In this article, I consider the war of images that unfolded in New Mexico during the 18th and 19th centuries, as that war can be retrospectively glimpsed in what archaeologists refer to as the Plains Biographic Tradition of rock art. I argue that the Biographic Tradition originated in New Mexico during a volatile period of cultural exchange at the beginning of the 18th century, when Native groups such as the Comanche and Apache swept into the Rio Grande valley to raid and trade, leaving not just with horses and captives but also with appropriated European images and aesthetic conventions. I suggest that the rise of the Biographic Tradition involved a fundamental reworking of what an image was, resulting in an intimate connection between figuration and warfare that rapidly expanded to Indigenous communities across a wide swath of the American West.
This article examines the Donlin Gold mining project in Alaska's Central Kuskokwim region-one of North America's largest proposed gold mines-where Indigenous self-determination intersects with large-scale resource extraction and subsistence lifeways. Located on lands owned by Alaska Native corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Donlin illustrates the complex roles community members navigate as both shareholders in for-profit corporations and stewards of ancestral territories. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research, the article traces the region's transformation from a boundary between Central Yup'ik and Northern Dene territories to a landscape shaped by demographic change, infrastructure expansion, and corporate governance. Rather than framing local responses as support or opposition, the article foregrounds the nuanced ways residents engage with the environmental, cultural, and economic dimensions of development. The Donlin case contributes to broader debates on Indigenous sovereignty, responsibility, and the moral economies of extraction in settler-colonial contexts.
Older migrants with dementia face layered vulnerabilities in aged-care systems, particularly concerning cultural identity and belonging. Previous research on double absence among Italian migrants in Australia describes how geographical displacement and cultural estrangement produce liminal experiences of belonging. This article extends that concept by theorizing triple absence, focusing on migrants with dementia. As they age out of place, gaps in culturally safe care, both endogenous and exogenous, contribute to a loss of selfhood and increased risk of social death. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and two case studies, the article explores Comusichiamo, a culturally tailored music and narrative program that fosters social reinhabitation. It demonstrates how embodied memory and cocreated storytelling can reassert personhood, restore cultural presence, and strengthen social ties. The study offers a conceptual framework for understanding dementia as a culturally situated experience shaped by migration, identity, and care.
Since 1996, the El Mir & oacute;n Cave Prehistoric Project in Cantabria, Spain, has been uncovering and studying an ever-increasing variety of finds. These range from "classic" ones such as artifacts, works of portable art, and faunal remains to unique ones-notably a Magdalenian-age human burial-to very novel ancient DNA discoveries in a long stratigraphic sequence spanning from the Mousterian through the Bronze Age, dated by 102 14C assays between >46,000-3,500 years ago. This article summarizes for the first time the principal Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic results of this long-term research project in the regional context of northern Atlantic Iberia and provides references to many of its most significant publications for detailed consultation. The excavation of this major habitation site as a key, "persistent" place (sensu Sarah Schlanger) in the landscape of the classic Cantabrian region is a good example of durable, successful, international, interdisciplinary collaboration. This has involved a working division of labor between project directors with different skills, specific interests and backgrounds, but a common dedication to an archeology that combines social, geological and biological science foci with a humanistic approach to understanding past human adaptations and lifeways as they evolved over the course of the late Upper Pleistocene through the mid-Holocene: a very long duration history.
