Contesting ‘Global Sisterhood’: The Global Women's Health Movement,the United Nations and the Different Meanings of Reproductive Rights (1970s–80s)

The article contributes to a genealogy of the global articulation of reproductive rights principles, as established at the 1994 United Nations (UN) Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo and the UN Women's Conference held in Beijing the following year. It highlights the key role played by an emerging global women's health movement in the 1970s–80s, in shaping UN debates on family planning, women's rights in procreative choice and women's roles in socio-economic development. The article focuses on the International Campaign for Abortion, Sterilisation and Contraception (est. London 1978) and the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (Amsterdam and Manila 1984; ECOSOC consultative status in 1992). Adopting an intersectional perspective, the paper highlights the local embeddedness of feminist positions, the shortcomings of Western feminism and the ways in which conflicts between women's organisations allowed for an original and evolving concept of reproductive rights to emerge. It is based on UN papers and the archives of the above organisations and family planning movements.     

The Protopalatial State of the Western Magazines of the Palace at Malia (Crete)

The evidence available for the reconstruction of the Western Magazines of the early palace at Malia is here re‐evaluated. Despite the importance given to external social agents stationed in the Protopalatial town outside the palace, our knowledge of the main building during this key period in the history of the settlement remains limited. The shallow stratigraphy associated with its construction and heavy rebuilding during the succeeding Neopalatial period obstruct a clear vision of the architectural phasing of the early building, but a new analysis focusing on building materials and techniques suggests the presence of a series of Protopalatial storage rooms behind the main façade on the West Court, later integrated into the Neopalatial building. This architectural analysis allows a better assessment of the role of the central building of Middle Bronze Age Malia.     

New evidence for Upper Palaeolithic small domestic dogs in South-Western Europe

Osteoarchaeology and genetics agree that the earliest dog domestications took place during the Upper Palaeolithic. However, they partially disagree about the process of domestication. The former indicated multiple origins, when some of the results of the latter suggested that dogs mainly came from a Chinese centre of domestication. In this study, we describe and discuss new evidence for Late Glacial small dogs in the South-West (Pont d’Ambon and Montespan) and North of France (Le Closeau). Special attention was paid to the possibility of miss-identification between small early dogs and dholes (Cuon alpinus), a middle-sized Canidae, the size of which can be similar to early small dogs. Detailed analyses of the archaeological contexts alongside that of taphonomy, morphoscopy, morphometry and pathology, identified 49 small canid remains from the three sites. They allowed us to exclude the presence of dholes and to conclude that they were all small Upper Paleolithic dogs. These, together with other more sparse discoveries, confirmed the presence of Western European Upper Paleolithic Small (WEUPS) dogs from, at least, the Middle Magdalenian to the end of the Epipaleolithic (i.e. 15,000–11,500 cal BP). As they are contemporaneous with the much larger Russian Upper Paleolithic dogs, they plea for several Euro-Asian origins for Late Palaeolithic dogs.