Social change and sexual mores: a comparison between pre‐20th‐century Norway and 20th‐century Botswana

This article compares pre‐20th‐century Norway and 20th‐century Botswana—two settings separated by time and space but sharing a sharp rise in non‐nuptial births. The comparison seeks to create a synergetic analytical effect by combining firsthand, experience‐near field data from Botswana with solid historical analyses of bastardy in Europe. This radical comparison provides a perspective that highlights the importance of treating “culture” not as a residual category, but as an integral part of everything social. This implies that there is a need not only for a proper sociocultural contextualization of localities, but also for an analysis of extra‐local power structures as fundamentally cultural, reflecting not only bureaucratic and political concerns but also values and existential perspectives.     

Vulnerability Index: A New Approach for Preventive Conservation of Monuments

A new approach is developed for vulnerability analysis of monuments based on a matrix model and the relationships with static and structural factors, climatic conditions, air quality, urban planning and social agents for preventive conservation of cultural heritage in urban centers.

The objective is to provide tools for decision-makers in the current recession to allow them to prioritize strategies for cultural heritage preservation in a town, where territorial policies are applied and regions where restoration budget is distributed. This new tool allows to classify monuments in order to prioritize restoration and is useful in deeper analysis associated to risks assessment.

The degradation of building materials and structures is mainly due to deterioration caused by structural instability, weathering, pollution, and anthropogenic damage. The vulnerability approach of each monument (vulnerability indexes) was calculated, based on a Leopold matrix that depends on intrinsic variables and the life of the monuments. For the very first time, the influence of different deterioration agents has been balanced with a Delphi forecast based on architects’ opinions.

The result is a new pre-Artificial Intelligence tool that enables users to reproduce human reasoning to study relations between vulnerability factors, risk factors, and the historical parameters of the monuments.     

Probabilistic Regionalization via Evidence Accumulation with Random Spanning Trees as Weak Spatial Representations

Spatial clusters contain biases and artifacts, whether they are defined via statistical algorithms or via expert judgment. Graph-based partitioning of spatial data and associated heuristics gained popularity due to their scalability but can define suboptimal regions due to algorithmic biases such as chaining. Despite the broad literature on deterministic regionalization methods, approaches that quantify regionalization probability are sparse. In this article, we propose a local method to quantify regionalization probabilities for regions defined via graph-based cuts and expert-defined regions. We conceptualize spatial regions as consisting of two types of spatial elements: core and swing. We define three distinct types of regionalization biases that occur in graph-based methods and showcase the use of the proposed method to capture these types of biases. Additionally, we propose an efficient solution to the probabilistic graph-based regionalization problem via performing optimal tree cuts along random spanning trees within an evidence accumulation framework. We perform statistical tests on synthetic data to assess resulting probability maps for varying distinctness of underlying regions and regionalization parameters. Lastly, we showcase the application of our method to define probabilistic ecoregions using climatic and remotely sensed vegetation indicators and apply our method to assign probabilities to the expert-defined Bailey's ecoregions.     

Chemical tracers of Lusitanian amphorae kilns from the Tagus estuary (Portugal)

In this paper, the characterization of Roman amphorae from the Porto dos Cacos (PC) and Quinta do Rouxinol (QR) workshops, in the Tagus estuary, dating to a period between the 1st and 5th century AD was carried out on the basis of instrumental neutron activation analysis data on 260 amphorae fragments, together with mineralogical compositional studies obtained by X-ray diffraction.     

On pottery change and northern Iroquoian origins: An assessment from the Finger Lakes region of central New York

Pots as tools is a concept that has been widely accepted and developed since Braun’s classic 1983 publication. However, in northeastern North America archaeologists continue to use pottery primarily as an aid to culture history and research problems based thereon. In central New York State it has been postulated that a change in pottery forming technique heralds the onset of Iroquoian pottery traditions at around AD 1000. Empirical data on pottery forming and two other pottery traits do not support this postulation. Rather the trends in these traits are consistent with social learning theory and changes in mobility and population aggregation. Following Engelbrecht (1999, 2003) we suggest that a more fruitful approach to understanding the evolution of northern Iroquoian groups is to be found in ethnogenesis theory as described by Moore (1994, 2001).