Enabling autonomous robots to safely and efficiently navigate, explore, and map underwater caves is of significant importance to water resource management, hydrogeology, archaeology, and marine robotics. In this work, we demonstrate the system design and algorithmic integration of a visual servoing framework for semantically guided autonomous underwater cave exploration. We present the hardware and edge-AI design considerations to deploy this framework on a novel AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) named CavePI. The guided navigation is driven by a computationally light yet robust deep visual perception module, delivering a rich semantic understanding of the environment. Subsequently, a robust control mechanism enables CavePI to track the semantic guides and navigate within complex cave structures. We evaluate the system through field experiments in natural underwater caves and spring-water sites and further validate its ROS (Robot Operating System)-based digital twin in a simulation environment. Our results highlight how these integrated design choices facilitate reliable navigation under feature-deprived, GPS-denied, and low-visibility conditions.
Oracle bone inscriptions (OBIs) are the earliest known form of Chinese characters and serve as a valuable resource for research in anthropology and archaeology. However, most excavated fragments are severely degraded due to thousands of years of natural weathering, corrosion, and man-made destruction, making automatic OBI recognition extremely challenging. Previous methods either focus on pixel-level information or utilize vanilla transformers for glyph-based OBI denoising, which leads to tremendous computational overhead. Therefore, this paper proposes a fast attentive denoising framework for oracle bone inscriptions, i.e., OBIFormer. It leverages channel-wise self-attention, glyph extraction, and selective kernel feature fusion to reconstruct denoised images precisely while being computationally efficient. Our OBIFormer achieves state-of-the-art denoising performance for PSNR and SSIM metrics on synthetic and original OBI datasets. Furthermore, comprehensive experiments on a real oracle dataset demonstrate the great potential of our OBIFormer in assisting automatic OBI recognition. The code will be made available at https://github.com/LJHolyGround/OBIFormer.
Conrad Schmidt, Tara Beuzen-Waller, Dana Pietsch
et al.
The Early Bronze Age in southeastern Arabia is characterized by a significant shift in the archaeological record that coincides with the regional deterioration of climatic conditions associated with the end of the Holocene Humid Period. This study presents evidence for human modification of the local landscape around Building VII, a large circular structure at Al-Khashbah, Oman dating to the late third millennium BC. Through multiproxy analyses combining archaeological, geophysical, geomorphological, pedological and malacological, geochemical, palynological, and archaeobotanical datasets, we found evidence for the excavation of sediments at the foot of Building VII during the Umm an-Nar period. This excavation was subsequently filled by sediment presenting evidence for soil development, increased organic carbon, salt enrichment, microcharcoal, and snails. We suggest that both the excavation and subsequent aggradation may be related to gardening activities, though archaeobotanical and palynological analyses did not yield sufficient preserved material for local vegetation reconstruction. Nevertheless, our results contribute valuable insights into local human-environmental interactions and show that investigations beyond the visible archaeology of the monumental buildings of Early Bronze Age Oman can record a wide range of human activities and land modification near these important sites. These results have the potential to provide information on the resilience and adaptation to climate aridification by Umm an-Nar period peoples in central Oman and landscape modification during this period of economic transformation, increasing sedentarization, and growing social differentiation.
In this article, Jan Vansina’s essay on the deep-time population history of the Kwilu-Kasai region, now more than half a century old, is revisited through the kaleidoscopic lens of newly collected linguistic, archaeological, palaeoecological and genetic evidence collected between 2018 and 2023. In contrast to Vansina’s view of the region as a terminus for the settlement of diverse Bantu speech communities, the area was likely an important center of diversification and expansion for early Bantu speakers. Under a drier climate favoring the increase of grassland and open woodland around Idiofa but not a general loss of the forest cover, Bantu speakers most probably started occupying the region from the 4th century BCE onwards. Pottery-producing settlements first emerge along the Kwilu River, i.e., at Luani (371–148 BCE) and Lukombe (357–27 BCE), and then near Idiofa (146–18 BCE), where the earliest evidence for iron metallurgy marks the actual start of the Early Iron Age (146 BCE-750CE) south of the Congo rainforest. The first settlers lived in small and enclaved communities without much mutual communication. These were perfect conditions for early divergence within the Bantu language family’s major West-Coastal Bantu branch. While modern language data situate the West-Coastal Bantu homeland between the Kasai and Kamtsha Rivers, this zone was only settled towards the beginning of the common era based on the currently available archaeological data. This apparent mismatch between archaeology and historical linguistics might be due to subsequent processes of language death and population relocation and restructuring. Confirming Vansina’s idea that modern-day Kwilu-Kasai communities do not directly descend from the region’s earliest Bantu-speaking settlers, significant population reshuffling did indeed occur after the Early Iron Age. During the so-called ‘hiatus period’ (750–1450 CE), human activity contracted to a few refuge areas, especially near the modern towns of Bandundu and Idiofa, and the vegetation underwent an irreversible climate-induced shift to open habitats, possibly connected to the Medieval Climate Anomaly. During the Late Iron Age, the study area was rapidly resettled, first in the south (15–16th c. CE), and then in the north (17–18th c. CE), and large cross-regional exchange networks developed. In line with oral histories still existing among Kwilu-Kasai peoples today and with the clans and political and social institutions they share, the region underwent a very advanced demographic, linguistic and cultural integration in the four to five centuries preceding the start of European colonization, which may have involved populations no longer present there today, such as Ubangi-speaking groups.
H.W.K. Berghuis, A. Veldkamp, Shinatria Adhityatama
et al.
The island of Java (Indonesia) is renowned for its Pleistocene hominin-bearing vertebrate fossil sites. Recently, a marine sand extraction work in the Madura Strait, off the coast of Surabaya, hit upon vertebrate-rich sandstones. More than 6000 vertebrate fossils have been retrieved from the dredged sand, amongst which are two skull fragments ascribed to Homo erectus. The fossils form the first vertebrate record from submerged Sundaland, the lowland plains that connected the great islands of western Indonesia to the Asian mainland during Middle and Late Pleistocene lowstands. Here we present the results of a comprehensive study of the age, depositional background and landscape setting of the subsea fossil locality. The fossiliferous sandstones form the fill of a lowstand valley of the Solo River. The material was OSL-dated to 162 +/- 31 and 119 +/- 27 ka, which links the valley to the lowstand of MIS6. Fluvial backfilling was probably related to the stage of rising sea-level in the run-up to MIS5. The top of the valley fill consists of marine sandstones, pointing to valley drowning and a change to estuarine conditions, probably during peak highstand conditions of MIS5e. The Madura Strait submerged valley is of similar age as the Solo terrace of Ngandong, one of the richest Homo erectus sites of Java and regarded as yielding the youngest record of this species.
Advaith V. Sethuraman, Philip Baldoni, Katherine A. Skinner
et al.
Autonomous underwater vehicles often perform surveys that capture multiple views of targets in order to provide more information for human operators or automatic target recognition algorithms. In this work, we address the problem of choosing the most informative views that minimize survey time while maximizing classifier accuracy. We introduce a novel active perception framework for multi-view adaptive surveying and reacquisition using side scan sonar imagery. Our framework addresses this challenge by using a graph formulation for the adaptive survey task. We then use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to both classify acquired sonar views and to choose the next best view based on the collected data. We evaluate our method using simulated surveys in a high-fidelity side scan sonar simulator. Our results demonstrate that our approach is able to surpass the state-of-the-art in classification accuracy and survey efficiency. This framework is a promising approach for more efficient autonomous missions involving side scan sonar, such as underwater exploration, marine archaeology, and environmental monitoring.
In recent years, muon tomography has turned into a powerful and innovative technique for non-invasive imaging of large and small structures with applications in different areas like geology, archaeology, security, etc. We present the design and simulation of a transportable and easy to construct detector based on plastic scintillator and Silicon photomultipliers current technology. From a flux of cosmic rays reaching the atmosphere we simulated atmospheric muons at ground using CORSIKA. The detector and the object to analyze are simulated with GEANT4, where the previously obtained muon flux is transported. We use two methods for muon tomography to differentiate objects made of different materials: absorption and scattering. The statistical differences for several object sizes and materials are quantified. Using a threshold of 3 $σ$ in the first method, we conclude that materials made of lead can be differentiated from objects made of other materials. The observation time needed to differentiate an object made of lead from one of aluminum was 4.9 and 9.9 days using the first and second method, respectively. In general, the absorption method gives the best results.
Underwater perception and 3D surface reconstruction are challenging problems with broad applications in construction, security, marine archaeology, and environmental monitoring. Treacherous operating conditions, fragile surroundings, and limited navigation control often dictate that submersibles restrict their range of motion and, thus, the baseline over which they can capture measurements. In the context of 3D scene reconstruction, it is well-known that smaller baselines make reconstruction more challenging. Our work develops a physics-based multimodal acoustic-optical neural surface reconstruction framework (AONeuS) capable of effectively integrating high-resolution RGB measurements with low-resolution depth-resolved imaging sonar measurements. By fusing these complementary modalities, our framework can reconstruct accurate high-resolution 3D surfaces from measurements captured over heavily-restricted baselines. Through extensive simulations and in-lab experiments, we demonstrate that AONeuS dramatically outperforms recent RGB-only and sonar-only inverse-differentiable-rendering--based surface reconstruction methods. A website visualizing the results of our paper is located at this address: https://aoneus.github.io/
Martine Regert, Didier Binder, André Carlo Colonese
et al.
Background Heat-altered stones (HAS) are commonly reported in prehistoric sites across several continents, yet they continue to be generally overlooked and systematic studies on them are scarce. Methods We performed a systematic literature review which consisted of searching journal articles, book chapters and books published in English, in Scopus and Web of Science. We collected information on their geographic distribution, chronology, composition, technological aspects and subsistence contexts from 73 records. Our aims were to assess the challenges and opportunities of analysing HAS, while highlighting that this class of artefacts is still largely an untapped source of information on prehistoric human activities. Results HAS have been documented since the Pleistocene, attesting that culinary and non-culinary activities using heating stones emerged among foraging groups subsisting on hunting, fishing and gathering. The high frequency of HAS during the middle and late Holocene testifies to the continuation of some practices over long time periods, amid the emergence of new food systems, and the introduction of new resources and technologies, such as domesticated plants and animals, and ceramic containers. A considerable lack of studies on HAS from Africa, Oceania, Asia, and South America was noted, all of which are key geographic areas for assessing the role of heating stones in human evolution, geographic dispersal, early cuisine and diet, and cultural transmission across the globe. Conclusions Our results highlight the persistent challenges archaeologists face in establishing fundamental definitions and diagnostic criteria for identifying HAS, while emphasizing the importance of HAS as essential elements for studying ancient foodways and cultural heritage. We call on archaeologists and cultural heritage managers to reconsider the heritage value of HAS and include them in specialised research agendas before significant knowledge of our past is lost.
Automated assembly of 3D fractures is essential in orthopedics, archaeology, and our daily life. This paper presents Jigsaw, a novel framework for assembling physically broken 3D objects from multiple pieces. Our approach leverages hierarchical features of global and local geometry to match and align the fracture surfaces. Our framework consists of four components: (1) front-end point feature extractor with attention layers, (2) surface segmentation to separate fracture and original parts, (3) multi-parts matching to find correspondences among fracture surface points, and (4) robust global alignment to recover the global poses of the pieces. We show how to jointly learn segmentation and matching and seamlessly integrate feature matching and rigidity constraints. We evaluate Jigsaw on the Breaking Bad dataset and achieve superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our method also generalizes well to diverse fracture modes, objects, and unseen instances. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first learning-based method designed specifically for 3D fracture assembly over multiple pieces. Our code is available at https://jiaxin-lu.github.io/Jigsaw/.
Geometric fracture assembly presents a challenging practical task in archaeology and 3D computer vision. Previous methods have focused solely on assembling fragments based on semantic information, which has limited the quantity of objects that can be effectively assembled. Therefore, there is a need to develop a scalable framework for geometric fracture assembly without relying on semantic information. To improve the effectiveness of assembling geometric fractures without semantic information, we propose a co-creation space comprising several assemblers capable of gradually and unambiguously assembling fractures. Additionally, we introduce a novel loss function, i.e., the geometric-based collision loss, to address collision issues during the fracture assembly process and enhance the results. Our framework exhibits better performance on both PartNet and Breaking Bad datasets compared to existing state-of-the-art frameworks. Extensive experiments and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which features linear computational complexity, enhanced abstraction, and improved generalization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ruiyuan-Zhang/CCS.
Marwa Moussawi, Andrea Giammanco, Vishal Kumar
et al.
Non-destructive subsurface imaging methods based on the absorption or scattering of photons or neutrons are becoming increasingly popular in cultural asset conservation. However, these techniques are limited by physical and practical issues: their penetration depth may be insufficient for large items, and they usually necessitate transferring the objects of interest to specialised laboratories. The latter issue is recently being addressed by the development of portable sources, but artificial radiation can be harmful and is thus subjected to strict regulation. Muons are elementary particles that are abundantly and freely created in the atmosphere by cosmic-ray interactions. Their absorption and scattering in matter are respectively dependent on the density and elemental composition of the substance they traverse, suggesting that they could be used for subsurface remote imaging. This novel technique, dubbed "muography", has been used in applications ranging from geophysics to archaeology, but has remained largely unexplored for a wide range of cultural heritage objects that are small by muography standards but whose size and density are too large for conventional imaging methods. This document outlines the general arguments and some early simulation studies that aim at exploring the low-size limit of muography and its relevance for cultural heritage preservation.
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Elements heavier than helium 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 with a vast amount of data from Gaia satellite and multi-object spectrographs to understand the origins of sub-structures of the Milky Way. Thanks to integral field units, this approach can also be applied to external galaxies from nearby to distant universe with the James Webb Space Telescope. In order to interpret these observational data, it is necessary to compare with theoretical predictions, namely chemodynamical simulations of galaxies, which include detailed chemical enrichment into hydrodynamical simulations from cosmological initial conditions. These simulations can predict the evolution of internal structures (e.g., metallicity radial gradients) as well as that of scaling relations (e.g., the mass-metallicity relations). After explaining the formula and assumptions, we will show some example results, and discuss future prospects.
Academic citation and social attention measure different dimensions of the impact of research results. Both measures do not correlate with each other, and they are influenced by many factors. Among these factors are the field of research, the type of access, and co-authorship. In this study, the increase in the impact due to co-authorship in scientific articles disaggregated by field of research and access type, was quantified. For this, the citations and social attention accumulated until the year 2021 by a total of 244,880 research articles published in the year 2018, were analyzed. The data source was Dimensions.ai, and the units of study were research articles in Economics, History and Archaeology, and Mathematics. As the main results, a small proportion of the articles received a large part of the citations and most of the social attention. Both citations and social attention in-creased, in general, with the number of co-authors. Thus, the greater the number of co-authors, the greater the probability of being cited in academic articles and mentioned on social media. The advantage in citation and social attention due to collaboration is independent of the access type for the publication. Furthermore, although collaboration with an additional co-author is in general positive in terms of citation and social attention, these positive effects reduce as the number of co-authors increases.
Seth D. Axen, Alexandra Gessner, Christian Sommer
et al.
Paleoclimatology -- the study of past climate -- is relevant beyond climate science itself, such as in archaeology and anthropology for understanding past human dispersal. Information about the Earth's paleoclimate comes from simulations of physical and biogeochemical processes and from proxy records found in naturally occurring archives. Climate-field reconstructions (CFRs) combine these data into a statistical spatial or spatiotemporal model. To date, there exists no consensus spatiotemporal paleoclimate model that is continuous in space and time, produces predictions with uncertainty, and can include data from various sources. A Gaussian process (GP) model would have these desired properties; however, GPs scale unfavorably with data of the magnitude typical for building CFRs. We propose to build on recent advances in sparse spatiotemporal GPs that reduce the computational burden by combining variational methods based on inducing variables with the state-space formulation of GPs. We successfully employ such a doubly sparse GP to construct a probabilistic model of European paleoclimate from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to the mid-Holocene (MH) that synthesizes paleoclimate simulations and fossilized pollen proxy data.
We present the Deep Integral Field Spectrograph View of Nuclei of Galaxies (DIVING$^{3D}$) survey, a seeing-limited optical 3D spectroscopy study of the central regions of all 170 galaxies in the Southern hemisphere with B < 12.0 and |b| > 15 degrees. Most of the observations were taken with the Integral Field Unit of the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph, at the Gemini South telescope, but some are also being taken with the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) Integral Field Spectrograph. The DIVING$^{3D}$ survey was designed for the study of nuclear emission-line properties, circumnuclear (within scales of hundreds of pc) emission-line properties, stellar and gas kinematics and stellar archaeology. The data have a combination of high spatial and spectral resolution not matched by previous surveys and will result in significant contributions for studies related to, for example, the statistics of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei, the ionization mechanisms in Low-Ionization Nuclear Emission-Line Regions, the nature of transition objects, among other topics.
Climate classification allows an efficient encapsulation of climate data into climate units. For North America and most of Central America during 20, 14, 13, 11, 10, 7, 5, and 1 thousand years ago (ka) and recent years, I applied a Köppen-Trewartha classification system, but with dry classes subsumed under primary thermal classes to preserve information. The boreal and polar classes decreased from a combined 70% of area during 20 ka until reaching 42% of area at 7 ka, after which the area remained relatively stable. Conversely, the subtropical and temperate classes increased from 25% of area until reaching 53% of area at 7 ka, with slight increase of the tropical class. The combined dry subclasses increased from 7.5% to 15% of area, primarily in the subtropical and temperate classes, displaying unique trends over time. Based on ordination, the classes since 5 ka are similar; the 1950 interval is most similar to 1 and 5 ka and the intervals of 1600 and 1800 are most similar. The climate classes and transitions generally corresponded with major vegetation distributions. Visually, political boundaries appeared to parallel climate classes, which might indicate the influence of long-standing ecological differences on human land use and settlement. A future research need is identifying the influence of climate on directing settlement and political boundary establishment.
Dushka Urem-Kotsou, Kyriakos Sgouropoulos, Stavros Kotsos
et al.
Some 27 Neolithic settlement sites have been recorded in Aegean Thrace thus far, of which only few have been excavated, and these by limited trench excavations providing very fragmentary evidence for their intra-site organization, architecture and other aspects of life. The exception to this is Makri near Alexandroupoli, which has been excavated almost in its whole extent revealing rich data for the organization of the settlement and the duration of its habitation. In order to improve the knowledge about the Neolithic settlers of Aegean Thrace, an ongoing project focusing on the Neolithic settlements in the provinces of Rhodope and Xanthe was designed, with the aim to investigate their intra-site organization, duration of habitation, palaeoenvironment, and environmental changes that may have affected the habitation. To this end, archaeological surface survey, multi-component geophysical research, palaeogeographical and geological investigations including borehole cores, and radiocarbon dating of the samples from drilling cores were undertaken at eight Neolithic settlements. In this paper, we present the results of archaeological surface survey of the settlements and digital technologies developed and applied in this research segment with particular focus on Diomedia, which appears to stand out from the rest with its exceptionally large size.
In the last decades, many changes have occurred in scientific publishing, including online publication, data repositories, file formats and standards. The role played by computers in this process rekindled the argument on forms of technical determinism. This paper addresses this old debate by exploring the case of publishing processes in prehistoric archaeology during the second part of the twentieth century, prior to the wide-scale adoption of computers. It investigates the case of a collective and international attempt to standardize the typological analysis of prehistoric lithic objects, coined typologie analytique by Georges Laplace and developed by a group of French, Italian, and Spanish researchers. The aim of this paper is to: 1) present a general bibliometric scenario of prehistoric archaeology publishing in continental Europe; 2) report on the little-known typologie analytique method in archaeology, using publications, archives, and interviews; 3) show how the publication of scientific production was shaped by social (editorial policies, support networks) and material (typography features and publication formats) constraints; and 4) highlight how actors founded resources to control and counterbalance these effects, namely by changing and improving publishing formats.
Sarah R. Stinnesbeck, Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, Eberhard Frey
et al.
Schubert and colleagues have recently criticized our assessment of the mandibular ramus of a small peccary from Muknal cave in Quintana Roo, Mexico, to a new genus and species, 'Muknalia minima' Stinnesbeck et al. 2017. They considered this assignation as invalid and the unique morphologies of the taxon to be the result of breakage and human modification. We strongly disagree with this interpretation and maintain our original view of a new genus and species.