Aocheng Li, James R. Zimmer-Dauphinee, Rajesh Kalyanam
et al.
Point cloud completion helps restore partial incomplete point clouds suffering occlusions. Current self-supervised methods fail to give high fidelity completion for large objects with missing surfaces and unbalanced distribution of available points. In this paper, we present a novel method for restoring large-scale point clouds with limited and imbalanced ground-truth. Using rough boundary annotations for a region of interest, we project the original point clouds into a multiple-center-of-projection (MCOP) image, where fragments are projected to images of 5 channels (RGB, depth, and rotation). Completion of the original point cloud is reduced to inpainting the missing pixels in the MCOP images. Due to lack of complete structures and an unbalanced distribution of existing parts, we develop a self-supervised scheme which learns to infill the MCOP image with points resembling existing "complete" patches. Special losses are applied to further enhance the regularity and consistency of completed MCOP images, which is mapped back to 3D to form final restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in completing 600+ incomplete and unbalanced archaeological structures in Peru.
This thesis employs a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture, alongside a detailed anthropological framework, to investigate potential historical connections between the visual morphology of the Indus Valley script and pictographic systems of the Tibetan-Yi Corridor. Through an ensemble methodology of three target scripts across 15 independently trained models, we demonstrate that Tibetan-Yi Corridor scripts exhibit approximately six-fold higher visual similarity to the Indus script (0.635) than to the Bronze Age Proto-Cuneiform (0.102) or Proto-Elamite (0.078). Contrary to expectations, when measured through direct script-to-script embedding comparisons, the Indus script maps closer to Tibetan-Yi Corridor scripts with a mean cosine similarity of 0.930 (CI: [0.917, 0.942]) than to contemporaneous West Asian signaries, which recorded mean similarities of 0.887 (CI: [0.863, 0.911]) and 0.855 (CI: [0.818, 0.891]). Across dimensionality reduction and clustering methods, the Indus script consistently clusters closest to Tibetan-Yi Corridor scripts. These computational findings align with observed pictorial parallels in numeral systems, gender markers, and iconographic elements. Archaeological evidence of contact networks along the ancient Shu-Shendu road, coinciding with the Indus Civilization's decline, provides a plausible transmission pathway. While alternate explanations cannot be ruled out, the specificity and consistency of similarities suggest more complex cultural transmission networks between South and East Asia than previously recognized.
AbstractArchaeological remains of dwellings that were originally built in wetland environments and today in many cases are waterlogged, offer rich materials and data due to their outstanding preservation. At the same time, off-site deposits in wetlands bear detailed information on palaeoenvironmental conditions. The unique methodological possibility to correlate archaeological settlementsequences with temporally uninterrupted palaeoenvironmental records in a high temporal resolution, and thus to reconstruct coherent long-term human–environment relationships, is of particular significance. In this opening chapter, the authors introduce the basic parameters of an overarching, contextual perspective to prehistoric wetland settlements of Mediterranean Europe, not only in geographical terms, but also in (inter-) disciplinary, or methodological terms, respectively. Sites from eastern Spain, southern France, Italy, Slovenia, theBalkan Peninsula, and the Bulgarian Black Seacoastare discussed by archaeologists, dendrochronologists, bioarchaeologists, and palaeoecologists. Whereas the waterlogging of the anthropogenic remains and environmental data allow for advanced archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research, at the same time the in situ-preservation of the relevant sites, deposits and findings is at stake due to natural erosion processes and human interventions, as well as increasingly to climate change. To preserve this exceptional cultural heritage, the authors underline the pressing necessity and importance to record, inventory, and protect, or professionally excavate and document these sites.
The public release of ChatGPT has resulted in considerable publicity and has led to wide-spread discussion of the usefulness and capabilities of generative AI language models. Its ability to extract and summarise data from textual sources and present them as human-like contextual responses makes it an eminently suitable tool to answer questions users might ask. This paper tested what archaeological literature appears to have been included in ChatGPT's training phase. While ChatGPT offered seemingly pertinent references, a large percentage proved to be fictitious. Using cloze analysis to make inferences on the sources 'memorised' by a generative AI model, this paper was unable to prove that ChatGPT had access to the full texts of the genuine references. It can be shown that all references provided by ChatGPT that were found to be genuine have also been cited on Wikipedia pages. This strongly indicates that the source base for at least some of the data is found in those pages. The implications of this in relation to data quality are discussed.
The Galactic dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) provide valuable insight into dark matter (DM) properties and its role in galaxy formation. Their close proximity enables the measurement of line-of-sight velocities for resolved stars, which allows us to study DM halo structure. However, uncertainties in DM mass profile determination persist due to the degeneracy between DM mass density and velocity dispersion tensor anisotropy. Overcoming this requires large kinematic samples and identification of foreground contamination. With 1.25 deg$^2$ and 2394 fibers, PFS plus pre-imaging with Hyper Suprime Cam will make significant progress in this undertaking.
Una antigua familia que explotó las minas de la sierra de Cartagena posee dos ánforas romanas y una escultura de bronce que, según la tradición oral, fueron encontradas en la mina Príncipe Alfonso (Llano del Beal, La Unión, Murcia), explotada por la familia entre los siglos XIX y XX. La existencia de un importante yacimiento arqueológico romano en dicha mina y la constatación de que una de las ánforas es una Lamboglia tipo 2 invitan a creer que la escultura procediese del yacimiento. Sin embargo, un análisis pormenorizado de la escultura de bronce revela que se trata de un falso histórico. La obra no carece por ello de interés, puesto que pudo ser creación del «Corro» y «el Rosao», dos célebres falsificadores de innegable capacidad artística.
Prehistoric archaeology, Auxiliary sciences of history
El Cuerno de África fue la cuna de los estados más antiguos del África Subsahariana, pero son escasamente conocidos y raramente se tienen en cuenta en discusiones generales sobre el origen de las sociedades jerarquizadas y las formaciones estatales. Sin embargo, durante tres milenios, el Cuerno fue testigo de la emergencia, desarrollo y colapso de diferentes organizaciones estatales, las cuales con frecuencia contradicen nuestras concepciones de lo que es un estado. Tienen mucho en común con otros estados africanos, como sus tendencias heterárquicas o la importancia de los símbolos materiales, los mitos y el ritual. En este artículo paso revista a los diferentes modelos de estado que se pueden identificar en el Cuerno de África desde una perspectiva arqueológica. Se advierten varios rasgos generales, como el carácter fragmentario y heterogéneo de su territorio, las fronteras porosas, la persistencia de comunidades no asimiladas en el interior del estado o la tendencia a la fisión y el colapso, que se relaciona con una fricción permanente entre fuerzas centrípetas y centrífugas.
Prehistoric archaeology, Auxiliary sciences of history
Panagiotis Siozos, Niklas Hausmann, Malin Holst
et al.
The use of elemental analysis based on Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) combined with Neural Networks (NN) is being evaluated as a method for assigning archaeological bone remains to individuals. The bone samples examined originate from excavations of burials at the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester (United Kingdom) that date from the 17th to the 19th century. In this study, we critically assess the influence of soil contaminants, by separating the bone elemental fingerprint into two groups of different components prior to the NN analysis. The first group includes elements related to the bone matrix (Ca and P) as well as elements that are regularly incorporated in the living bone tissues (Mg, Na, Sr, and Ba). The second group includes metals with a low probability of accumulation in living bone tissues whose presence is more likely to be related to diagenesis and the chemical composition of the burial soil (Al, Fe, Mn). The NN analysis of the spectral data, based on the use of an open access software, provided accurate results, indicating that it can be a promising tool for enhancing LIBS applications in osteoarchaeology. The influence of bone diagenesis and soil contaminants is significant. False classifications occurred exclusively in the NN analyses that relied partially on elemental peaks from the second group of elements. Overall, the present study indicates that discrimination between individuals through LIBS and NN analysis of bone material in an archaeological setting is possible, but a targeted approach based on selected elements is required and the influence of bone diagenesis will have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. The proposed LIBS-NN method has potential as a tool capable for distinguishing distinct individuals in disarticulated or commingled human skeletal assemblages particularly if combined with standard osteometric methods.
Nicole D. Payntar, Wei-Lin Hsiao, R. Alan Covey
et al.
The popularity of media sharing platforms in recent decades has provided an abundance of open source data that remains underutilized by heritage scholars. By pairing geotagged internet photographs with machine learning and computer vision algorithms, we build upon the current theoretical discourse of anthropology associated with visuality and heritage tourism to identify travel patterns across a known archaeological heritage circuit, and quantify visual culture and experiences in Cuzco, Peru. Leveraging large-scale in-the-wild tourist photos, our goals are to (1) understand how the intensification of tourism intersects with heritage regulations and social media, aiding in the articulation of travel patterns across Cuzco's heritage landscape; and to (2) assess how aesthetic preferences and visuality become entangled with the rapidly evolving expectations of tourists, whose travel narratives are curated on social media and grounded in historic site representations.
Many proposals for physics beyond the Standard Model give rise to a dark sector containing many degrees of freedom. In this work, we explore the cosmological implications of the non-trivial dynamics which may arise within such dark sectors, focusing on decay processes which take place entirely among the dark constituents. First, we demonstrate that such decays can leave dramatic imprints on the resulting dark-matter phase-space distribution. In particular, this distribution need not be thermal -- it can even be multi-modal, exhibiting a non-trivial pattern of peaks and troughs as a function of momentum. We then proceed to show how these features can induce modifications to the matter power spectrum. Finally, we assess the extent to which one can approach the archaeological "inverse" problem of deciphering the properties of an underlying dark sector from the matter power spectrum. Indeed, one of the main results of this paper is a remarkably simple conjectured analytic expression which permits the reconstruction of many of the important features of the dark-matter phase-space distribution directly from the matter power spectrum. Our results therefore provide an interesting toolbox of methods for learning about, and potentially constraining, the features of non-minimal dark sectors and their dynamics in the early universe.
Przemysław Bobrowski, Maria Lityńska-Zając, Marta Osypińska
et al.
Bargat El-Shab, situated in the southern part of the Western Desert in Egypt, is one of those places which have been drawing people’s attention from the beginning of the Holocene. Numerous traces of human settlement have been registered on the eastern shore of a small palaeolake-playa, including a site dated to the climatic optimum of the Holocene. Features discovered during research initiated by the CPE at the beginning of the century, which include storage pits and hearths, held not only an abundance of stone artefacts and to a lesser extent ceramic artefacts in its fills, but also had exceptionally rich archaeological and archaeobotanical material. All this provided new and valuable information about the lives of hunter-gatherer communities/ or Neolithic pastoral communities, representing the so-called El Nabta / Al Jerar variant of settlement in the Western Desert.
Knowledge and know-how: The ‘how’ of knowledge transferal continues to be a question in prehistoric archaeology, especially in relation to early hominid development. Has the transferal process been greatly affected by our so-called modern world and its technological advantages? Have the current modes of communication enhanced and eased the transfer of knowledge? As visualization is a key element in the transferal process, has, or can, live-streaming videos and or DVDs augment and/or replace face-to-face instruction? Using flint knapping as a platform for exploration, the question “can prerecorded video lessons be successful in the transfer of knowledge of flint knapping and assist in know-how development in the craft” is addressed in this paper. 28 prerecorded videos (consisting of over 30 hours of running time), both in the form of DVD and internet streaming sources, are placed head-to-head, contrasted and scrutinized against a standardized criterion in order to determine their efficiency in transferring knowledge.
Pietro Centorrino, Alessandro Corbetta, Emiliano Cristiani
et al.
We tackle the issue of measuring and analyzing the visitors' dynamics in crowded museums. We propose an IoT-based system -- supported by artificial intelligence models -- to reconstruct the visitors' trajectories throughout the museum spaces. Thanks to this tool, we are able to gather wide ensembles of visitors' trajectories, allowing useful insights for the facility management and the preservation of the art pieces. Our contribution comes with one successful use case: the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Italy.
The Logic of Proofs, LP, and other justification logics can have self-referential justifications of the form t:A. Such self-referential justifications are necessary for the realization of S4 in LP. Yu discovered prehistoric cycles in a particular Gentzen system as a necessary condition for S4 theorems that can only be realized using self-referentiality. It was an open problem whether prehistoric cycles also are a sufficient condition. The main results of this paper are: First, with the standard definition of self-referential theorems, prehistoric cycles are not a sufficient condition. Second, with an expansion on that definition, prehistoric cycles become sufficient for self-referential theorems.
Gwenaël Hervé, Annick Chauvin, Philippe Lanos
et al.
The influence of cooling rate on the intensity of thermoremanent magnetization (TRM) and the necessity to correct archaeo/palaeointensities for this effect have long been recognized. However the reliability of the correction is still questioned. We studied 35 bricks baked in two modern kilns (SK and BK) in known experimental conditions and with measurements of the direction and intensity of the geomagnetic field at the site. The smallest kiln (SK, 0.2 m 3) cooled in around 12 hours and the biggest kiln (BK, 8 m 3) in around 40 hours. Thermomagnetic, hysteresis and backfield curves indicated that the main magnetic carriers were Ti-poor titanomagnetites and Tipoortitanohematites. The fraction of the TRM carried by Ti-poor titanohematites is the maindifference between the two sets of bricks. This fraction is around 5-10% in bricks from BK kilnand up to 40% in those from SK kiln. Intensities of the Earth's magnetic field were determinedusing the original Thellier-Thellier protocol with correction of TRM anisotropy. The averageintensities overestimate the expected field intensity by 5% (SK) and 6% (BK). This resultemphasizes the necessity of the cooling rate correction. In order to have a detailed evaluation ofthe cooling rate effect, we used several slow cooling rates: 0.8, 0.4, 0.2 and 0.1{\textdegree}C/min. Thecorrection factors obtained with the 0.8{\textdegree}C/min cooling ranged between -2% and 21% and wereproportional to the TRM fraction carried by Ti-poor titanohematite. The higher proportion ofthese grains in bricks from SK kiln led to an overestimate of the correction factor and anunderestimate of the intensity by 7%. However, the expected intensity is recovered whentemperature steps higher than 580{\textdegree}C (i.e. in the range of Ti-poor titanohematites unblockingtemperatures) were excluded from the calculation of archaeointensity and cooling rate correction.In the case of the BK kiln bricks, for which Ti-poor titanohematites does not contributesignificantly to the TRM, all tested cooling rates give average intensities close to the expectedvalue. Incorrectly estimating the duration of the archaeological cooling has therefore a lowimpact on the accuracy of the archaeointensity data on these kinds of material.
Javier del-Hoyo-Calleja, Mariano Rodríguez-Ceballos
Publicamos varias inscripciones inéditas procedentes de Clunia, correspondientes a lo que habitualmente se conoce como instrumenta domestica: imbrices, pesas de telar, cerámica sigillata, etc. Su conocimiento puede ayudarnos a valorar mejor la riqueza que tuvo en su día esta colonia hispano-romana.
S. F. Sánchez, V. Avila-Reese, A. Rodríguez-Puebla
et al.
We present the results of the archaeological analysis of the stellar populations of a sample of ~4,000 galaxies observed by the SDSS-IV-MaNGA survey using Pipe3D. Based on this analysis we extract a sample of ~150,000 SFRs and stellar masses that mimic a single cosmological survey covering the redshift range between z~0 to z~7. We confirm that the Star-Forming Main Sequence holds as a tight relation in this range of redshifts, and evolves strongly in both the zero-point and slope. This evolution is different for the population of local star-forming (SFGs) and retired (RGs) galaxies, with the latter presenting a stronger evolution in the zero-point and a weaker evolution in the slope. The fraction of RGs decreases rapidly with z, particularly for those classified as RGs at z~0. Contrary to previous studies we detect RGs well above z>1, although not all of them are progenitors of local RGs. Finally, adopting the required corrections to make the survey complete in mass in a limited volume, we recover the cosmic star-formation rate (SFR), stellar mass density, and average specific SFR histories of the Universe in this wide range of look-back times, with a remarkable agreement with the values reported by various cosmological surveys. We demonstrate that the progenitors of local RGs were more actively forming stars in the past, contributing to most of the cosmic SFR density at z>0.5, and to most of the cosmic stellar mass density at any redshift. They suffer a general quenching in the SFR at z~0.35. Below this redshift the progenitors of local SFGs dominate the SFR density of the Universe.
Alan W. McConnachie, Rodrigo Ibata, Nicolas Martin
et al.
The Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey is a survey of $>400$ square degrees centered on the Andromeda (M31) and Triangulum (M33) galaxies that has provided the most extensive panorama of a $L_\star$ galaxy group to large projected galactocentric radii. Here, we collate and summarise the current status of our knowledge of the substructures in the stellar halo of M31, and discuss connections between these features. We estimate that the 13 most distinctive substructures were produced by at least 5 different accretion events, all in the last 3 or 4 Gyrs. We suggest that a few of the substructures furthest from M31 may be shells from a single accretion event. We calculate the luminosities of some prominent substructures for which previous estimates were not available, and we estimate the stellar mass budget of the outer halo of M31. We revisit the problem of quantifying the properties of a highly structured dataset; specifically, we use the OPTICS clustering algorithm to quantify the hierarchical structure of M31's stellar halo, and identify three new faint structures. M31's halo, in projection, appears to be dominated by two `mega-structures', that can be considered as the two most significant branches of a merger tree produced by breaking M31's stellar halo into smaller and smaller structures based on the stellar spatial clustering. We conclude that OPTICS is a powerful algorithm that could be used in any astronomical application involving the hierarchical clustering of points. The publication of this article coincides with the public release of all PAndAS data products.
This paper argues that, despite the purely physical nature of the process of the creation of blades that later will be components of multi-material tools, this is also like an artistic act. If this is so, the manner in which we discuss the sequence of blade production can be analysed in much the same way as any other narrative works of art, like Greek literature or Shakespearean drama. The article presents three stories about cores that were used for production of blades for tools during the Stone Age, examining the systematic sequence of actions (like the choice of the raw material, core preparation, blade production, repairs of core and discarding of the exhausted core) in the form of a 5-act dramatic structure. We suggest that these five parts or acts of drama are similar to the manner in which, in Stone Age archaeology, we talk about the knapping sequence and goals of blade production. Observation of three blade cores connected with the late Mesolithic and the Early and Middle Neolithic from the central part of Poland provides an opportunity for discussion about the features of those pieces and searching for similarities and differences in the use of “chocolate” flint during the latter part of the Stone Age