The River Thames, winding through the English capital of London, is the source of a substantial archaeological assemblage that includes hundreds of human bones, but the lack of a robust chronology for these finds limits interpretation. Here, 30 new radiocarbon dates are reported for the human remains. In combination with other available dates (some of which are also published here for the first time), this improved chronological framework demonstrates a predominance of Bronze and Iron Age dates and emphasises the need to explore the Thames assemblage in the broader context of watery deposition practices of later prehistoric north-west Europe.

Crackdown on religious institutions characterised the onset of the postwar communist dictatorships in East Central Europe. The literature commonly assumes that the new religious policies were influenced by the Soviet Union. However, the adoption of the Soviet blueprint was not straightforward and manifested differently across various regions. This article analyses the implementation process by examining the treatment of nonlegalised religious minorities in early Cold War Czechoslovakia. It argues that beyond adopting the legal framework, the strategy was not seriously informed by the Soviet realities. Through an analysis of the state's attitude towards Jehovah's Witnesses, the Pentecostal movement and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, this study concludes that the Czechoslovak Communist Party did not have any clear plan of action. The relationship with the religious organisations developed organically. It was heavily influenced by confessional distinctions among denominations and ad hoc local decisions, highlighting a deeply decentralised approach to creating religious policies.

We present the first results from a new backend on the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, the Commensal Realtime ASKAP Fast Transient COherent (CRACO) upgrade. CRACO records millisecond time resolution visibility data, and searches for dispersed fast transient signals including fast radio bursts (FRB), pulsars, and ultra-long period objects (ULPO). With the visibility data, CRACO can localise the transient events to arcsecond-level precision after the detection. Here, we describe the CRACO system and report the result from a sky survey carried out by CRACO at 110-ms resolution during its commissioning phase. During the survey, CRACO detected two FRBs (including one discovered solely with CRACO, FRB 20231027A), reported more precise localisations for four pulsars, discovered two new RRATs, and detected one known ULPO, GPM J1839 $-$10, through its sub-pulse structure. We present a sensitivity calibration of CRACO, finding that it achieves the expected sensitivity of 11.6 Jy ms to bursts of 110 ms duration or less. CRACO is currently running at a 13.8 ms time resolution and aims at a 1.7 ms time resolution before the end of 2024. The planned CRACO has an expected sensitivity of 1.5 Jy ms to bursts of 1.7 ms duration or less and can detect $10\times$ more FRBs than the current CRAFT incoherent sum system (i.e. 0.5 $-$2 localised FRBs per day), enabling us to better constrain the models for FRBs and use them as cosmological probes.

This study examines how formal institutions in hybrid regimes, particularly presidentialism, party organization and electoral rules, actively foster and sustain clientelistic networks, leading to particularistic outcomes. While existing literature highlights the weakening of formal institutions and pervasive clientelism as drivers of democratic breakdown, this study uses the concept of neopatrimonialism to analyse how formal institutions themselves consolidate patron–client relationships to maintain power and stability. Focusing on Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that the institutional incentive structure consolidates the president's role as the central ‘patron’, controlling resources and offices, and encourages clientelistic networks to coalesce around the presidency. The discretionary allocation of resources through patron–client relationships sustains neopatrimonial authority as long as clients' loyalty is rewarded. However, this governance increases clients' dependence on the patron, binding them at the expense of representation and responsiveness. The analysis offers insights into how such institutional configurations contribute to authoritarianism and particularistic governance in hybrid regimes.

The last 20 years have seen growing attention in Scandinavian archaeology towards the study of the Iron Age household. The aim of this paper is to challenge the conceptions of what the household is and argue for the potential in approaching households as heterogenous, emergent assemblages, with an untapped potential in diachronic and spatial studies. Inherent in the vast archaeological record of the Scandinavian Iron Age is a capacity for broader perspectives to explore household processes’ duration and change. Drawing on theoretical insights from the Communities of Practice (COP) framework and assemblage-based thinking, the paper accentuates the household as a key arena for learning, knowledge and identity formation and a heterogeneous unit bound up in changing spheres of interaction. Household practices, or the shared repertoire of households, represent analytical mechanisms that allow for the study of variation, continuity and recalibration, thus providing essential entry points to studies of social processes.

We expand the theory of 2-classifiers, that are a 2-categorical generalization of subobject classifiers introduced by Weber. The idea is to upgrade monomorphisms to discrete opfibrations. We prove that the conditions of 2-classifier can be checked just on a dense generator. The study of what is classified by a 2-classifier is similarly reduced to a study over the objects that form a dense generator. We then apply our results to the cases of prestacks and stacks, where we can thus look just at the representables. We produce a 2-classifier in prestacks that classifies all discrete opfibrations with small fibres. Finally, we restrict such 2-classifier to a 2-classifier in stacks. This is the main ingredient of a proof that Grothendieck 2-topoi are elementary 2-topoi. Our results also solve a problem posed by Hofmann and Streicher when attempting to lift Grothendieck universes to sheaves.