Piles Of Bones Research Articles

A non-contact method for weighting of aggregate pile based on binocular vision

Concrete is indispensable in contemporary industry, and the weighing of aggregates directly determines the quality of concrete preparation. In response to the difficulty of traditional methods in meeting the industrial requirements for accuracy, efficiency, and cost of measurement, this paper proposes a non-contact bone pile weight measurement method based on binocular vision. Firstly, the on-site image is obtained through a binocular camera, and the camera parameters are used to improve the image edge information and preprocess the image. Then, the improved semi global matching (SGM) algorithm is used to improve computational efficiency, obtaining three-dimensional information of the aggregate pile for volume calculation. Based on the watershed algorithm and T-S inference, the aggregate clearance rate is calculated, and the initial volume is corrected. Finally, a linear relationship is established between the density of the aggregate pile and the clearance rate, and the weight of the aggregate pile can be obtained by the density formula. The experimental results on different sizes of aggregate piles shows that the average error of the experiment is less than 4%. Efficiency of improved SGM matching algorithm has increased several times compared to the original algorithm, providing a low-cost and efficient measurement method for industrial aggregate weighing.

From excavating bones to reconstruct funerary practices: Contextualizing skeletal evidence for the post-funerary treatment of the dead at the Pre- and Protopalatial Petras cemetery (2900–1700 BCE), Siteia, Crete

This paper explores the character of the Petras human bone deposits in order to identify and reconstruct the original burial conditions and subsequently understand the social processes that resulted in the formation of a variable burial record. The Petras cemetery, located on the northeast coast of Crete, consists of 24 excavated House Tombs. The site was in use from Early Minoan IB (2900–2650 BCE) until Middle Minoan IIB (1850–1700 BCE), providing an excellent opportunity for the study of Prepalatial and Protopalatial mortuary practices. Drawing on existing research in social bioarchaeology, this study implements an integrated bioarchaeological approach involving the analysis of funerary taphonomy such as aspects of bone preservation, anatomical articulation and the position of skeletal remains. This way the given paper aims to reconstruct the funerary practices and their embedded meaning. Results suggest that all members of the community, were secondarily manipulated, while fully or partially decomposed, often inside the original burial location. A few intact primary burials present an exception which may attest to an ancestral population. The skeletal remains, even the ones placed inside funerary vessels, were reduced and re-arranged in commingled piles of bones in order to create room for new burials. Beyond practical considerations, the latter acts were also part of a ritual program, as the deposition of complete vases to fragmentary remains infer. Moreover, the Petras House Tombs attest to diachronic variability in group size, patterns of use and spatial arrangements of the human remains. Yet, these distinct choices were part of a single narrative which stressed the importance of a collective past, as the constant choice of the burial locale, the successive building upon old tombs and the commingled, unindividuated masses of bones indicate.

A review of the Yama Sukta in the Yajurveda

The Yama Sukta is the collection of the Ṛcas of the Yama-deity and is called the Yama Sukta. In this chapter the mantras relating to the Pitramedha are mentioned. Pitramedha is performed in memory of the year of the deceased father. In the memory of the year, in an odd year, the Pitrimedha should be held. It occurs in the constellation of Ekatara and in the constellations Chitra and others on the date of Amavasya in autumn, summer or Magha. The priest who is going to perform the Pitramedha should make a pile of bones in a pot. All the sons and grandsons of the deceased.

Display of the Ancient Religious Bone Cults in the Late Acheulean–Mousterian Art

The relevance of research. One of the most important unsolved problems of cultural studies, religious studies, art history, and history is to determine the time of the origin of religious ideas: that of the beginning of the spiritual evolution of the mankind, which at a certain stage of development begins to master not only the material world but also tries to comprehend the supernatural transcendent reality. The views of scholars regarding the time of the birth of religious beliefs is divided into two opposing points of view. According to one of them, expressed in the works of R. Marett, F. Ratzel, V. Kabo, A. Zubov, religious representations were inherent in the primitive man since the beginning of existence. A serious argument against this version is the fact that art the site of Olduvai culture no object was found that did not have a utilitarian purpose and that could be interpreted as a cult object. However, this fact can be explained by the fact that the rational awareness of the highest supernatural power was preceded by its subconscious (intuitive) sensation, which did not require objectivation in cult objects. Religious ideas were primitive so that they did not need any cult objects. According to other scholars, one can speak of the emergence of religious ideas only from the moment when the cult artefacts appeared; the pre-religious period had lasted until the end of the Mousterian era. However, the discovery of a number of archaeological sites in the second half of the 20th century at the beginning of the 21st century makes it possible to move the beginning of the appearance of Religious beliefs back until the period of the late Acheulean–beginning of Mousterian era.The purpose of the article: to establish the time of the origin and evolution of the earliest religious beliefs associated with the cult of bones, based on the analysis of the most ancient artefacts currently known, which testify to the ritual activities of the primitive man. The considered artefacts lead to the conclusion that the most ancient evidence of the cults of bones belongs to the era of the late Acheulean and Mousterian. Animal bones were among the first objects that the primitive man singled out from the environment as sacred, and endowed with a supernatural ability to revive the lives of animals and humans. Symbolic compositions of bones and signs carved in them became sacred attributes used for magical rites. The first acts of the ritual symbolization marked the emergence of sacred art and magic, which, radically different from the directly useful work, passed into a special plane of connection of men with the supernatural force. The earliest monuments (Torralba, Ambrona, Azykh), which testify to magical actions with bones, date back to about 400–200 thousand years BC. Thus, more than 2 million years passed from the appearance of man (ca. 2.7 million years ago) to the emergence of religious ideas, which required objectification in cult items and the performance of certain rituals. Although it cannot be denied that the intuitive subconscious sense of the supernatural power has been inherent in man since the beginning of his existence, purposefully by cultic magical actions that called on higher powers for help, he began to practice from the period of the late Acheulean. In the Mousterian era, in addition to the cult of bones, the cult of the skull arose as a container of special energy capable of renewing human life. Despite the fact that there are only a few examples of skull burials in the Mousterian period, apart from Mount Circeo, in Zhoukoudian (1929), Ngandonga (1931–1933) and Steingheim (1933), it can be assumed that about 70–50 thousand years ago, along with burials, an undissected body could be another rite of separation of the skull, which as a container of a special vital energy of man was buried in some parts of the caves on piles of bones and stones, just as at about the same time separately buried the skulls of bears in stone boxes and niches in caves of Regurdu, Azykh, Drachenloh, Wildenmannlisloch, and others. Later, with the development of ideas about the soul, the cult of skulls is further developed, based on the realization of the power of the extracorporeal spiritual essence of the revered dead (= ancestors), the concentration of which requires a magical container.

A simple pile of bones? The complex functioning of a medieval ossuary in the parish cemetery of Notre-Dame church in Boulogne-sur-mer (Pas-de-Calais) [abridged version

Collection and secondary deposition of bones were common funerary practices in mediaeval burial grounds. However, the resulting accumulations of bones rarely benefit from careful archaeological excavations and thorough studies. The recent excavation of an ossuary pit in the parish cemetery of Notre-Dame de Boulogne-sur-Mer yet shows that this type of archaeological feature cannot be reduced to the mere expression of a pragmatic management of human remains. This pit, well dated from the fourteenth century by radiocarbon, was used for the primary burials of four individuals (three young children, of which two were deposited in coffins, and an adult placed in a prone position), thus testifying to the coexistence of two functions, two “intents” and various “funerary phases” in the functioning of the ossuary. The results lead to questioning the meaning to be given to these atypical practices, which are sometimes encountered on other sites.

On Fields of Bones, Headsmen and Madonnas: The Symbols and Figures of Central Europe in the Past 25 Years of Jáchym Topol’s Writing

In the Czech literary scene, it is Jáchym Topol who may justly be labelled the author most consumed with Central Europe, one who is constantly attempting to decrypt the message encoded in its scars and wrinkles. His fictional treatment of Central-European themes is preceded by thorough knowledge of both the history and present state of the region. However, Topol is not merely a historian; in his fictionalising he uses a poetic, complex perspective, and arrives thus at a unique expression. Particular recurring figures in his literary work seem to answer in a riddle the questions of present-day Central Europe. First one of those is the biblical image of the field or of the pile of bones. In Topol’s writing, it represents both the systematic violence in Central-European history, and universal onus. The second recurring figure is the figure of a good-hearted headsman. In Topol’s prosaic and dramatic texts, the headsman embodies the ambivalence of the Czech national character, but also its survival strategies. It is intertextually linked to the works of Jaroslav Hašek, and brings the notion “Czechs are a Švejk-like nation” to its absurd, augmented consequences. The third figure which keeps returning in Topol’s work combines the features of a character and of a symbol. It is the figure of Madonna, representing the spiritual dimension of Central European tradition, bound to Christianity. The various Madonnas—the Polish Madonna of Częstochowa, the War Madonna in fictionalised modern-day Russia and eventually the Czech Madonna of Poříčí create the Christian counterworld in Topol’s novels, and signalize the persistent role and presence of spirituality in the region. In Topol’s novel Citlivý člověk it is actually thanks to this Madonna that the whole discourse opens to a new type of perspective.

The Swimmer

My works are a depiction of a spiritual relationship with the natural environment. I am drawn to the energy, light, color, materiality, surfaces, and compilations of complex forms found in the spaces where man-made structures collide with natural areas. Childhood memories of Michigan wetlands and forests play into my personal creative language, but I also respond to the mixed urban and natural landscape of Berlin. Piles of bones, discarded building materials, and even the energy of strong weather can appear in my works. I aim to capture a relationship with nature that is charged with the playful flux and flow of creation and destruction. I am an intuitive artist who freely explores the painting process.
 In this recent large-scale work, “Swimmer” (2019), an abstracted skeletal figure in the upper left of the canvas is caught in a tidal wave of bright blue water and debris. The architectonic aspects of this painting bring to mind the harder-edged shapes of building materials; these forms, too, are being shattered by the water. The great shifting forces of nature can be epic and overwhelming; this “swimmer” becomes a symbol of fragility in the environment.
 The Swimmer (2019)
 180 x 150 cm (71 x 57 in.)
 Acrylic, pigment, and mixed media on linen
 
 Photo: Eric Tschernow

Use of Subsistence-Harvested Whale Carcasses by Polar Bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea

The availability of a food subsidy has the potential to influence the condition, behavior, fitness, and population dynamics of a species. Since the early 2000s, monitoring efforts along the coast of northern Alaska have indicated a higher proportion of polar bears (<i>Ursus maritimus</i>) of the southern Beaufort Sea (SB) subpopulation coming onshore to feed on subsistence-harvested bowhead whale (<i>Balaena mysticetus</i>) carcasses during the fall and early winter seasons. Concurrently, Indigenous communities annually hunt bowhead whale and deposit the unused remains at localized “bone piles,” creating the potential for human-bear interactions. Our objective was to determine the annual number of polar bears feeding at the bone pile near Kaktovik, Alaska. Using a hair snag surrounding the bone pile, we collected hair samples to identify individual bears via microsatellite genotypes during 2011 – 14. We used capture-mark-recapture data in the POPAN open-population model to estimate the number of bears visiting the bone pile. We estimated that as many as 72 (SE = 9) and 76 (SE = 10) male and female polar bears, respectively, used the bone pile located at Kaktovik, Alaska, in 2012, which represents approximately 16% of the SB polar bear subpopulation. It will be important to monitor the number of bears using the bone pile and subsequent human-bear interactions and conflicts along the northern coast of Alaska, if sea ice continues to recede.

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City Jane Wong (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Let's begin here: on the sand. Or, rather, on the slabs of wood above the sand. On June 26, 1870, the Atlantic City boardwalk opened to the public. Sixteen years earlier, the first tourist train had arrived on the newly minted Camden and Atlantic Railroad. Tourists came to stick their toes in the Atlantic—steel blue, the color of whales they'd never see. They came to lean against each other in the high dunes and make promises they couldn't keep. They let the wind lift those promises up, to be caught in the chandeliers of expensive hotels or the beaks of passing seagulls. The women who came held frilled umbrellas—jellyfish along the shore. And when they returned to their jobs and errands and thumb-sucking babies, they carried sand with them, making the train car a beach in and of itself. Glitter of the sea. This is how the boardwalk came to be: a fed-up railroad conductor and simply too much sand for his own sweeping sanity. Just to be clear: this is not our story. Not yet. Our story moves across that steel blue world, from another continent, from a place where there is no such thing as "vacation." My ancestors would repeat that word, 假期, as if it were a cloud and could disappear [End Page 21] at any point. On this continent, there are herds of oxen and lily pads the size of unkeepable promises. As a small child in central New Jersey, I dreamt of this story. Of oxen, my mother riding the back of one, the hair on its hide so coarse, it makes your throat hurt. Our story, our history, holds a different version of Atlantic City. In 1988, my mother was still dreaming in Cantonese—not a single word of English wormed its way through her open-mouthed sleep. My brother Steven had just been born, howling like a wolf who knew he was a boy. Four years earlier, when the nurses placed me in my mother's arms, my mother says I stared at her silently. She held me up to the fluorescent light and declared: "I'm afraid. She knows too much." By 1988, my father had been holding mah-jong gambling circles for five years, in the basement of my grandparents' apartment in Matawan and then in our house in Tinton Falls, where my parents had settled that year. Cigarette smoke escaped like doves from underneath the floorboards. And the shuffling. The shuffling sound of mahjong tiles, a porcelain earthquake. I learned later that these tiles used to be made out of bone, backed by bamboo. Now: Bakelite, plastic. My father always invited the same people to play: Uncle Jimmy, the Chicken Bone Man, and Balding Uncle. Just to be clear again: our story is not about small enterprises. Our story goes beyond the little batons of twenty-dollar bills, passed around the mahjong table. Beyond the table's green felt, stained with cheap Tsingtao and sky-high piles of gnawed bones from the Chicken Bone Man's eponymous pastime. Our story is Atlantic City. We are talking Taj Mahal, Caesar's Palace, Bally. Casinos depicting worlds my father couldn't fathom, but kept returning to, like a moth drawn to a blinding bulb. At Caesar's Palace, there were towering white columns so extravagant, they held up nothing at all. There were white statues of horses braying, a ceiling painted like the sky with white clouds, the busts of white people we assumed were famous but were really just white. My parents didn't even know where Rome was on a map, or that Rome existed. But Caesar's Palace was irresistible in its whiteness. Who could say no to the patina of wealth? This is how we arrived: on that Chinese tourist bus where you have to fan yourself with your ten-dollar gambling voucher and put your cigarette out in a Dixie cup. Or, if you hit it big like we once did, you can arrive in the dolphin-colored leather of your BMW, before you inevitably...

Beautiful Piles of Bones: An Interview with 2017 Genetics Society of America Medal Recipient David M. Kingsley.

The Genetics Society of America Medal is awarded to an individual for outstanding contributions to the field of genetics in the last 15 years. Recipients of the GSA Medal are recognized for elegant and highly meaningful contributions to modern genetics, exemplifying the ingenuity of GSA membership. The 2017 recipient is David M. Kingsley, whose work in mouse, sticklebacks, and humans has shifted paradigms about how vertebrates evolve. Kingsley first fell in love with genetics in graduate school, where he worked on receptor mediated endocytosis with Monty Krieger. In his postdoctoral training he was able to unite genetics with his first scientific love: vertebrate morphology. He joined the group of Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, where he led efforts to map the classical mouse skeletal mutation short ear Convinced that experimental genetics had a unique power to reveal the inner workings of evolution, Kingsley then established the stickleback fish as an extraordinarily productive model of quantitative trait evolution in wild species. He and his colleagues revealed many important insights, including the discoveries that major morphological differences can map to key loci with large effects, that regulatory changes in essential developmental control genes have produced advantageous new traits, and that nature has selected the same genes over and over again to drive the stickleback's skeletal evolution. Recently, Kingsley's group has been using these lessons to reveal more about how our own species evolved.This is an abridged version of the interview. The full interview is available on the Genes to Genomes blog, at genestogenomes.org/kingsley/.

Guanaco bone piles from the Pampas region (Argentina) and their implications for hunter-gatherer subsistence

Six hunter-gatherer archaeological sites from the Pampas region (Argentina) are characterised by ‘bone piles’ dominated by guanaco bones. These assemblages are dated to the Middle and Late Holocene and their study contributes to the understanding of hunter-gatherer subsistence, especially in periods like these when diet was highly oriented to the consumption of guanaco. This article discusses assemblages with bone piles, with a special focus on the site Empalme Querandies 1. This is a base camp where a wide variety of resources was exploited. Of particular interest at this site is the presence of two bone piles, mainly composed of complete guanaco bones. These features are associated with at least two different chronological events that took place during the Late Holocene. Analyses conducted on specimens from the bone piles show that they were deposited in palustrine environments, the elements were highly articulated, the time of burial was short, and they correspond to guanacos of different ages. Taking ...

Temporal complexity of southernBeaufortSea polar bear diets during a period of increasing land use

AbstractFrom 2000 to 2013, use of land as a seasonal habitat by polar bears (Ursus maritimus) of the southern Beaufort Sea (SB) subpopulation substantially increased. This onshore use has been linked to reduced spatial and temporal availability of sea ice, as well as to the availability of subsistence‐harvested bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) bone piles. Here, we evaluated the role of climate conditions on consumption of traditional ice‐associated prey relative to onshore bowhead whale bone piles. We determined seasonal and interannual trends in the diets ofSBpolar bears using fatty acid‐based analysis during this period of increasing land use. Diet estimates of 569SBpolar bears from 2004 to 2012 showed high seasonal fluctuations in the proportions of prey consumed. Higher proportions of bowhead whale, as well as ringed seal (Pusa hispida) and beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas), were estimated to occur in the winter–spring diet, while higher proportions of bearded seal (Erignathus barbatus) were estimated for summer–fall diets. Trends in the annual mean proportions of individual prey items were not found in either period, except for significant declines in the proportion of beluga in spring‐sampled bears. Nonetheless, in years following a high winter Arctic oscillation index, proportions of ice‐associated ringed seal were lower in the winter–spring diets of adult females and juveniles. Proportions of bowhead increased in the winter–spring diets of adult males with the number of ice‐free days over the continental shelf. In one or both seasons, polar bears that were in better condition were estimated to have consumed less ringed seal and/or more bowhead whale than those in worse condition. Therefore, climate variation over this recent period appeared to influence the extent of onshore vs. on‐ice food use, which in turn, appeared to be linked to fluctuating condition ofSBpolar bears.

Memories —> Witness

Memories —> Witness

Diet of female polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea of Alaska: evidence for an emerging alternative foraging strategy in response to environmental change

Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) diet may become more variable in some Arctic regions due to climate warming and altered sea ice habitat. We surveyed carbon and nitrogen stable isotope profiles of five polar bear tissues sampled from adult females in the Southern Beaufort Sea of Alaska in order to assess inter-tissue isotopic variability and to determine whether any dietary shifts are occurring in this population. We did not detect any significant shifts from historical means in population-level tissue stable isotope values. A number of sectioned hair samples, however, were significantly depleted in 15N relative to the mean. We hypothesized that lower hair δ15N values were due to the consumption of bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) tissue. Telemetry data showed that polar bears with 15N-depleted hair sections were located on multiple dates near known subsistence-harvested bowhead whale bone piles and had spent 90 % of the prior year within 50 km of the shore. Bears with hair section δ15N values at or above the mean spent no time near bowhead whale bone piles and less than half of the year nearshore. An isotopic mixing model estimation of diet proportions determined that bowhead whale comprised approximately 50–70 % of fall diet for bears with lower hair δ15N values. We conclude that these results offer emergent evidence of an alternative foraging strategy within this population: ‘coastal’ bears, which remain near to shore for much of the year and use bowhead whale bone piles when they are present. In contrast, ‘pelagic’ bears follow a more typical strategy and forage widely on sea ice for seals.

Three Ways to Solve Domino Grids

When my son brought home a paper from school with a 7μ 8 grid of numbers on it, I was immediately interested. The goal: cover the puzzle with all the dominoes from the “bone pile,” making sure that each number of the puzzle is covered by the same number on a domino. Many similar puzzles can be found online and in puzzle collections: see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] for several online resources, which are the source of some of the examples considered here.

On Keeping Company with Wolves: Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”

On Keeping Company with Wolves:Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” Jim Shepard (bio) I encountered that group of writers that came to be known as the fabulists at just about the perfect time for me, although I didn’t know it then. I was at the end of my undergraduate education, and I’d already known from an early age that I wanted to write fiction. But given that I had gone to such a craphole of a high school, and had started to figure out just how much I really didn’t know, I decided that my only hope was to hunker down and go small when it came to ambition: to write obsessively about only what I knew, or thought I knew. The results were what you might expect: stories about sensitive and troubled but covertly appealing lower-middle-class kids negotiating your run-of-the-mill family dysfunctions. I don’t remember how I first encountered Angela Carter’s fiction—I don’t think it was in class, though a class reference probably led to it—but boy, did she blow the doors off that particular project. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, but no writer in the twentieth century did a better job of reminding us both of the importance of staying in touch with one’s own sense of play, and of granting those imagined states their own grave authority. Most, if not all, of the fabulists exposed how much [End Page 69] there was to be gained from pillaging high and low culture, and all of them had their particular pleasures, but while Donald Barthelme was mordant and deadpan, and Robert Coover all antic demolition, Angela Carter was the one who most reliably kept the reader in touch with the exhilaration and exuberance of encountering imagined worlds we thought we already knew. She reconceived all sorts of canonical fairy tales and fables with not only a sly and witty subversiveness but also a startling fierceness. Her work signaled a recommitment to the power of those primal feelings that fairy tales and fables were designed to mobilize: terror, or desire, feelings that attended upon revelations about the fundamental and unapologetic intimacy of innocence and guilt, say, or of eros and thanatos. So that we get, in “The Company of Wolves,” the expected wryness of both psychoanalytic and feminist lenses being trained on the narrative of Little Red Riding Hood—in all sorts of ways, our story proceeds with a noticeably Freudian logic, and our heroine makes abundantly clear that she’s no one’s doormat—and at times the result can be deftly funny. When the virginal but blooming and strong-minded child makes her way through the woods to her grandmother’s house, she finds herself powerfully attracted to a handsome hunter, with his flash of white teeth and carcasses of game birds, and we’re informed, “This young man had a remarkable object in his pocket. It was a compass.” And in terms of the ways in which that Freudianism and feminism come together, we also get a disconcerting sense of what else she’s attracted to: “He laughed at her again; gleaming trails of spittle clung to his teeth.” Granny, it turns out, with her Bible for company and her china spaniels on either side of the fireplace, has been trying to “keep the wolves outside by living well,” but that’s not going to fly, and she’s promptly devoured. But before she becomes just a pile of bones and some inedible hair, even she is erotically mesmerized by what happens when “the forest has come into the kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair.” When the wolf—or werewolf, in this case—strips off his shirt, “his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit,” and it’s hard, in twentieth-century literature, to come up with a moment as comic and disturbing as her reaction when he strips off his trousers: “His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.” Naturally, then, Little Red Riding Hood herself is even more compelled. She spies a tuft of her grandmother’s hair, registers how fully she’s in danger...

Classification of Disorders as Approached by Psymentology

“Interuniversalism” or “Interuniversalist perspective” is a totally holistic way of viewing the human being. In this perspective man is not considered just as a pile of flesh and bones, but as vast as the world of existence. Within this perspective, the aspects of human dimensions are viewed as countless, comprised of various counts of software & hardware fragments. According to Psymentology and its Interuniversalist approach, illness is defined as any disorder, obstruction, impairment and imbalance in any of the infinite elements and components of an individual. Accordingly, an exact diagnosis, made by a human being, would be out of question. Therefore only an intelligent system with thorough competence, via a precise scanning, could diagnose and cure any defected part. Such a superb conscious grid, known as “Interuniversal Consciousness” is being used in Psymentology. According to Psymentology, disorders are classified into physical, psychological, psychosomatic, mental, mentosomatic, Body-Mind-Psyche disorders, and so on.

Polar bear use of a persistent food subsidy: Insights from non-invasive genetic sampling in Alaska

Abstract Remains of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) harvested by Inupiat whalers are deposited in bone piles along the coast of Alaska and have become persistent and reliable food sources for polar bears (Ursus maritimus). The importance of bone piles to individuals and the population, the patterns of use, and the number, sex, and age of bears using these resources are poorly understood. We implemented barbed-wire hair snaring to obtain genetic identities from bears using the Point Barrow bone pile in winter 2010–11. Eighty-three percent of genotyped samples produced individual and sex identification. We identified 97 bears from 200 samples. Using genetic mark–recapture techniques, we estimated that 228 bears used the bone pile during November to February, which would represent approximately 15% of the Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear subpopulation, if all bears were from this subpopulation. We found that polar bears of all age and sex classes simultaneously used the bone pile. More males than females...

An Overview of Recent Research in Mainland Greece

The selection of sites below reflects some of the most distinctive additions of 2012, arranged according to a number of themes, which reflect a dominant and continuing interest in sites that illuminate the urban and civic characteristics of archaeological locations in mainland Greece.Among the important discoveries of 2012 was the prehistoric stone pile and chamber tomb cut into bedrock at the Early Helladic cemetery of Asteria (ID3306), near Glyphada, Attica, which is discussed by David Smith below. The tomb was repeatedly reused: it contained one strongly contracted skeleton in front of the door and a pile of bones in the east half of the chamber representing at least 20 individuals (17 adults and three children). M. Pantelidou Gofa (ASA) reports on the 2012 season at Tsepi, Marathon, where a new deposit was investigated outside tomb 39, as well as two new tombs, 56 and 58 (ID3311), noting that Tomb 56 has all the known characteristics of the Tsepi tombs: rectangular with a built chamber, walls and threshold.In the Athenian Agora, investigations continued in 2012 of the Hellenistic and Classical road levels of the Panathenaic Way. John Camp reports the following on behalf of the ASCSA (ID2893, cf. ID2471).

Yellowstone Wolf Project

Yellowstone Wolf Project Travis Mossotti (bio) Yellowstone Wolf Project It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac I. Big Sexy From Bozeman to Gardiner, the highways were slicked black by a late winter storm, and I noticed how thin Regina had grown from long hours, eating little, the new hole she’d carved into her belt using the tip of a hunting knife, then the one-street town, then the northern entrance to Yellowstone, its high arch, bull and cow elk suffering scabies, orange lichen painting a cluster of boulders from a two-year-old rockslide. I told her about the life-sized bronze statue of a grizzly in Bozeman’s airport lobby, reared up [End Page 115] and snarling like a movie bear—scripted, unnatural. Up ahead, a group of wolf watchers, wolf paparazzi, had gathered at a turnout, and she pulled over so I could look through high-powered zoom and see the first free wolf of my life, watched him nap on a hillside in Wyoming, belly full from a recent kill, nicknamed: Big Sexy. II. At the Kill Site We spent the morning dodging huge domelike patties of bison dung roasting golden brown along the path, hiked across rollers of scrubland sage and crumbled escarpments, followed a single set of wolf tracks for hours. Once, in a low valley next to a river bend, she pointed out a yellow flower wet with snowmelt, and suddenly they were everywhere they hadn’t been before. I remember the first that we saw of the cow elk carcass was a rumen pile, stomach ripped out and dragged clean from the body—they do this to keep the acid in the stomach from bursting and ruining the meal—then a spine, curved and wet, still clinging helplessly to the skull, and finally three of the four legs scattered about. She set to work to collect what data remained, sawed through femur and thick white marrow (healthy), plucked teeth from her mandible to identify age (a mere four years), [End Page 116] put the saw into her backpack before settling down on a bluff to eat lunch. We ate peanut butter and jelly on wheat above a river so blue it was green, so clear that the smoothed boulders stared back at us like hats behind a hat shop window. III. The Herd While crossing the narrow bridge, we slowed the truck for a moment to watch a family of river otters on the jagged ice shelves below—the river’s white teeth, teeth of melt and flood—when a herd of bison came stampeding from behind, an angry herd of stampeding hooves and heft that made it a few feet from the bumper before we sped away, lucky or blessed, the herd getting smaller in the rearview, our heartbeats normalizing. I thought it must have been the fear of being alone that set them charging across that bridge, that startled them in one direction versus the other, although I couldn’t have been certain. In any case we spent a few quiet minutes inside that coarse, sage-covered Lamar Valley which rose on both sides into peculiar mountain peaks, listened as snowmelt became the current of a mindful river that knew how to take its time. IV. Grass When later we found an elk that had died over the winter of natural causes—a rare luxury— had frozen, thawed, and been eaten, [End Page 117] tufts of tall grass were already laying claim to it, as though the earth had hands and was holding it still, pulling it down into the softened hillside. All that remained was a chunked pile of bones after the Silver wolves stumbled on its smell, a boon, stripped its body clean, went to sleep it off on Junction Butte. It’s no wonder elk live such startled, stressful lives, persisting across the white valleys of winter like furred stoics, blanketed by the fear that come spring they’ll bleat and shit while being eaten alive. And to imagine that this cow lasted eighteen winters: arthritic, necrotic; it goes...