Wood exploitation and food supply at the border of the Roman Empire: the case of the vicus of Thamusida – Sidi Ali ben Ahmed (Morocco)

This paper presents the results of inter-disciplinary work drawing on archaeobotanical and archaeometric studies to trace the agroforestry landscape and the supply economy at the vicus of Thamusida in north-west Morocco at the border of the Roman Empire. The available data indicate the self-sufficiency of the settlement in both forestry and agricultural products throughout the period investigated from the end of the 1st century BC to the beginning of the 4th century AD. Charcoal data testify to the presence of a Quercus suber forest in the close surroundings of the site and its exploitation for a variety of forestry products such as timber, fuelwood, cork, and probably also leaves and acorns to feed livestock. The overwhelming presence of Q. suber in the archaeological layer investigated clearly indicates that this forest was under human influence prior to Roman occupation and was already partially degraded. Charred seed and fruit remains suggest that the diet of both troops and civilians was mainly based on locally grown products and that all the inhabitants of the site had access to good cereals such as barley, naked wheats and pulses with large seeds such as horse bean and pea; quality fruits, such as olive and grape, were also produced locally for fresh consumption. Organic residue analyses of the contents of ceramic vessels and plastered vats allowed archaeobotanical data to be complemented, thereby shedding light on some of the imports at Thamusida. Despite the remote location of this settlement, imported goods such as oil and wine were transported here in amphorae from different parts of the Empire.     

The Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia Project: New Data and Method from the Insular Mediterranean

Sardinia has played a vital integrative role in the Holocene Mediterranean, most notably—although not only—as a key locus in emergent maritime “Mediterraneanization” and as an object of contestation among mainland polities over the last three millennia. Yet, despite the florescence of Mediterranean survey archaeology, this standard method has only been sparsely employed in Sardinia, with a pronounced focus on large, urban, coastal sites. Accordingly, we have little understanding of the ebb and flow of human settlement in the Sardinian interior. This represents a significant lacuna in the study of Mediterranean archaeology and history. Here, we report data from the first two seasons of the Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia (LASS) Project, a multidisciplinary project designed to correct this bias and to investigate how episodic integration into—but also disintegration from—larger economic and political structures drove sociocultural and socioeconomic change in southwestern Sardinia over the Mid-Late Holocene.     

The Misty Grail: The Search for a Comprehensive Measure of Development and the Reasons for GDP Primacy

Recent decades have seen a flurry of new indicators to measure economic progress, but none of them has succeeded in replacing GDP. This article seeks to explain this outcome and to contribute to the debate about composite indicators versus a dashboard approach. To this end, it reviews some of the most popular alternatives to GDP (the Human Development Index, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Happy Planet Index, and an environmentally corrected GDP), focusing on their conceptual foundations rather than on their statistical consistency as most of the literature does. It is shown that most of these measures are theoretically inconsistent; the exception is the environmentally corrected GDP, but since this too has failed to replace GDP, inconsistency must be only one reason behind the limited use of alternative measures. The author argues that the main reason for GDP's primacy is that GDP is better suited to reflect the goals of capitalist market economies. This implies that constructing composite indicators as alternatives to GDP will be pointless as long as the current preference system has not changed to include environmental or social goals. The author also suggests that for this purpose a dashboard approach, which provides different social groups with intelligible quantitative instruments, may be preferable to the use of composite indicators.     

Decorated prehistoric pottery from Castello di Annone (Piedmont,Italy): archaeometric study and pilot comparison with coeval analogous finds

Prehistoric pottery decorated with incisions or impressions filled with white and seldom coloured inlays is well documented in the archaeological literature, but the related in-depth archaeometric studies are sporadic. 43 decorated ceramic shards, dating from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, and an Iron Age fibula from the archaeological site of Castello di Annone (Piedmont, North-Western Italy) were analysed with FTIR, Raman and XRPD for characterization of the ornamental pigments forming these inlays. Few white components were used as fillers, namely talc and bone ash (hydroxyapatite – Bone White), often as a mixture and seldom accompanied by other pigments (i.e. kaolinite and presumably secondary calcite). Comparison with freshly-heated biogenic hydroxyapatite proved that ancient Bone White pigment was calcined at about 900 °C. Such a process was kept separate from pottery firing as these white mixtures show absence of talc degradation by-products and sporadic presence of kaolinite, implying these ceramics were decorated only after firing in furnace. Actual presence of fluorapatite in bone ash could allow dating with the Fluorine Method, but lack of fluorine detection with SEM-EDS causes such an attempt to be impracticable so far. A pilot comparative study with a restricted but representative group (11) of coeval finds from other sites of Piedmont suggests that while recurrence of talc prevails in Castello di Annone from the Neolithic throughout the Bronze age, massive use of bone ash (Bone White) becomes widespread in the close Iron Age settlements, possibly consequent to a more efficient handling of its production technology.     

Phoenician–Punic amphorae in northern coastal Etruria: New evidence from Pisa (Italy)

This study outlines the circulation of Phoenician–Punic amphorae in northern coastal Etruria, with a particular focus on Pisa (Italy), where their presence has been attested since the mid-eighth century BCE. A set of specimens from Piazza del Duomo was analysed by minero-petrographic and geochemical techniques. The results were compared with literature data from Mediterranean production areas. The research allowed a better definition of the role of Etruscan Pisa in the frame of commercial and cultural routes in the Mediterranean, specifically in the Tyrrhenian area, also providing the opportunity to review the attestations of Phoenician–Punic amphora on a regional scale.     

Is the evaluation of millennial changes in stature reliable? A study in southern Europe from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages

Analyses of stature variation in prehistoric and historical populations encounter considerable problems of reliability of the comparisons. To properly compare the results of different studies, it is necessary to conduct a systematic review of the chronological and cultural context of the skeletal series used and identify the most appropriate method to calculate stature values, since stature reconstruction formulae are specific for certain times and places. Stature variations in the population of Sardinia (a Mediterranean island now part of the Italian Republic but considered separately given its unique genetic structure) from the Neolithic to the Modern Period were studied to evaluate the intensity of millennial changes. The results were then compared with the values of coeval skeletal series reported in the literature for other Southern European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal). We used Sardinian skeletal series with radiocarbon dates or from culturally well-defined archeological contexts. The osteometric measurements were taken on femora of adults who had completed growth and who did not present evident pathological conditions. The data we collected and analyzed indicate that the conditions are lacking to reliably identify a common trend in millennial changes among the considered populations of southern Europe.