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E. Anciaux de Faveaux & P. de Maret, Premieres datations pour la fonte du cuivre au Shaba (Za{\i}re). Bulletin de la Société royale belge d’Anthropologie et de Préhistoire 95 (1984), 5–20.
Michael S. Bisson, Copper Metallurgy, Copper in African Prehistory. In: Joseph O. Vogel (Hrsg.), Encyclopedia of Precolonial Africa, Archaeology, History, Languages, Cultures, and Environments. (Walnut Creek 1997), 125–132.
Michael S. Bisson, Precolonial Copper Metallurgy, Sociopolitical Context. In: Joseph O. Vogel (Hrsg.), Ancient African Metallurgy, The Sociocultural Context. (Walnut Creek 2000), 83–145.
Bernard Clist, Els Cranshof, Toon De Herdt, Roger Kidebua, Igor Matonda, Alphonse Nkanza Lutayi, Blair Zaid & Koen Bostoen, Le projet KongoKing: Les prospections et fouilles menées en 2015 dans la province du Kongo Central (République Démocratique du Congo). Nyame Akuma 84 (2015), 128–141.
James Denbow, The Archaeology and Ethnography of Central Africa. (Cambridge 2014).
Eugenia Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, Copper in precolonial history and culture. (Madison 1984).
Pierre de Maret, Fouilles Archeologiques dans la Vallee du Haut-Lualaba, Zaire, II Sanga et Katongo, 1974. Sciences Humaines 120 (Tervuren 1985).
Pierre de Maret, Fouilles Archeologiques dans la Vallee du Haut-Lualaba, Zaire, III Kamilamba, Kikulu et Malemba-Nkulu, 1975, Textes. Sciences Humaines 131 (Tervuren 1992).
Pierre de Maret, Fouilles Archeologiques dans la Vallee du Haut-Lualaba, Zaire, III Kamilamba, Kikulu et Malemba-Nkulu, 1975, Planches. Sciences Humaines 131 (Tervuren 1992).
Pierre de Maret, Histoires de croisettes. In: Luc de Heusch (Hrsg.), Objets – signes d’Afrique. Annales sciences humaines 145 (Tervuren 1995), 133–145.
Nicolas Nikis, Pierre de Maret, Raymond Lanfranchi, Julienne Nsania, Jean-Paul Goma, Bernard Clist & Koen Bostoen, Projet KongoKing: Prospections en République du Congo (Brazzaville), Le cuivre et l’origine des anciens royaumes Kongo et Teke. Nyame Akuma 80 (2013), 32–42.
Les résultats de cette mission sont prometteurs. Les prospections et les sondages conirment la présence importante de vestiges de métallurgie du cuivre dans la région de Mindouli. Leur étude va permettre d’y associer des groupes céramiques de différentes époques dont certains relètent les circuits commerciaux qui reliaient cette zone de gisement de cuivre à d’autres régions. Un premier examen de ces groupes montre déjà une certaine homogénéité et la suite de leur analyse devrait permettre d’élaborer une première séquence céramique pour cette région de la République du Congo. Il sera alors possible de la relier avec ce qui était déjà connu en RDC et ce que les recherches en cours de l’équipe KongoKing étendent et enrichissent (Clist et al. 2013).
Les prochaines missions permettront non seulement d’approfondir les recherches autour de Mindouli, mais également de les étendre aux autres zones cuprifères de Boko-Songho ou de Renéville.
De même, les contacts noués à Mbé et les prospections aux alentours sont de bon augure pour des recherches plus poussées. Celles-ci devraient nous permettre d’obtenir des informations archéologiques sur cette zone des plateaux Bateke et de compléter la tradition orale pour reconstituer l’histoire du royaume Teke et ses liens éventuels avec le royaume Kongo.
Nicolas Nikis, La métallurgie du cuivre en Afrique centrale, Résultats préliminaires des recherches archéologiques en République du Congo. In: First Young Researchers Overseas’ Day 16 December 2014, Brussels, Belgium, Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences. (Unpublished 2014).
Le cuivre, en raison notamment de la rareté de ses gisements, fut un métal prisé dans de nombreuses régions d’Afrique et le contrôle de ses sources fut un enjeu pour beaucoup d’entités politiques au fil du temps. Concernant le Niari-Djoué, les sources écrites mentionnent dès le 16e s. l’exploitation du minerai par le royaume Kongo et ses voisins mais c’est seulement au 19e s. que les zones de production et la fabrication du métal ont fait l’objet de descriptions précises.
Malgré l’importance de ce métal, peu de recherches archéologiques ont été menées jusqu’à ce jour. Seules quelques fouilles ponctuelles ont été réalisées dans les années 1980 sur des sites cuprifères dans la région de Mindouli, datant la production entre le 12e et le 16e s. Depuis 2013, dans le cadre de ma thèse de doctorat sur la métallurgie du cuivre en Afrique Centrale, deux missions de prospections et de fouilles archéologiques ont été réalisées aux alentours de Mindouli et de Boko-Songho, localités qui ont connu une exploitation pré-coloniale du cuivre. Les premiers résultats permettent d’ores et déjà de déceler plusieurs phases au niveau micro-régional, ainsi que des différences probables au sein du processus métallurgique.
Keywords: Archéologie | Cuivre | Métallurgie | République du Congo | Royaume Kongo
Nicolas Nikis & Thierry de Putter, Recherches géo-archéologiques dans les zones cuprifères du bassin du Niari en République du Congo. Nyame Akuma 84 (2015), 142–153.
Archaeological fieldwork has been conducted since three years around the copper deposits of the Niari Basin, in the Republic of the Congo. In the 2015 fieldwork season, a geological survey has focused on the formation of the copper(lead-zinc) deposits, and on the accessibility of the carbonate ore used to produce copper. Preliminary results suggest that the mineralogy of the exploited deposits influenced the procurement strategy and the ore processing. The archaeological survey confirms that most geological showings have been exploited in the precolonial period, at Boko-Songho, Mfouati and Mindouli. In the latter area, three main production periods have been identified, ranging from the 13th to the 19th centuries AD. Early copper production peaks might coincide with the rise of local kingdoms (e.g. Kongo Kingdom).
Jan Vansina, The Tio kingdom of the Middle Congo, 1880–1892. (London,New York 1973).
John M. Fryxell, Ray Hilborn, Carling Bieg, Katrine Turgeon, Amanda Caskenette & Kevin S. McCann, Supply and demand drive a critical transition to dysfunctional fisheries. PNAS 114 (2017), 12333–12337.
There is growing awareness of the need for fishery management policies that are robust to changing environmental, social, and economic pressures. Here we use conventional bioeconomic theory to demonstrate that inherent biological constraints combined with nonlinear supply-demand relationships can generate threshold effects due to harvesting. As a result, increases in overall demand due to human population growth or improvement in real income would be expected to induce critical transitions from highyield/ low-price fisheries to low-yield/high-price fisheries, generating severe strains on social and economic systems as well as compromising resource conservation goals. As a proof of concept, we show that key predictions of the critical transition hypothesis are borne out in oceanic fisheries (cod and pollock) that have experienced substantial increase in fishing pressure over the past 60 y. A hump-shaped relationship between price and historical harvest returns, well demonstrated in these empirical examples, is particularly diagnostic of fishery degradation. Fortunately, the same heuristic can also be used to identify reliable targets for fishery restoration yielding optimal bioeconomic returns while safely conserving resource abundance.
Keywords: bioeconomic | equilibria | time series | overfishing | critical transition
Significance: Recent years have witnessed strenuous ongoing debate about the sustainability of many commercial fisheries. Here we apply commonly accepted principles of fishery science to consider the impact of price flexibility on long-term fishery sustainability in an era of increasing demand due to population increase and rising economic expectations. We apply this model to two commercial oceanic fisheries (cod and pollock) to demonstrate that harvest and price statistics that are commonly available for commercial fisheries can be used to diagnose the degree to which a given fishery has been overharvested. More importantly, the same heuristic can also be used to identify plausible targets for fishery rehabilitation and evaluate the effectiveness of alternative policy options to achieve those goals.
Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra & Christopher Poliquin, Handgun waiting periods reduce gun deaths. PNAS 114 (2017), 12162–12165.
Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a “cooling off” period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate the impact of waiting periods on gun deaths, exploiting all changes to state-level policies in the Unites States since 1970. We find that waiting periods reduce gun homicides by roughly 17 %. We provide further support for the causal impact of waiting periods on homicides by exploiting a natural experiment resulting from a federal law in 1994 that imposed a temporary waiting period on a subset of states.
Keywords: gun policy | gun violence | waiting period | injury prevention
Significance: Waiting period laws that delay the purchase of firearms by a few days reduce gun homicides by roughly 17 %. Our results imply that the 17 states (including the District of Columbia) withwaiting periods avoid roughly 750 gun homicides per year as a result of this policy. Expanding the waiting period policy to all other US states would prevent an additional 910 gun homicides per year without imposing any restrictions on who can own a gun.
Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Need A Paper? Get A Plug-In. nature 551 (2017), 399–400.
A collection of web-browser plug-ins is making the scholarly literature more discoverable.
These tools largely overlap in the data sources they use, and therefore, the papers they can access. These include PubMed Central, Europe PMC, Google Scholar and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, a database of more than 100 million documents from 5,000 or so sources. What distinguishes these tools from sites such as Sci-Hub is that their developers say that they retrieve only legally available articles.
Lizzie Wade, Original Sin. science 358 (2017), 295–297.
Some artifacts have questionable origins, and its initial mission was religious. Can the Museum of the Bible win scholarly respect?
That gingerly approach is unlikely to win the hearts of scholars. But it is in keeping with how Trobisch frames the museum’s mission. “If we could provide a safe classroom, a safe space, for everyone interested in [the] Bible,” he says, “then we’ve achieved whatever we want to achieve.”
Romuald Laso-Jadart et al., The Genetic Legacy of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, Recent Admixture and Post-admixture Selection in the Makranis of Pakistan. American Journal of Human Genetics (2017), preprint, 1–8. <DOI:10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.09.025>.
Romuald Laso-Jadart, Christine Harmant, Hélène Quach, Nora Zidane, Chris Tyler-Smith, Qasim Mehdi, Qasim Ayub, Lluis Quintana-Murci, & Etienne Patin
From the eighth century onward, the Indian Ocean was the scene of extensive trade of sub-Saharan African slaves via sea routes controlled by Muslim Arab and Swahili traders. Several populations in present-day Pakistan and India are thought to be the descendants of such slaves, yet their history of admixture and natural selection remains largely undefined. Here, we studied the genome-wide diversity of the African-descent Makranis, who reside on the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan, as well that of four neighboring Pakistani populations, to investigate the genetic legacy, population dynamics, and tempo of the Indian Ocean slave trade. We show that the Makranis are the result of an admixture event between local Baluch tribes and Bantu-speaking populations from eastern or southeastern Africa; we dated this event to 300 years ago during the Omani Empire domination. Levels of parental relatedness, measured through runs of homozygosity, were found to be similar across Pakistani populations, suggesting that the Makranis rapidly adopted the traditional practice of endogamous marriages. Finally, we searched for signatures of post-admixture selection at traits evolving under positive selection, including skin color, lactase persistence, and resistance to malaria. We demonstrate that the African-specific Duffy-null blood group—believed to confer resistance against Plasmodium vivax infection—was recently introduced to Pakistan through the slave trade and evolved adaptively in this P. vivax malaria-endemic region. Our study reconstructs the genetic and adaptive history of a neglected episode of the African Diaspora and illustrates the impact of recent admixture on the diffusion of adaptive traits across human populations.
Mark Lipson et al., Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers. nature 551 (2017), 368–372.
n551-0368-Supplement1.pdf, n551-0368-Supplement2.pdf, n551-0368-Supplement3.xlsx, n551-0368-Supplement4.xlsx
Mark Lipson, Anna Szécsényi-Nagy, Swapan Mallick, Annamária Pósa, Balázs Stégmár, Victoria Keerl, Nadin Rohland, Kristin Stewardson, Matthew Ferry, Megan Michel, Jonas Oppenheimer, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht, Eadaoin Harney, Susanne Nordenfelt, Bastien Llamas, Balázs Gusztáv Mende, Kitti Köhler, Krisztián Oross, Mária Bondár, Tibor Marton, Anett Osztás, János Jakucs, Tibor Paluch, Ferenc Horváth, Piroska Csengeri, Judit Koós, Katalin Sebõk, Alexandra Anders, Pál Raczky, Judit Regenye, Judit P. Barna, Szilvia Fábián, Gábor Serlegi, Zoltán Toldi, Emese Gyöngyvér Nagy, János Dani, Erika Molnár, György Pálfi, László Márk, Béla Melegh, Zsolt Bánfai, László Domboróczki, Javier Fernández-Eraso, José Antonio Mujika-Alustiza, Carmen Alonso Fernández, Javier Jiménez Echevarría, Ruth Bollongino, Jörg Orschiedt, Kerstin Schierhold, Harald Meller, Alan Cooper, Joachim Burger, Eszter Bánffy, Kurt W. Alt, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Wolfgang Haak & David Reich
Ancient DNA studies have established that Neolithic European populations were descended from Anatolian migrants1–8 who received a limited amount of admixture from resident huntergatherers3 –5,9. Many open questions remain, however, about the spatial and temporal dynamics of population interactions and admixture during the Neolithic period. Here we investigate the population dynamics of Neolithization across Europe using a highresolution genome-wide ancient DNA dataset with a total of 180 samples, of which 130 are newly reported here, from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Hungary (6000–2900 bc, n = 100), Germany (5500–3000 bc, n = 42) and Spain (5500–2200 bc, n = 38). We find that genetic diversity was shaped predominantly by local processes, with varied sources and proportions of hunter-gatherer ancestry among the three regions and through time. Admixture between groups with different ancestry profiles was pervasive and resulted in observable population transformation across almost all cultural transitions. Our results shed new light on the ways in which gene flow reshaped European populations throughout the Neolithic period and demonstrate the potential of time-series-based sampling and modelling approaches to elucidate multiple dimensions of historical population interactions.
Liisa Loog, Marta Mirazón Lahr, Mirna Kovacevic, Andrea Manica, Anders Eriksson & Mark G. Thomas, Estimating mobility using sparse data, Application to human genetic variation. PNAS 114 (2017), 12213–12218.
Mobility is one of the most important processes shaping spatiotemporal patterns of variation in genetic, morphological, and cultural traits. However, current approaches for inferring past migration episodes in the fields of archaeology and population genetics lack either temporal resolution or formal quantification of the underlying mobility, are poorly suited to spatially and temporally sparsely sampled data, and permit only limited systematic comparison between different time periods or geographic regions. Here we present an estimator of past mobility that addresses these issues by explicitly linking trait differentiation in space and time. We demonstrate the efficacy of this estimator using spatiotemporally explicit simulations and apply it to a large set of ancient genomic data from Western Eurasia. We identify a sequence of changes in human mobility from the Late Pleistocene to the Iron Age. We find that mobility among European Holocene farmers was significantly higher than among European hunter–gatherers both pre- and postdating the Last Glacial Maximum. We also infer that this Holocene rise in mobility occurred in at least three distinct stages: the first centering on the well-known population expansion at the beginning of the Neolithic, and the second and third centering on the beginning of the Bronze Age and the late Iron Age, respectively. These findings suggest a strong link between technological change and human mobility in Holocene Western Eurasia and demonstrate the utility of this framework for exploring changes in mobility through space and time.
Keywords: mobility | time-series data | morphological variation | cultural variation | ancient DNA
Significance: Migratory activity is a critical factor in shaping processes of biological and cultural change through time. We introduce a method to estimate changes in underlying migratory activity that can be applied to genetic, morphological, or cultural data and is well-suited to samples that are sparsely distributed in space and through time. By applying this method to ancient genome data, we infer a number of changes in human mobility in Western Eurasia, including higher mobility in pre- than post-Last Glacial Maximum hunter–gatherers, and oscillations in Holocene mobility with peaks centering on the Neolithic transition and the beginnings of the Bronze Age and the Late Iron Age.
Avraham Biran & Joseph Naveh, An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan. Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993), 81–98.
Raymond C. van Leeuwen, Agriculture and Wisdom, The Case of the “Gezer Calendar”. In: Festschrift Choon Leong Seow. (in Vorbereitung 2017), 1–16.
As shall become clear in the course of this essay, the inscription might be called the “Gezer Farmer’s Ditty” (henceforth, GFD) in light of its generic characteristics, because the Tablet appears both to be and to function as a children’s ditty that sums up the annual cycle of farming tasks in ancient Canaan or Israel. This primary use does not exclude its probable secondary use as a writing exercise.
Keywords: wisdom | agriculture | calendar | instruction | poetry | proverb | Hebrew/Canaanite/Phoenician inscriptions
Thomas Levy & Thomas Higham (Hrsg.), The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating, Archaeology, Text and Science. (London 2014).
Aren M. Maeir, The Southern Kingdom of Judah, Surrounded by Enemies. In: Jennie Ebeling, J. Edward Wright, Mark Elliott & Paul V. M. Flesher (Hrsg.), The Old Testament in Archaeology and History. (Waco 2017), 391–412.
Aren M. Maeir & Louise A. Hitchcock, Rethinking the Philistines, A 2017 Perspective. In: Oded Lipschits, Yuval Gadot & Matthew J. Adams (Hrsg.), Rethinking Israel, Studies in the History and Archaeology of Ancient Israel in Honor of Israel Finkelstein. (Winona Lake 2017), 247–266.
As we have attempted to demonstrate, the study of the Philistines and their origins, culture, and relationships with other cultures has gone through major changes in the last few decades. Due in part to a large quantity of finds from the many excavations that have and are being conducted in Philistia and in its surroundings (e.g., Lipschits and Maeir 2017), side by side with new interpretive frameworks, Philistine archaeology is a vibrant and quickly changing field. As research continues in Philistia and on the finds from Philistia, we are convinced that new and exciting understandings of this fascinating culture will continue to flourish, and in a decade or two, we will need once again to rethink our understanding.
Joseph Naveh, Some Considerations on the Ostracon from \AlifIzbet Sartah. Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978), 31–35.
In view of the affinities between the letter forms in the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon and those in the archaic Greek alphabet, and bearing in mind that late second-millennium Aphek and its surroundings were occupied by the Philistines (of Aegean origin), there is a faint possibility that this ostracon may have been written by a Philistine. If the four undeciphered lines form a text in a dialect used in the Aegean area, there would be ss?me basis for the assumption that the Proto-Canaanite alphabet was transmitted to the Greeks through the Philistines who had settled in the Canaanite coastal area. However, this is merely a hypothesis, which may be proved or disproved in the future.
Until such a key for understanding the ostracon can be found, it may be said that the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon contains the attempt of an unskilled person in the twelfth century B.C. to write an abecedary with the twenty-two Canaanite letters. He continued to scratch more letters of this kind, but apparently without attempting to make sense. His confusion of letters and his mistakes seem to be so serious that I would not recommend the drawing of paleographic conclusions from any of the forms produced by him. We cannot know which letter forms are based on the contemporary scribal tradition and which are the products of either the writer’s poor training or his bad memory.
Claudia Gerling et al., High-resolution isotopic evidence of specialised cattle herding in the European Neolithic. PLoS ONE 12 (2017), e180164. <DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0180164>.
pone12-e0180164-Supplement1.pdf, pone12-e0180164-Supplement2.pdf, pone12-e0180164-Supplement3.png
Claudia Gerling, Thomas Doppler, Volker Heyd, Corina Knipper, Thomas Kuhn, Moritz F. Lehmann, Alistair W. G. Pike & Jörg Schibler
Reconstructing stock herding strategies and land use is key to comprehending past human social organization and economy. We present laser-ablation strontium and carbon isotope data from 25 cattle (Bos taurus) to reconstruct mobility and infer herding management at the Swiss lakeside settlement of Arbon Bleiche 3, occupied for only 15 years (3384 ± 3370 BC). Our results reveal three distinct isotopic patterns that likely reflect different herding strategies: 1) localized cattle herding, 2) seasonal movement, and 3) herding away from the site year-round. Different strategies of herding are not uniformly represented in various areas of the settlement, which indicates specialist modes of cattle management. The pressure on local fodder capacities and the need for alternative herding regimes must have involved diverse access to grazing resources. Consequently, the increasing importance of cattle in the local landscape was likely to have contributed to the progress of socio-economic differentiation in early agricultural societies in Europe.
Yosef Ofer, The Mystery of the Missing Pages of the Aleppo Codex. Biblical Archaeology Review 41 (2015), iv, 59–62, 70.
I don’t believe that a suitcase containing hundreds of pages from the Crown exists somewhere in the world. The majority of the lost pages disappeared in Aleppo after the riots. True, individual pages of the Crown may yet turn up. But the generation that was active 67 years ago is gone. Maybe one of them gave something to the next generation. But the chance of our finding anything new decreases year by year.
Alessio Rovere et al., Giant boulders and Last Interglacial storm intensity in the North Atlantic. PNAS 114 (2017), 12144–12149.
Alessio Rovere, Elisa Casella, Daniel L. Harris, Thomas Lorscheid, Napayalage A. K. Nandasena, Blake Dyer, Michael R. Sandstrom, Paolo Stocchi, William J. D’Andrea & Maureen E. Raymo
As global climate warms and sea level rises, coastal areas will be subject to more frequent extreme flooding and hurricanes. Geologic evidence for extreme coastal storms during past warm periods has the potential to provide fundamental insights into their future intensity. Recent studies argue that during the Last Interglacial (MIS 5e, 128–116 ka) tropical and extratropical North Atlantic cyclones may have been more intense than at present, and may have produced waves larger than those observed historically. Such strong swells are inferred to have created a number of geologic features that can be observed today along the coastlines of Bermuda and the Bahamas. In this paper, we investigate the most iconic among these features: massive boulders atop a cliff in North Eleuthera, Bahamas. We combine geologic field surveys, wave models, and boulder transport equations to test the hypothesis that such boulders must have been emplaced by storms of greater-than-historical intensity. By contrast, our results suggest that with the higher relative sea level (RSL) estimated for the Bahamas during MIS 5e, boulders of this size could have been transported by waves generated by storms of historical intensity. Thus, while the megaboulders of Eleuthera cannot be used as geologic proof for past “superstorms,” they do show that with rising sea levels, cliffs and coastal barriers will be subject to significantly greater erosional energy, even without changes in storm intensity.
Keywords: Last Interglacial | Eemian | climate change | extreme waves | superstorms
Significance: The Last Interglacial was the last period of the Earth’s history when climate was warmer than preindustrial, with higher polar temperatures and higher sea levels. Based on geologic evidence in Bermuda and the Bahamas, studies suggest that during this period the North Atlantic was characterized by “superstorms” more intense than any observed historically. Here we present data and models showing that, under conditions of higher sea level, historically observed hurricanes can explain geologic features previously interpreted as evidence for more intense Last Interglacial storm activity. Our results suggest that, even without an increase in the intensity of extreme storms, cliffs and coastal barriers will be subject to significantly higher wave-induced energies under even modestly higher sea levels.
Theodore A. Wertime & James D. Muhly (Hrsg.), The Coming of the Age of Iron. (New Haven 1980).
Jens Ludwig, Reducing gun violence in America. PNAS 114 (2017), 12097–12099.
Some support for this hypothesis comes from Fig. 1, generously created for me by Luca et al., which plots the difference in log of gun homicide rates between states that did and did not change their waiting period requirements as a result of the Brady Act for each year before and after Brady went into effect, controlling for all of the other explanatory variables used in Luca et al.’s main analysis. (Results for the full sample period are similar.) While the confidence intervals are somewhat large, the graph provides at least suggestive evidence that states that enact waiting periods experienced a decline in gun homicides starting about 3 y before the laws go into effect.
Karlo Yeager Rodríguez, IAGO v2.0, Thus credulous fools are caught. nature 551 (2017), 266.
How many of your choices had been me, whispering in your ear? True, I might have hastened things along, but if you’re honest, [...] to tear yourself away from my streams. Had it been you who decided not to act? After all, every time you power me down, it’s your face you see reflected in my screen. Best not to think about it — your show’s about to start.