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'In the commercial world consumer demand is constantly encouraged through advertising and by granting credit. New "needs" are created, old ones refashioned …. In contrast, those who may require the help of the personal social services, for instance the welfare and children's services, encounter little encouragement to use them, nor is there a ready flow of simple information about their nature and how they can be obtained …. We can and should encourage those who need help to seek it …. One single department concerned with most aspects of "welfare" as the public generally understands the term, is an essential first step in making services more easily accessible.'

This paper is not primarily concerned with asking how far Social Service Departments have tried or succeeded in stimulating demand. Instead it looks at some of the pre-requisites for drawing the general public into a wider and more effective use of the personal social services. To continue the Seebohm Committee's commercial analogy, it offers some basic market research. The Committee itself, like the Younghusband Committee a decade earlier, was 'regrettably, unable to sound consumer reaction to the services in any systematic way'.

We synthesize how the tools of molecular anthropology, integrated with analyses of skeletal material, can provide direct insights into the context-specific experiences of racial structural violence in the past. Our work—which is emblematic of how biological anthropologists are increasingly interested in exploring the embodied effects of structural and race-based violence—reveals how anthropology can illuminate past lived experiences that are otherwise invisible or inscrutable. This kind of integrative research is exposing the legacies of structural violence in producing anatomical collections and the embodied effects of structural violence evident within individuals in those collections.

Dental calculus and other preserved microbiome substrates are an attractive target for dietary reconstruction in past populations through a variety of physical, chemical, and molecular means. Recently, studies have attempted to reconstruct diet from archaeological dental calculus using archaeogenetic techniques. While dental calculus may provide a relatively stable environment for DNA preservation, the detection of plants and animals possibly consumed by an individual through DNA analysis is primarily hindered by microbial richness and incomplete reference databases. Moreover, high genomic similarity within eukaryotic groups - such as mammals - can obfuscate precise taxonomic identification. In the current study we demonstrate the challenges associated with accurate taxonomic identification and authentication of dietary taxa in ancient DNA data using both synthetic and ancient dental calculus datasets. We highlight common errors and sources of contamination across ancient DNA datasets, provide recommendations for dietary DNA validation, and call for caution in the interpretation of diet from dental calculus and other archaeological microbiome substrates. ; J.A.F.Y. was partially funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research innovation programme (ERC-2015-StG 678901-FoodTransforms to Philipp W. Stockhammer, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany). Z.F. was supported by the Werner Siemens Stiftung through Dr. Christina Warinner. This research was supported in part through computational resources provided by the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (J.A.F.Y). ; Yes