Publicaties

Historical and Archaeological Aspects of Egyptian Funerary Culture, a thoroughly reworked translation of Les textes des sarcophages et la démocratie published in 2008, challenges the widespread idea that the “royal” Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom after a process of “democratisation” became, in the Middle Kingdom, accessible even to the average Egyptian in the form of the Coffin Texts. Rather they remained an element of elite funerary culture, ...

When recruitment into a clinical trial is limited due to rarity of the disease of interest, or when recruitment to the control arm is limited due to ethical reasons (eg, pediatric studies or important unmet medical need), exploiting historical controls to augment the prospectively collected database can be an attractive option. Statistical methods for combining historical data with randomized data, while accounting for the incompatibility ...

Although traditional verbal charms and incantation rituals have received extensive attention in Slavic ethnolinguistics and folklore studies, the need still exists for a more in-depth poetic and contextual (re)analysis of ritual folk texts, more in particular of the interrelation between their stylistic, compositional, referential and functional properties. In this context, the article points towards the possible benefits of an integrated ...

Background: A key conclusion of the Four Cities Study, carried out to explore reasons for heterogeneity in the HIV epidemic between two cities in sub-Saharan Africa with relatively low prevalence (Cotonou and Yaounde) and two with high prevalence (Kisumu and Ndola), was that differences in biological cofactors outweighed differences in sexual risk behaviours. The authors explore an alternative hypothesis, that risk behaviours were historically ...

My starting point is that all historical representations, regardless of their referential claims, share the ability to provide the reader with a sense of comfort in the existence of dramatic irony. When all has passed and every possible turn of event has taken place, we can find solace in our knowledge that from our retrospective positions we can, at least gradually, start to reconstruct what has happened. I analyse the imaginative appeal of ...

Historical biodiversity documents comprise an important link to the long-term data life cycle and provide useful insights on several aspects of biodiversity research and management. However, because of their historical context, they present specific challenges, primarily time- and effort-consuming in data curation. The data rescue process requires a multidisciplinary effort involving four tasks: (a) Document digitisation (b) Transcription, which ...