In this work we analyse a number of variants of the Wasserstein distance which allow to focus the classification on the prescribed parts (fragments) of classified 2D curves. These variants are based on the use of a number of discrete probability measures which reflect the importance of given fragments of curves. The performance of this approach is tested through a series of experiments related to the clustering analysis of 2D curves performed on data coming from the field of archaeology.
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Carbon and heavier elements are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to constrain the physical processes during galaxy formation and evolution. This approach, Galactic archaeology, has been popularly used for our Milky Way Galaxy thanks to a vast amount of data from the Gaia satellite and multi-object spectrographs, and now can also be applied to very distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - extra-galactic archaeology. In these studies the most important factor is the input stellar physics, namely nucleosynthesis yields and binary physics, which predominantly determine the model predictions. In this review I give a summary of stellar nucleosynthesis, and how they are tested with the observations in the Milky Way. Then I show how chemical enrichment of galaxies can be calculated, and show some results with the latest nucleosynthesis yields.
Leslie M. Morales, Jamie Tayar, Zachary R. Claytor
Galactic archaeology relies on accurate stellar parameters to reconstruct the galaxy's history, including information on stellar ages. While the precision of data has improved significantly in recent years, stellar models used for age inference have not improved at a similar rate. In fact, different models yield notably different age predictions for the same observational data. In this paper, we assess the difference in age predictions of various widely used model grids for stars along the red giant branch. Using open source software, we conduct a comparison of four different evolution grids and we find that age estimations become less reliable if stellar mass is not known, with differences occasionally exceeding $80\%$. Additionally, we note significant disagreements in the models' age estimations at non-solar metallicity. Finally, we present a method for including theoretical uncertainties from stellar evolutionary tracks in age inferences of red giants, aimed at improving the accuracy of age estimation techniques used in the galactic archaeology community.
Understanding the dietary preferences of ancient societies and their evolution across periods and regions is crucial for revealing human-environment interactions. Seeds, as important archaeological artifacts, represent a fundamental subject of archaeobotanical research. However, traditional studies rely heavily on expert knowledge, which is often time-consuming and inefficient. Intelligent analysis methods have made progress in various fields of archaeology, but there remains a research gap in data and methods in archaeobotany, especially in the classification task of ancient plant seeds. To address this, we construct the first Ancient Plant Seed Image Classification (APS) dataset. It contains 8,340 images from 17 genus- or species-level seed categories excavated from 18 archaeological sites across China. In addition, we design a framework specifically for the ancient plant seed classification task (APSNet), which introduces the scale feature (size) of seeds based on learning fine-grained information to guide the network in discovering key "evidence" for sufficient classification. Specifically, we design a Size Perception and Embedding (SPE) module in the encoder part to explicitly extract size information for the purpose of complementing fine-grained information. We propose an Asynchronous Decoupled Decoding (ADD) architecture based on traditional progressive learning to decode features from both channel and spatial perspectives, enabling efficient learning of discriminative features. In both quantitative and qualitative analyses, our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art image classification methods, achieving an accuracy of 90.5%. This demonstrates that our work provides an effective tool for large-scale, systematic archaeological research.
Visual communication, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings, is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information. In today's visually saturated world, effective design demands an understanding of graphic design principles, visual storytelling, human psychology, and the ability to distill complex information into clear visuals. This dissertation explores how recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged to automate the creation of effective visual communication designs. Although generative models have made great progress in generating images from text, they still struggle to simplify complex ideas into clear, abstract visuals and are constrained by pixel-based outputs, which lack flexibility for many design tasks. To address these challenges, we constrain the models' operational space and introduce task-specific regularizations. We explore various aspects of visual communication, namely, sketches and visual abstraction, typography, animation, and visual inspiration.
This geoarchaeological survey was dedicated to (i) the Umm an-Nar (2700–2000 BCE) settlement site of Dahwa and surrounding areas in the foothills of the Hajar Mountains as well as (ii) the coastal area near Saham on the Batinah coastal plain in northern Oman, the latter without focus on a specific cultural epoch. Stratigraphic sections from the proximal coastal plain provide insights into highly dynamic episodic sedimentation patterns with thick units of variable grain sizes and sorting. In one of the stratigraphic profiles in the town of Saham, a small anthropogenic pit or channel was found, interpreted as a pit hearth used by the Samad culture (300 BCE–100/200 CE) based on granulometry, thin-section analysis, clustered macro-charcoals, amorphous organic remains, as well as luminescence and 14C dating. Our coincidental discovery of this site indicates that there might be abundant traces of the Samad culture buried in the thick alluvium, from a period of hydrologically favourable conditions c. 50–300 CE. The Umm an-Nar dating of the Dahwa archaeological site in the foothills of the Hajar Mountains was confirmed for the first time by luminescence dating, although the low dose rate and high scatter of equivalent doses pose substantial challenges to the regional application of this method.
Discovering ancient agricultural terraces in desert regions is important for the monitoring of long-term climate changes on the Earth's surface. However, traditional ground surveys are both costly and limited in scale. With the increasing accessibility of aerial and satellite data, machine learning techniques bear large potential for the automatic detection and recognition of archaeological landscapes. In this paper, we propose a deep semantic model fusion method for ancient agricultural terrace detection. The input data includes aerial images and LiDAR generated terrain features in the Negev desert. Two deep semantic segmentation models, namely DeepLabv3+ and UNet, with EfficientNet backbone, are trained and fused to provide segmentation maps of ancient terraces and walls. The proposed method won the first prize in the International AI Archaeology Challenge. Codes are available at https://github.com/wangyi111/international-archaeology-ai-challenge.
The success of galactic archaeology and the reconstruction of the formation history of our galaxy critically relies on precise ages for large populations of stars. For evolved stars in the red clump and red giant branch, the carbon to nitrogen ratio ([C/N]) has recently been identified as a powerful diagnostic of mass and age that can be applied to stellar samples from spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS/APOGEE. Here, we show that at least 10\% of red clump stars and %$\approx 10\%$ of red giant branch stars deviate from the standard relationship between [C/N] and mass. {We use the APOGEE-\kepler\ (APOKASC) overlap sample to show that binary interactions are %the majority contributors to these responsible for the majority of these outliers and that stars with %any indicators of current or previous binarity should be excluded from galactic archaeology analyses that rely on [C/N] abundances to infer stellar masses. We also show that the %standard DR14 APOGEE analysis overestimates the surface gravities for even moderately rotating giants (vsini$>2$ km/s)}
We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a challenging and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and style. We use a difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training data reuse: an epic narration of a single combat between Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and a pterodactyl, a prehistoric flying reptile. We ask several LLMs and humans to write such a story and conduct a human evalution involving various criteria such as fluency, coherence, originality, humor, and style. Our results show that some state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match or slightly outperform our writers in most dimensions; whereas open-source LLMs lag behind. Humans retain an edge in creativity, while humor shows a binary divide between LLMs that can handle it comparably to humans and those that fail at it. We discuss the implications and limitations of our study and suggest directions for future research.
Adjusting indoor environment so as to provide thermal comfort is a matter of utmost importance in architecture. Despite the remarkable achievements so far made, the main challenge is to provide thermal comfort in buildings through minimum use of fossil fuels. In hot and dry climates, this is especially important during the hot period of the year. As the people in Sistan, a region in southeastern Iran characterized by a hot and dry climate, are from low-income families unable to afford any modern building materials and techniques, they resort to natural materials and adaptive techniques to achieve thermal comfort. This fact justifies inquiring into the effect of the local vernacular architecture, which relies on natural materials and indigenous climate adaptation techniques, on thermal comfort and energy saving. Accordingly, this study aimed at analyzing natural materials and adaptive techniques and their roles in providing summer thermal comfort in indoor spaces of the region. To this end, a typical building was selected while identifying the dominant types of vernacular architecture in Sistan. Quantitative analysis was then conducted to analyze the roles and effects of natural materials-based adaptive techniques like Dorche, Kolak and Khaarkhaneh1 , which help provide thermal comfort in specific situations. In light of the obtained results, indoor environmental parameters of the regional vernacular architecture fail to meet the thermal comfort zone in very hot days. However, adaptive techniques hinging on natural materials and ventilation has the potential to make indoor thermal parameters tolerable at different times of the day in such periods. This will result in residents’ increased thermal comfort, which will in turn reduce the amount of energy consumption.
Theodoros Avgitas, Sabine Elles, Corinne Goy
et al.
A tomography experiment using muon cosmic rays was conducted on an archaeological site in Greece, a tumulus. This contribution presents issues related to the simulation of the experiment and of the site, using tools commonly used in high-energy physics. The scientific objective is to compare the results of the simulation with the recorded data to highlight anomalies.
This paper is part of a larger project investigating how American archaeological work in the Southwest gradually elides ongoing acts of displacing native and Mexican peoples in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Some of the earliest American encounters with ruins and abandoned settlements belonging to Ancestral Puebloan civilizations occurred in the context of demarcating the new boundary between Mexico and the United States. For example, John Russell Bartlett’s Personal Narrative of the U.S.-Mexican Boundary Survey (1854) is noteworthy for the way such ruins are a major focus within it. However, Bartlett actively associates these ancient ruins with processes of forced removal that he can see happening right in front of him, which result in another, more recent kind of ruin. Over time, though, the recognition of a complex and often violent history of relocation that both shapes and continues into the present drops out of later archaeological work in the region. From the perspective of anachronism, this general change in how Southwest archaeology relates past and present involves superimposing a wished-for present, specifically one devoid of native inhabitants, onto the past ruin to the extent that that ruin is understood to be devoid of any relevance for contemporary indigenous peoples living in the region. Put another way, numerous critics of nineteenth-century European and American archaeological practice have pointed out how it “produces archaeological subjects by splitting contemporary non-European peoples off from their precolonial, and even their colonial past. To revive indigenous history and culture as archaeology is to revive them as dead” (Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 1992). This paper extends this critique further by exploring how such an operation is essentially a special form of anachronism and how it arises out of archaeological practices that, at least initially, are not.In particular, this paper tracks how this change in archaeological practice depends on a notion of prehistoric time which is developed by privileging certain kinds of archaeological evidence (especially pottery and architectural remains) and certain ways of presenting and interpreting that evidence, looking at the history of excavations at Mesa Verde at the turn of the century. Key texts include Gustaf Nordenskiöld’s Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde (1893), and Jesse Walter Fewkes’s Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park (1909 & 1911). In reinforcing the perception of Mesa Verde as a historically-disconnected, prehistoric site, Fewkes’s report differs from its forerunner in several aspects, specifically its consolidation of distinct structures (namely, how many there are and which are noteworthy), its shift from an analytical to a descriptive mode of writing, and finally its cultivation of a photographic aesthetic that bolsters the sense of a timeless ruin.
In this review I will discuss the comparison between model results and observational data for the Milky Way, the predictive power of such models as well as their limits. Such a comparison, known as Galactic archaeology, allows us to impose constraints on stellar nucleosynthesis and timescales of formation of the various Galactic components (halo, bulge, thick disk and thin disk).
Early-type stars show a bimodal distribution of magnetic field strengths, with some showing very strong fields ($\gtrsim 1\,\mathrm{kG}$) and others very weak fields ($\lesssim 10\,\mathrm{G}$). Recently, we proposed that this reflects the processing or lackthereof of fossil fields by subsurface convection zones. Stars with weak fossil fields process these at the surface into even weaker dynamo-generated fields, while in stars with stronger fossil fields magnetism inhibits convection, allowing the fossil field to remain as-is. We now expand on this theory and explore the time-scales involved in the evolution of near-surface magnetic fields. We find that mass loss strips near-surface regions faster than magnetic fields can diffuse through them. As a result, observations of surface magnetism directly probe the frozen-in remains of the convective dynamo. This explains the slow evolution of magnetism in stars with very weak fields: these dynamo-\emph{generated} magnetic fields evolve on the time-scale of the mass loss, not that of the dynamo.
Within the framework of new urban policies in the City of Buenos Aires, a redevelopment project began to
be implemented in Villa 20 in 2016. Various state mechanisms were created to guarantee the participation of residents in decision-making. In this article, the processes of collective mobilization around redevelopment are analyzed, particularly the formation of the political front Mesa Activa por la Reurbanización de la Villa 20. From an ethnographic approach and the concept of hegemony, the perspectives of the actors are recovered and the daily network of practices and social relations is reconstructed. It is shown that neighbors and militants develop political actions, both inside and outside the state devices, through which they build unity. Likewise, they establish interpersonal relationships with state agents: confrontational ties, as well as alliances, affinity relationships, and cooperation.
Martín Almagro-Gorbea, Alberto J. Lorrio Alvarado, Mariano Torres Ortiz
Las cuencas del Bajo Vinalopó y del Bajo Segura fueron una de las áreas más estratégicas de la península ibérica en la Antigüedad. Hacia el 500 a. C. este territorio sufre profundos cambios: hacia el 525 a. C. desaparecen la colonia fenicia de La Fonteta y la población orientalizante de Peña Negra, identificada con la ciudad de Herna (OM 456-460) y surge como nuevo centro territorial la ciudad ibérica de Ilici, en la actual Alcudia de Elche. Precisamente, hacia el 500 a. C. aparece un nuevo horizonte de importaciones griegas en el Sureste de Iberia asociado a un nuevo estilo jonio-ibérico en pilares-estela y esculturas y a la introducción de la escritura «greco-ibérica». Estos elementos reflejan una política expansiva focense, contemporánea a las Guerras Médicas y a los conflictos coloniales entre griegos y púnicos en el Mediterráneo Occidental. Como consecuencia, la «crisis del 500 a. C.» supuso un profundo cambio, al sustituirse la estructura territorial y urbana orientalizante, de raíces fenicias, y surgir la ciudad-estado «ibérica», más próxima al mundo helénico.
The first supernovae enrich the previously pristine gas with metals, out of which the next generation of stars form. Based on hydrodynamical simulations, we develop a new stochastic model to predict the metallicity of star-forming gas in the first galaxies. On average, in internally enriched galaxies, the metals are well mixed with the pristine gas. However, in externally enriched galaxies, the metals can not easily penetrate into the dense gas, which yields a significant metallicity difference between the star-forming and average gas inside a halo. To study the consequences of this effect, we apply a semi-analytical model to Milky Way-like dark matter merger trees and follow stellar fossils from high redshift until the present day with a novel realistic metal mixing recipe. We calibrate the model to reproduce the metallicity distribution function (MDF) at low metallicities and find that a primordial IMF with slope of $\mathrm{d}N/\mathrm{d}M \propto M^{-0.5}$ from $2 Msun$ to $180 Msun$ best reproduces the MDF. Our improved model for inhomogeneous mixing can have a large impact for individual minihalos, but does not significantly influence the modelled MDF at [Fe/H]$\gtrsim -4$ or the best-fitting Pop~III IMF.
This paper is a top down historical perspective on the several phases in the development of probability from its prehistoric origins to its modern day evolution, as one of the key methodologies in artificial intelligence, data science, and machine learning. It is written in honor of Barry Arnold's birthday for his many contributions to statistical theory and methodology. Despite the fact that much of Barry's work is technical, a descriptive document to mark his achievements should not be viewed as being out of line. Barry's dissertation adviser at Stanford (he received a Ph.D. in Statistics there) was a philosopher of Science who dug deep in the foundations and roots of probability, and it is this breadth of perspective is what Barry has inherent. The paper is based on lecture materials compiled by the first author from various published sources, and over a long period of time. The material below gives a limited list of references, because the cast of characters is many, and their contributions are a part of the historical heritage of those of us who are interested in probability, statistics, and the many topics they have spawned.