Hasil untuk "Archaeology"

Lorenzo Monti, Tatiana Muraveva, Brian Sheridan et al.

In data-driven scientific discovery, a challenge lies in classifying well-characterized phenomena while identifying novel anomalies. Current semi-supervised clustering algorithms do not always fully address this duality, often assuming that supervisory signals are globally representative. Consequently, methods often enforce rigid constraints that suppress unanticipated patterns or require a pre-specified number of clusters, rendering them ineffective for genuine novelty detection. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLiMB (CLustering in Multiphase Boundaries), a domain-informed framework decoupling the exploitation of prior knowledge from the exploration of unknown structures. Using a sequential two-phase approach, CLiMB first anchors known clusters using metric-adaptive constrained partitioning, and subsequently applies density-based clustering to residual data to reveal arbitrary topologies. We demonstrate this framework on RR Lyrae stars data from the Gaia Data Release 3. CLiMB attains an Adjusted Rand Index of 0.829 with 90% seed coverage in recovering known Milky Way substructures, outperforming heuristic and constraint-based baselines, which stagnate below 0.20. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis confirms CLiMB's superior data efficiency, showing monotonic improvement as knowledge increases. Finally, the framework successfully isolates three distinct dynamical features (Shiva, Shakti, and the Galactic Disk) in the unlabelled field, validating its potential for scientific discovery.

C. Charbonnel, N. Prantzos

Lithium plays a unique role in astrophysics, as it is a powerful diagnostic for the physics and evolution of low-mass stars, Galactic archaeology, and cosmology. We review the Li observations in stars at different phases of their evolution, the strengths and the limitations of the current theoretical stellar models to explain the Li abundance data, our understanding of the Li sources and of the evolution of Li through- out the Galactic history. Key takeaways from the current state of the research in the field are: 1) Stellar evolution models accounting for fundamental transport processes of chemical species and angular momentum hold the promise of providing a common stellar Li depletion explanation to the Li abundance patterns observed in all Galactic stellar populations, including the dip and the plateau(s). 2) Novae are most probably the main source of Li in the Galaxy, on observational (but not yet theoretically established) grounds. 3) Radial migration of stars in the Galactic disk holds the key to understand many aspects of the Li evolution in the Milky Way.

Regina Csordás

One of the customs observed in Avar burials is that the Avars provided their dead with food and drink, as a kind of ‘passage’ to the afterlife. However, these bone and ceramic finds may have another interpretation, as it is also possible that they were placed with the deceased during the funerary feast. The bones could be traces of a last supper, or even donations placed in the grave to win the favour of the spirits.

Ofir Katz, Ofir Katz, Mikhail S. Blinnikov et al.

Shahad Elshehaby, Alavikunhu Panthakkan, Hussain Al-Ahmad et al.

This paper presents a thoroughly automated method for identifying and interpreting cuneiform characters via advanced deep-learning algorithms. Five distinct deep-learning models were trained on a comprehensive dataset of cuneiform characters and evaluated according to critical performance metrics, including accuracy and precision. Two models demonstrated outstanding performance and were subsequently assessed using cuneiform symbols from the Hammurabi law acquisition, notably Hammurabi Law 1. Each model effectively recognized the relevant Akkadian meanings of the symbols and delivered precise English translations. Future work will investigate ensemble and stacking approaches to optimize performance, utilizing hybrid architectures to improve detection accuracy and reliability. This research explores the linguistic relationships between Akkadian, an ancient Mesopotamian language, and Arabic, emphasizing their historical and cultural linkages. This study demonstrates the capability of deep learning to decipher ancient scripts by merging computational linguistics with archaeology, therefore providing significant insights for the comprehension and conservation of human history.

Sebastian Fajardo, Sina Mohammadi, Jonas Gregorio de Souza et al.

Ancient populations markedly transformed Neotropical forests, yet the spatial extent of their ecological influence remains underexplored at high resolution. Here we present a deep learning and remote sensing based approach to estimate areas of pre-Columbian forest modification based on modern vegetation. We apply this method to high-resolution satellite imagery from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, as a demonstration of a scalable approach, to evaluate palm tree distributions in relation to archaeological infrastructure. Palms were significantly more abundant near archaeological sites with large infrastructure investment. The extent of the largest palm cluster indicates that ancient human-managed areas linked to major infrastructure sites may be up to two orders of magnitude bigger than indicated by current archaeological evidence alone. Our findings suggest that pre-Columbian populations influenced vegetation, fostering conditions conducive to palm proliferation, leaving a lasting ecological footprint. This may have lowered the logistical costs of establishing infrastructure-heavy settlements in less accessible locations.

Jincheng Zhang, William Ringle, Andrew R. Willis

Manual identification of archaeological features in LiDAR imagery is labor-intensive, costly, and requires archaeological expertise. This paper shows how recent advancements in deep learning (DL) present efficient solutions for accurately segmenting archaeological structures in aerial LiDAR images using the YOLOv8 neural network. The proposed approach uses novel pre-processing of the raw LiDAR data and dataset augmentation methods to produce trained YOLOv8 networks to improve accuracy, precision, and recall for the segmentation of two important Maya structure types: annular structures and platforms. The results show an IoU performance of 0.842 for platforms and 0.809 for annular structures which outperform existing approaches. Further, analysis via domain experts considers the topological consistency of segmented regions and performance vs. area providing important insights. The approach automates time-consuming LiDAR image labeling which significantly accelerates accurate analysis of historical landscapes.

S. Buder, J. Kos, E. X. Wang et al.

The stars of the Milky Way carry the chemical history of our Galaxy in their atmospheres as they journey through its vast expanse. Like barcodes, we can extract the chemical fingerprints of stars from high-resolution spectroscopy. The fourth data release (DR4) of the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) Survey, based on a decade of observations, provides the chemical abundances of up to 32 elements for 917 588 stars that also have exquisite astrometric data from the $Gaia$ satellite. For the first time, these elements include life-essential nitrogen to complement carbon, and oxygen as well as more measurements of rare-earth elements critical to modern-life electronics, offering unparalleled insights into the chemical composition of the Milky Way. For this release, we use neural networks to simultaneously fit stellar parameters and abundances across the whole wavelength range, leveraging synthetic grids computed with Spectroscopy Made Easy. These grids account for atomic line formation in non-local thermodynamic equilibrium for 14 elements. In a two-iteration process, we first fit stellar labels to all 1 085 520 spectra, then co-add repeated observations and refine these labels using astrometric data from $Gaia$ and 2MASS photometry, improving the accuracy and precision of stellar parameters and abundances. Our validation thoroughly assesses the reliability of spectroscopic measurements and highlights key caveats. GALAH DR4 represents yet another milestone in Galactic archaeology, combining detailed chemical compositions from multiple nucleosynthetic channels with kinematic information and age estimates. The resulting dataset, covering nearly a million stars, opens new avenues for understanding not only the chemical and dynamical history of the Milky Way, but also the broader questions of the origin of elements and the evolution of planets, stars, and galaxies.

Patrick J. Park, Sebastian Herzele, Timothy W. Koeth

We re-examine a common narrative that experimental errors by Walther Bothe in 1941 led Germany to abandon graphite as a reactor moderator during World War II. Using document-based nuclear archaeology, we first show that both American and German scientists used an incorrect carbon scattering cross section, thereby undermining the accuracy of all wartime data, including their conclusions on carbon's absorption. Moreover, we argue that the availability of exceptionally pure petroleum coke in the United States, rather than any academic breakthrough, decisively enabled their production of nuclear-grade graphite. In contrast, Bothe's Siemens electrographite had more boron contamination than any graphites considered in Fermi's experiments, rendering it genuinely impractical as a moderator. By reframing the decision to eschew graphite as a deliberate decision rather than a mere experimental oversight, we believe the German decision was a rational consequence of a complex interplay between material constraints and wartime priorities.

Tullio Basaglia, Zane W. Bell, Daniele D'Agostino et al.

Geant4 is an object-oriented toolkit for the simulation of the passage of particles through matter. Its development was initially motivated by the requirements of physics experiments at high energy hadron colliders under construction in the last decade of the 20th century. Since its release in 1998, it has been exploited in many different applicative fields, including space science, nuclear physics, medical physics and archaeology. Its valuable support to scientific discovery is demonstrated by more than 16000 citations received in the past 25 years, including notable citations for main discoveries in different fields. This accomplishment shows that well designed software plays a key role in enabling scientific advancement. In this paper we discuss the key principles and the innovative decisions at the basis of Geant4, which made it a game changer in high energy physics and related fields, and outline some considerations regarding future directions.

Arianna Vasini, Emanuele Spitoni, Francesca Matteucci

The diagram depicting the abundance ratios [Mg/Mn] vs. [Al/Fe] has gained attention in recent literature as a valuable tool for exploring fundamental aspects of the evolution of the Milky Way and the Local Group. In particular, this combination of elements is supposed to be highly sensitive to the star formation history (SFH), unveiled by the imprints left on those abundances. Unfortunately, a complete discussion on the uncertainties associated is still missing, making it difficult to know how reliable the associated results are. In this paper we analyze, by means of detailed chemical evolution models, the nuclear uncertainties of Mg, Al, Mn and Fe to show how different yields can affect the trends in the [Mg/Mn] vs. [Al/Fe] plane. In fact, if different yield assumptions produce conflicting results, then the [Mg/Mn] vs. [Al/Fe] diagram does not represent a strong diagnostic for the SFH of a galaxy. We discuss the results on the [Mg/Mn] vs. [Al/Fe] diagram, as predicted by several Milky Way (MW) and Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) chemical evolution models adopting different nucleosynthesis prescriptions. The results show that the literature yields require some corrective factors to reproduce the APOGEE DR17 abundances of Mg, Al and Mn in the MW and that the same factors can also improve the results for the LMC. In particular, we show that by modifying the massive stars yields of Mg and Al the behaviour of the [Mg/Mn] vs. [Al/Fe] plot changes substantially. In conclusion, by changing the yields within their error bars, one obtains trends which differ strongly, making it difficult to draw any reliable conclusion on the SFH of galaxies. The proposed diagram is therefore uncertain from a theoretical point of view and it could represent a good diagnostic for SFH if the uncertainties on the nucleosynthesis of these elements (Mg, Mn, Al and Fe) could be reduced by future stellar calculations.

Amrutha Samalan, Samip Basnet, Eduardo Cortina Gil et al.

Muography is finding applications in various domains such as volcanology, archaeology, civil engineering, industry, mining, and nuclear waste surveys. To simplify transportation and installation in remote locations after laboratory testing, a fully portable and autonomous muon telescope based on Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) is being developed. Two glass-RPC prototypes have been created, sharing the same design goals but with different detector parameters, and comparative studies are ongoing. Drawing from prototype experience, a double-gap RPC with advanced features and improved spatial resolution is constructed. Resistive electrodes are produced manually, and a new data acquisition board is currently undergoing calibration. The results on prototype performance, readout board comparisons and the technical progress on the double-gap RPC are presented.

Simone Parisotto, Ninetta Leone, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb et al.

In this paper we propose an artificial intelligence imaging solution to support archaeologists in the classification task of Roman commonware potsherds. Usually, each potsherd is represented by its sectional profile as a two dimensional black-white image and printed in archaeological books related to specific archaeological excavations. The partiality and handcrafted variance of the fragments make their matching a challenging problem: we propose to pair similar profiles via the unsupervised hierarchical clustering of non-linear features learned in the latent space of a deep convolutional Variational Autoencoder (VAE) network. Our contribution also include the creation of a ROman COmmonware POTtery (ROCOPOT) database, with more than 4000 potsherds profiles extracted from 25 Roman pottery corpora, and a MATLAB GUI software for the easy inspection of shape similarities. Results are commented both from a mathematical and archaeological perspective so as to unlock new research directions in both communities.

Yuxi Lu, Tobias Buck, Ivan Minchev et al.

Recovering the birth radii of observed stars in the Milky Way is one of the ultimate goals of Galactic Archaeology. One method to infer the birth radius and the evolution of the ISM metallicity assumes a linear relation between the ISM metallicity with radius at any given look-back time. Here we test the reliability of this assumption by using 4 zoom-in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations from the NIHAO-UHD project. We find that one can infer precise birth radii only when the stellar disk starts to form, which for our modeled galaxies happens ~ 10 Gyr ago, in agreement with recent estimates for the Milky Way. At later times the linear correlation between the ISM metallicity and radius increases, as stellar motions become more ordered and the azimuthal variations of the ISM metallicity start to drop. The formation of a central bar and perturbations from mergers can increase this uncertainty in the inner and outer disk, respectively.

Diana Măriuca Vornicu

Steven Ge, Toshiya Itoh

We study the imbalance problem on complete bipartite graphs. The imbalance problem is a graph layout problem and is known to be NP-complete. Graph layout problems find their applications in the optimization of networks for parallel computer architectures, VLSI circuit design, information retrieval, numerical analysis, computational biology, graph theory, scheduling and archaeology. In this paper, we give characterizations for the optimal solutions of the imbalance problem on complete bipartite graphs. Using the characterizations, we can solve the imbalance problem in $\mathcal{O}(\log(|V|) \cdot \log(\log(|V|)))$ time, when given the cardinalities of the parts of the graph, and verify whether a given solution is optimal in $O(|V|)$ time on complete bipartite graphs. We also introduce a restricted form of proper interval bipartite graphs on which the imbalance problem is solvable in $\mathcal{O}(c \cdot \log(|V|) \cdot \log(\log(|V|)))$ time, where $c = \mathcal{O}(|V|)$, by using the aforementioned characterizations.

Danae Fiore, Agustín Acevedo, Cristian Favier Dubois

Este trabajo analiza un conjunto de placas grabadas procedentes del Golfo San Matías (provincia de Río Negro) con el objeto de evaluar recurrencias de diseño que indiquen la presencia de reglas de ornamentación y/o codificación de información visual entre las poblaciones cazadoras-recolectoras que las produjeron y utilizaron. Posteriormente, se desarrollan comparaciones sistemáticas con 170 placas procedentes de Patagonia y otras regiones de Argentina, utilizando como indicador principal la presencia de tipos de motivos compartidos. Los datos se evalúan a la luz de un modelo teórico con expectativas que vinculan variabilidad/estandarización de diseños, laxitud/estructuración ornamental y heterogeneidad/redundancia informativa. Los resultados demuestran que las placas mantienen una baja estandarización de los diseños, compatible con una función comunicativa de baja redundancia (con contenidos heterogéneos) y/o con una función ornamental con reglas laxas. Los repertorios compartidos documentan, además, numerosos vínculos interregionales, que son corroborados mediante otras líneas de evidencia arqueológica.

Н.Н. Серегин, А.Н. Чистякова, К.М. Монгуш

Статья посвящена введению в научный оборот и разноплановой интерпретации фрагмента редкого металлического зеркала из собрания Национального музея Республики Тыва им. Алдан-Маадыр (г. Кызыл). Атрибуция композиции, помещенной в сохранившуюся часть орнаментального поля зеркала, потребовала обращения к обширным коллекциям китайских предметов, отраженным в каталогах и специальной литературе. Установлено, что изделие относится к редкой группе находок с изображением сцены беседы «Сюй Ю и Чао Фу» - сюжета, известного со времен династии Хань. Рассмотрение особенностей отливки, оформления бортика и стилистики изображений зеркала показывает, что изготовление данного экземпляра может быть отнесено к периоду некитайской династии Цзинь (1115-1234 гг. н. э.). Определить место и значение фрагмента в системе подобных предметов, обнаруженных на территории Тувы, позволил осуществленный обзор известных находок. Публикуемый фрагмент, изготовление которого относится к чжурчжэньскому времени, демонстрирует наиболее поздний период в распространении таких изделий на территории Тувы. При этом важно, что изделие демонстрирует весьма редкий экземпляр зеркала, полные аналогии которому отсутствуют не только в обозначенном регионе, но также, насколько нам известно, не выявлены к настоящему времени в памятниках Северной и Центральной Азии. Не исключено, что анализируемая находка связана с появлением в Туве в монгольское время нового населения, имевшего контакты с соответствующими ремесленными центрами.

Alano Jaciguara Dantas de Alencar Martins, Daline Lima de Oliveira, Mizael Manoel Santos da Costa et al.

Este artigo procura mostrar um perfil gráfico preliminar dos registros rupestres com gravuras na área arqueológica do Seridó (setor geográfico do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte), evidenciando as técnicas utilizadas, os suportes rochosos, as temáticas, a cenografia e discutir possíveis fatores ambientais nas escolhas das técnicas dos registros gráficos na paisagem natural das microrregiões (Seridó Oriental e Seridó Ocidental) da área da pesquisa.

Qin-Qin Lü, Julian Henderson, Yongqiang Wang et al.

Abstract Natron-based glass was a vital part of material culture in the Mediterranean and Europe for nearly two millennia, but natron glass found elsewhere on the Eurasian Continent has not received adequate discussion, despite its influence on ancient Asian glass. Here we present a new interpretation of natron glass finds from both the West and the East. After establishing the compositional types and technological sequence of Mediterranean natron glass (eighth-second century BCE) using trace elements, we report the analysis of a mid-1st millennium BCE glass bead from Xinjiang, China, which was likely made with Levantine raw glass, and identify common types of stratified eye beads in Eurasia based on a compositional and typological comparison. Combining these findings, we propose that a considerable number of Mediterranean natron glass products had arrived in East Asia at least by the fifth century BCE, which may have been a contributing factor in the development of native Chinese glass-making. The swift diffusion of natron glass across Eurasia in the 1st millennium BCE was likely facilitated by a three-stage process involving maritime and overland networks and multiple forms of trade and exchange, indicating a highly adaptable and increasingly efficient transcontinental connection along the ‘Proto-Silk Road’.