The Unidentified Forts of the Burghal Hidage

STRUCTURAL Analysis coupled with archaeological excavation at King John's House. Romsey, has revealed a mid-13th-century chamber block which probably stood within a precinct of adjoining buildings. The discovery and extravagant claims subsequently made for the building illustrate how far interpretation may be conditioned by the circumstances of the time.     

Free ports and steel containers: The corpora delicti of artefact trafficking

Technologies of containment and storage change the materiality and ontology of archaeological artefacts. This article looks at the relationship between ISO shipping containers and the assemblages of values that constitute the illicit trade in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern artefacts. Concealment and revelation are vital properties of this relationship.     

The selection of bird bones for artefact production at Dutch neolithic sites

The bird bones used for artefacts at the Dutch neolithic site of Aartswoud were from birds that were not represented among the food remains. Studies at other contemporary sites show that this was also the case at some other sites. The bones seem to have been selected from birds of particularly large size. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimental investigations into edge performance and its implications for stone artefact reduction modelling

This paper details an experimental investigation into stone artefact performance and use, and examines the implications for maintenance and rejuvenation activities. Controlled experiments testing the performance of differently shaped working edges reveal that rates of use attrition are not constant; they are dependent upon the blank morphology's suitability to particular tasks. The evidence contributes to a broader understanding of the principles of reduction analyses by showing that morphological differences in blanks are accompanied by differences in the artefacts’ functional capacity. These differences in turn affect the rate at which maintenance and rejuvenation activities will be required and therefore the extent of reduction exhibited at discard.     

Performance evaluation of a multi-image 3D reconstruction software on a low-feature artefact

Nowadays, multi-image 3D reconstruction is an active research field and a number of commercial and free software tools have been already made available to the public. These provide methods for the 3D reconstruction of real world objects by matching feature points and retrieving depth information from a set of unordered digital images. This is achieved by exploiting computer vision algorithms such as Structure-From-Motion (SFM) and Dense Multi-View 3D Reconstruction (DMVR). In this work, we evaluate the performance of a low-cost commercial SFM–DMVR software by digitising a Cycladic woman figurine. Although the surface properties of the specific artefact are considered 3D laser scanner friendly, its almost featureless white-grey surface composes a challenging digitisation candidate for image based methodologies as no strong feature points are available. We quantify the quality of the 3D data produced by the SFM–DMVR software in relation to the data produced by a high accuracy 3D laser scanner in terms of surface deviation and topological errors. We question the applicability and efficiency of two digitisation pipelines (SFM–DMVR and laser scanner) in relation to hardware requirements, background knowledge and man-hours. This is achieved by producing a complete 3D digital replica of the Cycladic artefact by following both pipelines.     

A new ornamented artefact from Poland: final palaeolithic symbolism from an environmental perspective

An ornamented artefact made of antler, found in the environs of ?widwin (Pomerania, NW Poland), was subject to structural and environmental analysis. Radiocarbon dating (10?700 ± 60 BP or 10?910–10?680 cal. BC) places it in the Final Palaeolithic, at the end of Weichselian (boundary of the Allerød and Younger Dryas). The surface of the artefact bears a complex ornament of zigzag lines and an anthropomorphic drawing, representing most probably a woman with spread legs. Palynological analysis of the deposit in which the object was found indicates forest communities (pine-birch forests) with some open areas, in a cool climate. Ultrastructural examination points to the elk Alces alces (Linnaeus, 1758) as the source species; the antler was at the stage of intense growth which indicates that the elk was killed or died in the spring-summer period. The antler was large, and the object made of it was used for a long time, playing a role in rituals and symbolic culture of a hunting group. The ornamentation shows an affinity to the early Mesolithic art and makes it possible to better trace the relations between the hunters of the late Pleistocene and those of the early Holocene.     

Life in the Swahili town house reveals the symbolic meaning of spaces and artefact assemblages

Swahili ethnographic information was used to interpret eighteenth-century coral house excavations in Lamu, Kenya. The author was especially interested in learning the symbolic or social meaning of durable objects that were found in archaeological assemblages. It was learned that many of the artefacts found in the excavations are related to rituals performed in Swahili houses. The spaces within the house are ranked and used to teach social position. Features of coral houses, animal remains, infant burials, shells, ceramics, and beads can be shown to have symbolic meaning within the Swahili context.

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Résumé L'auteur a utilisé des informations ethnographiques souahélies afin d'interpréter les fouilles de maisons en corail du 18e siècle à Lamu, Kenya. Elle s'intéressait surtout à connaître la signification symbolique ou sociale des objets non-périssables trouvés dans les assemblages archéologiques. Elle a appris que beaucoup des artefacts trouvés pendant les fouilles sont à rattacher aux rituels célébrés dans les maisons souahélies. Les espaces à l'intérieur de la maison sont classés et utilisés afin de montrer la position sociale. On peut démontrer que certaines particularités des maisons en corail, les restes de faune, les inhumations de tous petits enfants, la céramique et les grains de collier ont des significations symboliques dans leur contexte souahéli.

     

Directional analysis of surface artefact distributions: a case study from the Murghab Delta, Turkmenistan

This paper investigates directional influences in the distribution of Bronze Age surface pottery in the northern Murghab Delta, Turkmenistan. Drawing upon a continuous dataset of pottery sherd counts obtained by intensive field survey, it examines the degree to which we can make sense of the archaeological processes at work in a heavily obstructed and dynamic landscape. In so doing, it makes use of two analytical methods that have rarely been used in archaeology: a) geostatistical analysis using variograms to investigate directional spatial autocorrelation in recorded sherd counts; and b) angular wavelet analysis in evaluating directional influences in the sherd distributions for particular chronological periods. While some kinds of directional influence can be identified visually, a quantitative approach is particularly useful in deconstructing such patterns. In this particular dataset, distinct but related directional processes can be identified and measured: a) the impact of the complex system of watercourses in the delta on both settlement and post-depositional processes; and b) recovery bias in the observations made during survey.