Individual Artifacts Research Articles

BRIQUETAGE AND BRINE: LIVING AND WORKING AT THE CLASSIC MAYA SALT WORKS OF EK WAY NAL, BELIZE

AbstractSystematic flotation survey and spatial analysis of artifacts at the submerged salt work of Ek Way Nal reveal evidence of a residence, salt kitchens, and additional activities. Ek Way Nal is one of 110 salt works associated with a Late to Terminal Classic (A.D. 600–900) salt industry known as the Paynes Creek Salt Works. Wooden posts that form the walls of 10 buildings are remarkably preserved in a peat bog below the sea floor providing an opportunity to examine surface artifacts in relation to buildings. Numerous salt kitchens have been located at the Paynes Creek Salt Works by evidence of abundant briquetage—pottery associated with boiling brine over fires to make salt. As one of the largest salt works with 10 buildings, there is an opportunity to examine variability in building use. Systematic flotation survey over the site and flagging and mapping individual artifacts and posts provide evidence that the Ek Way Nal salt makers had a residence near the salt kitchens, along with evidence of salting fish for subsistence or surplus household production. The results are compared with ethnographic evidence from Sacapulas and other salt works.

Artefakty interpretované jako „lékařské nástroje“ z doby železné nebo římské na území dnešní ČR, SR a naddunajské části Dolního Rakouska

The article presents a catalogue of artefacts identified as “medical instruments” of the Iron Age, or the Roman Age, from what is known today as the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Lower Austria – North of the Danube. A brief overview of the types and the variety of shapes of the artefacts, interpreted as “medical instruments” in the European environment, was presented and a catalogue of artefacts of the Iron Age or the Roman Age, from the territory under examination was compiled. The individual artefacts were critically reviewed, and it was decided whether they could have been used for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes.

Findings of antiquities on the territory of the Penza Governorate in the 19th – early 20th centuries based on the materials of the State Archive of the Penza Region

The paper deals with archaeological findings on the territory of the Penza Governorate in the 19th beginning of 20th centuries based on the materials of the State Archive of the Penza Region. To compare the information obtained with the published data, the study used published sources such as: the Reports of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, the description of antiquities of the Governorate (A.A. Spitsyn, 1925) and other sources. The process of archaeological study of the Penza Governorate in the pre-revolutionary period depended on the activities of the provincial statistical committee, the provincial scientific archival commission, independent researchers and the provincial administration. As a result a set of archaeological discoveries made on the territory of the Penza Governorate in the 19th beginning 20th centuries was drawn up. The list of findings includes facts of the discovery revealed in the research of archaeological sites and individual artifacts with indication of detection time, place and composition of the find or treasure. According to the research, in the 19th early 20th centuries, 148 evidence of found antiquities were revealed. Coins, Stone Age tools, jewelry and other items had different destinies: they remained in the hands of the finders, were sold, melted down, settled in scientific organizations and museums of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Penza. In most cases, the treasures were returned to the finders, and less often they were transferred to the metropolitan museums and given a reward for them. The issues raised in the paper are inextricably linked with the problem of accounting and protection of archaeological monuments and preservation of cultural heritage.

The impact of multiple concurrent factors on the length of the ultrasound pulmonary vertical artifacts as illustrated through the experimental and numerical analysis of simple models.

Nowadays, the diagnostic value of the artefactual information provided by lung ultrasound images is widely recognized by physicians. By carefully observing each individual artifact, an expert physician can derive important information on the distribution of the aerated spaces at the pleural level and, consequently, on the nature of the pulmonary disease. In this paper, a specific visual characteristic of the vertical artifacts (their length) is addressed. The impact of the acoustic properties of the interstitial medium, of the imaging parameters, and of the trap geometry on the length of the vertical artifacts is illustrated through experimental results and through the theoretical analysis of a simple model.

A method for transforming knowledge discovery metamodel to ArchiMate models

Enterprise architecture has become an important driver to facilitate digital transformation in companies, since it allows to manage IT and business in a holistic and integrated manner by establishing connections among technology concerns and strategical/motivational ones. Enterprise architecture modelling is critical to accurately represent business and their IT assets in combination. This modelling is important when companies start to manage their enterprise architecture, but also when it is remodelled so that the enterprise architecture is realigned in a changing world. Enterprise architecture is commonly modelled by few experts in a manual way, which is error-prone and time-consuming and makes continuous realignment difficult. In contrast, other enterprise architecture modelling proposal automatically analyses some artefacts like source code, databases, services, etc. Previous automated modelling proposals focus on the analysis of individual artefacts with isolated transformations toward ArchiMate or other enterprise architecture notations and/or frameworks. We propose the usage of Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) to represent all the intermediate information retrieved from information systems’ artefacts, which is then transformed into ArchiMate models. Thus, the core contribution of this paper is the model transformation between KDM and ArchiMate metamodels. The main implication of this proposal is that ArchiMate models are automatically generated from a common knowledge repository. Thereby, the relationships between different-nature artefacts can be exploited to get more complete and accurate enterprise architecture representations.

Grave Goods in Early Medieval Europe: regional variability and decline

This article analyses the use of grave goods in burials across early medieval Europe and how that use changed over the course of the 6th to 8th centuries CE with the widespread transition to unfurnished burial. It uses data gathered from published cemetery excavation reports from England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The grave good use in these cemeteries was analysed using GIS methods to visualise regional differences, as well as statistical methods to analyse how grave good use evolved over time in those regions. This analysis revealed clear regional distinctions in grave good use, with England and Alamannia appearing similar, with relatively high levels of grave good use. Meanwhile, parts of Frankia and of Burgundy had considerably lower levels of grave good use. Distributions of individual artefact types tended to match those of overall numbers, but there were a few key exceptions, such as vessels, which followed a quite different pattern, being found in high numbers along the Frankish coast, but in much lower numbers elsewhere. Despite these overall trends, there was still considerable intra-regional and intra-cemetery variation that suggests communities and individuals had the ability to make highly individual choices about the way to bury their dead, along with the ability to subvert local norms. It also revealed that while there was a general decline in the use of grave goods across this period, and everywhere eventually reached the point of almost completely unfurnished burial, this decline occurred at different rates. In particular, there was a zone around the North Sea, including Kent, western Frankia, and the Low Countries, where there was little change in grave good use until it was suddenly abandoned in the early 8th century. Different types of objects declined at different rates across different regions, with few clear trends, suggesting that only personal accessories held a common significance across Europe; the meanings of all other object types were negotiated on a local basis.

Matching Pragmatic Lithic Analysis and Proper Data Architecture

AbstractThe documentation and analysis of archaeological lithics must navigate a basic tension between examining and recording data on individual artifacts or on aggregates of artifacts. This poses a challenge both for artifact processing and for database construction. We present here an R Shiny solution that enables lithic analysts to enter data for both individual artifacts and aggregates of artifacts while maintaining a robust yet flexible data structure. This takes the form of a browser-based database interface that uses R to query existing data and transform new data as necessary so that users entering data of varying resolutions still produce data structured around individual artifacts. We demonstrate the function and efficacy of this tool (termed the Queryable Artifact Recording Interface [QuARI]) using the example of the Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project (SNAP), which, focused on a Paleolithic and Mesolithic chert quarry, has necessarily confronted challenges of processing and analyzing large quantities of lithic material.

Objects Don't Have Desires: Toward an Anthropology of Technology beyond Anthropomorphism

ABSTRACT“Postdualist” approaches, such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, represent understandable reactions to the humanist and idealist traditions in Western thought, but tend to be deluded by a focus on individual artifacts rather than on the global, material relations on which their existence depends. The attribution of agency and even desires to abiotic objects, championed by posthumanist researchers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, is cognate to the category mistakes recurrently identified by social theorists as fetishism and anthropomorphism. Paradoxically, given their subversive ambitions, proponents of the new concern with materiality and artifactual agency are offering an ideology that ultimately buttresses the capitalist world order by ignoring the materiality of world trade and the causality inherent in the artifact of money. The concerns with distributed agency also tend to displace responsibility and accountability from humans to artifacts. Moreover, in converging with a deep genealogy of ideas that blur the boundary between nature and artifice, the material turn depoliticizes technology by naturalizing it. The article proposes a new anthropology of technology that acknowledges the reliance of modern technology on asymmetric global resource flows orchestrated by money and the fictive reciprocity of market prices. [material turn, posthumanism, fetishism, technology, postdualism]

Identifikace potenciální strukturální koherence na základě keramického materiálu z provinciálního pohřebiště II v antické Gerulatě (SR) za pomoci kvantitativních analýz

The ceramic vessels from necropolis No. II were redocumented during the ongoing revision of archaeological material from cemeteries belonging to the Roman military fort with civil hinterland – Gerulata. This necropolis contains the highest informative value for both archaeological and anthropological material. Therefore, for the needs of this study, a set of pottery was chosen from that particular site, which consisted of approximately 120 complete various-shaped artefacts to be used for volume calculation. The vessels primarily served for offerings but were also partly used as urns. Drawing and photo documentation was used to create 3D models of the individual artefacts. These visualisations were a data source for the quantitative measurement of the volume variations. Models and volume calculations were created in Blender open-source software before identifying a correlation between vessel shape and volume and the graves in which they were found. The main subject of this research was to identify potential structural coherence within the funerary habits using the univariate statistical analysis produced in PAST 3 open-source software.

Directional changes in Levallois core technologies between Eastern Africa, Arabia, and the Levant during MIS 5

Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5, ~ 130 to 71 thousand years ago, was a key period for the geographic expansion of Homo sapiens, including engagement with new landscapes within Africa and dispersal into Asia. Occupation of the Levant by Homo sapiens in MIS 5 is well established, while recent research has documented complementary evidence in Arabia. Here, we undertake the first detailed comparison of Levallois core technology from eastern Africa, Arabia, and the Levant during MIS 5, including multiple sites associated with Homo sapiens fossils. We employ quantitative comparisons of individual artefacts that provides a detailed appraisal of Levallois reduction activity in MIS 5, thereby enabling assessment of intra- and inter-assemblage variability for the first time. Our results demonstrate a pattern of geographically structured variability embedded within a shared focus on centripetal Levallois reduction schemes and overlapping core morphologies. We reveal directional changes in core shaping and flake production from eastern Africa to Arabia and the Levant that are independent of differences in geographic or environmental parameters. These results are consistent with a common cultural inheritance between these regions, potentially stemming from a shared late Middle Pleistocene source in eastern Africa.

Alans and Islam

The article is devoted to the problem of manifestation of the influence of Islam in the Alanian monuments on the territory of the modern Republic of North Ossetia-Alania from the position of the possible acceptance of this religion by the Alans themselves. In general, in the North Caucasus, according to archaeological data, Muslim communities were represented in the pre-Mongol period. But for the region of interest to us, such evidence is not recorded. Individual artifacts presented in Alanian burials cannot serve as a basis for this. In the context of the funeral rites and other accompanying inventory recorded in them, one should assume the adherence of the buried and their community to their own traditional religion of the Alans. Therefore, one should reject the attempts of individual researchers to attribute the burials to Islamic ones. The spread of Islam among the multiethnic population of the North Caucasus during the period of its entry into the territory of the Golden Horde was repeatedly noted by specialists based on an analysis of archaeological material. This process was especially evident in urban centers. It was interrupted as a result of the end of foreign rule in the region. According to the researchers, some Alanian burials of the Zmeyskaya burial ground are associated with these processes. The direct influence of Islam in this area is also confirmed by other archaeological sites. As for the specific Alanian burials, the interpretation of the features of their funeral rite as purely Islamic raises certain doubts. Information from some written sources about the spread of Islam among the Alans of the North Caucasus also cannot be perceived unambiguously. It is possible that they were influenced by information about the conversion to Islam of a part of the Alans who left the region and settled in the capital’s center of the Golden Horde. Probably the transfer to the local population of ideas about its Islamization due to the fact of the adoption of Islam as a state religion.

School's Back

Social virtual reality (social VR) is an emerging technology that has the potential to support unique social experiences for groups of older adults. In this paper we explore the use of social VR to support group reminiscence, an activity that has been shown to have a positive impact on the lives of older adults. We developed School Days, a bespoke social VR application that enables groups of geographically dispersed older adults to meet in a virtual environment to reminisce about their school experiences. We conducted a user study over the course of 5 months with 16 participants aged 70--81 to evaluate how School Days supported reminiscence. In this paper, we focus on how the use of reminiscence scaffolding features in School Days impacted on the older adults' ability to participate more fully in the reminiscence activities. Our results illustrate the value of social VR for connecting older adults over distance, and contribute new knowledge of how virtual environments can be designed to scaffold reminiscence; how techniques such as 3D conversation starters and individual artefacts can be used to scaffold reminiscence; and how pre-recorded holographic stories (Avacasts) can be used to introduce new perspectives and prompt self-reflection. We contribute five design reflections aimed at guiding the design of future reminiscence tools in social VR.

Исследования многослойного поселения Старый Тартас-1 (Венгеровский район Новосибирской области)

This article presents the evidence obtained from traditional collecting surface materials at the Staryi Tartas-1 site located on the floodplain terrace on the left bank of the Om River opposite the village of the same name in Vengerovsky District of Novosibirsk Region. The works of 2021 enrich our knowledge about the site and elucidate the individual features of material culture among its inhabitants. A fundamentally new pottery form - a bowl - has been observed in the pottery complex which belongs to the Pit-Comb Ware culture. A rare flattened bottom decorated in a typical manner of that culture as well as wall fragments with traces of distinctive smoothing and false textile imprints, and clear imprints of the walking comb stamp have become available. The remains of a ruined workshop for producing stone artifacts with 47 items which may be described as production waste, have been found. In addition, cores, often converted into tools (27 items), knife-like blades (14 items), and scrapers (9 items) have been collected. All items were typical of the stone industry of the Early Metal Age. The collection included individual artifacts of the Odinov, Krotovo, and Andronovo (Fedorovo) cultures. Complexes related to the ethnographic period and associated with the eastern part of Fort Ust-Tartas included fragments of vessels made on the potter’s wheel, containers for storing and preparing food, such as pan, glazed dishes, two sandstone and shale abrasives, two massive sinkers for nets, made on fragments of primitive bricks with double crisscross notches for fastening to the net. These findings prove incorrectness of the attempts to dispute the location of Fort Ust-Tartas on the basis of written sources, which have appeared in the media.

Farming on the Fringe: Diachronic Changes in Land-Use Patterns and Agricultural Strategies in Ancient Nemea

Between 1984 and 1990, the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (hereafter NVAP), systematically surveyed the Nemea, Asopos, and Longopotamos Valleys, around Nemea, Phlious, and Kleonai in the northeastern Peloponnesos (Figure 1). This survey, covering an area of roughly 80 square kilometers, was for its time cutting-edge, both in its intensive approach to surveying the totality of the walkable landscape, and its use of computers for recording and mapping finds. The fieldwalking and record-keeping methods employed, which treated individual artifacts as the basic units of analysis, have produced a robust dataset for evaluating settlement patterns, agricultural land-use, and other past human activities within their ecological, economic, social, and historical contexts. This chapter examines the NVAP survey territory and considers the contributions of intensive pedestrian survey to the crafting of a medium- to long-term history of the Greek countryside from the Archaic to Late Roman periods. Through detailed analyses of survey finds’ physical properties and spatial distribution, I assess past settlement patterns and agricultural methods, consider the dynamics of regional production and consumption of ceramics and other goods, and elucidate a range of activities carried out at rural sites.

The Integration of Campsites in Cultural Landscapes: Architectural Actions on the Catalan Coast, Spain

Over the last 60 years, the development of tourism in Spain has produced an unprecedented occupation of the territory. Urban growth, hotels and infrastructures have transformed much of the natural environment. This phenomenon has irreversibly altered conditions of regions with great landscape value, putting their cultural heritage at risk. Yet, the campsite is a model of tourist settlement based on shared living in the open natural space. It promotes minimal and temporary interventions in the territory, by means of transportable accommodations with precise occupations of place, leaving a slight footprint. Therefore, architecture contributes to affording the order and services that these individual artifacts cannot provide by themselves. In terms of slight land occupation and natural qualities preservation, the campsite has proven to be one of the most responsible tourist models. It is an opportunity for the future: a resource for landscape integration and local dynamics reactivation. We present a set of architectural actions for the integration of campsites in cultural landscapes along the Catalan coast. These are recommendations catalogued by means of a diagnosis tool that proposes strategies at different levels, from enclosure to lodgings. Focusing on end-users, this research fosters cultural identity preservation and responsible communal living in nature.

Investigating lithic scatters in arid environments: The Early and Middle Stone Age in Namibia

Surface lithic scatters are relatively common in arid environments worldwide and attest to human occupation and use of desert environmental resources over long (104–106-year) time scales. A recent paper by Hardaker (2020) describes Early to Middle Stone Age lithic scatters in desert environments in Namibia, and deduces their spatial patterns and the relative age of individual lithic artifacts. Here, we challenge the results of Hardaker’s study based on (1) the methodology that was employed to map the scatters and analyse lithic age, and (2) the spatial interpretation applied to the lithic scatters and the derived ages of individual artifacts. This re-evaluation of Hardaker’s study provides a better conceptual basis for documenting and interpreting lithic scatters worldwide, which should apply established geoarchaeological methods and be set in the context of desert geomorphological processes and environments during the Quaternary.

The Brontës in Haute Couture: A Sartorial Adaptation of Literary Texts

Abstract This essay elucidates the ways in which Veronique Branquinho, a contemporary Belgian avant-garde fashion designer, appropriates the literary heritage of the Brontë sisters. A well-read, intellectual visual artist, she has presented collections marked with literary references. Her recent works tap into some key aspects of the Brontë oeuvre, re-envisioning them into highly original sartorial forms. The influence of the Brontës manifests itself in the ethos of Branquinho’s craftsmanship as well as in the individual artefacts that she has created. The designer’s Brontë-inspired dresses with their formal beauty and distinctive aesthetics could be viewed as an intermedial ode to the British writers, her enduring muses, attesting to the universal appeal of the sisters across disciplines.

Signal recovery from stimulation artifacts in intracranial recordings with dictionary learning

Objective. Electrical stimulation of the human brain is commonly used for eliciting and inhibiting neural activity for clinical diagnostics, modifying abnormal neural circuit function for therapeutics, and interrogating cortical connectivity. However, recording electrical signals with concurrent stimulation results in dominant electrical artifacts that mask the neural signals of interest. Here we develop a method to reproducibly and robustly recover neural activity during concurrent stimulation. We concentrate on signal recovery across an array of electrodes without channel-wise fine-tuning of the algorithm. Our goal includes signal recovery with trains of stimulation pulses, since repeated, high-frequency pulses are often required to induce desired effects in both therapeutic and research domains. We have made all of our code and data publicly available. Approach. We developed an algorithm that automatically detects templates of artifacts across many channels of recording, creating a dictionary of learned templates using unsupervised clustering. The artifact template that best matches each individual artifact pulse is subtracted to recover the underlying activity. To assess the success of our method, we focus on whether it extracts physiologically interpretable signals from real recordings. Main results. We demonstrate our signal recovery approach on invasive electrophysiologic recordings from human subjects during stimulation. We show the recovery of meaningful neural signatures in both electrocorticographic (ECoG) arrays and deep brain stimulation (DBS) recordings. In addition, we compared cortical responses induced by the stimulation of primary somatosensory (S1) by natural peripheral touch, as well as motor cortex activity with and without concurrent S1 stimulation. Significance. Our work will enable future advances in neural engineering with simultaneous stimulation and recording.

Artifactual Lung Ultrasonography: It Is a Matter of Traps, Order, and Disorder

When inspecting the lung with standard ultrasound B-mode imaging, numerous artifacts can be visualized. These artifacts are useful to recognize and evaluate several pathological conditions in Emergency and Intensive Care Medicine. More recently, the interest of the Pulmonologists has turned to the echographic study of the interstitial pathology of the lung. In fact, all lung pathologies which increase the density of the tissue, and do not consolidate the organ, are characterized by the presence of ultrasound artifacts. Many studies of the past have only assessed the number of vertical artifacts (generally known as B-Lines) as a sign of disease severity. However, recent observations suggest that the appearance of the individual artifacts, their variability, and their internal structure, may play a role for a non-invasive characterization of the surface of the lungs, directing the diagnoses and identifying groups of diseases. In this review, we discuss the meaning of lung ultrasound artifacts, and introduce hypothesis on the correlation between their presence and the structural variation of the sub-pleural tissue in light of current knowledge of the acoustic properties of the pleural plane.

Средний неолит полуострова Камчатка

Purpose. The study of archaeological sites of the Middle Neolithic of Kamchatka should offer a chronology and a set of criteria for identifying the period. Results. The research data is based on the materials of the studied cultural layer, buried dwellings and individual artifacts of 46 archaeological sites. It has been established that the average Neolithic of Kamchatka can be dated back to 4 000–1 500 cal BP. The sites were found on high water-glacial terraces with a height of 4 to 30 meters on the banks of large rivers and lakes, the sea coast of the eastern part of the peninsula. Their number had increased compared to the previous period. Dwellings had become more complex. Perhaps this is due to the need to have more reliable shelters in the conditions of the marine climate and frequent precipitation of volcanic ash. The ground buildings, semi-underground dwellings and workshops for the manufacture of stone tools were found at the sites. Near the dwellings, special fortifications in the form of artificial ditches and ramparts made of stones and soil were also found. These may have been defensive structures. The increased population size, its settlement mainly along the coast in order to develop marine resources, may have caused conflicts between certain groups of the population in the struggle for the best fishing sites. The stone industry is represented by cores (amorphous and prismatic knife-shaped blades) and primary cleavage products (knife-shaped blades of different sizes without retouching, with edge retouching and on both sides). Among the tools there were retouched triangular stone arrowheads without stem and with stem, leaf-shaped, including miniature, arrowheads; knives – narrow and wide-bladed with a dedicated handle, leaf-shaped oval; roughly beaten and polished sharp-edged adzes of different sizes with a sub-triangular and oval cross-section; end scrapers of various geometric shapes; calibrators of arrow shafts. The strategy of life support of society was aimed at hunting for marine mammals, fishing and gathering, including shellfish. In the sphere of spiritual culture, signs of ceremonial activity (labrets) and art (small figurines and ornaments) have also been identified. Conclusion. It is assumed that with an increased population size and changes in the environmental situation, a new way of life of the population developed, associated with a highly specialized and complex appropriating economy which essentially formed its own archaeological culture (Taryinskaya culture).