Hasil untuk "Archaeology"

S. Piggott, B. Trigger

Agnieszka Kaliszewska, Monika Syga

In this work we analyse a number of variants of the Wasserstein distance which allow to focus the classification on the prescribed parts (fragments) of classified 2D curves. These variants are based on the use of a number of discrete probability measures which reflect the importance of given fragments of curves. The performance of this approach is tested through a series of experiments related to the clustering analysis of 2D curves performed on data coming from the field of archaeology.

Chiaki Kobayashi

Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Carbon and heavier elements 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 thanks to a vast amount of data from the Gaia satellite and multi-object spectrographs, and now can also be applied to very distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - extra-galactic archaeology. In these studies the most important factor is the input stellar physics, namely nucleosynthesis yields and binary physics, which predominantly determine the model predictions. In this review I give a summary of stellar nucleosynthesis, and how they are tested with the observations in the Milky Way. Then I show how chemical enrichment of galaxies can be calculated, and show some results with the latest nucleosynthesis yields.

Leslie M. Morales, Jamie Tayar, Zachary R. Claytor

Galactic archaeology relies on accurate stellar parameters to reconstruct the galaxy's history, including information on stellar ages. While the precision of data has improved significantly in recent years, stellar models used for age inference have not improved at a similar rate. In fact, different models yield notably different age predictions for the same observational data. In this paper, we assess the difference in age predictions of various widely used model grids for stars along the red giant branch. Using open source software, we conduct a comparison of four different evolution grids and we find that age estimations become less reliable if stellar mass is not known, with differences occasionally exceeding $80\%$. Additionally, we note significant disagreements in the models' age estimations at non-solar metallicity. Finally, we present a method for including theoretical uncertainties from stellar evolutionary tracks in age inferences of red giants, aimed at improving the accuracy of age estimation techniques used in the galactic archaeology community.

Rui Xing, Runmin Cong, Yingying Wu et al.

Understanding the dietary preferences of ancient societies and their evolution across periods and regions is crucial for revealing human-environment interactions. Seeds, as important archaeological artifacts, represent a fundamental subject of archaeobotanical research. However, traditional studies rely heavily on expert knowledge, which is often time-consuming and inefficient. Intelligent analysis methods have made progress in various fields of archaeology, but there remains a research gap in data and methods in archaeobotany, especially in the classification task of ancient plant seeds. To address this, we construct the first Ancient Plant Seed Image Classification (APS) dataset. It contains 8,340 images from 17 genus- or species-level seed categories excavated from 18 archaeological sites across China. In addition, we design a framework specifically for the ancient plant seed classification task (APSNet), which introduces the scale feature (size) of seeds based on learning fine-grained information to guide the network in discovering key "evidence" for sufficient classification. Specifically, we design a Size Perception and Embedding (SPE) module in the encoder part to explicitly extract size information for the purpose of complementing fine-grained information. We propose an Asynchronous Decoupled Decoding (ADD) architecture based on traditional progressive learning to decode features from both channel and spatial perspectives, enabling efficient learning of discriminative features. In both quantitative and qualitative analyses, our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art image classification methods, achieving an accuracy of 90.5%. This demonstrates that our work provides an effective tool for large-scale, systematic archaeological research.

Patrice Labedan, Nicolas Drougard, Alexandre Berezin et al.

The analyses of ancient coins, and especially the identification of those struck with the same die, provides invaluable information for archaeologists and historians. Nowadays, these die links are identified manually, which makes the process laborious, if not impossible when big treasures are discovered as the number of comparisons is too large. This study introduces advances that promise to streamline and enhance archaeological coin analysis. Our contributions include: 1) First publicly accessible labeled dataset of coin pictures (329 images) for die link detection, facilitating method benchmarking; 2) Novel SSIM-based scoring method for rapid and accurate discrimination of coin pairs, outperforming current techniques used in this research field; 3) Evaluation of clustering techniques using our score, demonstrating near-perfect die link identification. We provide datasets, to foster future research and the development of even more powerful tools for archaeology, and more particularly for numismatics.

T. A. Balina , L. S. Batalova , M. A. Pospishenko

Light industry is one of the oldest sectors of the world economy, which has developed rapidly under the influence of industrial revolutions, the introduction of technological innovations, the development of trade, increased competition in consumer goods markets and other factors, which formed special areas of the industry with its centers. Global trends and features of the development of light industry are of interest for spatio-temporal analysis necessary for understanding the problems of domestic production. The relevance of the study is due to the need for a scientific analysis of the development of key sectors of the light industry in the context of modern geopolitical and macroeconomic realities in the context of constituent entities and federal districts. Having a relatively small share in the structure of manufacturing, light industry plays an important role in the country’s economy, provides all its spheres with various types of products, and the population with consumer goods. Russia’s modern light industry has complex technological chains, relies on a diverse raw material base, it is focused on the growth of consumer demand, which requires the modernization of production. Radical changes in the sectoral and spatial structure of light industry in the world, as well as import substitution requirements have had a great impact on the state of the industry in the regions of Russia. Geopolitical challenges have shown that it is necessary to make maximum use of the existing potential by creating new production facilities, introducing modern technologies, forming our own raw material bases, and training personnel for the sustainable development of the industry. The post-Soviet crisis slowed down the development of light industry for a long time, but at present it is being renovated and transformed into a creative industry. The retrospective analysis reveals positive dynamics in the development of key sectors of light industry, despite the aggravation of a number of problems. Changes in the sectoral and territorial structure of the industry were identified, a typology of the subjects of the Russian Federation was made up by the share of light industry in the economy of the regions. Measures are proposed to bring the industry to a qualitatively new level of development.

Alexander Whitehead, Anthony Sinclair, Christopher Scott

The pathogenic environment has been a constant shaping presence in human evolution. Despite its importance, this factor has been given little consideration and research. Here, we use experimental archaeology and microscopic analysis to present and support a novel hypothesis on the pathogenic properties of bifacial butchery tools during the Middle Pleistocene. Use-wear evidence from the Acheulean site of Boxgrove, Sussex suggests that a sample of flint bifaces were used for butchery tasks for a remarkably limited duration. Circumstantial evidence from other Acheulean sites, such as the apparent discard of bifaces at single-episode butchery sites, and biface caching sites, also suggest limited-use, and extend this interpretation beyond Boxgrove. There is no current utilitarian explanation for why such an apparently over-engineered tool would be discarded after such a limited duration of use. This pilot study demonstrates, via experimental investigation, that residual animal tissue from performing butchery tasks cannot be completely removed from the flake scars of flint bifaces using prehistorically available cleaning methods. It is argued that the animal tissue is likely to begin spoiling within hours of butchery, which poses a significant risk of introducing pathogens into foodstuffs if the biface is reused, resulting in foodborne illness. Subsequently, hominins likely learned to minimise this risk by discarding each flint bifacial tool after a single episode of butchery.

David Hengsbach

Yi Wang, Chenying Liu, Arti Tiwari et al.

Discovering ancient agricultural terraces in desert regions is important for the monitoring of long-term climate changes on the Earth's surface. However, traditional ground surveys are both costly and limited in scale. With the increasing accessibility of aerial and satellite data, machine learning techniques bear large potential for the automatic detection and recognition of archaeological landscapes. In this paper, we propose a deep semantic model fusion method for ancient agricultural terrace detection. The input data includes aerial images and LiDAR generated terrain features in the Negev desert. Two deep semantic segmentation models, namely DeepLabv3+ and UNet, with EfficientNet backbone, are trained and fused to provide segmentation maps of ancient terraces and walls. The proposed method won the first prize in the International AI Archaeology Challenge. Codes are available at https://github.com/wangyi111/international-archaeology-ai-challenge.

Erica Bufanda, Jamie Tayar, Daniel Huber et al.

The success of galactic archaeology and the reconstruction of the formation history of our galaxy critically relies on precise ages for large populations of stars. For evolved stars in the red clump and red giant branch, the carbon to nitrogen ratio ([C/N]) has recently been identified as a powerful diagnostic of mass and age that can be applied to stellar samples from spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS/APOGEE. Here, we show that at least 10\% of red clump stars and %$\approx 10\%$ of red giant branch stars deviate from the standard relationship between [C/N] and mass. {We use the APOGEE-\kepler\ (APOKASC) overlap sample to show that binary interactions are %the majority contributors to these responsible for the majority of these outliers and that stars with %any indicators of current or previous binarity should be excluded from galactic archaeology analyses that rely on [C/N] abundances to infer stellar masses. We also show that the %standard DR14 APOGEE analysis overestimates the surface gravities for even moderately rotating giants (vsini$>2$ km/s)}

L. Mashonkina, Yu. Pakhomov, T. Sitnova et al.

Detailed chemical abundances of very metal-poor (VMP, [Fe/H] < -2) stars are important for better understanding the First Stars, early star formation and chemical enrichment of galaxies. Big on-going and coming high-resolution spectroscopic surveys provide a wealth of material that needs to be carefully analysed. For VMP stars, their elemental abundances should be derived based on the non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE = NLTE) line formation because low metal abundances and low electron number density in the atmosphere produce the physical conditions favorable for the departures from LTE. The galactic archaeology research requires homogeneous determinations of chemical abundances. For this purpose, we present grids of the 1D-NLTE abundance corrections for the Na I, Mg I, Ca I, Ca II, Ti II, Fe I, Zn I, Zn II, Sr II, and Ba II lines, which are used in the galactic archaeology research. The range of atmospheric parameters represents VMP stars on various evolutionary stages and covers effective temperatures from 4000 to 6500~K, surface gravities from log g = 0.5 to log g = 5.0, and metallicities $-5.0 \le$ [Fe/H] $\le -2.0$. The data is publicly available, and we provide the tools for interpolating in the grids online.

Andrea Fiorini

This paper concerns the results of the archaeological investigations at the Savelli fortress on the Aventine Hill in Rome. This fortification surrounds a well-known park of the city: the Giardino degli Aranci. The research has been addressed to improve the knowledge on a topic of great historical interest: the architectural typologies developed by Roman aristocratic families in order to defend their properties. Locating Rocca Savelli within a specific architectural typology is problematic, due to the lack of research on this site. The research team of the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna has surveyed the remains, studied their building features and documented stratigraphic data. This paper summarises the preliminary results of such research effort. The structures still conserved above the ground level can be dated back to the second half of the 13th century and are the output of craftsmen specialised in building with local tuff. The fortification was most likely built by the Savelli family in order to defend its dwelling on the Aventine Hill. The next step of the research will be addressed to in-depth analyses of data collected during the fieldwork. The aim is to better specify the original features of the structure and its later modifications. At a later stage, it will be possible to understand the economic, cultural and ideological background of the people connected to the fortification (patrons, builders and inhabitants). Ultimately, the project will include geophysical prospections and small excavations across the park to investigate the presence of further structures conserved below the present ground level.

Theodoros Avgitas, Sabine Elles, Corinne Goy et al.

A tomography experiment using muon cosmic rays was conducted on an archaeological site in Greece, a tumulus. This contribution presents issues related to the simulation of the experiment and of the site, using tools commonly used in high-energy physics. The scientific objective is to compare the results of the simulation with the recorded data to highlight anomalies.

Simon Briend, Francisco Calvillo, Gábor Lugosi

We study the problem of finding the root vertex in large growing networks. We prove that it is possible to construct confidence sets of size independent of the number of vertices in the network that contain the root vertex with high probability in various models of random networks. The models include uniform random recursive dags and uniform Cooper-Frieze random graphs.

Victor Cojocaru

In the context of a monograph on proxenia in the Black Sea area, the author embarked on  investigating into the awarded privileges. This article provides him with the opportunity to expand on this topic, starting with a brief reference to the historiographical aporia about the contradiction between the understanding of proxenia as a quasicontractual office, involving an obligation on the proxenos to perform particular duties, and the honorific aspect of this status which seemed prominent in the rapidly expanding epigraphic record of proxeny decrees for the Hellenistic period. Next, the research is structured according to the main stages encountered in the available documents: I. Ateleia (kai proxenia); II. Proxenia kai ateleia; III. Proxenia kai politeia; IV. Awarded privileges in Hellenistic time; V. Proxeny decrees from Chersonesos in Roman time. However, at each stage, the research approach takes into account the existence of an ‘Ionian Pontic space’, a ‘Dorian Pontic space’, and of the peculiarities of the Bosporan decrees. In the final remarks, the author points out the previous omissions regarding the awarded privileges to proxenoi in the Black Sea area. As an annex to this study two tables, based on an exhaustive catalogue of documents, provide a synthesis of the diachronic and comparative perspectives.

Lysenko, S.S.

Bracelets with “projections”, “knobs”, “bulges”, etc. are quite often terms used in the literature. Moreover, the items called in this way have different decor and different dates. Researchers often cite completely different types of things as analogies. There is a need for a more detailed study of these bracelets. This paper deals with the selection of bracelets with projections from the territory of Eastern Europe. It is proposed to divide these items into types corresponding to the period of their existence: Hallstatt, La Tène and late Classical.

Véronique Lallemand, Jérôme Kotarba, Christine Rendu

Following a series of programed archaeological work and survey-inventories, the Cerdagne basin, which was the focus of many public works projects, has seen a vigorous development of preventive archaeology. This development is based on scientific specifications favouring collaboration between various institutions, around shared issues and the outlining of presumed areas for archaeological legal statutes. Measures permit an adaptation of methods to the specifics of mountainous cultivated landscapes, in particular by associating various specialities and frequently resorting to radiocarbon dating. The numerous and diversified remains, in function of altitude levels and slope, are testimonies of human actions and works over a very long time, extending from the Mesolithic to the modern era. Altitude prairies appear as a heritage conservatory of paramount importance in a fragile ecological context subjected for long periods to the pressure of human communities.

Berseneva Natalia A.

The study concerns children’s burials of the Srubnaya culture (Bronze Age, the South Urals). The assumption that grave goods are related to the gender and age of the dead and may also reflect the stages of growing up of children and their inclusion in economic life (gender and labour socialization) was the theoretical basis of the research. A sample consisting of 178 anthropologically identified individuals who died before the age of 15 years was analyzed. This sample was divided into three age sub-groups in order to catch the dynamics in distribution of the grave goods in accordance to age and in order to identify the different stages of children’s life course. The author’s study demonstrated that children before 2 years old were mostly accompanied by gender-neutral grave goods (ceramic vessels) or were buried without any items. After this age grave goods become more diverse and numerous. It is possible to suggest that gender socialization in the Srubnaya society started around the age of two-three but female gender was marked more often than male. The study of age dynamics demonstrates that as the children grew older, the number of jewelry increased, while other items were still few in number. Labour socialization was not reflected in burial rite. The perspective of the study is seen in the extension of the source base and further analysis of artifacts, including ceramic material.

Francesca Matteucci

In this review I will discuss the comparison between model results and observational data for the Milky Way, the predictive power of such models as well as their limits. Such a comparison, known as Galactic archaeology, allows us to impose constraints on stellar nucleosynthesis and timescales of formation of the various Galactic components (halo, bulge, thick disk and thin disk).