Underneath Ranefer's floors – urban environments on the desert edge

The city of Akhetaten, modern day Amarna, was founded by the monotheist pharoah Akhenaten as his new capital ca. 1353 BC, and abandoned within about 25 years. Much of the site has been excavated over the past century and few deposits remain undisturbed. In one house, however, that of the king's chief charioteer, Ranefer, rebuilding had sealed occupation debris beneath the final mud brick house floors and in the desiccating conditions of the desert, these preserved extensive insect faunas, which for the first time provide detailed data on living conditions and pest infestation in a major pharaonic urban centre. Pests of stored products include the grain weevil, Sitophilus granarius, the lesser grain borer, Rhizopertha dominica, and flour beetles, Tribolium castaneum, as well as more general pests, such as the lesser mealworm, Alphitobius diaperinus, and the biscuit beetle, Stegobium paniceum. Flies include the house fly, Musca domestica, and the puparia of a flesh fly, Sarcophagidae, burrowed vertically into the mud-brick floor in a room corner, perhaps beneath abandoned offal or meat. The taphonomy of the insect assemblages would suggest that much consisted of material dumped into the house plot, either during a phase of abandonment or to level up the area before the later house, that of Ranefer, was constructed. Trampled surfaces within the midden, often consolidated with desert sand, indicate foul damp conditions and also imply that the process was intermittent. Living conditions in the city of Akhenaten are likely not to have been as salubrious as contemporary tomb paintings might suggest.     

Sex assessment of medieval Norwegian skeletons based on permanent tooth crown size

The excavation of the Library site in Trondheim uncovered the medieval cemetry of St. Olav's church containing 388 skeletons, of which 248 had skulls with teeth. Sex assessment was based on osteological criteria, and for 145 skeletons sex classification was performed with a high degree of certainty. The remaining 103 were classified as uncertain male, uncertain female and sex undetermined. Mesio-distal and facio-lingual crown widths of permanent teeth in the group of reliably assessed males and females were used in sex-discriminant analyses. A combination of two or more teeth was less effective in discrimination than using one tooth alone. This was due to missing data in the combined variable sets and thereby loss of cases. Missing variables were due to post-mortem tooth loss, attrition or large deposits of calculus. The teeth were ranked according to their power in sex discrimination. The left maxillary first molar (26) represented by its facio-lingual dimension was the best sex discriminator (classified 85 per cent of the cases correctly), followed by the right maxillary first molar (16) also represented by its facio-lingual dimension (classified 77 per cent correctly). With only one variable in the discriminant function, a critical value could be calculated and tabulated for each tooth. This was used in sex assessment of the osteologically undetermined and uncertain groups. Only variables that could sex classify correctly at least 70 per cent of the cases with the Jack-knife procedure were used. Sex assessment could be made for 16 of 24 (66.7 per cent) of the osteologically sex-undetermined adult individuals and for 21 of 44 (47.7 per cent) of the children. Of 35 osteologically uncertainly sex-assessed skulls, only nine (six men and three women) corresponded with dental classification.     

Cultivating digital mediation: The implementation of publicly funded digital museum initiatives in Denmark

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to review and re?ect on the factors defining the expected benefits that have influenced the implementation of digital mediation initiatives in publicly funded museums over the course of the last 20 years. The expectations directed towards digital museum mediation are established by taking a closer look at Danish cultural policy implementation and socio-technological development. Examples from a review of cultural policy documents, funding applications and reports, supplemented by articles from a museum practice journal illustrate trends and developments in digital museum mediation. This article identifies a development of digital museum mediation in three phases, from providing access to digitized cultural heritage to more user-oriented communication strategies such as personalization and participation. The analysis shows that, in a cultural political context, the adoption of digital mediation in institutions is part of a higher strategy where technological development acts as a catalyst for innovation in the cultural sector.     

OSL dating as an alternative tool for age determination of relic charcoal kilns

Chronometric studies of charcoal production remains are largely based on ¹⁴C-dating of associated charcoal. Owing to intrinsic limitations, however, this method provides no meaningful time resolution for post-1650 CE features. We investigate the potential of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of heated sandy sediments as an alternative and complementary tool for dating charcoal kiln remains. Seven samples from five relic charcoal kilns and 11 complementary samples from the underlying sandy substrate are used. Through a range of procedural tests, we demonstrate that the single-aliquot, regenerative-dose procedure in combination with OSL signals from quartz allows determining equivalent doses both accurately and precisely. For four of the five investigated kilns, OSL ages are consistent with independent age information from ¹⁴C-dating and written sources. Especially for post-1650 CE features, the precision can be significantly better than that of ¹⁴C-dating, and we highlight the potential of OSL dating for distinguishing, relatively, between charcoal production phases with an unprecedented time resolution. We conclude that the approach is a promising alternative to ¹⁴C.