Archaeological Texts Research Articles

Arab Migration During Early Islam: The Seventh to Eighth Century AD from an Archaeological Perspective

Abstract The topic of Arab migration during the medieval period has occupied many modern historians. The evidence for migration in chronicles and geographies, however, is quite thin. This article looks at these texts as well as at contemporary “archaeological texts” (inscriptions and papyri documents) and archaeology. Each of these sources provides different information under different limitations which sometimes correlates with another. One main focus of the article is the ability of archaeology to answer – alone – the question about Arab migration. For that purpose, two archaeological models are proposed. One model highlights the link between the material culture of two regions (origin and destination) in two sequent times and its evolvement in the destination. The other model points to continuous links between origin and destination and the evolvement of material culture in the origin. The models are compared to a number of case studies from the early Islamic period (seventh to tenth century AD) in the Levant, Spain, and additional regions. The case studies present innovations which might reflect migrants: irrigation methods, specific forms of architecture, production techniques of portable artifacts, and evidence for a new confession – Islam. While the archaeological records of early Islam are often too limited to answer most of the models’ criteria, two case studies seem promising: soapstone pots/bowls and early Muslim burials. Both cases imply the migration of people from the Arabian Peninsula elsewhere in the eighth or even the seventh century.

Do Social Sciences and Humanities Speak the Language for Specific Purposes? A Look at Archaeological Texts


 The unbreakable bond between language and scientific thought has incarnated into a special way of using general language, which we call language for specific purposes. It is thanks to this language that articulation of observations, conceptual and semantic constitution of scientific fields and exchange of new knowledge are possible. Language for specific purposes is not a new system of signs, rather it uses all the linguistic resources contained within general language, from which it is inseparable. Its peculiarity lies in the frequency and the specific ways of using lexicon and morphosyntactic structures, especially the ones which help it approach the ideal of precision and brevity of expression. In the first part of the paper, in addition to the detailed definition of the concept of language for specific purposes, we analyze which language is necessary for scientific purposes, whether or not scientists understand one another and if there are any universal characteristics of language for specific purposes. The second part of the paper is devoted to a smaller study with the goal of questioning some general traits of the language of archeology, performed on a group of abstracts originally written in the Serbian language.

NEAT—Named Entities in Archaeological Texts: A semantic approach to term extraction and classification

Abstract The lack of annotated datasets affects the development of Natural Language Processing applications and heavily impacts the access to textual data, in particular for specific domains and specific languages. In this paper, we propose a methodology to annotate texts concerning domain-specific knowledge, to provide a reliable source of data for the task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the domain of archaeology for the Italian laguage. This method integrates syntactic and semantic information from several structured sources to annotate entities’ mentions in unstructured texts. Furthermore, we make use of an ontology to label entities with the specific type they refer to. By using a corpus made up of item descriptions from Europeana’s Archaeology Collection, we first test our proposed methodology on a mock dataset composed of 1,000 texts. After several steps of improvements, we use the final process to create a complete dataset composed of 5,000 descriptions. The resulting dataset, Named Entities in Archaeological Texts has a total of 41,002 spans of texts annotated with their domain-specific entity classification according to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.

The World Turned Upside Down, Again: Hauntings of the English Revolution and Archaeologies of Futures Past in Contemporary British Films

In the 1960s and 1970s, the period of the Civil War and the English Revolution featured prominently in a variety of films ranging from the mainstream historical drama Cromwell to the independent Winstanley and the folk horror film Witchfinder General. Film-makers’ interest in the period at that time coincided with the cultural, social and political turmoil of 1968 as well as with the increasingly popularised revision of the period in Marxist historiography, such as Christopher Hill’s seminal book The World Turned Upside Down. Recently, there has been a renewed interest of British film-makers in Hill’s focus on the subcultures of the English Revolution, such as the Diggers, as well as in the aesthetics of earlier films about the period. This article analyses two contemporary films about the period, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and Thomas Clay’s Fanny Lye Deliver’d, and through historicisation and contextualisation within film, genre and media history seeks to understand the significance of their return to the historical material of the seventeenth century as well as to the style of their filmic models from the 1960s and 1970s. The article argues that the two films perform an ‘archaeology of the future’ (Jameson) that excavates utopian ‘futures past’ (Koselleck) in British cultural history as well as in British film and media history. By analysing Wheatley and Clay’s films as hauntological and archaeological texts, the article explores the potential of the cinematic image for engaging with national and film history as well as with visions of the past and the future.

Can BERT Dig It? Named Entity Recognition for Information Retrieval in the Archaeology Domain

The amount of archaeological literature is growing rapidly. Until recently, these data were only accessible through metadata search. We implemented a text retrieval engine for a large archaeological text collection (~658 million words). In archaeological IR, domain-specific entities such as locations, time periods and artefacts play a central role. This motivated the development of a named entity recognition (NER) model to annotate the full collection with archaeological named entities. In this article, we present ArcheoBERTje, a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model pre-trained on Dutch archaeological texts. We compare the model’s quality and output on an NER task to a generic multilingual model and a generic Dutch model. We also investigate ensemble methods for combining multiple BERT models, and combining the best BERT model with a domain thesaurus using conditional random fields. We find that ArcheoBERTje outperforms both the multilingual and Dutch model significantly with a smaller standard deviation between runs, reaching an average F1 score of 0.735. The model also outperforms ensemble methods combining the three models. Combining ArcheoBERTje predictions and explicit domain knowledge from the thesaurus did not increase the F1 score. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the differences between the vocabulary and output of the BERT models on the full collection and provide some valuable insights in the effect of fine-tuning for specific domains. Our results indicate that for a highly specific text domain such as archaeology, further pre-training on domain-specific data increases the model’s quality on NER by a much larger margin than shown for other domains in the literature, and that domain-specific pre-training makes the addition of domain knowledge from a thesaurus unnecessary.

Words that Archaeologists Choose

Writing is the means by which archaeological knowledge is produced, shared and negotiated, which is why, as part of a wider reflexive archaeology, writing within the discipline has come under scrutiny. When writing, archaeologists make choices about what words to use to express their ideas about the past (even if these choices are sometimes subconscious). This study examines such choices via the application of methods from two linguistic subdisciplines, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, to a case study of Maltese archaeological texts and terms for a specific yet problematic type of Maltese artifact (axe-amulets/pendants). Using these methods, we connect political and theoretical shifts to changes in English-language use and terminology across three periods of Maltese archaeological history, demonstrating how authors choose words that reflect the broader assumptions and understandings that inform their work. In sum, this paper contributes to an increasingly critically aware understanding of the history of colonial and postcolonial archaeology in Malta and other Mediterranean islands and encourages writers to have a heightened awareness of the taken-for-granted but fundamental part that language plays in their poetics and politics.

New Public Excavations

The paper draws on recent salvage archaeological excavations in Melbourne, Australia that prompt questions on architectural concerns of ‘site’ in contemporary architectural discourse. For design practitioners, site is usually communicated in direct and straightforward ways, with some practical understanding of the physical forces that form the current site, but little of influencing political or cultural elements. This is particularly problematic in settler-colonial cities such as Melbourne which are built out of complex and contested environments. The urban archaeological excavation is therefore seen as a metaphorical ‘autopsy,’ a brief moment of pause when the site’s history and composition can be publicly examined and challenged. Crucially, the act exposes the significant and potent presence of ground and dirt as actants in the city. This paper examines archaeological and architectural texts and practices to explore the added meaning that a refocusing on dirt and ground as material and medium can add to the architectural reading and interpretation of site in the settler‑colonial city.

Excavating Archaeological Texts: Applying Digital Humanities to the Study of Archaeological Thought and Banal Nationalism

ABSTRACT To date, the evolution of archaeological knowledge production and theory has been discussed and analyzed using qualitative methods by reading vast amounts of archaeological texts in search of specific discourses or framings of the past. In this paper, we present text mining methodologies from digital humanities that can be applied to large corpora of archaeological texts to trace and evaluate changing knowledge practices. Such a big data approach is imperative. Due to the rapid increase of archaeological publications, qualitative research into the intellectual history of archaeology has become complicated and highly selective. The big data methods presented in this study were tested on a large corpus (4,811 texts totaling over 51 million words) of different types of archaeological texts from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The different text mining tools were successful in identifying theoretical trends. Our tools were also successful in charting the decrease in quality due to changed organizational circumstances (developer-led archaeology). Furthermore, we could also map changing banal nationalist framings of the past.

La “frontera” sureste del territorio vacceo en los siglos II-I a. C. Propuesta de definición

En general, y aunque discrepancias no faltan, conocemos relativamente bien los límites del territorio vacceo, pero aún están por concretar tramo a tramo. En este trabajo nos vamos a centrar en el sector sureste del mismo y en una fase específica: los siglos II-I a. C., que son aquellos para los que mejores datos tenemos, tanto arqueológicos como de los autores clásicos. Más que una línea demarcatoria o “frontera” entre el territorio vacceo y el arévaco, por el lado oriental, y entre aquél y el vettón, por el meridional, entendemos que los límites debieron de ser amplios espacios abiertos, terrenos de nadie, entre entidades ciudadanas fronterizas completamente autónomas desde el punto de vista político. Aplicando a los núcleos urbanos fronterizos criterios geográficos, medioambientales, paleoeconómicos y, por supuesto, los relativos a la cultura material, creemos que es posible establecer diferencias que nos permiten ajustar los espacios entre etnias vecinas.

STEM-COMPOSITION AS THE MAIN WAY OF WORD FORMATION IN ARCHEOLOGICAL TERMINOLOGY

The article describes the features of word formation which are most typical for archaeology sublanguage / substantival composites and compound adjectives. Archaeological terminology is of some interest from a linguistic point of view, as it has numerous objects of study and is marked by its distinctive terminology. The description of the discovered archaeological material comes from the perspective of an integrative approach which allows to collate the results of research in many areas of both humanitarian and natural-scientific plan. The most productive way of designating and describing discovered archaeological sites is the morphological and syntactic method of term-formation. Stem-composition is the dominant way of word formation in the sublanguage of archaeology. Since the description of features and properties, the image of discovered objects occupies quite a large place in archaeological texts, the stem-composition proves to be productive for adjectives. Compound words serve as a mean of language economy and express significant information in compact forms and are a source of archaeological vocabulary extension.

(Re)writing the Early Biography of the Alhambra’s Fountain of Lions: New Evidence from a Neo-Latin Poem (1497)

In the centuries following the conquest of Granada in 1492, the Alhambra’s iconic Fountain of Lions underwent numerous changes. More than a hundred years ago, a process of restoring the object to its original appearance under Nasrid rule was initiated. The joint interpretation of archaeological findings and historical texts guided the process of writing and rewriting the early biography of an object whose physical form has gradually been reshaped according to these narratives. The present article focuses on a brief period in the complex history of the fountain—the decades surrounding the conquest of Granada—and revisits Islamic and Christian written testimonies, emphasizing their inherent limitations as documentary sources. By introducing a hitherto unknown Neo-Latin poem, the article calls into question the early biography of the Fountain of Lions as it has been narrated so far, thereby challenging recent modifications to the fountain.

The phenomenon of the phantom place: Archaeology and ships

This article presents ‘the phenomenon of the phantom place’ and its occurrences. This phenomenon finds its equivalent in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the phantom limb, and manifests itself when a past place acquires such representational value in absentia that determines our perception of the present, tangible place. To demonstrate its occurrences and assess its importance, archaeological writing and practices are examined. First, through an examination of archaeological texts on shipwrecks, it is shown how the excavation site can be perceived as a spatiotemporal fusion of material remains (presences) and the absent functional place (the phantom) these represent. Second, the value of phantom places is shown through the investigation of a (re)constructed place; specifically a trireme. The latter case study demonstrates how the experience of places replicating past spatialities is largely affected by the obsolete functions these places served in the past. The case studies employed centre around a single spatiality, the ship. This phenomenon, however, is neither restricted to archaeologists nor specific places; it is integral to the way we perceive place.

Successor Eponyms, Debt Notes, Intercalation, and the Old Assyrian Calendar during Kültepe Level II: A Critical Reappraisal

The appearance of an annual chronology from Old Assyrian records in the form of eponym lists, more than a decade ago, has had a significant impact on the quest to anchor early second millennium chronology. Old Assyrian specialists have produced a series of refinements to the list of eponyms (year names).1 The editors of the Revised Eponym List (REL) support a chronology of the early second millennium Bc that is close (or identical) to the Middle Chronology, and militates against the high, low, and ultra-low chronologies, based on the relation between archaeological stratigraphy, texts, and dendrochronological results from the Warsama palace at Kultepe.2 Since its appearance, a number of authors have proposed minor (but

The history of breeding for polled cattle

In this review, the history of breeding for polled cattle is compiled from literature as well as graphic representations of cattle in art and science. Domesticated taurine cattle originated around 8500 years BCE in the Near East and spread from there to Africa as well as to Europe. Earliest findings of polled domesticated cattle are from today’s Slovakia and Germany from 6000 years BCE. Textual findings and especially graphic displays can be found of polled cattle in Ancient Egypt. Although archaeological finds of skulls that can be evaluated for natural polledness are rare, archaeological texts and graphical displays indicate that genetically polled cattle in Ancient Egypt were present and quite numerous. Polled cattle apparently were also kept by Germanic tribes and can be followed through medieval times into the 17th and 18th century where textual accounts are more frequent. In Scandinavian countries and Great Britain polled cattle have survived in greater proportions up to today while in the middle of Europe polled cattle were not well regarded by farmers and almost became extinct. Among the British breeds, Angus and Galloway were established as beef cattle breeds in the 17th/18th century, and still flourish. However, the British polled dairy breed Suffolk became extinct. It was one of the ancestral breeds of the Red Polled beef breed and was used in attempts to promote polled dairy cattle in France in the 19th century. Reports of single individuals in polled cattle found in predominantly horned populations possibly indicate several origins of the polled mutations. Recently, at least two different types of mutations, located on BTA01, have been found to be responsible for the mutation commonly referred to as the polled allele. One is the so-called ‘Celtic’ type, found in Scandinavia and Britain while the’‘Friesian’ type is found in cattle of the Holstein family. Today, aspects of animal welfare more and more influence farmers’ attitudes towards naturally polled cattle and also governmental policies play an important role. For the important horned dairy breeds of central Europe, e.g. Holstein, Brown Swiss and Fleckvieh, as well as for the beef breed Charolais, breeding programs for the introgression of the polled allele are starting and will be aided by new tools such as genomic selection.

Extracting Information from Archaeological Texts

AbstractTo address archaeology’s most pressing substantive challenges, researchers must discover, access, and extract information contained in the reports and articles that codify so much of archaeology’s knowledge. These efforts will require application of existing and emerging natural language processing technologies to extensive digital corpora. Automated classification can enable development of metadata needed for the discovery of relevant documents. Although it is even more technically challenging, automated extraction of and reasoning with information from texts can provide urgently needed access to contextualized information within documents. Effective automated translation is needed for scholars to benefit from research published in other languages.

Ufarlige forbindelser?

The article discusses the role of rigid methodology inthe archaeological theoretical debate by focusing on thepotential of the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.This tradition is defined in its relation to empiricism through acritique of theoreticism. Further on, two archaeological texts,one focusing on postprocessual and the other on symmetricalarchaeology, are analyzed in order to fully understand theirinherent metaphysics. It is argued that both texts maintain apre-critical understanding of Kantian philosophy, and thatthis point is vital to their main arguments. In the end, theauthor argues for the potential of Kantian philosophy for abetter understanding of archaeological theory.

Interpreting ground‐penetrating radar By Lawrence B.Conyers Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012 ISBN 978‐1‐61132‐216‐3. Pp. 220. AUD 126. Available from Footprint Books, Warriewood, NSW.

Interpreting ground-penetrating radar By Lawrence B. Conyers Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012 ISBN 978-1161132-216-3. Pp. 220. AUD 126. Available from Footprint Books, Warriewood, NSW. Although archaeological remote sensing has achieved reasonable acceptance in Europe and America, Australian terrestrial archaeologists still tend to view the various techniques with a fair degree of confusion and/or suspicion. This ranges from scepticism about its potential to provide any useful results (or, indeed, wariness that it will lose their work), through to enthusiastic advocacy but sometimes overly high expectations, thanks in part to how it is portrayed in the media. A large part of the difficulty in correcting perceptions has been the nature of the available literature on the subject. Most general archaeological texts understandably present only limited description and positive examples as a means of illustrating the potential of the different remote sensing techniques. Conversely, almost all of the detailed handbooks on the market have emphasised the technical aspects of their operation, heavy with the types of language that only a geophysicist could understand or love. Archaeological geophysics in Australia has also been very end-user driven, with university departments purchasing equipment as a device to demystify the techniques and encourage their use, while at the same time having limited in-depth knowledge or the opportunity for consistent use (although there are a few exceptions of postgraduates with a genuine geophysics background). With increasing simplification of the equipment and software, this sort of non-specialist operation is likely to increase worldwide. For many of us in the remote sensing end-user category, this latest volume by Larry Conyers is what we have been waiting for. Conyers is one of the notable personalities in the use of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and has previously been an author of several more technical tomes on the technique. In this new publication we have a different approach, with Conyers presenting what is in some respects a personal narrative of his worldwide experiences on a vast array of archaeological sites of all periods. Conyers and his students have also spent a couple of decades experimenting, simulating in test sites, comparing the GPR results to the excavated site and learning from their mistakes. The strength of the volume is that he has structured it around presenting numerous examples of what different sites in different environments look like as a GPR reflection along individual transects (the equivalent of looking at a vertical section through a site) or as an amplitude slice (where the transects are compiled to produce horizontal maps of the site depending on depth). Perhaps more importantly, Conyers deals with success and failures and illustrates problems and errors, allowing the novice to decode and understand where he or she went wrong. The opening chapters provide an overview of the basic method and theory of GPR, sufficient that a neophyte could understand the processes of collecting and interpreting the data. This is followed by a personal history of Conyers' use of the technique, which also neatly provides a summary of how the use of the technique has evolved in (primarily American) archaeology. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with geological and cultural complexities, respectively--in essence, how to determine whether the GPR results are being produced or influenced by natural or cultural phenomena. The former might include what happens when you run the equipment over a sand dune, a buried fiver channel, a beach or a body of water. An interesting section on understanding the appearance of bedrock in GPR results as a factor in how we structure conventional archaeological excavations uses Lynley Wallis' work in Gledswood rock shelter in Queensland as an example. The chapter on cultural complexity considers how to distinguish subsurface archaeological features from more recent disturbances, such as pipes and service trenches, compaction from vehicles, or scarring from ploughing and earthmoving. …

Mounds, Myths, and Grave Mistakes: Wills De Hass and the Growing Pains of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology

For much of the nineteenth century, antiquarians, who frequently came from professions and backgrounds outside of the scientific realm, domi nated the study of American prehistory. In their writings, they mused upon how the past might have looked rather than rigorously described the context of archaeological findings. Although their efforts in the field rescued count less artifacts from the path of American expansion, their own excavations typically were haphazard. By the midpoint of the century, the first descrip tive archaeological texts were beginning to emerge, laying the groundwork for future methodology, but the discipline still lacked the characteristics of a modern profession, including full research support and opportunities for advanced training. At the same time, early archaeologists themselves were given to wild speculation, with many still believing that a separate non-American Indian race had been responsible for the mounds of the South and Midwest. 2 Wills De Hass embodies the complicated legacy of these transitional archaeologists. A physician and historian of then-western Virginia, De Hass parlayed his curiosity and self-funded research of local earthworks into a committee chairmanship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and, later, an appointment to lead mound exploration for the new Bureau of Ethnology. But De Hass did damage to his own reputation and to the progress of American archaeology by defending the Grave Creek stone—a celebrated hoax of the time—and by elevating the Moundbuilder quest above other research pursuits. These fervent beliefs ultimately contributed to De Hass’s professional downfall and served to obscure his myriad contributions to the nascent discipline. De Hass was born in Washington County, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1817. His ancestors, originally French Huguenot stock, came to the New World generations earlier by way of Holland. One ancestor, John Philip De Hass,

The uncreated man. A story of archaeology and imagination

AbstractWhat is the place of imagination in archaeology? This paper works with a set of materials from the deep archive of the South African archaeologist John Goodwin (1900–59) to explore the relationship between archaeology and imagination. The first half of the paper focuses on a short story written by Goodwin, describing the accidental creation and subsequent ‘uncreation’ of an indigenous person of the Cape (described in the story as a ‘Hottentot’) by the gods on Olympus. The second half of the paper describes two encounters in life between Goodwin and indigenous people of the Cape (the first with the so-called ‘Tweerivieren Bushmen’, exhibited in life at the Empire Exhibition of 1936; the second with the human remains from Oakhurst Cave). Encounters in life, in death and in imagination, the terms of these three episodes double and repeat one another in the different forms of writing to which they give rise (the imagined world of the short story, and the ‘bare description’ of Goodwin's archaeological texts). At the centre of each is the haunted figure of the ‘Bushman’/‘Hottentot’, a being whose status is figured as a kind of ‘death-in-life’. In my telling, forms of actual and epistemic violence are never far from these events. Looking, showing and telling are described as activities which range across a set of characteristic sites: the body, the archive and the grave. In so doing, they summon their counterparts, the categories of the unspeakable and the untellable.

Archaeology as a High Court in Ancient Israelite History: A Reply to Nadav Na’aman

This is a rejoinder to N. Na'aman, "Does Archaeology Really Deserve the Status of A ‘High Court’ in Biblical and Historical Research?," B. Becking and L.L. Grabbe (eds.) Between Evidence and Ideology (OtSt, 59; Leiden: Brill, 165–183) that claims that although archaeological evidence can be fragmentary and may be misinterpreted, when solid data from well-excavated sites is compared to assumptions regarding the nature of biblical texts and their date of compilation, the former should prevail, at least until tested by new archaeological evidence or extra-biblical texts.