解构与重建:历史类博物馆展陈中考古文物信息的跨学科解读

考古文物是我国历史类博物馆的核心展品,在其主要社会职能中扮演了举足轻重的角色.随着考古学阐释理念的不断发展和完善,以物证史法、情境展示法、关联阐释法等已被逐渐应用到博物馆展陈中.但以传统考古学为核心的阐释方法在公众传播过程中仍然存在着单一视角与多元需求的矛盾、学科思维与展陈逻辑的矛盾、学术规范与启发教育的矛盾.对于历史...     

Cladistics Is Useful for Reconstructing Archaeological Phylogenies: Palaeoindian Points from the Southeastern United States

Cladistics, a method used to create a nested series of taxa based on homologous characters shared only by two or more taxa and their immediate common ancestor, offers a means of reconstructing artifact lineages that reflect heritable continuity as opposed to simple historical continuity. Although cladistically derived trees are only hypotheses about phylogeny, they are superior both to trees created through phenetics, which employs characters without regard as to whether they are analogous or homologous, and to trees created by using undifferentiated homologous characters. To date, cladistics is an unused approach to constructing archaeological phylogenies but one that holds considerable potential for resolving some of archaeology's historical problems. For example, it has long been noted that the southeastern United States exhibits the greatest diversity in fluted-point forms in North America—an observation that prompted Mason (1962) to propose that fluted points originated in the Southeast and then spread to other areas. However, because of a paucity of such points from well-dated contexts in the Southeast, it is difficult to ascertain chronological, let alone phylogenetic, relations among the various forms. Evolutionary trees derived from cladistical analysis are testable hypotheses about those phylogenetic relations.     

Species Associations Among Insect Remains from Urban Archaeological Deposits and their Significance in Reconstructing the Past Human Environment

Assemblages of archaeological insect (mainly Coleoptera) remains from in and around Anglo-Scandinavian buildings at 16–22 Coppergate, York, were investigated in order to identify associations between pairs and groups of species, and to determine the significance of those associations as indicators of past human activity and living conditions. Following initial exploration, a pairwise measure of association was used to establish working groups of co-occurring species, which were then related to their likely habitats. Detrended canonical correspondence analysis (DCCA) was used to test the groups. Robust and consistent species associations were identified among the death assemblages. The groups defined by the analyses usually corresponded to the ecological preferences of species, although some groups of species would not be found together at the present day. Some groups probably represented complexes of habitats that occurred together in the past, and not single communities, and some may be peculiar to Coppergate and similar sites. It is suggested that the species associations are of value in assemblage interpretation, and that variations in associations among sites will reflect archaeologically significant aspects of the sites.     

Archaeological Intra-Site Recording with Photography

Abstract

Experimentation in overhead photography aimed at eliminating errors in measurement by conventional mapping techniques has resulted in the development of instruments having from one to several applications in intra-site mapping. A useful by-product of this research has been the achievement of superior panoramic views. Since altitude is a critical factor in achieving either of these objectives, this paper distinguishes the results to be gained by use of low, medium, and high altitude instruments. The paper concludes with some overall field considerations along with photo-laboratory suggestions especially directed toward producing a photographic montage of the site as a whole.     

Resolutions from World Archaeological Congress Inter-Congress on Structural Violence, Ramallah, Palestine

News

Resolutions from World Archaeological Congress Inter-Congress on Structural Violence, Ramallah, Palestine     

Archaeological Intelligence

The county of Norfolk is well known for its huge number of ruined and abandoned medieval churches. ‘St Mary's Chapel’ at Ashwellthorpe has not usually been, reckoned among these. Although local tradition always maintained that it was the parish church of the lost village of Ashwell, some architectural historians have been sceptical, suggesting that it is merely a post-medieval domestic building on which part of a church roof has been re-used. Renovation of the property has not only confirmed its ecclesiastical origin, but revealed that it is the chancel of a church later used as a chantry chapel, with a major refurbishment in the fifteenth century.     

Archaeological Publications

Abstract

A number of lithic studies over the past several years have indicated that average flake weight (size) appears to be a direct reflection of the ease of lithic procurement, with the greater the distance to the lithic source, the smaller the respective general flake size. Similar high-quality lithic materials from Pot Creek Pueblo and the Cerrita pithouse site of the Taos area of the northern Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico provide an excellent basis for the study of the effects of source distance on the metrical attributes of lithic material due to the wide array of local and nonlocal lithic resources available at varying distances from the two settlements and utilized within them. The analysis indicates that flake thickness and volume (flake length × width × thickness) provide statistically significant linear trends and patterns in relation to respective source material distance. The general flake dimensional-decremental trend with increasing source distance probably reflects smaller lithic parent material sizes with increasing material source distance as well as a lithic technology oriented toward greater material conservation and less technological variability as the distance to the respective lithic material source increases.     

Archaeological Pragmatics

In the course of the 9th century areas in Western Europe were conquered by the Vikings. The Isles of Orkney were settled by Norwegians and became a stronghold. Some possible economic characteristics of Orkney have been considered in an attempt to gain insight into how the local resources might have: been exploited and into the contact between Norway‐Orkney and The British Isles.     

Reconstructing aesthetics

This [effect of the discovery of the New World on Renaissance Europe] is among the most difficult problems which face us, and it is one to which I can see no clear answer. Some work has been done, and much more could be done, on the printing and translation of books relating to America in comparison with those on other parts of the globe. But unless we can find more about their readership, the printing statistics, however valuable in themselves, afford only a certain indicator of a highly complex phenomenon.