Arts and Humanities

5 open-access papers in Arts and Humanities, free to watch.

3:43

Crafting power in Kush: faience production and state control in the Napatan region

Rennan Lemos, Kathryn Howley, Siobhan Shinn, Shadia Abd Rabo

A pile of broken beads, shells, and burnt workshop waste can reveal something much bigger than how ancient craftspeople worked. At Sanam Temple, it points to how a kingdom organized power, and who was allowed to share in it. What can a pile of shells, failed beads, and a workshop beside a temple reveal about an ancient state? At Sanam, these ordinary production remains point to royal power, restricted consumption, and long-distance resource control.

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3:51

Comparative evaluation of Risser sign and Kreitner–Kellinghaus modified system for age estimation using iliac crest ossification in Egyptians

Marwa Ismail Mohamed Haiba, Samar Mohamed Abd El hamid Eshiba, Mohamed Nagah

A pelvic X-ray may make adulthood more likely, but it cannot prove someone is eighteen. This study found that the choice of grading system can sharply change how trustworthy that judgment becomes. A pelvic X-ray can show advanced bone maturation, but this study finds that even complete iliac crest fusion as early as about sixteen years cannot by itself prove that someone is legally an adult.

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3:52

Plea for a theory of open texture

Allison Koslow

What happens when a new discovery makes an old word stop giving us a clear answer? The problem is not simply that we lack information: sometimes the word itself seems to wobble. What happens when a familiar word meets a genuinely new case, and neither “yes” nor “no” feels like a mistake? This paper argues that the discomfort may reveal a distinctive feature of language, not merely ignorance or vagueness.

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3:22

Why No One Has Implemented the Turing Test: Identifying Turing’s Design and Putting it into Practice

Diane Proudfoot, Sharon Temtsin, Christoph Bartneck

People often say today’s chatbots have passed the Turing test. This paper argues that the test most people mean is not Turing’s test, and that, under his actual design, the machine still failed. Generative AI is often said to have killed the Turing test. But this paper argues that the machines may not have passed Turing’s test at all, and then puts Turing’s original design into practice.

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2:56

Readers of the Living: Interpretive Mastery and Natural Thinking in Plutarch, Celsus, Origen, and Porphyry

Lea Niccolai

What if an animal’s cry was not just noise, but something to be read? This paper argues that ancient thinkers used animal behaviour to test whether the whole natural world could be interpreted like a text. What if ancient debates about animals were secretly debates about reading? This paper argues that interpreting animal behaviour helped philosophers test how meaning could move between literature, scripture, and nature.

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