Object-based landform delineation and classification from DEMs for archaeological predictive mapping

In this paper we report the results of an experiment with automated landform delineation and classification from digital elevation models (DEMs) using object-based image analysis (OBIA). Archaeologists rely on accurate and detailed geomorphological maps to predict and interpret the location of archaeological sites. However, they have been using high-resolution DEMs primarily for visual interpretation and expert-judgement classification of landform. OBIA can perform these classifications much faster and in a more objective fashion. The method was tested on a study area in the south east of the Netherlands. It is concluded that OBIA is a suitable technique for quick and objective delineation of landform, but needs an improved conceptual framework adapted to the local situation and archaeological questions to better identify and interpret the derived landform objects.     

Physical and Numerical Approaches for the Optimal Insertion of Seismic Viscous Dampers in Shear-Type Structures

This article presents the results of an exhaustive parametric analysis which compares the performances offered by various systems (which lead to both classical and non classical damping matrices) of added viscous dampers in shear-type structures. The aim of the research work here presented is the identification of the system of added viscous dampers which maximizes the dissipative properties under an equal “total size” constraint. The choice of the systems of added viscous dampers considered in the comparison is carried out both using a numerical approach (based upon the use of genetic algorithms) and a physically based approach (based upon the properties of classically damped systems). The comparison is carried out through the numerical evaluation of the dynamic response of representative shear-type structures to both stochastic and recorded earthquake inputs. The results obtained using both approaches indicate that a damping system based upon the mass proportional damping component of the Rayleigh viscous damping matrix (referred to as MPD system) is capable of optimizing simultaneously a number of different performance indexes, providing the best “overall” damping performances. The MPD system is characterised by viscous dampers (a) which connect each floor to a fixed point and (b) which are sized proportionally to the corresponding floor mass.     

Fl?chenmonitoring in der Regional- und Bauleitplanung Neue M?glichkeiten durch die Analyse von Satellitenbildern

Deutschland hat ein umfassendes und in der Praxis bew?hrtes Planungssystem einschlie?lich integrierter Umweltprüfung, das auch für zus?tzliche bzw. erweiterte Prüfinstrumente günstige Voraussetzungen bietet. Das Fl?chenmonitoring in der Regionalplanung, aber auch für die St?dte und Gemeinden in der vorbereitenden Bauleitplanung kann mit Hilfe einer gezielten Ver?nderungsanalyse der Landbedeckung als ein Baustein eines umfassenden Monitoringsystems und zur Unterstützung des Nachhaltigkeitsprinzips verstanden werden. Da jedoch insbesondere für einen l?ngeren Beobachtungszeitraum kaum bzw. keine (digitalen) Informationen über die Landbedeckung existieren, stellt die Auswertung von Satellitendaten einen L?sungsansatz dar. Inwiefern sich die semiautomatische Analyse von Satellitenbildern als ein geeignetes Instrument zur Bewertung und Ver?nderung der Nutzung eines Landkreises eignet bzw. worin Analyseprobleme sowie M?glichkeiten und Grenzen der Anwendung in der Regionalplanung existieren, soll im folgenden Beitrag am Beispiel des Landkreises Osnabrück thematisiert werden.     

Getting “Out of Africa”: Sea Crossings,Land Crossings and Culture in the Hominin Migrations

Palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists have advanced a wide range of explanatory narratives for the various movements of Homo erectus/Homo ergaster, and the first modern Homo sapiens, “Out of Africa”—or even back again. The application of Occam's razor—a parsimonious approach to causes—gives a more cautious approach. There is nothing in the available evidence that would require the ability for a human water crossing from Africa before the later Pleistocene, whether across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Sicilian Channel or the southern Red Sea (Bab el-Mandab). A parsimonious narrative is consistent with movements across the Sinai peninsula. The continuous arid zone from northern Africa to western Asia allowed both occupation and transit during wet phases of the Pleistocene; there is no requirement for a “sponge” model of absorption followed by expulsion of human groups. The Nile Valley as a possible transit route from East Africa has a geological chronology that could fit well much current evidence for the timing of human migration. The limited spatial and temporal opportunities for movements “Out of Africa,” or back again, also puts particular difficulties in the way of the gene flow required for the multiregional hypothesis of the development of modern Homo sapiens.     

From the Ground Up: Agency,Practice, and Community in the Southwestern British Bronze Age

Embodied, sensual, engagements between people, earthly elements, and celestial bodies during focused, periodic acts of ritual construction and artifact deposition in the southwestern British Bronze Age resulted in the remaking of identities, local communities, symbolic/mythical knowledge, and the landscape itself. To appreciate how material culture, time, and space were employed to define the criteria by which people understood themselves and their world necessitates an archaeological focus upon shared practices in particular settings that served to define rules of engagement with the environment based upon shared human perceptions. Agency appears in this encounter as central in the construction and perpetuation of symbolic perception, shared social memory, and community identity.     

Linking Theory and Evidence in an Archaeology of Human Agency: Iconography,Style, and Theories of Embodiment

Many of the theories that inspire agency approaches in archaeology identify deep philosophical problems with other lines of thought. This creates challenges for identifying methods: do radical theories require radical methods? Choosing as a case study one of agency’s interpretive frameworks (embodiment) and, further, a single class of evidence (anthropomorphic imagery), I argue that the answer is “no.” In this case, familiar art historical methods, deliberately played off one against the other, provide a middle range framework for linking theory and evidence.     

Zooarchaeology and Historical Archaeology: Progress and Prospects

This review assesses the development and current status of zooarchaeological research in historical archaeology. Analytical issues in recovery, identification, quantification and interpretation are discussed with particular reference to assemblages from historical sites. The results section summarizes the substantive contributions zooarchaeological studies of historical assemblages have made to our understanding of past diet, food production systems, social and cultural variation, and archaeological interpretations. The last four decades of research has provided a strong basis for future analyses that draw together diverse strands of zooarchaeological, historical, scientific, and anthropological evidence.     

Civilization and Barbarism: When Barbarism Builds Cities

Around the mid-nineteenth century, D. F. Sarmiento introduced in Argentine literature the duality of “civilization and barbarism,” assuming that it was, at that time, an inescapable model in the analysis of society. Early in the 1880s, when the “conquest of the desert” came to an end and conflicts between city inhabitants and their urbanistic and “civilizing” urban plannings, vis-à-vis the rural populations that assumedly resisted change, worsened, the model acquired a new meaning. Taking one particular case of analysis, the foundation of the city of La Plata in lands owned by the Estancia Iraola, this paper uses archaeology to explore the limitations and falsehoods of such duality, jointly with the assumption of a simplistic relation of determinism between an environment and a particular human group.     

Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City: Issues of Scale,Integration and Complexity

Historical archaeologists have advocated the need to explore the archaeology of the modern city using several different scales or frames of reference—the household and the district being the most common. In this paper, we discuss the value of comparisons at larger scales, for example between cities or countries, as a basis for understanding archaeology of the modern western city. We argue that patterns of similarity and dissimilarity detected at these larger scales can (and should) become part of our interpretive and explanatory armoury, when it comes to understanding patterns and processes at smaller scales. However, we also believe that these larger scale enquiries do not by any means exhaust (or diminish the importance of) the site- or household-specific questions that continue to demand adequate answers. By reporting some of the thinking behind the work that has been done in Melbourne, Sydney and shortly to begin in London, we seek to more clearly establish the value of this broader comparative agenda in urban historical archaeology.     

Reverse Engineering the Ceramic Cooking Pot: Cost and Performance Properties of Plain and Textured Vessels

Ceramic cooking pots throughout the world vary in exterior surface treatment from smooth to roughly textured. An intriguing example of this variation occurred in the Puebloan region of the southwestern United States where cooking pots changed from scraped plain to highly textured, corrugated vessels between the seventh and eleventh centuries AD, and then reverted back to plain-surfaced by the fifteenth century. To investigate potential cost and performance differences between plain and corrugated cooking pots, a set of controlled experiments were performed, which document manufacturing costs, cooking effectiveness, and vessel durability. These experiments indicate that while corrugation may have increased manufacturing costs, neck corrugations improved vessel handling, upper body corrugations yielded greater control over cooking, and basal corrugations extended vessel use-life. Discerning the explanatory significance of these results for cooking pot change in the Southwest and elsewhere requires additional data on the contexts in which these pots were made and used.