Etymologically related, the concepts of terroir and territoriality display divergent cultural histories. While one designates the palatable characteristics of place as a branded story of geographic distinction, the other imbues the soil with political meaning. This paper traces the production of eno-locality in a contested space on both sides of the Green Line in Israel/Palestine. The case of the Yatir award-winning winery shows how terroir and territory are blended in the political economy and cultural politics of colonial place-making. Located on a multiscalar frontier—climatic, geopolitical, and viticultural—Yatir Winery positions itself simultaneously within the Mediterranean transnational landscape and in a biblical site of historical authenticity. Enacting strategic regimes of signification to target the increasing demand for high-end wines on both the global and local markets, it makes a claim for place, while appropriating Palestinian land and redefining ancient Jewish heritage. The result articulates a settler colonial landscape whose symbolic and material transformations are reflected in the Israeli search for rooted identity. Analytically, we explore the power of border and frontier wines to reconfigure the differences between New World and Old World paradigms. We conclude by outlining a comparative framework of the charged relations between terroir and territory that articulates the nexus between border typologies and the colonial politics of wine.

This article takes a fresh approach to Walter Ralegh's published account of his voyage to Guiana, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), using it as a case study through which to explore the fragility of sixteenth-century processes of knowledge production about new lands. The article revisits this famous account in order to scrutinise in more detail the types of evidence Ralegh used to support his claims that a rich and powerful empire lay ready to be conquered by the English in the Amazon. This new analysis of Ralegh's narrative highlights the continued centrality of reputational models of authority in early modern travel literature and examines the types of evidence that could be employed by writers to support their suppositions when witness testimony was lacking. Ralegh's narrative illustrates that systems of knowledge production centred on the New World were, at the end of the sixteenth century, still in a state of flux. New ideas about what constituted credible knowledge, from firsthand experience to the collection of material artefacts, competed with older frameworks of authentication and authority. By examining knowledge production in frustration, and by dissecting Ralegh's failure to present a believable vision of El Dorado, this article throws into starker relief the many pitfalls and difficulties that beset those who attempted to present new and credible knowledge about the New World.

In 1539 the Italian Giovanni Paoli, better known as Juan Pablos, began operating in Mexico City the first printing press that existed in the New World. The first books he printed were religious texts, vocabularies of some indigenous languages of Mexico, and compilations of ordinances and laws. In 1556 followed the Sumario compendioso de las cuentas, a text of arithmetic and algebra that was the first American mathematics book. A year later, he printed the Physica Speculatio by friar Alonso de la Veracruz, a text of Natural Philosophy that dealt with Aristotelian works such as Physics, On the Heavens, and Meteorology. As part of this book, was included the text of geocentric astronomy written during the thirteenth century by the Italian mathematician Giovanni Campano de Novara, entitled Tractatus de Sphaera, where the author discussed, from a geometric perspective, the cosmic structure and the stellar distribution. No doubt this is the first astronomical treatise that was published in the entire American continent, which is why it is emphasized here.

This research explores the contribution bioarchaeology can make to the study of slavery in Roman Britain, responding to the calls by Webster and colleagues for the greater use of osteological and scientific techniques in this endeavour. It reviews the evidence for the bodies of the enslaved in the primary sources and bioarchaeological evidence from the New World and the Roman Empire. The paper aims to establish patterns of physiological stress and disease, which could be used to reconstruct osteobiographies of these individuals, and applies these findings to bioarchaeological evidence from Britain. It concludes that at the present time, it may not be possible for us to successfully separate out the enslaved from the poor or bonded labourers, because their life experiences were very similar. Nevertheless, these people are overlooked in the archaeological record, so unless we attempt to search for them in the extant evidence, the life experiences of the majority of the Romano-British population who were vital to its economy will remain lost to us.

Leishmania kinetoplast DNA contains thousands of small circular molecules referred to as kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) minicercles. kDNA minicircles are the preferred targets for sensitive Leishmania detection, because they are present in high copy number and contain conserved sequence blocks in which polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers can be designed. On the other hand, the heterogenic nature of minicircle networks has hampered the use of this peculiar genomic region for strain typing. The characterization of Leishmania minicirculomes used to require isolation and cloning steps prior to sequencing. Here, we show that high-throughput sequencing of single minicircle PCR products allows bypassing these laborious laboratory tasks. The 120 bp long minicircle conserved region was amplified by PCR from 18 Leishmania strains representative of the major species complexes found in the Neotropics. High-throughput sequencing of PCR products enabled recovering significant numbers of distinct minicircle sequences from each strain, reflecting minicircle class diversity. Minicircle sequence analysis revealed patterns that are congruent with current hypothesis of Leishmania relationships. Then, we show that a barcoding-like approach based on minicircle sequence comparisons may allow reliable identifications of Leishmania spp. This work opens up promising perspectives for the study of kDNA minicercles and a variety of applications in Leishmania research.

Maruca vitrata (Fabricius, 1787) is a cryptic pantropical species of Lepidoptera that are comprised of two unique strains that inhabit the American continents (New World strain) and regions spanning from Africa through to Southeast Asia and Northern Australia (Old World strain). In this study, we de novo assembled the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of the New World legume pod borer, M. vitrata, from shotgun sequence data generated on an Illumina HiSeq 2000. Phylogenomic comparisons were made with other previously published mitochondrial genome sequences from crambid moths, including the Old World strain of M. vitrata. The 15,385 bp M. vitrata (New World) sequence has an 80.7% A+T content and encodes the 13 protein-coding, 2 ribosomal RNA and 22 transfer RNA genes in the typical orientation and arrangement of lepidopteran mitochondrial DNAs. Mitochondrial genome-wide comparison between the New and Old World strains of M. vitrata detected 476 polymorphic sites (4.23% nucleotide divergence) with an excess of synonymous substitution as a result of purifying selection. Furthermore, this level of sequence variation suggests that these strains diverged from ~1.83 to 2.12 million years ago, assuming a linear rate of short-term substitution. The de novo assemblies of mitochondrial genomes from next-generation sequencing (NGS) reads provide readily available data for similar comparative studies.

As part of a survey of human leishmaniasis in Nicaragua we examined phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of 40 Leishmania isolates. We identified 3 distinct parasites associated with cutaneous disease in this area; Leishmania panamensis (40% of cases), Leishmania braziliensis (33%), and a strain which exhibits the heterozygous isoenzyme and DNA fingerprinting patterns expected of a L. panamensis/L. braziliensis hybrid (27%). There was complete correlation between the isoenzyme and DNA data for each of the putative hybrids examined. All of the ‘hybrids’ were obtained from foci in the northern region of the country where L. panamensis and L. braziliensis occur sympatrically. These observations provide strong evidence for sexual reproduction in New World Leishmania populations and suggest that it is of taxonomic and epidemiological significance.