A (Digital) Future for Saharan Rock Art?

First visited by westerners in the mid-nineteenth century, Saharan rock art has since received a great deal of attention. The richness and diversity of this region is recognised by the inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage list of three properties: Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria, Tadrart Acacus in Libya, and Ennedi in Chad. The situation in many North African countries now makes this vast region very difficult to access: safety in the field is not guaranteed and few research funds are available. Today, a new generation of African and foreign scientists has no access to rock art sites in the north of the continent and the lack of fieldwork may entail a lack of safeguard and awareness. The growth of digital technologies over the last 15 years has revolutionised methods for recording rock art sites. Digital technologies are also used to mitigate the gap between artworks and accessibility in those countries where turmoil and social instability make fieldwork impossible. However, much of the documentation and most digital recordings of artworks currently available on the Internet lack an archaeological context. Equally, many of these websites barely mention methodological and theoretical aspects. It is also difficult to understand the extent of awareness among local communities in remote areas—sometimes suffering a digital and linguistic divide—and if (and how) they are genuinely able to exploit these digital resources. Here, I collate some examples from different parts of the Sahara illustrating that the recording, management and dissemination of rock art still present highs and lows. I argue that we should share theories and methods within the digital scientific community, with a view to adopting a shared nomenclature and a public thesaurus, making our cataloguing criteria explicit and, finally, developing an ethical code of conduct involving local communities.     

Immersive Visualization and Curation of Archaeological Heritage Data: Çatalhöyük and the Dig@IT App

Advanced data capture techniques, cost-effective data processing, and visualization technologies provide viable solutions for the documentation of archaeological heritage and material culture. Work at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Çatalhöyük has demonstrated that new digital approaches for capturing, processing, analyzing, and curating stratigraphic data in 3D are now feasible. Real-time visualization engines allow us to simulate the stratigraphy of a site, the three-dimensional surfaces of ancient buildings, as well as the ever-changing morphology of cultural landscapes. Nonetheless, more work needs to be done to address methodological questions such as follows: can three-dimensional models and stratigraphic relationships, based on 3D surfaces and volumes, be used to perform archaeological interpretation? How can a 3D virtual scenario become the interface to cultural data and metadata stored in external online databases? How can we foster a sense of presence and user embodiment in the simulation of ancient cities and archaeological sites? This article aims to provide viable solutions to the methodological challenge of designing a comprehensive digital archaeological workflow from the data acquisition and interpretation in the field to a three-dimensional digital data curation based on interactive visualization, searchable 3D data, and virtual environments. This work describes the results we achieved developing the application Dig@IT, a multi-platform, scalable virtual reality tool able to foster archaeological data analysis, interpretation, and curation in a realistic and highly interactive virtual environment.     

Center of Diversity: Sámi in Early Modern Stockholm in the Light of European Colonial Expansion. A Historical Archaeological Approach

This paper deals with the presence of Sámi in central and southern Sweden in the seventeenth century. The Nordic countries have generally been believed to be ethnically homogeneous, with the** colonial subjects not being present in the center of these empires. If the multicultural aspects of early modern Nordic countries are at all discussed, Sámi and other ethnic groups are understood as peoples living on the outskirts of the empires. This notion has cemented an idea that cities such as Copenhagen or Stockholm were inhabited solely by peoples from southern Scandinavia and the continent. Drawing on the experience of the role and presence of indigenous people from the Americas and the Arctic in cities such as London in the seventeenth century, this paper examines the multi-ethnic aspects of early modern Stockholm, capital of Sweden, as an imperial center.     

Clothes as Expression of Action in Former Concentration Camps

The prisoners of the former concentrations camps were supposed to be deprived of their socialization by brutal dehumanization. Among other things, the use of blue-and-white striped prison clothes was meant to reinforce a homogeneous and uniform prisoner society. However, studies from a sociological perspective have shown that prisoners’ societies were indeed diverse and structured, allowing individuals to develop strategies of survival within their – albeit limited – scope for action. In this article, prisoners’ possibilities to act are discussed using the example of clothing – an omnipresent and visible medium. Various changes and alterations preserved in prisoner clothing from former concentration camps reveal open or secretive acts of individuals and thus provide insights into the different levels of action inside the camps.     

Eating Barrelled Meat in Upper Canada: Cultural and Archaeological Implications

Much of the meat consumed in nineteenth-century southern Ontario (Upper Canada) came in the form of preserved barreled products. The specific ways of obtaining, preparing and consuming these products resulted in unique regional foodways. Through analyses of historical and archaeological evidence, this paper investigates how barreled meat was packed, shipped and purchased in Upper Canada and discusses the various ways its consumption impacted the lives of its residents and contributed to the formation of local identities. An investigation of butchery marks and body portion distributions lead to a possible method for archaeologically distinguishing between barreled and non-barreled meat assemblages.     

Ancient Biological Invasions and Island Ecosystems: Tracking Translocations of Wild Plants and Animals

Biological invasions are one of the great threats to Earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity in the Anthropocene. However, species introductions and invasions extend deep into the human past, with the translocation of both wild and domestic species around the world. Here, we review the human translocation of wild plants and animals to the world’s islands. We focus on establishing criteria used to differentiate natural from human-assisted dispersals and the differences between non-native and invasive species. Our study demonstrates that, along with a suite of domesticates, ancient people transported numerous wild plants and animals to islands and helped shape ecosystems in ways that have important ramifications for modern conservation, restoration, and management.     

Telepresence-Enabled Maritime Archaeological Exploration in the Deep

Telepresence-enabled exploration of deep sea environments has developed over the past 30 years, providing access to archaeologists, scientists, and the general public to sites otherwise inaccessible due to depth. Pioneered through the inception of the JASON Project in the late 1980 s, telepresence missions have expanded to two dedicated ships of exploration, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer and exploration vessel Nautilus, and has been implemented on a series of opportunistic missions on other vessels. This paper chronicles the history of the use of telepresence for the exploration of shipwrecks in deep water as well as how this capability has allowed the public to engage with such missions. Broadening the scope of who can explore the deep sea, telepresence has also expanded what is observed and documented in the deep, which speaks to humanity’s use of the maritime world and an archaeology of discard through our material disposed of into the deep sea.     

Fish and Fish Products in Late Antique Palestine and Babylonia in Their Social and Geographical Contexts: Archaeology and the Talmudic Literature

This paper looks at the ancient Jewish talmudic literature (4th-7th centuries CE) for information about fish and fish products in the ancient world and compares it with information from classical sources and from archaeology. Analysis of the texts show that information about food, and particularly fish and fish products, can be derived from texts originally written as religious regulations and moral narratives. Talmudic textual evidence, backed up by parallel archaeological finds, documents long-distance transport of preserved fish, including what is identified as Nile perch from Egypt and mackerel from Spain. Parallel papyrological evidence testifies to the import of the parrot wrasse. Graeco-Roman allec, a sauce made of macerated tiny fish, is identified by the Palestinian Talmud with tarit terufah, made of tiny chopped fish, and afitz, cf Greek afye, immature fish, often cooked as such. Remains of allec have been found archaeologically in Israel/Palestine. The Palestinian Talmud identifies tarit[a] with tza?ana, one of a trio of strong-smelling Babylonian fish-dishes eaten by the poor: the others are gildana and harsana. The varied material on these discussed here adds to our knowledge of ancient salted and/or fermented fish-dishes. The identification of tza?ana with 9th-to-10th century ?a?na from Baghdad of the Caliphs and 14th-century Cairo appears very likely. Thus tarit/tza?ana/?a?na appears to have been not very appetising processed fish food for the poor in Roman Palestine, Jewish Babylonia, Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliphs and Mamluk Egypt, and it may be identified with allec. The talmudic literature also discusses reasons for failure of the preservation processes, as well as of potentially lethal effects of insufficient preservation.