The art of wax modelling has an ancient origin but rose to prominence in 14th century Italy with the cult of votive artefacts. With the advent of Neoclassicism this art, now deemed repulsive, continued to survive in a scientific environment, where it flourished in the study of normal and pathological anatomy, obstetrics, zoology and botany. The achievement of having originated the creation of a...

In debates on societal collapse, Iceland occupies a position of precarious survival, defined by not becoming extinct, like Norse Greenland, but having endured, sometimes by the narrowest of margins. Classic decline narratives for late medieval to early modern Iceland stress compounding adversities, where climate, trade, political domination, unsustainable practices, and environmental degradatio...

Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions form the scientific backbone of the current global change debate. Although some European records extend into medieval times, high-resolution, long-term, regional-scale paleoclimatic evidence is missing for the eastern part of the continent. Here we compile 545 samples of living trees and historical timbers from the greater Tatra region to reconstruct ...

The aim of this paper is to give a bioarchaeological overview of the graves with multiple simultaneous burials in the South-East Estonian Siksälä cemetery (12th– 15th cc). Six inhumation graves with a total of 16 individuals were analysed. The studied multiple burials represent various age and gender combinations. Any relations between skeletal pathologies and grave goods could not be observed....

The impact of the Mongol invasions of the Middle East has been the subject of extensive research, especially in the last few decades. Scholars have evaluated the damage and the benefits brought by the Mongols to the Islamic world in different fields such as the military, religion, politics, economy and culture. Despite this, in the case of Anatolia, the Mongol period is still under-studied when...

Vector-borne diseases have been the scourge of man and animals since the beginning of time. Historically, these are the diseases that caused the great plagues such as the 'Black Death' in Europe in the 14th Century and the epidemics of yellow fever that plagued the development of the New World. Others, such as Nagana, contributed to the lack of development in Africa for many years. At the turn ...