人文科学最新文献

Taphonomic studies of osteoarchaeological human assemblages have mainly focused on establishing recognisable markers that allow us to discriminate between humanly induced modifications from natural causes, or how to differentiate cannibalism from secondary burial. Less attention has been dedicated to recognise specific taphonomic patterns associated with the different motivations for cannibalism. In this paper, I present a review of archaeological human assemblages whose induced modifications have been interpreted either as survival or ritualistic cannibalism, based on their association with historic and ethnographic evidence. The broad range of different butchery and modification patterns observed for these assemblages suggests that the osteological evidence and the frequency of taphonomic traits alone cannot be used to unequivocally identify different forms of cannibalism. However, the environmental, historical and archaeological contexts can offer indications on the type of cannibalism practiced. In particular, the strongest arguments for cannibalism as a survival event are found within the environmental context and the opportunistic behaviour associated with the cannibalistic act. On the other hand, evidence for ritualistic cannibalism comes from its recurrent appearance within a historical context, as a widespread activity over time and as an established customary behaviour for the group involved.

In her debate article, Frieman's (2024) reflections on the idea of unproof are a welcome and elegant addition to current debate on the nature of archaeological evidence, how we construct the stories we tell about the past, and the role of archaeology in the contemporary world. Frieman draws on both feminist and anarchist theory to argue that the value of archaeology is the way it allows us to grasp worlds different from our own and suggests that this can allow us to pre-figure better future worlds. This chimes closely with other recent work on the subject (e.g. Barton 2021; Cipolla et al. 2024; Schofield 2024)—clearly, archaeologists are considering the radical potential of our own discipline to change the world.

The classical language switching paradigm using arbitrary cues to indicate the language to speak in has revealed switching between languages comes at a cost (i.e., switch cost) and makes one slower in the first than in the second language (i.e., reversed language dominance). However, arbitrary cues can create artificial requirements not present during everyday language interactions. Therefore, we investigated whether simulating elements of real-life conversations with question cues (‘Co?’ versus ‘What?’) facilitates language switching in comparison to the classical paradigm (Experiment 1: red versus blue outline; Experiments 2 and 3: low versus high tone). We revealed a dissociation between the two indices of language control: (1) question cues, compared to arbitrary cues, reduced switch costs but (2) did not modulate (in Experiment 1) or increase the reversed language dominance (Experiments 2 and 3). We propose that this conversational switching paradigm could be used as a conceptually more ‘true’ measure of language control.

Frieman (2024) observes in her own, highly metaphorical language that one can offer an unbounded number of interpretations to explain the distribution of archaeological remains in time and space. These interpretations offer different perspectives that can inform action—in Frieman's case an explicitly feminist understanding of the past informing the present. She provides two brief examples from the literature, suggesting that each embodies present-day biases: the distribution of Bronze Age swords relative to the provenance of ornamentation sets in Denmark and Germany, and the ‘Egtved Girl’, a Bronze Age burial of a young person of undetermined sex clad in a bronze-decorated tunic, associated with jewellery and the cremated remains of a child. Interpretations previously advanced for the first example include a patrilocal residence system wherein male warriors brought to their natal homes women ornamented with objects from their own homelands; from this interpretation we hypothesise the presence of patriarchal chiefdoms. The second example, the Egtved individual, has been characterised as a foreign bride, isotope analyses suggesting an itinerant life in the months prior to death. As each interpretation lingers in the literature, it becomes a certitude on which researchers build. Alternative interpretations go unimagined. But Frieman argues for the need for multiple, culturally complex interpretations that emerge from the gaps in the evidence, or the ‘unproofs’.

To start: I thank the responding authors for their generosity and thoughtfulness in engaging in this debate about ‘Attending to unproof: an archaeology of possibilities’ (Frieman 2024) and also the journal's editors for facilitating this discussion.

Motivational drivers and emotions that students experience play an important role in the process of learning a new language (L2). This has been recognised by researchers and educators, and extensive research has been conducted in recent decades to examine the psychological and emotional factors involved in L2 learning. However, two ubiquitous epistemic emotions, namely, boredom and curiosity, remain underexplored in the L2 research literature. This study addresses this gap. It performed a series of statistical tests to examine the relationship between these two epistemic emotions and L2 motivation. Specifically, it assessed whether epistemic curiosity plays a mediating role in the nexus of L2 motivation, epistemic curiosity, and epistemic boredom. Data were collected from adolescent learners of English in China (N = 312). The findings from the correlation analysis indicated that epistemic boredom had statistically significant negative relationships with epistemic curiosity and L2 motivation, except for the ought-to L2 self variable, where the relationship was not statistically significant. Conversely, epistemic curiosity had a positive and statistically significant relationship with L2 motivation, except for the ought-to L2 self variable, where the relationship was not statistically significant. Next, the path analysis examined the influence of L2 motivation on epistemic boredom without considering the mediating effect of epistemic curiosity. Its findings indicated that epistemic boredom had a statistically significant negative relationship with the general motivation/attitude and general motivation/effort variables. The subsequent path analysis, which focused solely on two goal-oriented L2 motivation constructs from the Gardnerian framework, detected the mediating role of epistemic curiosity. Some pedagogical implications are drawn from these findings.