The evidential and theoretical bases defining these taxonomic units, however, are generally lacking. Here, the authors review the current state of Upper Palaeolithic cultural taxonomy and make recommendations for the long-term improvement of the situation

Reject or revive? The crisis of cultural taxonomy in the European Upper Palaeolithic and beyond

International audienc

Access to Justice Online: Are Canadian Court Websites Accessible for Users with Visual Impairments?

Steps taken to make legal information available online have resulted in access to justice benefits for many. However, these benefits may not extend to everyone equally. As scholars have cautioned, the adoption of new technologies that purport to improve access to justice may perpetuate the exclusion of vulnerable and marginalized individuals and groups from the justice system. This article applies this insight to legal information made available online by Canadian court websites and CanLII. It does so through a two-part study. First, we used an automated testing tool to determine whether the websites noted above comply with accessibility standards. Second, after having secured research ethics approval, we worked with Access & Diversity at the University of British Columbia to recruit persons with visual impairments; these participants evaluated the same websites and provided feedback. Our results showed that while largely accessible, the tested websites fall short of best practices, presenting challenges to users with visual impairments. We recommend that Canadian courts correct the deficiencies identified by our study, that other online legal resources be tested for accessibility issues, and that future research focus on the extent to which online legal resources are accessible to other vulnerable or marginalized individuals or groups. Implementing these recommendations will ensure that the access to justice benefits of online legal information are extended to everyone

Comprehensive assessment of youth violence in five Caribbean countries: Gender and age differences

Differences in gender and age have been established in the context of crime, violence, and prevalence of risk and protective factors. These studies are often notable only in the Western Hemisphere. Despite growth in crime and violence in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), relatively little understanding of violence in CARICOM member states exists. In light of these concerns, the major purposes of this study include: (1) comprehensively assessing the scope of the four behaviors (i.e., engagement, victimization, witness, and report) in relation to violence and youth’s perceptions of risk and protective factors in family and school domains, and (2) examining how they differ by youth’s gender and age. This study draws on assessment data on youth violence in five CARICOM Member States: Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago using a completed 51-item quantitative questionnaire from approximately 512 students. The results suggest that violence engagement, victimization, witness, and report significantly differed by gender and age. Male students were more likely to engage in violence, but less likely to report such violence to adults. Similarly, older students reported that they were more likely to engage in and witness violence. For risk and protective factors, female students reported significantly higher scores on domestic violence, whereas male students had higher scores on the access to drugs/weapons. Older students also tended to report higher levels of some school risk factors and lower levels of some protective factors in both family and school

Editorial: the cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory, Volume II

No description supplie

Impact of age and race on outcomes of a program to prevent excess weight gain and disordered eating in adolescent girls

Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) prevents weight gain and reduces loss-of-control (LOC)-eating in adults. However, IPT was not superior to health-education (HE) for preventing excess weight gain and reducing LOC-eating over 1-year in adolescent girls at risk for excess weight gain and eating disorders. Limited data suggest that older and non-White youth may be especially responsive to IPT. In secondary analyses, we examined if age or race moderated weight and LOC-eating outcomes. The 113 participants (12–17 years; 56.6% White) from the original trial were re-contacted 3 years later for assessment. At baseline and follow-up visits through 3 years, we assessed BMI, adiposity by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry, and LOC-eating presence. In linear mixed models, baseline age moderated 3-year BMI outcome; older girls in IPT had the lowest 3-year BMI gain compared to younger girls in IPT and all girls in HE, p = 0.04. A similar pattern was observed for adiposity. Race moderated 3-year LOC-eating; non-White girls in IPT were most likely to abstain from LOC-eating at 3 years compared to all other girls, p = 0.04. This hypothesis-generating analysis suggests future studies should determine if IPT is especially efficacious at reducing LOC-eating in older, non-White adolescents

The tempo of cultural change in the Kostenki Upper Paleolithic : further insights

open access via Cambridge University Press agreement This work was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (AHOB3 and RPG-2012-800). We thank the staff of the ORAU past and present for their careful laboratory work. We also thank the reviewers and Editor-in-Chief for their comments. AB and AS acknowledge Russian Science Foundation grant numbers 20-78-10151 and 18-78-00136, and Russian Foundation of Basic Research grant numbers 18-39-20009, 18-00-00837 and 20-09-00233. We also acknowledge the participation of IHMC RAS (state assignment 0184-2019-0001) and ZIN RAS (state assignment АААА-А19-119032590102-7). We thank the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) for supporting the Oxford node of the National Environmental Isotope Facility (NEIF).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Seasonality at middle and upper palaeolithic sites based on the presence and wear of deciduous premolars from nursing mammoth calves

Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites, where mam- moths dominate the faunal assemblages, are mainly found in Central and Eastern Europe. At these sites concentrations of skulls, tusks and long bones, interpreted as deliberate constructions, of- ten occur. Rare instances of weapon tip fragments embedded in mammoth bones provide direct ar- chaeological evidence of human hunting. Indirect evidence, such as the accumulation of mammoth bones from multiple individuals with specific ontogenetic ages, occurs more frequently. Based on the eruption sequence and wear of deciduous premolars from mammoth calves, we examined whether a season of death could be deduced from the characteristics of the dentition. Our results suggest that the mammoth hunt was not restricted to the cold half of the year.The symposium and the volume "Human-elephant interactions: from past to present" were funded by the Volkswagen Foundation