Certain Types Of Objects Research Articles

Study of methods for searching and localizing objects in images from aircraft using convolutional neural networks

The use of unmanned and manned aerial vehicles for remote object localization and classification is very common. These methods are used in various systems, ranging from territory surveys to law enforcement. Methods of object localization and classification using neural networks require a detailed study and research of the quality of their work on data that has certain specifics, such as vehicle detection. The use of neural networks to detect certain types of objects using images obtained from aircraft can also help in the study of hard-to-reach locations. Therefore, the main subject of this paper is the localization and classification of objects in images obtained using digital cameras mounted on aircraft. The main focus is on determining the accuracy of object localization and detection using selected types of neural networks, which are the most important indicators of neural network efficiency. The speed of a neural network is also an equally important characteristic as it directly affects its ability to be used in tasks that require fast object localization, such as video surveillance or automated car control systems. The main goal of this study is to study the accuracy of object localization and classification in images obtained with the help of cameras mounted on aircraft, as well as to study the speed of neural networks and determine the effectiveness of their application in real-world conditions. The objectives of this study are to train YOLO v5, SSD, and Faster RCNNs on the VisDrone dataset and to further study them on the vehicle localization dataset. The main goal of this work is to obtain statistics on the performance of neural networks trained on the VisDrone dataset. On the basis of the obtained statistics, conclusions are drawn about the effectiveness of the considered neural networks. The conclusions are drawn by considering the speed of the model, localization (IoU), and classification (Precision, Recall) metrics. Possible directions for further development of the topic under study are presented as conclusions.

Fast Context-Awareness Encoder for LiDAR Point Semantic Segmentation

A LiDAR sensor is a valuable tool for environmental perception as it can generate 3D point cloud data with reflectivity and position information by reflecting laser beams. However, it cannot provide the meaning of each point cloud cluster, so many studies focus on identifying semantic information about point clouds. This paper explores point cloud segmentation and presents a lightweight convolutional network called Fast Context-Awareness Encoder (FCAE), which can obtain semantic information about the point cloud cluster at different levels. The surrounding features of points are extracted as local features through the local context awareness network, then combined with global features, which are highly abstracted from the local features, to obtain more accurate semantic segmentation of the discrete points in space. The proposed algorithm has been compared and verified against other semantic KITTI data algorithms and has achieved state-of-the-art performance. Due to its ability to note fine-grained features on the z-axis in space, the algorithm shows higher prediction accuracy for certain types of objects. Moreover, the training and validation time is short, and the algorithm can meet high real-time requirements for 3D perception tasks.

Types of Legal Regulation of Civil Circulation

Based on an analysis of domestic doctrinal and legislative provisions, the author considers the types of legal regulation of such legally significant social phenomenon as civil circulation – normative and individual legal regulation. Regarding the normative legal regulation of civil circulation, attention is paid to the fact that the definition “civil” for circulation is tentative and it does not form the subject of regulation exclusively of the branch of civil law. The regulation of circulation at the international, federal, regional and local levels is considered, and as the consequence special attention is paid to the issue of the competence of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and municipalities in terms of the adoption of civil law norms. It is emphasized that the establishment of types of subjects and objects of circulation is permissible only at the federal level, and at the regional and local levels only restrictions or the procedure for civil circulation of certain types of objects are detailed. Regarding individual legal regulation, it is stated that it is subnormative in nature, complements normative legal regulation, and is carried out within its framework. Possible grounds for individual legal regulation include: relatively defined, dispositive, imperative norms of law and gaps in positive law. The existing doctrinal approaches to the classification of individual legal regulation are considered, taking into account which the main types of individual legal regulation of civil circulation are proposed to be considered self-organization (streamlining of their relations by the participants themselves) and law enforcement (the activities of the competent authorities to adopt individual legal acts both regulatory and protective regulating the behavior of the subjects of circulation). Subspecies of self-organization, which differ in the way of interaction between subjects, are autonomous and coordinating individual legal regulation; law enforcement according to the specified criterion is classified as subordinated.

ПРОБЛЕМЫ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО УПРАВЛЕНИЯ ЗЕМЕЛЬНЫМ ФОНДОМ И РЕГИСТРАЦИИ ПРАВ НА ОБЪЕКТЫ ЗЕМЕЛЬНЫХ ОТНОШЕНИЙ

This article examines the problems associated with the management of the land fund. The author draws attention to the fact that despite the active involvement in the sphere of economics and law enforcement, certain types of objects that perform the functions of land are not provided for in the legislation as objects of land relations. The article analyses the issues of individualisation of objects of land relations and their state registration, and draws attention to the fact that state land management implies the availability of reliable information about management objects, the source of which is the unified state register of real estate. Based on the results of the study, the author made proposals aimed at developing the current legislation.

Establishing Time Criticism

Establishing Time Criticism

Why are you talking to yourself? The epistemic role of inner speech in reasoning

AbstractPeople frequently report that, at times, their thought has a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, we explore the specifically epistemic role of inner speech in conscious reasoning. A plausible position—but one I argue is ultimately wrong—is that inner speech plays asolelyfacilitative role that is exhausted by (i) serving as the vehicle of representation for conscious reasoning, and/or (ii) allowing one to focus on certain types of objects or relations, e.g., causal relations, abstracta, counterfactuals, etc., or to consciously entertain structured propositional contents that it would be hard (or impossible) to focus on or entertain with representations in other (e.g., imagistic) formats. According to this position, inner speech doesn't figure as a justificatory element in our reasoning or as the partial epistemic basis of our conclusions—it merely facilitates reasoning through (i) and/or (ii). In contrast to the view that inner speech is amerefacilitator, I establish that (outside of potentially playing roles (i) and/or (ii)) the language we use itself serves as a crucial source of information in reasoning. In other words, we reason from propositions about the language we use in inner speech as opposed to exclusively reasoning from the semantic contents of the speech. My conclusion follows from how we use language as a cognitive tool to keep track of information, e.g., the contents of premises, lemmas, previous reasoning results, etc., in reasoning.

Square-Shaped Belt Fittings from the 10th Century in the Carpathian Basin : Archaeological and Archaeometric Analysis

When analysing archaeological finds, some questions cannot be answered using traditional archaeological methods, therefore the involvement of the natural sciences is extremely important when examining certain types of objects. Thanks to modern technologies, the relationship between workshops and objects in different remote areas can also be explored. Decorated and undecorated square-shaped belt fittings, which are rare amongst the 10th-century relics of the Carpathian Basin, can be traced back to the Altai region. The castings that can be connected to the first generation of conquering Hungarians are very diverse. Every single one of them is unique in terms of size, materials, and ornamentation. The study below reports the new material analyses of the square fittings of Tiszaeszlár–Bashalom, Budaörs–Tűzkőhegy, and Hajdúböszörmény–Erdős tanya, comparing them to the metal composition of foreign analogies.

Typology of the medieval axes from the north of Western Siberia

The paper presents the results of the research on the Middle Ages iron axes found in different years in the north of Western Siberia and the Urals, excluding pole-axe (berdysh Rus.) that appear in large numbers in the study area with the growing of the Russian population. The relevance of such study has matured, since there are enough sources that need to be generalized and critically compiled. Taking into account the morphological features of the archaeological evidence, the authors propose to classify all currently known axes by 2 groups and 13 types. The first group including 3 types of minting axes were made exclusively for combat use. The second group includes 10 types of axes, classified as universal, which served both for the military and for economic purposes. The text with the description of the sites contains also table with the data on the basic parameters of axes (item length, blade width) and the time of their use (existence). For the first time, a new type of battle axe (type 13), accidentally found in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug — Ugra, is published. We present analogues of this subject among the products of Russian blacksmiths of the 13th–14th centuries and explain the position on the dating and on origin of the axe. The paper discusses the evolution of certain types of objects, describes plots concerning the origin of certain items (imports from Volga Bulgaria, Russian lands, etc.) and the special attitude of the local population to this type of weapon, which could be stored for centuries in the holy places of the Ob Ugrians. The authors come to the conclusion that imported axes of the second group were used as a standard for Siberian blacksmiths. But local products, characterized by primitive technology (a multilayer package), low quality welding of iron strips and an abundance of slag inclusions, can be finally identified only after metallographic microstructural analysis. This research should be prolonged, because annual archaeological investigations replenish the source base, and, with no doubt, the typology of axes proposed in the article will be supplemented and adjusted.

Aerial LiDAR Data Augmentation for Direct Point-Cloud Visualisation.

Direct point-cloud visualisation is a common approach for visualising large datasets of aerial terrain LiDAR scans. However, because of the limitations of the acquisition technique, such visualisations often lack the desired visual appeal and quality, mostly because certain types of objects are incomplete or entirely missing (e.g., missing water surfaces, missing building walls and missing parts of the terrain). To improve the quality of direct LiDAR point-cloud rendering, we present a point-cloud processing pipeline that uses data fusion to augment the data with additional points on water surfaces, building walls and terrain through the use of vector maps of water surfaces and building outlines. In the last step of the pipeline, we also add colour information, and calculate point normals for illumination of individual points to make the final visualisation more visually appealing. We evaluate our approach on several parts of the Slovenian LiDAR dataset.

Classification of Objects in a Point Cloud using Neural Networks

3-dimensional scans captured in shape of point clouds are widely used in many di erent areas. Every such area use di erent kinds of sensors to ac-quire point clouds and do the analysis of the data but each of those needs some preanalysis to be done. One of the most important is segmentation and classification of points into types of objects. Such information considerably widens possibilities of usage for further purposes. There are many classifiers and many features based on which labeling can be done. In this paper few most commonly used approaches were chosen to check the influence of neighboring points acquisition on classification process. Results proof signif-icant relation between those two steps of point cloud analysis. Visualization of analyzed point cloud also shown that precision of predictions not always comes with better visibility of certain types of objects. Additionally, color-less analysis of geometrical features seems to be promising way for further research.

Standardization factor in ergodesign

The purpose of ergodesign activity is to optimize ergonomic and design requirements for objects, providing conditions for the formation of tools and ways to maintain the necessary comfort and operability of operators using the components of the designed systems or serving them. From these positions, it is advisable to design complete systems "man-technology-environment", and not just products or technical means, which only at the stage of their practical "adaptation" to a person become components of these systems. In the case of applying this approach, fundamentally new opportunities open up for increasing the efficiency of the operators' life activity and the functioning of systems in general. The development of ergodesign normative documents in various areas of human activity, but subordinate to the goals set in the first sentences of this annotation, is a determining factor in the successful implementation of these provisions. The article defines the main directions of standardization and ergodesign development, analyzes the goals of the standards, in particular in the field of ergodesign, developed recently, and operating today. It has been proved that ergodesign requirements, indicators and measures are mandatory for accounting in project activities, and their regulation in the form of national design-ergonomic standards leads to a significant increase in the efficiency and culture of ergodesign, optimizes the generation of ergodesign ideas, developments. However, the extremely low education of practicing designers, ergodesign specialists in matters of standardization and, most importantly, the specifics of the application of regulatory documents in their professional activities, eliminates the positive aspects of rationing in ergodesign. The article substantiates the urgent need to carry out work on mastering the existing regulatory framework for the programs of the corresponding design and ergodesign specializations in higher educational institutions and the need for active information support of specialists with data on the introduction of both new ergodesign normative documents and the practical mastery of these standards, the specifics of ergodesign standardization generally. The authors briefly analyzed the specifics and contents of the main national design-ergonomic standards in force in Ukraine today, as well as the standards that establish the classification and typical nomenclature of design-ergonomic product quality indicators that govern industrial product quality control methods, general design and ergonomic requirements for certain types of objects and work places. Key words: design, ergodesign, ergodesign development, design-ergonomic assessment, ergodesign requirements and indicators, standardization, harmonization, national ergodesign standards.

Contemporary approach to the understanding of the notion of “beautiful” as an aesthetic category

The author elaborates the idea of modern aesthetics that the notion of beautiful is not a fundamental category of modern art and modern philosophy of art. Under the direct influence of science and arts modern philosophy has added to the categories such notions as probability, absurdity, the mundane, the understanding etc. On the other hand a new understanding of society and man prompted the introduction of such categories as lifeworld, fear, solitariness, care, doubt, language games etc. It has become evident that many categories are not only blurred but rather heterogeneous, thus the system of categories is something to be referred to with considerable reservations.
 The article proposes a preliminary definition and interpretation of the beautiful and the main principles of the analysis of the beautiful. In the most general and tentative terms the beautiful can be defined as something that complies with the idea of beauty accepted in a given society or civilization. Ideas of beauty can vary from culture to culture and from civilization to civilization. This is no to say that certain, albeit few, objects cannot be considered beautiful throughout many historical epochs. Standards of beauty as well as social standards in general, do not refer to any object but only to certain types of objects. Consequently beautiful is always beautiful of a kind. Beauty in general does not exist, there are only beautiful objects of a definite kind.
 The article maintains that there are at least three reasons why the beautiful cannot be verbally defined. The first is methodological, the second is social and the third is related to the peculiarities of the beautiful itself, primarily it sensual nature. In the first place the degree of clarity of scientific notions depends on the level of the development of science. The scientific study of arts is a never-ending venture. And while it continues, its categories and in particular the category of the beautiful will require clarification.

Incremental Tensor-Based Completion Method for Detection of Stationary Foreground Objects

In tasks such as abandoned luggage detection and stopped car detection, stationary foreground objects (SFOs) need to be detected and properly classified in real time. Different methods have been proposed to detect SFOs, but they are mainly focused on certain types of objects. In this paper, an incremental singular value decomposition-based method is presented to detect all types of SFOs such as abandoned objects and removed objects. The proposed method decomposes the video tensor spatiotemporally and divides it into background and foreground components. An appropriate analysis is applied to the foreground tensor to define a pixel time series of each stationary foreground category. Such analysis leads to the fact that SFOs can be detected easily owing to their continuous persistence in the decomposed foreground tensor. Furthermore, the unique structure of the pixel time series of each category allows identifying the category of the detected objects, whether they are abandoned or removed, and detecting the exact time of the start and end of each event. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a superior performance in detecting SFOs at both object and pixel levels. In addition, the proposed method is computationally simple, and its complexity is lower compared to other approaches; hence, it can adequately satisfy real-time requirements.

Translator's Introduction: Jacques Rancière, "Autonomy and Historicism: The False Alternative"

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION: JACQUES RANCIÈRE, “AUTONOMY AND HISTORICISM: THE FALSE ALTERNATIVE” PATRICK NICKLESON A discipline . . . is not first of all the definition of a set of methods appropriate to a certain domain or a certain type of object. It is first the very constitution of this object as an object of thought, the demonstration of a certain idea of knowledge. —Jacques Rancière1 HE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER JACQUES RANCIÈRE has recently gained much notice in Anglo-American scholarship for bringing an egalitarian theory of politics and historiography to bear on the aesthetics of literature, poetry, film, sculpture, and painting. That Rancière has little to say about music has been noted in many sources.2 The rare essay on music historical literature translated below was written as a contribution to a 2003–04 seminar called Penser l’oeuvre musicale au XXe siècle: avec, sans ou contre histoire? at l’École Normale supérieure,3 organized by François Nicolas and Gilles Dulong. As such, many of Rancière’s lines of argument are specifically responses to the proceedings, and in T 326 Perspectives of New Music particular to Nicolas’s formalist insistence on an autonomous “world of music.”4 Because this contribution is atypical of Rancière’s writing, and it may be a first introduction to his thought for some readers, I offer a brief overview of his thought as a means of tying this essay into his broader writing. Rancière’s egalitarian philosophy is founded on a premise, as much political and pedagogic as methodological, that “the same intelligence is at work in all acts of the human mind.”5 From this foundational axiom he challenges what he calls “allegories of inequality”—between teacher and student, performer and listener, subject and object, even cause and effect.6 This has led to a particularly pointed critique of mastery and expertise, as well as the Althusserian scientism in which he was trained, which places the opening sentences of this essay—in which he confesses he is neither a musician nor a historian of music, and that the specific power of music has always evaded him—particularly pointed. While the reference to musicians and music literature found here distinguish “Autonomy and Historicism: The False Alternative” from his other writing, the essay also reveals close parallels to ideas presented elsewhere more prominently. Readers familiar with Aesthetics and Its Discontents will recognize an early version of his commentary on Adorno’s reading of Beethoven’s diminished-seventh chords, and the ideas presented here on artistic autonomy and heteronomy are more prominently laid out in articles like “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy.”7 While the latter article makes its case through reference to those whom Davide Panagia calls Rancière’s “writerly figures”—Mallarmé, Flaubert, Schelling, and so on8—here we find him referring to the Ars Nova, Bach, Rameau, the Second Viennese School, Lachenmann, and Sciarrino. Rancière is not introducing the reader to new work, new ideas, or new concepts in music; his approach is that of a philosopher of historiography , set out to “dissonate” our foundational assumptions about the teleological underpinnings of modernism in music and elsewhere.9 These musical figures shift the discussion of Rancière’s well-known regimes of art in light of the regimes of historicity that he borrows here from François Hartog,10 such that the representative regime is described as “the pairing of history-as-example and of history-as-agency” and the aesthetic regime as a form of history-as-coexistence. In this sense, it is a unique introduction to his often misinterpreted (or at least oversimplified ) ideas of the regimes of the arts, of interest to both Rancière scholars and newcomers. Further, in his opening discussion of Rameau’s Treatise, Socrates’s dreamed injunction to “make music,” and the relationships between the Conservatory classroom and the popular Translator’s Introduction: Autonomy and Historicism 327 radio audience, we get a clear sense of the broad method of equality through which Rancière’s thought comes into contact with a discipline like music—that is, in forming itself around the constitution of a particular...

Evidence for Rapid Adiabatic Cooling as an Origin of the Recombining Plasma in the Supernova Remnant W49B Revealed by NuSTAR Observations

Abstract X-ray observations of supernova remnants (SNRs) in the last decade have shown that the presence of recombining plasmas is somewhat common in a certain type of object. The SNR W49B is the youngest, hottest, and most highly ionized among such objects, and hence provides crucial information about how the recombination phase is reached during the early evolutionary phase of SNRs. In particular, spectral properties of radiative recombination continuum (RRC) from Fe are the key for constraining the detailed plasma conditions. Here we present imaging and spectral studies of W49B with Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), utilizing the highest-ever sensitivity to the Fe RRC at ≳8.8 keV. We confirm that the Fe RRC is most prominent at the western part of the SNR because of the lowest electron temperature (∼1.2 keV) achieved there. Our spatially resolved spectral analysis reveals a positive correlation between the electron temperature and the recombination timescale with a uniform initial temperature of ∼4 keV, which is consistent with the rapid adiabatic cooling scenario as an origin of the overionization. This Letter demonstrates NuSTAR’s suitability for studies of thermal emission, in addition to hard nonthermal X-rays, from young and middle-aged SNRs.

The Stoics on the Mental Mechanism of Emotions: Is There a “Pathetic Syllogism”?

AbstractThe mechanism of emotions in Stoicism has been presented by Graver a decade ago as relying on a “pathetic syllogism” having as its premises a judgment about the goodness of a certain type of object and a judgment that it is proper to have a certain emotional response to that object. It is true that each emotion is an irrational impulse resulting not only from the opinion that something is good but also from the opinion that it is appropriate to have a certain type of emotional response to that object, as shown by Graver. However, the present paper intends to present an alternative to Graver’s view by reducing the mechanism of emotion to the mechanism of all impulses: each impulse is an assent given to the impression that it is befitting for me to accomplish certain actions, and what Cicero and Stobaeus describe is not the combination of two premises resulting in an emotion as a conclusion, but the idea that it is necessary to give one’s assent to the impulsive impression to produce an emotion. Likewise, in Seneca, it is in such a way that a preliminary form of impulse is transformed into an emotion. A universal judgment about an object being good or a reaction being appropriate is certainly involved in certain emotions, but not in all of them, since many emotions depend on a fresh impression that overwhelms the general rational judgments of someone due to one’s insufficient mental preparation and to the weakness of one’s mind. In those cases, an emotion may involve the impression that a behaviour or a feeling is appropriate without endorsing the idea that it is universally good or appropriate, since the mechanism of the emotion relies on the vividness of one particular impression even against one’s system of beliefs.

Enduring Through Gunk

According to one of the more popular endurantist packages on the market, a package I will call multilocational endurantism, enduring objects are exactly located at multiple instantaneous regions of spacetime. However, for all we know, the world might turn out to be spatiotemporally gunky and spatiotemporal gunk (with some natural assumptions) entails that this package is false. The goal of this paper is to sketch a view which retains the spirit of multilocational endurantism while also recognizing the possibility of certain types of objects which endure through gunk.

Centres of artisanal culture: discussions on provincial art museums and the handicraft industry in the first quarter of the 20th century

This article deals with the complex of issues concerning the definition of provincial art museums and industrial (applied) art museums in Russia’s cultural life during the early twentieth century. А movement for aesthetic education in the late nineteenth century led to the increasing importance of decorative art and the spread of museums exhibiting such objects. The ideas of German and English art critics and museum workers were widely recognised in many countries, including Russia. In the 1910s, the role and significance of local art museums and industrial art museums in Russia pertained not only to aesthetic issues, but also economic ones. This article analyses archival materials related to the committees established at the Institute for the History of Arts (Petrograd) during the spring and summer of 1917 following the meeting of representatives of the sciences and the arts: here, the creation of a special Ministry of the Arts was discussed. One commission was devoted to the art and handicraft industry. A programmatic report was delivered by V. Ya. Kurbatov, a prominent art historian and researcher of the culture of St Petersburg. The principal propositions of the report can be analysed in the context of other speeches by the same author. In his reports, Kurbatov put forward the idea of establishing museums directly connected with the economic development of the regions rather than ones solely used to conserve and exhibit certain types of objects. He proposed the establishment of a new kind of museum – ‘museum-workshops’. Turning to similar initiatives abroad (e. g. the ideas of A. Lichtwark, a museum curator, reformer of aesthetic education, and the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle for many consecutive years) helps us to clarify the pragmatic aspect of the project. In a sense, one can see a parallel between these projects and the attention given by the Soviet government to provincial museums, from which the authorities also hoped to receive direct economic benefits. Consequently, when it comes to issues surrounding museums, it is possible to see another dimension of the interaction between the centre and province aimed at forming a culturally homogeneous space for both the empire and the Soviet state.

The morphosyntax of aspect stacking in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic

Many Northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages have two distinct strategies for marking perfective aspect, both morphosyntactically restricted in different ways. The canonical perfective strategy – the perfective verb base – typically bans certain types of objects, while the secondary perfective strategy – the imperfective verb base bearing the perfective prefix qam- – requires a certain type of object. This paper deals mainly with the secondary perfective strategy, attempting to understand and formally characterize its distribution and structure. While this phenomenon is well-known in the descriptive and historical literature (see Coghill 1999 and references therein), it has never before received theoretical treatment. I argue that qam- is a high perfective aspect marker analogous to certain so-called “superlexical” prefixes in Slavic languages, which have a perfectivizing function and select for an imperfective stem (Babko-Malaya 1999; 2003; Ramchand 2004; Romanova 2004; Tatevosov 2008; Gribanova 2013; i.a.). Slavic-like stacking of high aspects is thus shown to exist in languages that lack a corresponding system of rich lexical aspect (cf. the Slavic “lexical” prefixes). The secondary perfective in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic also illuminates another cross-linguistic pattern: apparent temporal or aspectual mismatches between the clause level and the verb-stem/base level, like those found in Indo-Iranian languages (Haig 2008), need not imply that the verb bases/stems lack tense and aspect. Finally, I show that the secondary perfective furnishes a new type of argument for the syntactic nature of φ-agreement.

From Monuments to Miniatures: Emergence of Stamps and Related Image-bearing Objects during the Neolithic

In southwest Asia, the emphasis on architecture and burial ritual, which was instrumental in the construction of place-bound identities during the Early Neolithic (c. 10,000–7000 cal. bc), shifted toward an emphasis on miniature portable objects, such as figurines, stamps and ceramics, during the Later Neolithic (c. 7000–5000 cal. bc). Through a focus on stamps, this article argues that the appearance and proliferation of image-bearing portable objects is related to a new understanding of identities around emergent concepts of ‘house’ and ‘community’, which reordered the terms of social affiliation as well as difference and hierarchy at various scales. In terms of an iconographical approach, stamp imagery shows some affinities with the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic themes of the Early Neolithic; however, the majority of the Later Neolithic stamp imagery is composed of highly abstract types that cannot immediately be associated with the themes of the Early Neolithic. A close examination would indicate that these abstract types were also reproduced by manipulating ancestral imagery. It would also appear that certain types of images were employed on certain types of objects, such as ceramics and figurines, in increasingly structured ways. Arguably, these seemingly different object classes are an outcome of a seamless historical discourse of raw materials, images and forms, continuously shifting the conceptualization of self and society. It is in this context that stamps may be treated as figurines of a highly abstract, highly crafted and highly standardized nature. While the clay figurines appropriated social identities in the domestic sphere, stamps and ceramics were instrumental in linking multiple scales of identity formation, from personal to communal. Reconsidering the material shift from the Early to Late Neolithic, I suggest that the spreading regulation of appropriating body and food was central in the construction of a convergent politics of reproduction around the concepts of ‘house’.