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The COVID-19 pandemic is extraordinary, but many ordinary events have contributed to its becoming and persistence. Here, we argue that the emergence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, which has radically altered day-to-day life for people across the globe, was an inevitability of contemporary human ecology, presaged by spillovers past. We show the ways in which the emergence of this virus reiterates other infectious disease crises, from its origin via habitat encroachment and animal use by humans to its evolution of troublesome features, and we spotlight a long-running crisis of inequitable infectious disease incidence and death. We conclude by describing aspects of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic that present opportunities for disease control: spaces for intervention in infection and recovery that reduce transmission and impact. There are no more "before times"; therefore, we encourage embracing a future using old mitigation tactics and government support for ongoing disease control.

Although ubiquitous today, the "state" did not always exist. Archaeological and historical assessments of state beginnings—and research on the characteristics of the state form in both past and present—help address how the state as a social, economic, and territorial construct became dominant. Utilizing the categories of politics, violence, literacy, and borders, this article examines how individuals and households are mutually implicated in negotiations of power and expressions of everyday life that have been present from before the inception of the state through to the modern day. The state is constituted and expressed through nested exploitative engagements predicated on actual and perceived benefits; the outcomes of the existence of the state range from collaborative platforms for integration to the realities of inequality, environmental degradation through future discounting, and institutionalized power dynamics. As a container for human interactions, the state may be situationally unwanted but also seems inescapable once initialized.

Scholars such as Murray Emeneau and John Gumperz made India prominent in the development of sociolinguistics as a field of study through their simultaneous attention to difference and cohesiveness. Later, scholars stressed the ideological mediation of practice, especially the importance of colonial constructions that continue to be relevant in the postcolonial period. Work on specific notions such as mother tongue and medium of instruction, and the salience of English, led scholars to provide insights into multilingual practices in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Finally, a vast scholarship on an array of older and newer media forms ranging from early print publications to social media has posed questions about the possibilities of representation and participation. Ethnographic approaches to digital media that focus on the complex dynamics between ideologies and practices have put South Asia at the forefront of studies of communication.

Digital archaeology is both a pervasive practice and a unique subdiscipline within archaeology. The diverse digital methods and tools employed by archaeologists have led to a proliferation of innovative practice that has fundamentally reconfigured the discipline. Rather than reviewing specific technologies, this review situates digital archaeology within broader theoretical debates regarding craft and embodiment; materiality; the uncanny; and ethics, politics, and accessibility. A future digital archaeology must move beyond skeuomorphic submission and replication of previous structural inequalities to foment new archaeological imaginaries.

In recent years, disappointment has emerged as a prominent topic of anthropological inquiry and theorization. We explore this disciplinary interest in order to probe the conditions that have made it possible, the lines of inquiry it opens up, and the self-reflexive critiques it underscores. Running throughout the anthropological literature on disappointment is a pressing concern with the messy, unpredictable, and friction-laden dimensions of social life, dimensions that eschew easy categorization in terms of the heroic/abject, agentive/passive, macro/micro, righteous/wrong-headed, or progressive/reactionary. After exploring the conditions that underlie disappointment, we discuss comparison, poetics, and slog as three domains of its anthropological analysis, highlighting key methodological innovations, ethnographic genres, and research questions within each area. We close with reflections on disappointment within the discipline, focusing on the experience of field research, the moral optimism of the discipline, and the institutional conditions that shape knowledge production and professional life.

The environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage—all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated approaches that address deep-time scales. Archaeology can make a substantial contribution here. This article reviews the merits and limitations of the resilience concept in archaeology. Despite its ever-increasing relevance, resilience is still frequently understood within the framework of positivist approaches and branches of systems thinking that cannot capture our unfolding predicament and pay too little attention to the embodied historical asymmetries between more-than-human social worlds. This review identifies the potential for reformulations of resilience theory and its attendant concepts within a less positivistic and human-centered conceptual register. New translations of resilience in archaeology pave the way for more nuanced approaches to concepts of history and their sociopolitical use, as well as alternative time dynamics of historical change.

In this article, we suggest that in starting from dialogical, interactive studies of human discourse, we can uncover properties of cooperation that have otherwise been missed or have remained underappreciated by scholars trying to account for cooperation from an evolutionary point of view or from the point of view of its mental representation (i.e., by means of collective intentions or goals). Before uncovering these properties, we argue that a distinction must be drawn between intersubjectivity, understood as an ever-present empathic sensitivity to others, and intersubjective attunement, the process of adjusting one's actions to the ever-changing contextual conditions of interaction. It is by attending to intersubjective attunement that cooperative activities are shown to be inherently vulnerable to breach, failure, and all kinds of interactional glitches, while also being open to modifications, e.g., repairs, that allow for their successful completion. Unpacking these conditions for cooperation allows us to reveal five general properties that guide its semiotic constitution, namely, sensorial access, distributed intentionality, fluctuation of attention, improvisation, and negotiable role ascription. Attention to the semiotics of cooperation across communities and within particular activities can add a sixth general property, namely, variability in how and the extent to which cooperation is acknowledged. We introduce the term cryptocooperation to describe joint activities where the cooperative role by certain participants is underrecognized and thereby remains hidden.

Beginning in earnest in the 1990s, archaeologists have used the material record as an alternative window into the experiences and practices of Black and Indigenous peoples in North America from the sixteenth century onward. This now robust body of scholarship on settler colonialism has been shaped by postcolonial theories of power and broad-based calls to diversify Western history. While archaeologists have long recognized the political, cultural, biological, and economic entanglements produced by settler colonialism, the lives of Indigenous peoples have largely been studied in isolation from peoples of African descent. In addition to reinforcing static ethnic divisions, until recently, most archaeological studies of settler colonialism have focused on early periods of interethnic interaction, ending abruptly in the nineteenth century. These intellectual silos gloss over the intimate relationships that formed between diverse communities and hinder a deeper understanding of settler colonialism's continued impact on archaeological praxis.

This article provides a critical review of archaeological research that addresses race and racism in Chinese American communities. Future directions for Chinese diaspora archaeologies include employing an Asian American studies praxis that centers community-engaged research, using diasporic frameworks, and applying emic language to naming material culture and identities. Other innovative archaeological scholarship on the racialization of Chinese Americans reframes Chinese American communities as part of larger multiethnic neighborhoods, highlights gender and sexuality, and traces the transpacific connections of Chinese transmigrants. The interventions outlined provide archaeologists who are engaged in the study of the Chinese American past with the pathways needed to begin practicing antiracist Chinese diaspora archaeologies.

As an empirical concept, biolegality emerged at the height of biotechnological advances in Euro-American societies when rapid changes in the life sciences (including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences) and their attendant techniques (including reproductive technologies and gene editing) started to challenge ethical norms, legal decisions, and legal forms. As a theoretical concept, biolegality deepens the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics with an operation of legality that emphasizes how biology and its attendant technologies alter legal form, knowledge, practice, and experience. These empirical and theoretical developments affect how we understand sociality. While public discourse remains preoccupied with the call for more regulation—thereby underscoring law's lag in its dealings with technology—the social science scholarship describes instead how bioscience and biotechnology are fragmenting and rearranging legal knowledge about property, personhood, parenthood, and collective identity. As it opens broader anthropological debates around exchange, self, kinship, and community, the study of biolegality brings a novel currency to the discipline, addressing how biology and law inform new ways of relating and knowing.

The mid-1990s through the first decade of the new millennium marked an increase in publications pertaining to war and violence in the ancient past. This review considers how scholars of the past decade have responded to that work. The emerging consensus is that war and violence were endemic to all societies studied by archaeologists, and yet the frequency, intensity, causes, and consequences of violence were highly variable for reasons that defy simplistic explanation. The general trend has been toward archaeologies of war and violence that focus on understanding the nuances of particular places and historical moments. Nevertheless, archaeologists continue to grapple with grand narratives of war, such as the proposition that violence has decreased from ancient to modern times and the role of war and violence in state formation and collapse. Recent research also draws attention to a more expansive definition of violence.

This article augments and complicates Nelson's claim that "we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it" ( Dedaić & Nelson 2003 , p. 459). Military endeavors require verbal legitimation, but militarizing participants and wide swaths of the civilian population requires more than just a stated rationale. It requires the complex construction of acquiescent selves and societies through linguistic maneuvers that present themselves with both brute force and subtlety to enable war's necropolitical calculus of who should live and who can, or must, die ( MacLeish 2013 , Mbembe 2003 ). War also involves vexed, stunted, and deadly forms of communication with perceived enemies or civilian populations. And those who are victims of military deeds, including civilians and sometimes service members themselves, are often left with psychic wounds that they cannot talk their way out of, for such wounds resist semantic expression and may emerge through more complex semiotic forms.

Archaeoprimatology explores how humans and nonhuman primates coexisted in the past. This discipline has profound roots in texts of early scholars. Archaeoprimatological research examines the liminality between humans, apes, monkeys, and prosimians deep in time before the rise of the Anthropocene. By exploring the beginning of the relationship between modern Homo sapiens and primates, which possibly dates to approximately 100,000 BCE, I survey the evidence, ranging from portable objects and 2D surfaces with primatomorphic depictions to primate remains at archaeological sites worldwide. For example, an overview of ancient frescoes and mosaics with primate representations reveals that the vast majority of them were rendered in locations where primates were not part of the local fauna. An extensive review of primates in the zooarchaeological record shows as a global pattern that traded primates were usually young individuals and frugivorous/omnivorous species. Local primates yielded at sites of regions they naturally inhabited were mostly hunted. Thus, examining past patterns of the human–nonhuman primate interface provides insight into major questions about human niche construction and primate conservation today.

We review the state of paleoanthropology research in Asia. We survey the fossil record, articulate the current understanding, and delineate the points of contention. Although Asia received less attention than Europe and Africa did in the second half of the twentieth century, an increase in reliably dated fossil materials and the advances in genetics have fueled new research. The long and complex evolutionary history of humans in Asia throughout the Pleistocene can be explained by a balance of mechanisms, between gene flow among different populations and continuity of regional ancestry. This pattern is reflected in fossil morphology and paleogenomics. Critical understanding of the sociocultural forces that shaped the history of hominin fossil research in Asia is important in charting the way forward.