Fire and its roles in early hominid lifeways

Discovery of the uses and later the invention of fire-making are fundamental to humanity. Following reports over the last decade of traces of fire found on Lower Pleistocene archaeological sites in eastern Africa, the dating of the control of fire by hominids has become a controversial issue. In this paper we critically review the contexts and, in the light of a battery of archaeometric techniques, the nature of reported instances of fire from Koobi Fora and Chesowanja in Kenya, and from Gadeb and the Middle Awash in Ethiopia. We conclude with a discussion of the roles fire may have played in the lifeways of early Pleistocene savanna-living hominids.

---

Résumé La découverte des usages du feu et ensuite de sa préparation est fondamentale pour l'humanité. Suite à des rapports au cours de la dernière décennie signalant des traces de feu relevées dans des sites archéologiques du Pléistocène inférieur dans l'est de l'Afrique, la datation du contrôle du feu par les hominiens est devenu une source de controverse. Dans cet article, nous révisons d'un oeil critique les contextes et la nature des cas de feu signalés à Koobi Fora et à Chesowanja au Kenya, et à Gadeb et dans l'Awash moyen en Éthiopie, à la lumière d'une suite de techniques archéometriques. Suit en conclusion une discussion sur les rôles qu'aurait pu jouer le feu dans les modes de vie des hominiens vivant dans les savannes du Pléistocène inférieur.

     

Elimination of Source A and B Errors in p-Median Location Problems

The p-median problem is a powerful tool in analyzing facility location options when the goal of the location scheme is to minimize the average distance that demand must traverse to reach its nearest facility. It may be used to determine the number of facilities to site, as well as the actual facility locations. Demand data are frequently aggregated in p-median location problems to reduce the computational complexity of the problem. Demand data aggregation, however, results in the loss of locational information. This loss may lead to suboptimal facility location configurations (optimality errors) and inaccurate measures of the resulting travel distances (cost errors). Hillsman and Rhoda (1978) have identified three error components: Source A, B, and C errors, which may result from demand data aggregation. In this article, a method to measure weighted travel distances in p-median problems which eliminates Source A and B errors is proposed. Test problem results indicate that the proposed measurement scheme yields solutions with lower optimality and cost errors than does the traditional distance measurement scheme.     

Recursive Algorithm for Determination of Proximal (Thiessen) Polygons in Any Metric Space

A new and recursive algorithm for determining proximal polygons is based on quadtree concepts. The algorithm can use any distance metric, and produces a quadtree of the image of the proximal polygons. This can be converted to vector form, or be incorporated directly into a quadtree-based geographic information system, in order to solve a number of closest-point problems. The algorithm can also produce the Delaunay triangulation, which is the dual of the proximal polygons. Empirically, the running time of the algorithm is proportional to the number of centers raised to the 1.6 power.     

Reviews of books

Historical Archaeology -