Hasil untuk "Prehistoric archaeology"

C. Levis, F. R. C. Costa, F. Bongers et al.

Past human influences on Amazonian forest The marks of prehistoric human societies on tropical forests can still be detected today. Levis et al. performed a basin-wide comparison of plant distributions, archaeological sites, and environmental data. Plants domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples are much more likely to be dominant in Amazonian forests than other species. Furthermore, forests close to archaeological sites often have a higher abundance and richness of domesticated species. Thus, modern-day Amazonian tree communities across the basin remain largely structured by historical human use. Science, this issue p. 925 Plant species domesticated in pre-Columbian times are widely and often abundantly distributed in modern-day Amazonian forest. The extent to which pre-Columbian societies altered Amazonian landscapes is hotly debated. We performed a basin-wide analysis of pre-Columbian impacts on Amazonian forests by overlaying known archaeological sites in Amazonia with the distributions and abundances of 85 woody species domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples. Domesticated species are five times more likely than nondomesticated species to be hyperdominant. Across the basin, the relative abundance and richness of domesticated species increase in forests on and around archaeological sites. In southwestern and eastern Amazonia, distance to archaeological sites strongly influences the relative abundance and richness of domesticated species. Our analyses indicate that modern tree communities in Amazonia are structured to an important extent by a long history of plant domestication by Amazonian peoples.

D. Steadman

On tropical Pacific islands, a human-caused "biodiversity crisis" began thousands of years ago and has nearly run its course. Bones identified from archaeological sites show that most species of land birds and populations of seabirds on those islands were exterminated by prehistoric human activities. The loss of birdlife in the tropical Pacific may exceed 2000 species (a majority of which were species of flightless rails) and thus represents a 20 percent worldwide reduction in the number of species of birds. The current global extinction crisis therefore has historic precedent.

P. Ebrey, 趙 世瑜

The Cambridge Illustrated History of China is an illuminating account of the full sweep of Chinese civilisation – from prehistoric times to the intellectual ferment of the Warring States Period, through the rise and fall of the imperial dynasties, to the modern communist state. Written by a leading scholar and lavishly illustrated, its narrative draws together everything from the influence of key intellectual figures, to political innovations, art and material culture, family and religious life, not to mention wars and modern conflicts. This third revised edition includes new archaeological discoveries and gives fuller treatment of environmental history and Chinese interaction with the wider world, placing China in global context. The Qing dynasty is now covered in two chapters, while the final chapter brings the story into the twenty-first century, covering the transformation of China into one of the world's leading economies and the challenges it faces. Lively and highly visual, this book will be appreciated by anyone interested in Chinese history.

Ralph Großmann-Klabunde

This study examines 401 Corded Ware Culture (CWC) burials from the Thuringian Basin using exploratory and principal component analyses within Bourdieu’s framework of habitus and capital. Results reveal a marked gender dichotomy: male graves emphasise weapons and bone tools, while female graves highlight ornaments and different bowls. At the same time, amphorae, beakers, and flint artefacts occur across sexes and ages, reflecting communal practices of feasting, exchange, and symbolic consumption. Age-based differentiation follows a life-course model: subadults were modestly furnished, while adults – especially mature individuals – received increasingly elaborate goods. Women gained recognition earlier through kinship and ritual roles, whereas men accrued status gradually through achievement and material display. Exceptional burials with rare or abundant objects signal inequality, framed within a shared habitus of burial practices. The Thuringian evidence thus portrays CWC society as gender-differentiated and hierarchically stratified, yet unified by common ritual traditions and cross-cutting practices of community life.

Selena Vitezović

The Bronze Age cemetery at the site of Mokrin is situated in the northern Banat region, near the town of Kikinda, in northeast Serbia. Necropolis belonging to the Bronze Age Moriš (Maros) culture was first noted in the nineteenth century, and extensive excavations were carried out in the 1960s revealing over 300 graves. The burials at Mokrin contained rich archaeological material: ceramic vessels, jewelry and clothing accessories made from bronze, gold, osseous and lithic raw materials, copper and stone tools and weapons, and animal bones. The rich data provided by this necropolis, especially the diversity and richness of offerings and/or funerary equipment were used for assessing and analyzing the stratification and social organization of the communities buried at the Mokrin necropolis. Personal ornaments made from osseous raw materials were recorded at almost one third of the graves, and the most common among them were different beads made from bones and mollusk shells. This paper presents the results of the analyses of technological traits, manufacturing procedure, and use wear traces. Traces of use and their position in graves showed that some beads were used as part of composite jewelry (necklaces, bracelets), but others were part of clothing items, probably attached to belts, head dressings, etc. Also, numerous beads display intensive use wear traces, meaning they were used for a long time, and were probably highly valued.

Sridhar Mahadevan

We introduce a new paradigm for building large causal models (LCMs) that exploits the enormous potential latent in today's large language models (LLMs). We describe our ongoing experiments with an implemented system called DEMOCRITUS (Decentralized Extraction of Manifold Ontologies of Causal Relations Integrating Topos Universal Slices) aimed at building, organizing, and visualizing LCMs that span disparate domains extracted from carefully targeted textual queries to LLMs. DEMOCRITUS is methodologically distinct from traditional narrow domain and hypothesis centered causal inference that builds causal models from experiments that produce numerical data. A high-quality LLM is used to propose topics, generate causal questions, and extract plausible causal statements from a diverse range of domains. The technical challenge is then to take these isolated, fragmented, potentially ambiguous and possibly conflicting causal claims, and weave them into a coherent whole, converting them into relational causal triples and embedding them into a LCM. Addressing this technical challenge required inventing new categorical machine learning methods, which we can only briefly summarize in this paper, as it is focused more on the systems side of building DEMOCRITUS. We describe the implementation pipeline for DEMOCRITUS comprising of six modules, examine its computational cost profile to determine where the current bottlenecks in scaling the system to larger models. We describe the results of using DEMOCRITUS over a wide range of domains, spanning archaeology, biology, climate change, economics, medicine and technology. We discuss the limitations of the current DEMOCRITUS system, and outline directions for extending its capabilities.

Michalis Chatzispyrou, Luke Horgan, Hyunkil Hwang et al.

This paper presents a framework for mapping underwater caves. Underwater caves are crucial for fresh water resource management, underwater archaeology, and hydrogeology. Mapping the cave's outline and dimensions, as well as creating photorealistic 3D maps, is critical for enabling a better understanding of this underwater domain. In this paper, we present the mapping of an underwater cave segment (the catacombs) of the Devil's Eye cave system at Ginnie Springs, FL. We utilized a set of inexpensive action cameras in conjunction with a dive computer to estimate the trajectories of the cameras together with a sparse point cloud. The resulting reconstructions are utilized to produce a one-dimensional retract of the cave passages in the form of the average trajectory together with the boundaries (top, bottom, left, and right). The use of the dive computer enables the observability of the z-dimension in addition to the roll and pitch in a visual/inertial framework (SVIn2). In addition, the keyframes generated by SVIn2 together with the estimated camera poses for select areas are used as input to a global optimization (bundle adjustment) framework -- COLMAP -- in order to produce a dense reconstruction of those areas. The same cave segment is manually surveyed using the MNemo V2 instrument, providing an additional set of measurements validating the proposed approach. It is worth noting that with the use of action cameras, the primary components of a cave map can be constructed. Furthermore, with the utilization of a global optimization framework guided by the results of VI-SLAM package SVIn2, photorealistic dense 3D representations of selected areas can be reconstructed.

Hillary Davis, Thor Tepper-Garcia, Naomi McClure-Griffiths et al.

The development of an N-body/hydrodynamic `surrogate' model of the Milky Way (MW) - a model that resembles the MW in several key aspects after many Gyrs of evolution - would be extremely beneficial for Galactic Archaeology. Here we present four new `surrogate' models, all built with the Nexus framework. The simulations contain stars, dark matter and gas. Our most sophisticated model allows gas to evolve thermodynamically, and includes star formation, metal production, and stellar feedback. The other three models in this work have an isothermal gas disc. We examine these new simulations in the context of cold gas observations of the Galaxy. Our focus is the so-called `HI terminal velocity curve' - a heliocentric measurement of the maximum Vlos as a function of Galactic longitude, which dates back to the early days of radio astronomy. It is a powerful approach to indirectly estimating the gas dynamics because it does not require knowledge about the distance to individual gas clouds, which is difficult to estimate. A comparison of the terminal velocities and recovered rotation curve values in the simulations against observations suggests that our models are in need of further refinement. The gravitational torques associated with our synthetic bars are too strong, driving excessive streaming motion in the inner gas disc. This causes the simulated terminal velocity curves in the Galactic Quadrant I and IV to deviate substantially from each other, unlike what is seen in observed HI terminal velocities of the MW. We suggest possible ways forward for future models.

Jiayi Wu, Tianfu Wang, Md Abu Bakr Siddique et al.

Underwater image restoration algorithms seek to restore the color, contrast, and appearance of a scene that is imaged underwater. They are a critical tool in applications ranging from marine ecology and aquaculture to underwater construction and archaeology. While existing pixel-domain diffusion-based image restoration approaches are effective at restoring simple scenes with limited depth variation, they are computationally intensive and often generate unrealistic artifacts when applied to scenes with complex geometry and significant depth variation. In this work we overcome these limitations by combining a novel network architecture (SLURPP) with an accurate synthetic data generation pipeline. SLURPP combines pretrained latent diffusion models -- which encode strong priors on the geometry and depth of scenes -- with an explicit scene decomposition -- which allows one to model and account for the effects of light attenuation and backscattering. To train SLURPP we design a physics-based underwater image synthesis pipeline that applies varied and realistic underwater degradation effects to existing terrestrial image datasets. This approach enables the generation of diverse training data with dense medium/degradation annotations. We evaluate our method extensively on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Notably, SLURPP is over 200X faster than existing diffusion-based methods while offering ~ 3 dB improvement in PSNR on synthetic benchmarks. It also offers compelling qualitative improvements on real-world data. Project website https://tianfwang.github.io/slurpp/.

Jack T. Warfield, Joel C. Zinn, Jessica Schonhut-Stasik et al.

We present stellar age determinations for 4661 red giant branch stars in the APO-K2 catalog, derived using mass estimates from K2 asteroseismology from the K2 Galactic Archaeology Program and elemental abundances from the Apache Point Galactic Evolution Experiment survey. Our sample includes 17 of the 19 fields observed by K2, making it one of the most comprehensive catalogs of accurate stellar ages across the Galaxy in terms of the wide range of populations spanned by its stars, enabling rigorous tests of Galactic chemical evolution models. Taking into account the selection functions of the K2 sample, the data appear to support the age-chemistry morphology of stellar populations predicted by both inside-out and late-burst scenarios. We also investigate trends in age versus stellar chemistry and Galactic position, which are consistent with previous findings. Comparisons against APOKASC-3 asteroseismic ages show agreement to within ~3%. We also discuss offsets between our ages and spectroscopic ages. Finally, we note that ignoring the effects of $α$-enhancement on stellar opacity (either directly or with the Salaris metallicity correction) results in an ~10% offset in age estimates for the most $α$-enhanced stars, which is an important consideration for continued tests of Galactic models with this and other asteroseismic age samples.

Vinicius M. Placco, Arvind F. Gupta, Felipe Almeida-Fernandes et al.

In this work, we present high-resolution (R~100,000), high signal-to-noise (S/N~800) spectroscopic observations for the well-known, bright, extremely metal-poor, carbon-enhanced star BD+44 493. We determined chemical abundances and upper limits for 17 elements from WIYN/NEID data, complemented with 11 abundances re-determined from Subaru and Hubble data, using the new, more accurate, stellar atmospheric parameters calculated in this work. Our analysis suggests that BD+44 493 is a low-mass (0.83Msun) old (12.1-13.2Gyr) second-generation star likely formed from a gas cloud enriched by a single metal-free 20.5Msun Population III star in the early Universe. With a disk-like orbit, BD+44 493 does not appear to be associated with any major merger event in the early history of the Milky Way. From the precision radial-velocity NEID measurements (median absolute deviation - MAD=16m/s), we were able to constrain companion planetary masses around BD+44 493 and rule out the presence of planets as small as msin(i)=2MJ out to periods of 100 days. This study opens a new avenue of exploration for the intersection between stellar archaeology and exoplanet science using NEID.

J. Wilmshurst, A. Anderson, T. Higham et al.

Jorge Sánchez-Lafuente-Pérez, Fernando Muñoz-Villarejo

Se dan a conocer un conjunto de seis lápidas romanas aparecidas en la Muralla de León en junio-julio de 2020.

Anggraeni Anggraeni, Sektiadi Sektiadi

Kalumpang is one of the important regions for archaeology related to the existence of Neolithic and the Early Metal Age settlement remains. The finds provide knowledge about the history of early habitation of the Indonesian Archipelago by the Austronesian speaking people. One of the important finds from three prehistoric sites in the Kalumpang area, namely the Minanga Sipakko, Kamassi, and Palemba sites, is potsherds with various decorations. Pottery is still survives today in the Kalumpang area, although its production is only based on consumer demand. On the contrary, handwoven production tend to increase significantly. Considering that pottery has played an important role in  daily lives  and rituals since the Prehistoric Period, this cultural heritage needs to be preserved. So far, there is no one who are interested in finding strategies to increase pottery production and attract the public's attention. Therefore, the team of research and Community Service from Archaeology Department Universitas Gadjah Mada need to identify: (1) the types of pottery that are still being produced by potters in the Kalumpang area; (2) early Neolithic-Metallic pottery decorative motif elements that can be applied to Kalumpang pottery that is still being produced; (3) new types of products  related to the production of Kalumpang pottery. The results of identification are then set forth in the pottery motif design development module. This module can be used by various parties as an initial reference for developing pottery products. Agents of change, such as teachers and members of Karangtaruna, are expected to be able to use the modules to inspire traditional potters to continue their production by utilizing local cultural heritage. It is hoped that the production of Kalumpang pottery will be sustained and open up insight and concern for the wider community towards the cultural wealth of their ancestors. ==== Kalumpang merupakan salah satu wilayah penting dalam kajian arkeologi terkait adanya temuan sisa permukiman Neolitik dan Masa Logam Awal yang dapat memberikan sumbangan pengetahuan tentang sejarah penghunian Kepulauan Indonesia oleh penutur bahasa Melayu Polinesia (rumpun bahasa Austronesia). Salah satu temuan penting dari tiga situs Prasejarah di wilayah Kalumpang ialah Situs Minanga Sipakko, Kamassi, dan Palemba, yaitu fragmen tembikar dengan berbagai ragam hias. Di wilayah tersebut, tembikar masih diproduksi, tetapi hanya bila ada pemesan. Hal ini berbanding terbalik dengan produksi tenun yang cenderung meningkat secara signifikan. Mengingat tembikar sejak Masa Prasejarah menjadi barang penting dalam kehidupan sehari-hari dan ritual serta masih ada pembuatnya, warisan budaya ini perlu dilestarikan. Sejauh ini, belum ada pihak yang peduli dan berminat untuk mencari strategi agar produksi tembikar kembali meningkat dan diminati masyarakat luas. Oleh karena itu, Tim Penelitian-Pengabdian kepada Masyarakat Arkeologi UGM melakukan identifikasi terhadap: (1) jenis tembikar yang masih diproduksi oleh perajin di wilayah Kalumpang; (2) elemen motif hias tembikar Masa Neolitik-Logam Awal yang dapat diterapkan pada tembikar yang masih diproduksi; (3) bentuk produk baru terkait dengan produksi tembikar Kalumpang. Hasil identifikasi tersebut selanjutnya dituangkan dalam modul pengembangan desain motif tembikar. Modul tersebut dapat dipakai oleh berbagi pihak sebagai acuan awal untuk melakukan pengembangan produk tembikar. Agen perubahan, seperti guru dan anggota Karangtaruna, diharapkan dapat menggunakan modul tersebut untuk menginspirasi para perajin tembikar tradisional agar tetap berproduksi dengan memanfaatkan warisan budaya setempat. Dengan demikian, diharapkan produksi tembikar Kalumpang tetap lestari dan membuka wawasan serta kepedulian masyarakat luas terhadap kekayaan budaya nenek moyang.

Jing Li, Qiu-Feng Wang, Siyuan Wang et al.

Deciphering oracle bone scripts plays an important role in Chinese archaeology and philology. However, a significant challenge remains due to the scarcity of oracle character images. To overcome this issue, we propose Diff-Oracle, a novel approach based on diffusion models to generate a diverse range of controllable oracle characters. Unlike traditional diffusion models that operate primarily on text prompts, Diff-Oracle incorporates a style encoder that utilizes style reference images to control the generation style. This encoder extracts style prompts from existing oracle character images, where style details are converted into a text embedding format via a pretrained language-vision model. On the other hand, a content encoder is integrated within Diff-Oracle to capture specific content details from content reference images, ensuring that the generated characters accurately represent the intended glyphs. To effectively train Diff-Oracle, we pre-generate pixel-level paired oracle character images (i.e., style and content images) by an image-to-image translation model. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are conducted on datasets Oracle-241 and OBC306. While significantly surpassing present generative methods in terms of image generation, Diff-Oracle substantially benefits downstream oracle character recognition, outperforming all existing SOTAs by a large margin. In particular, on the challenging OBC306 dataset, Diff-Oracle leads to an accuracy gain of 7.70% in the zero-shot setting and is able to recognize unseen oracle character images with the accuracy of 84.62%, achieving a new benchmark for deciphering oracle bone scripts.

Yixiao Zhou, Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard, Martin Asplund et al.

Solar-like oscillations have been detected in thousands of stars thanks to modern space missions. These oscillations have been used to measure stellar masses and ages, which have been widely applied in Galactic archaeology. One of the pillars of such applications is the $ν_{\max}$ scaling relation: the frequency of maximum power $ν_{\max}$, assumed to be proportional to the acoustic cut-off frequency, $ν_{\rm ac}$, scales with effective temperature and surface gravity. However, the theoretical basis of the $ν_{\max}$ scaling relation is uncertain, and there is an ongoing debate about whether it can be applied to metal-poor stars. We investigate the metallicity dependence of the $ν_{\max}$ scaling relation by carrying out 3D near-surface convection simulations for solar-type stars with [Fe/H] between -3 and 0.5 dex. Firstly, we found a negative correlation between $ν_{\rm ac}$ and metallicity from the 3D models. This is in tension with the positive correlation identified by studies using 1D models. Secondly, we estimated theoretical $ν_{\max}$ values using velocity amplitudes determined from first principles, by quantifying the mode excitation and damping rates with methods validated in our previous works. We found that at solar effective temperature and surface gravity, $ν_{\max}$ does not show correlation with metallicity. This study opens an exciting prospect of testing the asteroseismic scaling relations against realistic 3D hydrodynamical stellar models.

Adrián Calonge-Miranda

El valle medio del Ebro se configuró en época romana como una zona dinámica que tenía unas conexiones terrestres y fluviales. Se desarrolló un conglomerado de ciudades donde predominaban las de pequeño tamaño junto con casos como los de Pompaelo (Pamplona, Navarra) y Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza, Aragón) que contaban con un tamaño mayor. Gracias al avance de la investigación en las entidades urbanas, se puede ubicar el lugar donde se levantaron las zonas productivas y los distritos artesanales, integrados o no en su urbanismo. El objetivo principal es analizar estas demarcaciones productivas en su relación con el resto de la ciudad y de las infraestructuras de comunicación, así como su desarrollo.

Brian T. Cook, Deborah F. Woods, Jessica D. Ruprecht et al.

RR Lyrae variable stars have long been reliable standard candles used to discern structure in the Local Group. With this in mind, we present a routine to identify groupings containing a statistically significant number of RR Lyrae variables in the Milky Way environment. RR Lyrae variable groupings, or substructures, with potential Galactic archaeology applications are found using a forest of agglomerative, hierarchical clustering trees, whose leaves are Milky Way RR Lyrae variables. Each grouping is validated by ensuring that the internal RR Lyrae variable proper motions are sufficiently correlated. Photometric information was collected from the Gaia second data release and proper motions from the (early) third data release. After applying this routine to the catalogue of 91234 variables, we are able to report sixteen unique RR Lyrae substructures with physical sizes of less than 1 kpc. Five of these substructures are in close proximity to Milky Way globular clusters with previously known tidal tails and/or a potential connection to Galactic merger events. One candidate substructure is in the neighbourhood of the Large Magellanic Cloud but is more distant (and older) than known satellites of the dwarf galaxy. Our study ends with a discussion of ways in which future surveys could be applied to the discovery of Milky Way stellar streams.

Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha, Mahshid Abdoli et al.

Collaborative research causes problems for research assessments because of the difficulty in fairly crediting its authors. Whilst splitting the rewards for an article amongst its authors has the greatest surface-level fairness, many important evaluations assign full credit to each author, irrespective of team size. The underlying rationales for this are labour reduction and the need to incentivise collaborative work because it is necessary to solve many important societal problems. This article assesses whether full counting changes results compared to fractional counting in the case of the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. For this assessment, fractional counting reduces the number of journal articles to as little as 10% of the full counting value, depending on the Unit of Assessment (UoA). Despite this large difference, allocating an overall grade point average (GPA) based on full counting or fractional counting give results with a median Pearson correlation within UoAs of 0.98. The largest changes are for Archaeology (r=0.84) and Physics (r=0.88). There is a weak tendency for higher scoring institutions to lose from fractional counting, with the loss being statistically significant in 5 of the 34 UoAs. Thus, whilst the apparent over-weighting of contributions to collaboratively authored outputs does not seem too problematic from a fairness perspective overall, it may be worth examining in the few UoAs in which it makes the most difference.

Sébastien Durost, Guillaume Reich, Jean-Pierre Girard

The HyperTh{é}sau and Bibracte num{é}rique projects have given rise to a collective effort centred on the use of vocabulary as a means of ensuring the interoperability of archaeological data throughout its life cycle. To this end, the use of the standardised form of the thesaurus -- via the Opentheso platform -- provides a tool that is already adapted to the Linked Data. Nevertheless, its use quickly raised the question of the different paradigms presiding over the elaboration of a specific vocabulary by each (group of) scientist(s). The ISO 25964 standard -- designed for the management and interoperability of indexing languages -- is flexible enough to permit the comparison and linking of different scientific or documentary ``points of view''. Their coherence through interoperability alignments nevertheless requires to interface different semantic granularities: search reporting, the description of raw data, a gateway or ''pivot'' between the two, by using a regulated cooperation methodology. The challenges that remain to be met on this path do not prevent the thesaurus tool from already being a suitable support for a complete ''human-to-machine-to-human'' interoperability, developed within the framework of the Bibracte Ville Ouverte project and exemplified through a research on the ceramics of that archaeological site.