Hasil untuk "Prehistoric archaeology"

Richard Coll Josifov, Luc Devroye, Gabor Lugosi

We investigate the behaviour of five classical centrality measures--Jordan, rumor, betweenness, degree, and closeness centralities--in the setting of uniform random recursive trees. Motivated by applications in network archaeology, we focus on two fundamental questions: (i) the birth index (time of arrival) of the most central vertex, and (ii) the relative centrality of the root. We quantify the probability that the root is the most central vertex, analyze its expected rank under each centrality measure, and determine the expected birth index of a central vertex. In addition, we characterize the typical size of the set of top-ranked vertices that contains the root with high probability. Finally, for each centrality notion, we study the persistence properties of the center and the asymptotic behaviour of the root's rank.

Zhongyuan Zhang, Alexander P Ji, Vinicius M Placco et al.

Massive Population III stars are currently not observed, but their initial mass function (IMF) can be inferred through stellar archaeology: fitting core-collapse supernova yield models to elemental abundances of low-mass, long-lived metal-poor stars. While prior work demonstrates that yield fitting can recover progenitor properties, it remains unclear which measured elements most control mass recovery quality and what level of IMF precision is achievable for a measured element set. We perform a systematic study of element importance for progenitor mass recovery. Using the Heger & Woosley (2010) yield grid, we generate mock observations, fit the initial mass, and evaluate the typical performance on the fractional mass recovery. Add/remove-one-element experiments and comparisons among different baseline element sets are used to rank elements by importance. We find that the most important elements for accurate mass recovery are C, N, Na, and K, with O, Al, Co, and Ni consistently improving performance when available. Overall, with currently measurable elements from high-resolution spectroscopy, stellar archaeology can deliver practical Population III IMF constraints assuming the core-collapse supernova yield models provide a good representation of stellar evolution in the early universe.

Agustina Espinoza Mecozzi

This paper integrates human ecology and evolution into practices and reflections that are foundational to sociocultural anthropology. It problematizes protected natural areas in Argentina by discussing: a. the discourses that isolate them from the surrounding regional and ecological context, turning them into “islands” of biodiversity, and b. the historical relationship between these areas and Indigenous communities. The theoretical basis of this work lies in Niche Construction Theory and Actor-Network Theory, analyzing the case of the Potae Napocna Navogoh community and the Río Pilcomayo National Park. In conclusion, emerging tensions and challenges from this context are identified, and the strategies and policies necessary to promote collaboration and dialogue among all involved parties are addressed.

Ajith Anil Meera, Abian Torres, Pablo Lanillos

Prehistoric humans invented stone tools for specialized tasks by not just maximizing the tool's immediate goal-completion accuracy, but also increasing their confidence in the tool for later use under similar settings. This factor contributed to the increased robustness of the tool, i.e., the least performance deviations under environmental uncertainties. However, the current autonomous tool design frameworks solely rely on performance optimization, without considering the agent's confidence in tool use for repeated use. Here, we take a step towards filling this gap by i) defining an optimization framework for task-conditioned autonomous hand tool design for robots, where ii) we introduce a neuro-inspired control confidence term into the optimization routine that helps the agent to design tools with higher robustness. Through rigorous simulations using a robotic arm, we show that tools designed with control confidence as the objective function are more robust to environmental uncertainties during tool use than a pure accuracy-driven objective. We further show that adding control confidence to the objective function for tool design provides a balance between the robustness and goal accuracy of the designed tools under control perturbations. Finally, we show that our CMAES-based evolutionary optimization strategy for autonomous tool design outperforms other state-of-the-art optimizers by designing the optimal tool within the fewest iterations. Code: https://github.com/ajitham123/Tool_design_control_confidence.

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

Ancient populations inhabited and 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. Our findings document a non-random spatial association between archaeological infrastructure and contemporary palm concentrations. 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. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that past human activity may have influenced local palm abundance and potentially reduced the logistical costs of establishing infrastructure-heavy settlements in less accessible locations. More broadly, our results highlight the utility of palm landscape distributions as an interpretable signal within environmental and multispectral datasets for constraining predictive models of archaeological site locations.

Martin Hanik, Esfandiar Nava-Yazdani, Christoph von Tycowicz

For decades, de Casteljau's algorithm has been used as a fundamental building block in curve and surface design and has found a wide range of applications in fields such as scientific computing, and discrete geometry to name but a few. With increasing interest in nonlinear data science, its constructive approach has been shown to provide a principled way to generalize parametric smooth curves to manifolds. These curves have found remarkable new applications in the analysis of parameter-dependent, geometric data. This article provides a survey of the recent theoretical developments in this exciting area as well as its applications in fields such as geometric morphometrics and longitudinal data analysis in medicine, archaeology, and meteorology.

Noa Keshet, Ehud Behar, Timothy R. Kallman

Supernovae are responsible for the elemental enrichment of the galaxy and some are postulated to leave behind a black hole. In a stellar binary system the supernova pollutes its companion, and the black hole can accrete back its own debris and emit X-rays. In this sequence of events, which is only poorly understood, winds are ejected, and observed through X-ray absorption lines. Measuring abundances of elements in the wind can lead to inferences about the historical explosion and possibly identify the long-gone progenitor of the compact object. Here, we re-analyze the uniquely rich X-ray spectrum of the 2005 outburst of GRO J1655-40. We reconstruct the absorption measure distribution (AMD) of the wind, and find that it increases sharply with ionization from H-like O up to H-like Ca, and then flattens out. The AMD is then used to measure relative abundances of 18 different elements. The present abundances are in partial agreement with a previous work with discrepancies mostly for low-Z elements. The overabundance of odd-Z elements hints at a high-metallicity, high-mass ($\simeq25\,M_\odot$) progenitor. Interestingly, the abundances are different from those measured in the companion atmosphere, indicating that the wind entrains lingering ambient supernova debris. This can be expected since the current total stellar mass of the binary ($<10\,M_\odot$) is much less than the progenitor mass.

Maria Rah, Manolya Yatman, Ali Taani et al.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy comprising three main components: the Bulge, the Disk, and the Halo. Of particular interest is the Galactic disk, which holds a significant portion of the baryonic matter angular momentum and harbors at least two primary stellar populations: the thin and thick disks. Understanding the formation and evolution of the Galactic disk is crucial for comprehending the origins and development of our Galaxy. Stellar archaeology offers a means to probe the disk's evolution by listening to the cosmological narratives of its oldest and most pristine stars, specifically the metal-poor stars. In this study, we employed accurate photometric metallicity estimates and Gaia Early Data Release 3 astrometry to curate a pure sample of the oldest Galactic stars. This proceeding presents a summary of our primary findings.

Víctor Andrés Torres-González

El Lacio fue el primer territorio en el que la República romana comenzó en el siglo IV a. C. a extender su ciudadanía más allá de los muros de la Urbs y a crear un sistema descentralizado de administración local para las ciudades que iba anexionando, ya que Roma no dejaba de ser una ciudad-estado y, por tanto, su organigrama político no era capaz de asumir el gobierno directo de esas comunidades. Así surgieron los primeros municipia, denominados antiquissima por Cicerón, a los que se les permitió seguir autogobernándose según sus propias leyes e instituciones, lo que explica las diversas magistraturas epicóricas que hubo en esta región. En el presente trabajo se pretende ofrecer una visión de conjunto sobre los tres tipos de magistrados epicóricos existentes en el Lacio: dictator, praetores y aediles. De este modo, se llevará a cabo un estudio de las fuentes literarias y, sobre todo, epigráficas para establecer una relación entre el tipo de ciudadanía concedida (civitas optimo iure o sine suffragio), la etnia (latina, volsca, hérnica) y el régimen de magistrados en vigor en cada comunidad. Asimismo, se analizará el desarrollo y las funciones de estos magistrados epicóricos en cada uno de los antiguos municipios laciales para delimitar su ámbito de competencias y sus relaciones con el resto de los cargos cívicos y religiosos de la ciudad. Finalmente, se llegará a la conclusión de que la dictadura, la pretura y la edilidad epicóricas fueron una declaración orgullosa del pasado y de la antigua posesión de la ciudadanía romana por parte de estos municipia antiquissima frente a los ordenamientos de cuatorviros y duunviros de las comunidades cívicas romanas posteriores al Bellum Sociale, aunque el sistema más eficaz y evolucionado de estas últimas acabó ejerciendo una cierta influencia en el funcionamiento de estas magistraturas epicóricas laciales.

Tullio Basaglia, Zane W. Bell, Daniele DAgostino et al.

This paper summarizes Geant4 contribution to scientific research over the past 25 years through a scientometric analysis of the results with which it has been associated. The scientometric data collected from scholarly literature and databases are evaluated with methods pertaining to econometrics and ecology to quantify relevant traits, diversity and disparity in their scientific and geographic distributions, and to identify statistically significant trends. The analysis reviews the contribution of Geant4 to the field - experimental particle physics - that originally motivated its development and highlights its role in other research domains including nuclear physics and engineering, astrophysics and space science, biomedical physics, archaeology and the cultural heritage.

Anish Ghoshal, Yann Gouttenoire, Lucien Heurtier et al.

Light primordial black holes (PBHs) with masses smaller than $10^9$ g ($10^{-24} M_\odot$) evaporate before the onset of Big-Bang nucleosynthesis, rendering their detection rather challenging. If efficiently produced, they may have dominated the universe energy density. We study how such an early matter-dominated era can be probed successfully using gravitational waves (GW) emitted by local and global cosmic strings. While previous studies showed that a matter era generates a single-step suppression of the GW spectrum, we instead find a "double-step" suppression for local-string GW whose spectral shape provides information on the duration of the matter era. The presence of the two steps in the GW spectrum originates from GW being produced through two events separated in time: loop formation and loop decay, taking place either before or after the matter era. The second step - called the "knee" - is a novel feature which is universal to any early matter-dominated era and is not only specific to PBHs. Detecting GWs from cosmic strings with LISA, ET, or BBO would set constraints on PBHs with masses between $10^6$ and $10^9$ g for local strings with tension $Gμ= 10^{-11}$, and PBHs masses between $10^4$ and $10^9$ g for global strings with symmetry-breaking scale $η= 10^{15}~\mathrm{GeV}$. Effects from the spin of PBHs are discussed.

José-Antonio Senén-Guirado

El debate de la restitución y retorno del Patrimonio Arqueológico a sus países de origen sigue siendo a día de hoy un tema que todavía tiene difícil solución, especialmente en cuanto se refiere a las piezas arqueológicas de mayor valor histórico. A pesar de ello, existe un amplio consenso en el seno de la sociedad sobre la necesidad de buscar la mejor solución a dicha cuestión, dando prioridad a la protección patrimonial en todo caso. Analizaremos algunas cuestiones pendientes a día de hoy, así como los casos que más interés han despertado a nivel mediático.

Hauguel-Bleuven Lola, Calvo-Gómez Jorge, Marchand Gregor

The notion of style has been the subject of much research and theoretical development in prehistoric archaeology. This vast concept touches several fields, including the morphology of artefacts, technical gestures and their function. The lithic typology of arrowhead armatures was widely developed in the twentieth century for the study of the French Mesolithic and includes some of these aspects. The functional, technical, or aesthetic nature of the morphological characteristics of these artefacts has received little attention, while the mapping of types has been overvalued This article presents a new approach combining statistical analysis with the use-wear analysis of arrowhead from several Breton sites, dated to the Late Mesolithic.

Wendy Dekmak

In northwestern Santa Cruz, the stratified site Colmillo Sur I presents a series of occupations with radiocarbon dates between 5470 cal BC and 1415 cal AC. This allows us to study continuities and changes in resource use patterns over a 7000 year period. In this paper we present the information obtained regarding the raw material procurement process and its temporal variability. We learned that throughout the occupation of the site there was a selection for raw materials of the best qualities coming from at least 80 km in different directions. Furthermore, we identified temporal trends in resource selection that persist over hundreds or thousands of years. We propose that the site was included in mobility circuits which guaranteed access to the best raw materials as well as persistence in occupation during certain periods

Nicolas Jeantet, Ronan Ledevin, Monica Gala et al.

Past bird communities are still under-studied in several Caribbean regions, including the Lesser Antilles. In order to improve our understanding of this area’s avifauna, we explore morphometrical variations of the carpometacarpus (CMC) within West Indies Mimidae species. We combine geometric morphometric (GMM) and conventional osteology focusing on characters of the entire or distal portion of the CMC. Morphological variation related to their phylogenetic history is investigated using uni- and multi-variate statistics, and the expression of certain osteological characters. Fossil bone remains from the Guadeloupe Islands were included in the datasets to test the applicability of these results to the archaeological and paleontological record. Our results are consistent with the known phylogeny of Mimidae. The GMM analysis clearly differentiated taxa at both inter- and intra-generic levels, which when combined with osteological characters, allow fossil specimens to be determined to species. For the fossil record of Guadeloupe Islands, this concerns three taxa: the Scaly-breasted Thrasher 'Allenia fusca', the Gray Catbird 'Dumetella carolinensis', the first fossil occurrence of this bird in the Greater and Lesser Antilles, and the Brown Trembler 'Cinclocerthia ruficauda' in Desirade and Marie-Galante, where the bird is now extirpated. These results are of particular interest for tracking the impact of environmental changes on the composition of West Indian bird communities.

Desislava Takorova

The Early Neolithic houses in the Central and the Eastern Balkans have relatively unified interior design: a cupola oven, a mill installation and sometimes a mortar, a platform for household activities, grain storages, a clay couch, etc. This article focuses on the ovens and the mill installation in two large houses of the Slatina–Sofia Early Neolithic settlement, which is dated back to the transition between the 7th and the 6th millennium BC. Some typical features of the burnt remains of these elements of the house interior, such as the missing stone filling at the base of the oven and the oven floor and the missing grinding stones of the mill installations, provide reasons to suggest that after the demolition of the house the remains were used in various rituals due to their symbolic meaning.

Victoria Igol

Victims have become increasingly important in the contemporary social movement. They are the protagonists of many mobilizations, demands reparations from the State, works in state agencies, and so on. This article is about the treatment in Congress of Law 27.372, commonly known as the Victims’ Law, whose objective is to modify the role of the victim in the criminal process. I will focus on the debate on the law, based on the presentations made by different crime victims, experts and officials during the treatment of the law, considering three topics of discussion that are relevant to understanding the world of victims. The first of these is about the opposition between experience and expert knowledge, the other two analyze the difference between revenge and the search for justice, and criminal policy as a moral issue.

Marcel Bradtmöller, S. Grimm, J. Riel‐Salvatore

Silvia González Soutelo

Hoy en día los edificios de baños son uno de los monumentos mejor conservados y estudiados del Imperio Romano. Sin embargo, existe un significativo vacío en su caracterización en función del agua utilizada en ellos. Las aguas mineromedicinales, de hecho, condicionaron no solo la localización, sino también la función, y consecuentemente, la arquitectura de estos edificios. De acuerdo con esa consideración, uno de los principales objetivos de este estudio es proporcionar una primera síntesis de los rasgos más característicos de estos complejos de baños, a partir de una selección de los edificios balnearios con aguas mineromedicinales mejor conservados y documentados del Imperio Romano. En ese sentido, se presenta un primer mapa de distribución, así como una revisión del estado de la investigación sobre estos establecimientos, atentos a algunas de las dificultades de su estudio desde una perspectiva global. Bath constructions are today among other monuments one of the better preserved and studied monuments of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, there remains a significant research gap as to the nature of water exploited within. The mineral-medicinal waters, in fact, conditioned not only the location, but also the function and, consequently, the architecture of these features. Hence, one of the main objectives of our current study is to highlight the main architectonic and functional characteristics of these bathing complexes. This paper thus advances a first distribution map specifically defining the spread of the better preserved and/or better documented spas using mineral-medicinal waters in the Roman Empire (henceforth referred to as healing or thermal spas/baths). This study also advances the current state of research on the question, some of the main characteristics of these types of complexes, as well as some of the drawbacks to their study.  

E. Athanassoula

I present examples of how chemo-dynamical N-body simulations can help understanding the structure and evolution of the inner Galaxy. Such simulations reproduce the observed links between kinematics, morphology and chemistry in the bar/bulge region and explain them by the self-consistent cohabitation of a number of components. Galactic archaeology, applied to simulation snapshots, explains the sequence in which the stars of the various components were formed. The thick disc stars form earlier than those of the thin disc and in a much shorter time scale. The bar in the thick disc is horizontally thicker than that of the thin disc and has a different vertical morphology. The Galaxy's inner disc scalelength is much smaller than what is expected from nearby galaxies of similar stellar mass.