Mobile Toolkit Research Articles

Late Holocene technological provisioning at the Kings Table rockshelter, Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia

ABSTRACTTechnological analysis of the late Holocene component of the stone artefact assemblage recovered from the Kings Table rockshelter in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, provides the basis for an assessment of the site's role in broader late Holocene settlement‐subsistence systems. Drawing on Kuhn's widely employed “provisioning model”, as well as Kelleher's general pre‐contact occupation model for the Blue Mountains National Park (BMNP), we argue that the Kings Table rockshelter functioned as a short‐term field camp for logistically‐organised hunter‐gatherers whose principal residential bases were located in “off‐mountains” contexts. It is argued that the late Holocene component of the Kings Table assemblage has a technological “signature” entirely consistent with individual provisioning. Aboriginal groups occupying this site over the course of the late Holocene employed a mobile toolkit whose lithic component was dominated by artefacts manufactured out of high‐quality, transported silicified tuff and incorporated both backed artefact‐bearing composite tools and hafted edge‐ground hatchets (axes) as key elements.

Planning a trip during Middle Palaeolithic. The mobile toolkit debate and some considerations about expedient vs curated technologies in the light of new data from the Ciota Ciara cave (NW Italy)

Since the term “personal gear” was introduced, the presence, in an archaeological lithic assemblage, of artefacts in allochthonous rocks has been considered as a source of information about land mobility and techno-economic organization. A technological and functional approach has been used to face the study of the lithic artefacts made in allochthonous raw materials from level 14 of the Ciota Ciara cave (north-western Italy). This level attests the phases of most intense frequentation of the cave, and it is the layer where allochthonous lithic raw materials are better represented. In a technological context described as markedly opportunistic, tools and unretouched flake, made in raw materials collected at a distance between 2 and 30 km, have been introduced in the site. The present work is aimed towards the understanding of the role of these artefacts within the technological organization of the Neanderthal groups that inhabited the cave. The results indicate that these “exotic” artefacts were part of a mobile toolkit and that they were multifunctional tools used for different activities (mainly butchering activities). We can hypothesize the transport within the site of finished products in the form of small, unretouched flakes and retouched tools, and, just sporadically, of small cores. The significative presence of Levallois radiolarite flakes in the Ciota Ciara toolkit is particularly interesting as the presence of this type of product in toolkits has already been reported by other scholars and for different European Middle Palaeolithic contexts. Moreover, the introduction in the site of unretouched flakes and of tools made in allochthonous and better-quality rocks could be interpreted as a planned behaviour, aimed at satisfying the need for more durable and efficient tools during the periods of staying at the Ciota Ciara cave.

ПРО ЕФЕМЕРНУ ЕПІПАЛЕОЛІТИЧНУ СТОЯНКУ В КРИМСЬКОМУ ПЕРЕДГІР'Ї: З ІСТОРІЇ ПОЛЬОВИХ ДОСЛІДЖЕНЬ У КРИМУ 1990 РОКУ

This paper presents materials from one of the Palaeolithic sites discovered by the author in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Crimea. The Hamak-Koba sediment pack was once tested, and some archaeological materials were recovered. These are few but rather informative and have been published for the first time now. Judging by the available data, Hamak-Koba is a short-term site of a mobile group of hunters. The remains of shells of the land snail Helix vulgaris, which were probably consumed as food, may indicate the Epipalaeolithic or Mesolithic age of the site and probably exclude the winter season of its visitation. The technical and typological features of the stone artefacts found, including blades with indications of intensive use and burnt endscrapers, are consistent with the assumption of the site's age therefore positioned somewhere between the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. An undisturbed horizon with artefacts and hearth remains was discovered during the test pitting. It also turned out that a significant part of the shelter is practically devoid of culture-bearing deposits. The locality suggests one of the points visited by early hunters while travelling through the exploited territory in search of resources. This version is supported by the features of the stone artefacts, which show signs of special selection and therefore belong to a part of a mobile toolkit, traces of intensive wear on them, and the location of the site in a rock shelter near convenient access to a plateau providing dominating heights and good observation points, although far from water sources.

Planning a Trip During Middle Palaeolithic. The Mobile Toolkit Debate and Some Considerations About Expedient vs Curated Technologies in the Light of New Data from the Ciota Ciara Cave (NW Italy)

Planning a Trip During Middle Palaeolithic. The Mobile Toolkit Debate and Some Considerations About Expedient vs Curated Technologies in the Light of New Data from the Ciota Ciara Cave (NW Italy)

Planning a Trip During Middle Palaeolithic. The Mobile Toolkit Debate and Some Considerations About Expedient vs Curated Technologies in the Light of New Data from the Ciota Ciara Cave (Nw Italy)

Planning a Trip During Middle Palaeolithic. The Mobile Toolkit Debate and Some Considerations About Expedient vs Curated Technologies in the Light of New Data from the Ciota Ciara Cave (Nw Italy)

Lithic provisioning strategies at the Middle Paleolithic open-air site of Nesher Ramla, Israel: A case study from the upper sequence

The mid-Middle Paleolithic (late Marine Isotope Stage 6 and Marine Isotope Stage 5) is the least documented phase of the Levantine Middle Paleolithic (MP), especially concerning flint provisioning strategies. Our study of raw material exploitation at Nesher Ramla karst sinkhole (central Coastal Plain, Israel) provides an intriguing glimpse into the decision making of mid-Middle Paleolithic hominins. In this study we focused on the identification of the provisioning strategies derived from two horizons (which we dubbed the “Pelvis Horizon” and the “Stones Horizon”) from the upper part of the Nesher Ramla sequence. We applied several analytical measures: a survey of raw material sources, material composition and typo-technological analyses of the archaeological assemblages, mainly using the chaîne opératoire approach and a taphonomic-taxonomic analysis of the faunal assemblages.Our study demonstrates that different lithic provisioning strategies were practiced in each horizon. The findings for the Pelvis Horizon are particularly interesting. They offer strong evidence for hunter-gatherers’ personal toolkits associated with the provisioning of individuals strategy. The Stones Horizon, conversely, produced a mixed signal, containing evidence for both intensive in situ knapping and mobile toolkits. The faunal remains echo these differences: Compared to the Stones Horizon, the zooarchaeological assemblage of the Pelvis Horizon presents lower frequencies of bone fracturing, anthropogenic modifications, and burning. Accordingly, during the Pelvis Horizon, the site most likely functioned as an ephemeral hunting station whereas, during the Stones Horizon, it hosted a broader range of activities and longer occupations. These observations shed light on the variability of south Levantine MP mobility patterns, modes of occupation, and site function.

Genopo: a nanopore sequencing analysis toolkit for portable Android devices

The advent of portable nanopore sequencing devices has enabled DNA and RNA sequencing to be performed in the field or the clinic. However, advances in in situ genomics require parallel development of portable, offline solutions for the computational analysis of sequencing data. Here we introduce Genopo, a mobile toolkit for nanopore sequencing analysis. Genopo compacts popular bioinformatics tools to an Android application, enabling fully portable computation. To demonstrate its utility for in situ genome analysis, we use Genopo to determine the complete genome sequence of the human coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in nine patient isolates sequenced on a nanopore device, with Genopo executing this workflow in less than 30 min per sample on a range of popular smartphones. We further show how Genopo can be used to profile DNA methylation in a human genome sample, illustrating a flexible, efficient architecture that is suitable to run many popular bioinformatics tools and accommodate small or large genomes. As the first ever smartphone application for nanopore sequencing analysis, Genopo enables the genomics community to harness this cheap, ubiquitous computational resource.

Inferring Circadian Rhythms of Cognitive Performance in Everyday Life

Physical, mental, and behavioral processes of most living beings underlie cyclic changes, mainly governed by the day-night cycle. Investigations of these circadian rhythms have traditionally required constrained settings and invasive methods, such as repetitive blood testing and testing in sleep laboratories. Recent developments in pervasive technology, e.g., the proliferation of smartphones in our everyday lives, allow us to develop less intrusive ways to infer circadian rhythmicity in everyday settings. In this article, we present an overview of the current state of research, describe a mobile toolkit for collecting ground truth data on cognitive state fluctuations, and detail the implementation of a wearable system to unobtrusively detect alertness changes in the wild. Understanding and monitoring circadian rhythms will lead to the development of interventions to support mental health, physical health, and will ease the negative consequences of time shifts inflicted by jet lag or shift-work.

Neanderthal mobile toolkit in short-term occupations at Teixoneres Cave (Moia, Spain)

Hunter–gatherers have a nomadic lifestyle and move frequently on the landscape based on the seasonal distribution of resources. During these displacements, carrying capacities are limited, and the composition of the transported gear is generally planned ahead of the activity to perform. During the Pleistocene, prehistoric hunter–gatherers faced similar difficulties in exploiting the territory and employed different strategies for coping with their subsistence needs and the possible shortage of stone tools. The understanding of how these behaviors developed diachronically is pivotal for the reconstruction of the human trajectories of land use in different environments, orographic settings, and climates. Thus far, the identification of the mobile toolkit has been related to blanks produced with allochthonous rocks, whereas the recognition of the transported artefacts knapped in local and semi-local raw materials encounters more difficulties because of the possible association with the lithic production conducted at the site. In this paper, we present the mobile toolkit of sub-unit IIIb and IIIa of Teixoneres Cave, a Middle Paleolithic site where a clear differentiation between in-situ knapping activities in local quartz and the import of stone tools in other raw materials is documented. The analysis of these latter assemblages reveals that the bulk of the toolkit is composed of knapping by-products and that the number of curated artefacts, Levallois flakes, and cores is significantly lower. Results show that the main strategy of transport at Teixoneres Cave was a combination of hunting and cutting tools aiming toward a generalized set of gears instead of narrowing the equipment to few specialized items. These new data highlight the plasticity of Neanderthals’ technological organization in the western Mediterranean.

Use-wear analysis of a specific mobile toolkit from the Middle Paleolithic site of Abric Romaní (Barcelona, Spain): a case study from level M

A use-wear analysis was carried out on a specific mobile toolkit belonging to level M of the Middle Paleolithic site of Abric Romani (Barcelona, Spain), which is dated to MIS 3, between 51 and 55 Ka BP. In an environment rich in local and regional chert sources and in a technological context marked by expedient behavior, a set of flakes, which also included debordant elements with asymmetric transversal sections, were introduced into the site having already been knapped. A combination of technological, refitting, and raw material unit analyses (RMU) have distinguished them from the rest of the chert artifacts knapped in situ. Given that the aim of the reduction sequences in level M, as in most of the stratigraphic sequence, is the production of small flakes of poor quality chert, the introduction of these finished tools indicates the existence of planned behavior in relation to raw material constraints and, to a major extent, with specific needs. The question is whether there is any functional difference between these flakes knapped outside and those produced on-site. A first step to solving this issue is the evaluation of the potential of these tools for use-wear analysis. Thirty-seven flakes were selected for this study prioritizing the state of surface preservation. To provide reliable data with which to compare the archeological traces, we have performed a specific experimental program using the main chert varieties identified in the archeological sample. Digital 3D, optical, and scanning electron microscopies were combined to characterize wear patterns in a mobile toolkit. Our preliminary results show that, despite the significant patination on some of the pieces, a limited array of tools have a good state of surface preservation and show use-wear evidence related to a variety of butchery activities.

235 Pyjama Paralysis: Time to Make a Move!

Abstract Background The adverse effects of inpatient falls are well known. The harms of unwarranted bedrest and prolonged immobilisation present insidiously but, arguably, have a greater impact. Deconditioning, itself, is a major contributor to falls in older adults. There is still a troubling assumption that falls can be prevented through restraint and preventing at-risk patients from mobilising. Methods We reviewed medical and nursing notes and conducted brief-structured interviews with nurses and brief bedside observations for medical inpatients aged ≥75. We constructed a research template based on the UK National Falls audit 20151 and the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP) - mobility toolkit2. We included all patients on medical wards over the age of 75, admitted for 3 or more days. We excluded patients who were critically unwell or imminently dying. Results We reviewed 100 medical inpatients aged over 75. Patients’ mobility deteriorated significantly from their baseline, with 73% of patients requiring assistance compared to 22% at baseline. PJ paralysis was endemic with only one third of patients wearing day clothes. 75% of patients spent more than half of the day in bed. There were 8 falls during the entire study period. Poorer levels of mobility correlated with delirium and incontinence. Conclusion The deleterious effects on older patient of the traditional model of acute hospital care with gratuitous bedrest are universally acknowledged. Falls should be prevented through supervision rather than restraint. Campaigns such as “End PJ Paralysis” and the HELP mobility toolkit can enable a cultural change within hospitals. Such change is impossible without the staffing and leadership to endorse it.

The Mobility Toolkit: Electronically Augmented Assessment of Functional Recovery Following Lower-extremity Trauma

The Mobility Toolkit: Electronically Augmented Assessment of Functional Recovery Following Lower-extremity Trauma

The bulb retouchers in the Levant: New insights into Middle Palaeolithic retouching techniques and mobile tool-kit composition.

In this paper we describe two assemblages of flint retouchers or “bulb retouchers” retrieved from Nesher Ramla and Quneitra, two Middle Palaeolithic, open-air sites in the Levant. The site of Nesher Ramla yielded the largest assemblage of bulb retouchers (n = 159) currently known, allowing a detailed investigation of this poorly known phenomenon. An extensive experimental program and use-wear analysis enabled us to characterize the different sets of traces related to the retouching activity and to identify different motions applied by the knappers in the course of this action. In both sites, blanks used as bulb retouchers were almost exclusively retouched items, with a special emphasis on convergent morphotypes in Nesher Ramla. The use of retouched items as bulb retouchers is a common trait over different time spans and geographical areas. Our data suggests that bulb retouchers were versatile, multi-purpose tools with a long use-life, transported over long distances as components of the hunter-gatherer mobile tool kit. The high frequencies of bulb retouchers within some archaeological units of Nesher Ramla appear to be connected to the highly curated nature of the lithic assemblages, in turn reflecting a high mobility of the human groups that produced them.

Long-distance transport of red ocher by Clovis foragers

Red ocher (hematite) is a ferrous iron oxide mineral commonly used by Paleoindians in a variety of contexts, but its significance in mobile toolkits is not well understood. Here we demonstrate the importance of ocher to Paleoindians by determining the distance they were willing to carry it. The La Prele Mammoth site (48CO1401) is an approximately 13,000-year-old mammoth processing site with an associated campsite that contains scattered ocher nodules and a prominent ocher stain. The geochemical signature of La Prele ocher was established and compared to four natural ocher sources in Wyoming using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). Ocher from La Prele was sourced to the Powars II ocher quarry approximately 100 km away. Paleoindians were willing to carry ocher for long distances, suggesting that red ocher was an important constituent of the Clovis mobile toolkit, while supporting the notion that Clovis maintained large territories. This geochemical analytical technique has potential for establishing geologic sources of ocher from other regions and time periods.

Health issues in a Bangalore slum: findings from a household survey using a mobile screening toolkit in Devarajeevanahalli

BackgroundSlums are home to nearly one billion people in the world and are expanding at an exponential rate. Devarjeevanahalli is a large notified slum in Bangalore, South India which is characterised by poverty, overcrowding, hazardous living environment and social complexities. The poor living conditions not only affect the health of the people living there but also poses distinctive challenges to conducting health surveys. The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a household survey that was done to study the health condition of people living in a slum.MethodsA community-based cross-sectional survey was designed to determine the prevalence of health conditions using a mobile screening toolkit-THULSI (Toolkit for Healthy Urban Life in Slums Initiative). Devarjeevanahalli slum was chosen purposively as it is fairly representative of any slum in a big city in India. Sample size was calculated as 1100 households and demographic parameters at the household level and parameters related to priority health conditions (hypertension, diabetes mellitus, anaemia and malnutrition) at the individual level were studied.Six zones within the slum were purposively selected and all the contiguous households were selected. The last of the six zones was partially surveyed as the desired sample size was achieved.ResultsA total of 1186 households were surveyed and 3693 people were screened. More than three fourth (70.4%) of the population were below poverty line. Only one third had a regular job and the average daily income was 5.3$ and 2.6$ in men and women respectively. The prevalence of hypertension (35.5%), diabetes (16.6%) and anaemia (70.9%) was high in the screened slum population. Most of the people (56.5% of hypertensives and 34.4% diabetics) were screened for the first time. Almost half of the children under the age of five years were stunted.ConclusionsPoor income security and huge burden of health issues were reported among adults and children in the household health screening in a large notified slum in South India. Most people were unaware of their disease condition prior to the screening. Relatively simple technological solutions enabled the local health team to screen the slum population despite many challenges.

Lowering the Technical Threshold for Organizers to Create and Deliver Mobile Crowd Sensing Applications

In order to lower the technical threshold for creating and delivering Mobile Crowd Sensing Applications (MCSAs), several frameworks or toolkits have been developed, but they either fail to provide general support or still require relatively professional software development skills. Besides, the application delivery to the participants is not precise enough, because they only consider the constraints predefined by the organizers without taking the participant-side factors into account. In this paper, we propose a prototype toolkit for the organizers without software development skills to build MCSA in a rather quick and simple way. First, in terms of the application creation, it enables organizers to build MCSA by just doing some simple settings, which totally eliminates the requirement of programming skills. Second, in terms of the application delivery, it selects participants who are more likely to accept the created applications by mining their participation history. Finally, we demonstrate the expressiveness and usability for the application creation and evaluate the effectiveness of the willingness-based participant selection algorithm for the application delivery.

Lithic raw material conveyance and hunter-gatherer mobility during the Lower Magdalenian in Cantabria, Spain

Hunter-gatherer groups' organizational strategies were influenced by how key resources were structured on landscapes, including lithic toolstones with fixed outcrop locations. Lithic artifacts, which were created via reductive sequences, can inform landscape-level behavioral reconstructions because toolstone decreased in quantity through use as it was transported further from its source and its reduction stages can be determined using diagnostic lithic debris (e.g. primary cortical pieces, renewal flakes, and cores). By comparing lithic raw materials and their reduction stages at four Lower Cantabrian Magdalenian sites—Altamira, El Juyo, El Mirón, and El Rascaño—this paper reconstructs lithic provisioning and hunter-gatherer mobility in the center of the Vasco-Cantabrian region during the Last Glacial period. This study proposes that the Lower Magdalenian groups who occupied these sites shared a regional economic territory that extended from Cantabria into western Navarra and conveyed toolstones between sites as part of mobile toolkits. Local raw material conveyance demonstrates that shifting environmental zones was an important factor in these hunter-gatherers' mobility strategies in Cantabria.

Crossing the Pleistocene–Holocene transition in the New Guinea Highlands: Evidence from the lithic assemblage of Kiowa rockshelter

This paper emphasises sub-regional variation in the timing and nature of subsistence changes in the New Guinea Highlands at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. An analysis of the Kiowa lithic assemblage was used to examine the interplay between tool technology, mobility levels, and subsistence strategies by investigating changes in the procurement, manufacture, and use of different raw stone materials in an overall lithic technology. Throughout Kiowa’s occupation local stone was used extensively, and over time people increased their knowledge of the local lithic landscape, using more diverse local raw materials. Since the terminal Pleistocene, people carried reliable polished axes for a variety of activities and made expedient use of locally abundant river pebbles, while smaller nodules were located and carried as mobile toolkits to facilitate longer distance hunting and collecting excursions. In the mid Holocene exotic raw materials were also traded from more distant zones. The abandonment of Kiowa in the late Holocene shows that hunting became less economically important as cultivation developed in the area. Technological changes, in combination with changes in faunal remains are suggestive of increasing activity at Kiowa through the Holocene as the site became specialised for bat hunting, perhaps driven by restricted land use and reduced mobility, reciprocally affected by increasing populations and the intensification of plant food production in the Highlands generally. Despite this, evidence for changes to horticulture around Kiowa itself, in the Chimbu area, is limited to the mid-late Holocene, indicating that the early development of agriculture in the Wahgi may have been relatively localised, and did not necessarily displace existing subsistence strategies elsewhere in the Highlands.

Mobile and Accessible Learning for MOOCs

Many modern web-based systems provide a ‘responsive’ design that allows material and services to be accessed on mobile and desktop devices, with the aim of providing ubiquitous access. Besides offering access to learning materials such as podcasts and videos across multiple locations, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous technologies have some additional affordances that may enable new forms of learning on MOOCs. We can divide these into two categories: firstly, context-sensitive features including delivery of content for a specific location, enabling a seamless continuity of learning across settings, and linking people in a location with others in a virtual representation of that place; secondly social learning opportunities to connect people as they move within and across locations, to enable crowd-sourced learning. In this paper we explore these aspects of mobile and accessible learning for MOOCs, drawing on examples from MOOC courses, mobile toolkits, and crowd-sourced learning sites.

Lithic raw material procurement at Bodrogkeresztúr–Henye Gravettian site, northeast Hungary

The Carpathian basin provides abundant lithic raw material sources for stone tools. In spite of their abundance, Gravettian lithic assemblages contain raw materials from north and east of the Carpathians. Bodrogkeresztúr–Henye assemblage from Northeastern Hungary is one of the sites yielding an exotic stone assemblage. The procurement strategy of these raw materials has not been discussed until now in the theoretical background of forager societies. The present study demonstrates that Gravettian lithic procurement strategy was opportunistic, most probably embedded in daily foraging, and the technology was adapted to the natural stone environment and anticipated needs during mobility. Although the exotic stones are of high quality and apparently the result of thorough selectivity, those seem to have been acquired with the same strategy, and the reason why those are present in the Bodrogkeresztúr–Henye assemblage is that they were taken as a mobile toolkit, and arrived at the site exposed to curation for a long time.