Humans

As death in the United States is increasingly managed within biomedical institutions, end-of-life doulas (EOLDs) have emerged as non-medical practitioners who support dying people and their families through education, advocacy, companionship, ritual, and vigil care. Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews with practicing EOLDs across the United States, this qualitative study examines how these doulas conceptualize a good death, navigate emotionally intensive care work, and sustain themselves in a largely unregulated field. These interviews suggest that EOLDs challenge dominant biomedical models of dying by organizing care around client autonomy, relational presence, and personalization of treatment rather than cure, intervention, and control. According to the interviews, central to their practices are death-positive worldviews, emotionally intimate approaches to care, and strong peer networks. For these EOLDs, lower reported burnout and compassion fatigue were linked not only to self-care, but to a broader relational framework in which death is understood as a meaningful life passage rather than a professional defeat.

Documented skeletal collections provide many of the samples necessary for forensic anthropological research, including the creation and validation of skeletal analytical methods. Although modern collections are considered more representative of the current living population, they often differ significantly from each other by geographic location, organization, and procurement strategies. As these factors influence which donors are included in a particular collection, they also create collection-specific sample bias. This research aims to identify how that bias impacts skeletal variation across collections and whether it obscures normal patterns of human skeletal variation. Craniometric and demographic data were collected from a sample of individuals from eight modern United States-based documented skeletal collections (n = 1161). The results indicate that collection-specific sample bias influences average cranial morphology, but to a lesser extent than sex or population. Across analyses, samples consistently and preferentially clustered with individuals from similar population and sex groups rather than with individuals from the same collection of origin. These analyses suggest that normal patterns of human variation are not obscured by collection origin and that documented skeletal collections therefore remain valid and reliable sources of data for understanding population diversity and sex differences, even when some level of collection-specific bias is present.

Faunal remains constitute one of the main sources of evidence for reconstructing foodways and economic practices in Phoenician societies. Archaeological research conducted over recent decades in the Iberian Peninsula has highlighted their importance for understanding food production processes, maintenance activities, and animal consumption patterns linked to livestock management, fishing, shellfish gathering, and the use of bone for tool making. In this paper, we present the results of zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses of mammal, bird, fish, and mollusc remains recovered from the archaeological excavation at the corner of Sagasta and Tinte Streets in Cádiz, Spain. These data are integrated with biomolecular analyses, specifically ancient DNA of bovine specimens, and organic residue analysis of two storage vessels. Radiocarbon dating places these remains at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 8th century BC, providing a key reference point for understanding archaic Phoenician occupation in the region. The archaeofaunal evidence highlights the central role of livestock, particularly sheep, goats and cattle, alongside the intensive use of marine resources such as fish and molluscs, and the exploitation of wetland environments for duck hunting. The archaeogenomics analysis of two bovine remains yielded <1% endogenous DNA content, consistent with poor DNA preservation at this site, although it allowed for sex determination of one female individual. Additionally, lipid residue analysis from the storage ceramics enabled the identification of foodstuffs once contained within them. Finally, evidence for the use of bone in the production of bone tools has also been documented. All biotic remains from the Sagasta–Tinte site have been compared with those from other regional sites to contextualise the findings.