Hasil untuk "Prehistoric archaeology"

Shida Xu, Jingqi Jiang, Jonatan Scharff Willners et al.

Underwater sonar imaging plays a crucial role in various applications, including autonomous navigation in murky water, marine archaeology, and environmental monitoring. However, the unique characteristics of sonar images, such as complex noise patterns and the lack of elevation information, pose significant challenges for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. In this paper, we present NAS-GS, a novel Noise-Aware Sonar Gaussian Splatting framework specifically designed to address these challenges. Our approach introduces a Two-Ways Splatting technique that accurately models the dual directions for intensity accumulation and transmittance calculation inherent in sonar imaging, significantly improving rendering speed without sacrificing quality. Moreover, we propose a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based noise model that captures complex sonar noise patterns, including side-lobes, speckle, and multi-path noise. This model enhances the realism of synthesized images while preventing 3D Gaussian overfitting to noise, thereby improving reconstruction accuracy. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both simulated and real-world large-scale offshore sonar scenarios, achieving superior results in novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

Jovan Komluski, Sofia Filatova, Frank Schlütz et al.

Summary: In medieval central Europe, rye was one of the most important agricultural crops. We combined archaeobotanical methods and ancient DNA sequencing of historical rye material to study patterns of genetic diversity across four centuries. We applied archaeobotanical methods to characterize rye material acquired from construction material ranging from the 14th to 18th centuries from different locations in Germany. Next, we extracted DNA to sequence complete chloroplast genomes of six individual samples and compared sequences of historical rye samples to chloroplast genomes of other cereal crops, including a modern rye cultivar. Comparing the aDNA chloroplast samples with modern and non-domesticated rye chloroplast, we show that genetic variation in the historical German rye population was considerably higher. The exceptional difference in levels of genetic variation likely reflects the consequences of late domestication and selective breeding on genetic variation in this important crop in the last few centuries.

Jay Farihi, Jason L. Sanders, Sophia Lilleengen et al.

This paper reports a Galactic kinematical and dynamical analysis of 1003 main-sequence carbon stars. The sample is drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and cross-matched with Gaia DR3 to obtain 6-dimensional positions and velocities using a Bayesian framework. The study provides the first reliable distances for a large sample of dwarf carbon stars, which are then analyzed using both space motions and actions. The results are combined with dynamical equilibrium models for the three primary Galactic components to assign membership, finding that around 60 per cent belong to the halo, and over 30 per cent originate in the thick disc. Therefore, the results indicate dwarf carbon stars are dominated by a metal-poor halo population, and are thus an excellent resource for stellar archaeology. These stars remain on the main sequence and are relatively nearby, but atmospheric modelling is challenged by their cool effective temperatures and strong molecular features. In light of this, efforts should be made to improve C/O >1 atmospheric modelling, as the subset of low-mass dwarf carbon stars may numerically dominate the Galactic population of carbon-enriched, metal-poor stars.

Shihui Lin, Baitian Tang, Genghao Liu et al.

Many Galactic globular clusters (GCs) originated in diverse host galaxies before being subsequently incorporated into the Milky Way through hierarchical galaxy assembly. Identifying their origins is crucial for revealing galaxy properties at early times. Traditional classification methods relying on dynamical properties face inherent uncertainties stemming from the evolving Galactic potential and complex merger histories. Chemically driven classification confronts a distinct obstacle: multiple populations - abundance variations in light elements of GC members. In this Letter, we identify primordial populations exhibiting lower [Al/Fe] as reliable tracers of their birth environments' chemical evolution. A clear chemical dichotomy emerges between in-situ and accreted GC populations at [Fe/H] > -1.5, particularly in the [Mg/Fe]-[Al/Fe] plane, indicating that their progenitor galaxies have experienced fundamentally different enrichment histories. While our chemically driven classification demonstrates general consistency with dynamically driven classifications, notable discrepancies emerge: NGC 288 and M4 are reclassified as in-situ, and Terzan 9 as accreted. This chemically driven GC classification provides promising application for Galactic archaeology.

Qing Zhang, Jing Huang, Mingyang Xu et al.

While mainstream robotics pursues metric precision and flawless performance, this paper explores the creative potential of a deliberately "lo-fi" approach. We present the "Semantic Glitch," a soft flying robotic art installation whose physical form, a 3D pixel style cloud, is a "physical glitch" derived from digital archaeology. We detail a novel autonomous pipeline that rejects conventional sensors like LiDAR and SLAM, relying solely on the qualitative, semantic understanding of a Multimodal Large Language Model to navigate. By authoring a bio-inspired personality for the robot through a natural language prompt, we create a "narrative mind" that complements the "weak," historically, loaded body. Our analysis begins with a 13-minute autonomous flight log, and a follow-up study statistically validates the framework's robustness for authoring quantifiably distinct personas. The combined analysis reveals emergent behaviors, from landmark-based navigation to a compelling "plan to execution" gap, and a character whose unpredictable, plausible behavior stems from a lack of precise proprioception. This demonstrates a lo-fi framework for creating imperfect companions whose success is measured in character over efficiency.

Lorenzo Spina, Milan Quandt Rodriguez, Laura Magrini et al.

Reconstructing the formation history of the Milky Way is hindered by stellar migration, which erases kinematic birth signatures. In contrast, stellar chemical abundances remain stable and can be used to trace stars back to their birth environments through chemical tagging. This study aims to improve chemical tagging by developing a method that leverages kinematic and age information to enhance clustering in chemical space, while remaining grounded in chemistry. We implement a graph attention auto-encoder that encodes stars as nodes with chemical features and connects them via edges based on orbital similarity and age. The network learns an ``informed'' chemical space that accentuates coherent groupings.Applied to $\sim$47,000 APOGEE thin disk stars, the method identifies 282 stellar groups. Among them, five out of six open clusters are successfully recovered. Other groups align with the known moving groups Arch/Hat, Sirius, Hyades, and Hercules. Our approach enables chemically grounded yet kinematically and age informed chemical tagging. It significantly improves the identification of coherent stellar populations, offering a framework for future large-scale stellar archaeology efforts.

Simon C. O. Glover, Ralf S. Klessen

Population III (or Pop. III) stars, the first stellar generation built up from metal-free primordial gas, first started to form at redshifts z ~ 30. They formed primarily in small dark matter halos with masses of a few million solar masses. The cooling of the gas in these halos was dominated on all scales by molecular hydrogen. Current theoretical models indicate that Pop. III stars typically formed in small clusters with a logarithmically flat mass function due to widespread fragmentation in the protostellar accretion disks around these primordial stars. Massive Pop. III stars are thought to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early Universe, as their feedback regulates subsequent star formation, although the immediate effects of this feedback remain uncertain. Direct detection of Pop. III stars is challenging, but our chances of detecting at least a few Pop. III supernovae within the next decade are brighter. Indirect approaches based on stellar archaeology or gravitational wave detections offer promising constraints. Current observations suggest that most massive Pop. III stars ended their lives as core-collapse supernovae rather than pair-instability supernovae, offering insight into the initial mass function and evolutionary pathways of these primordial stars.

Alla Buiskykh

This paper is devoted to the publication of two newly excavated building structures consisting of underground and ground constructions that are attributed to the latest period of Olbia’s existence. Archaeological artefacts found inside them are presented, including trading amphoras and ceramic pottery that are diagnostic for the final stage of the Cherniakhiv culture dating the last third of the 4th – the first quarter of 5th century AD. Separate attention is paid to a speculative idea about the fortified city, settled by Goths on the territory of the former Roman fortress of Olbia. The results of the recent archaeological excavations give the possibility of refuting this idea. The urban structure of the latest period, its status, and its spatial development are not yet clear and must be studied in depth.

Håvard Kilhavn, Julie Shipp, Anastasia Bertheussen

Benjamin Jung, Antonio Figueroa, Malte Göttsche

Nuclear archaeology research provides scientific methods to reconstruct the operating histories of fissile material production facilities to account for past fissile material production. While it has typically focused on analyzing material in permanent reactor structures, spent fuel or high-level waste also hold information about the reactor operation. In this computational study, we explore a Bayesian inference framework for reconstructing the operational history from measurements of isotope ratios from a sample of nuclear waste . We investigate two different inference models. The first model discriminates between three potential reactors of origin (Magnox, PWR, and PHWR) while simultaneously reconstructing the fuel burnup, time since irradiation, initial enrichment, and average power density. The second model reconstructs the fuel burnup and time since irradiation of two batches of waste in a mixed sample. Each of the models is applied to a set of simulated test data, and the performance is evaluated by comparing the highest posterior density regions to the corresponding parameter values of the test dataset. Both models perform well on the simulated test cases, which highlights the potential of the Bayesian inference framework and opens up avenues for further investigation

Mei Wang, Weihong Deng, Jiani Hu et al.

The study of oracle characters plays an important role in Chinese archaeology and philology. However, the difficulty of collecting and annotating real-world scanned oracle characters hinders the development of oracle character recognition. In this paper, we develop a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, i.e., unsupervised attention regularization net?work (UARN), to transfer recognition knowledge from labeled handprinted oracle characters to unlabeled scanned data. First, we experimentally prove that existing UDA methods are not always consistent with human priors and cannot achieve optimal performance on the target domain. For these oracle characters with flip-insensitivity and high inter-class similarity, model interpretations are not flip-consistent and class-separable. To tackle this challenge, we take into consideration visual perceptual plausibility when adapting. Specifically, our method enforces attention consistency between the original and flipped images to achieve the model robustness to flipping. Simultaneously, we constrain attention separability between the pseudo class and the most confusing class to improve the model discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UARN shows better interpretability and achieves state-of-the-art performance on Oracle-241 dataset, substantially outperforming the previously structure-texture separation network by 8.5%.

Yongqing Liang, Congyi Zhang, Junli Zhao et al.

Deducing the 3D face from a skull is a challenging task in forensic science and archaeology. This paper proposes an end-to-end 3D face reconstruction pipeline and an exploration method that can conveniently create textured, realistic faces that match the given skull. To this end, we propose a tissue-guided face creation and adaptation scheme. With the help of the state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion model and parametric face model, we first generate an initial reference 3D face, whose biological profile aligns with the given skull. Then, with the help of tissue thickness distribution, we modify these initial faces to match the skull through a latent optimization process. The joint distribution of tissue thickness is learned on a set of skull landmarks using a collection of scanned skull-face pairs. We also develop an efficient face adaptation tool to allow users to interactively adjust tissue thickness either globally or at local regions to explore different plausible faces. Experiments conducted on a real skull-face dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline in terms of reconstruction accuracy, diversity, and stability. Our project page is https://xmlyqing00.github.io/skull-to-face-page.

Daryoosh Akbarzadeh

The Avesta and Zoroastrian manuscripts, in Pahlavi language, have been studied, interpreted and translated numerous times over the past century. The study of sacred numbers, only based on the above-mentioned texts, has also been a part of printed scholarly works. The reference to the Indo-European background of the numbers can be seen frequently in past works.Although in the background of this research, reference has been made to textual studies such as Indo-Iranian sources, but archaeological evidences have received less attention.This paper deals with a specific topic that is the sacred Zoroastrian numbers and entanglement with Sasanian coins. For this purpose, the author stresses on the number of pearls (beads) of the necklaces, headbands, hangings of the royal hat, and shoulder stripes based on the coins. The author will focus on the known sacred numbers such as 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24…to prove the claim. Also, the article draws a clear line between necklaces worn in the batllefield, on coins and in bas- reliefs (Royal Scenes). In addition, the presence or absence of the beads of the pearl stripes on the shoulders or chest have been suggested as gender sign as a key question of this article. This restudy will show a new part of religious aspects on the royal Sasanian art.The author believes that the number of the pearls on the kings’ necklaces or headbands have followed a systematic structure from a single string to the two strings, from the rise to the fall of the empire. Also, I will briefly refer to texts to support archaeological evidences

Natalia Bulyk, Roman Berest

The article deals with the scientific and museological activities of Lviv archaeologists during World War I. The focus is on the fate of archaeologists who were forced to serve in the army (Y. Pasternak, V. Hrebeniak); the state of scientific institutions of Lviv, and the living and working conditions of professors and teaching staff of the University of Lviv, as well as museum workers of the city, were analyzed. In addition, it is about stocking and inventorying the museum collections with archaeological finds, and attempts to restore the activities of museum institutions regardless of conditions (National Museum of Jan III Sobieski, Dzieduszycki Museum). The issue of the loss of human lives is not the least. During these years, Lviv archaeology lost a Polish professor of archaeology Karol Hadaczek and his student, the talented Ukrainian archaeologist Volodymyr Hrebeniak. It was found that the War stopped the development of archaeological science in Lviv and pushed it back for some time. Only in the post-War years, was it possible to restore field research, and publishing activities, replenish museum collections, and educate new personnel.

Yan Benhammou, Erez Etzion, Gilad Mizrachi et al.

We utilise muons from cosmic ray to explore hidden underground archaeological structures. Presented here is the design, simulation studies and first laboratory results of a compact, scintillators based, cosmic ray muon telescope for underground muon radiography.

Gihan Kamel

The concrete vision of having Africa as a leader sharing equivalent responsibilities and deliverables towards the global scientific societies turn out to be more obvious by time. Africa is not an exception when it comes to advanced science and technological grounds. Many challenges do exist and many others are still accumulating such as establishing cutting-edge large scale research infrastructures and institutions, reversing the brain-drain dramatic challenge, addressing local and/or regional concerns (health, environment, water, human heritage), as well as being a vehicle for industrial development and growing economy. In addition to bringing forward the African educational systems, employment status, besides the human capacity building which is alleged to be the backbone of any advanced society. Into the discussion, and besides their strong influence on education and advancing science and technology, as well as, capacity building development, are synchrotron light sources demonstrating the extensive capabilities with numerous techniques supporting a wide range of applications of basic science for instance physics, chemistry and biology, along with applied science aspects including life sciences such as biomedicine, pharmaceuticals and drug design, in addition to agriculture, environment, and air and water pollution, besides materials science and industrial applications, and energy and climate change. Furthermore, comprehensive insights can be identified and documented for cultural heritage and archaeology domains.

Michał Kobusiewicz

Profesor dr hab. Romuald Schild, badacz o ogromnym dorobku naukowym z zakresu prahistorii środkowej Europy i północno-wschodniej Afryki, były Dyrektor Instytutu Archeologii i Etnologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, członek wielu organizacji międzynarodowych i polskich, obchodzi w 2021 r. osiemdziesiątą piątą rocznicę urodzin. Działalność naukową kontynuował także w ciągu ostatnich czternastu lat będąc już na emeryturze. W tym okresie brał czynny udział w badaniach terenowych w Polsce, a także kierował programem ratowania zabytków kultury neolitycznej z Pustyni Zachodniej w Egipcie. Wydał też trzy obszerne monografie polskich stanowisk dotyczących okresów paleolitu i mezolitu, kluczowych dla znajomości tych okresów.

Tadeusz Galiński

Saeed Amirhajloo, Hamid Reza Ghorbani, Hamid Alimoradi

Some production techniques of prehistoric ceramics are still continuing in the South and Southeast of Iran. One of these production techniques is common in the traditional workshops in the Shahvar and Hakami – Minab - for produc-ing “Jahleh” as a thin-walled ceramic. We can compare Jahleh with prehistoric wares. The question is, how do the ethno-archaeological studies on Jahleh, help us to understand the production techniques of the prehistoric ceramics? The research method includes interviews with potters in Shahvar and Hakami in 2019, the survey in some prehistoric sites, and the studies on prehistoric thin-walled ceramics. The analysis was done using analogy, and deductive rea-soning. Results show similarities between Jahleh and some of the prehistoric wares in Iran and Mesopotamia. If we pay attention to the “similarity between the tools”, “the pottery methods in Shahvar and Hakami”, and “some of the archaeological findings”, we can accept that the production method of prehis-toric thin-walled ceramics is similar to the method of producing Jahleh. There-fore, the study on the Jahleh in a contemporary context helps us to understand the processes of producing prehistoric ceramics.

Lin Hu, Bing Huang, Feng Liu

The 7\times7 reconstruction of the Si(111) surface represents arguably the most fascinating surface reconstruction so far observed in nature. Yet, the atomistic mechanism underpinning its formation remains unclear after it was discovered sixty years ago. Experimentally, it is observed post priori so that analysis of its formation mechanism can only be carried out in analogy with archaeology. Theoretically, density-functional-theory (DFT) correctly predicts the Si(111)-(7\times7) ground state but is impractical to simulate its formation process; while empirical potentials failed to produce it as the ground state. Developing an artificial neural-network potential of DFT quality, we carried out accurate large-scale simulations to unravel the formation of the Si(111)-(7\times7) surface. We reveal a possible step-mediated atom-pop rate-limiting process that triggers massive non-conserved atomic rearrangements, most remarkably, a critical process of collective vacancy diffusion that mediates a sequence of selective dimer, corner-hole, stacking fault and dimer-line pattern formation, to fulfill the 7\times7 reconstruction. Our findings may not only solve the long-standing mystery of this famous surface reconstruction but also illustrate the power of machine learning in studying complex structures.