First discovery of ancient soft‐stone (chlorite) vessel production in Arabia: Aqir al‐Shamoos (Oman)

Soft‐stone vessels are a prominent feature of ancient culture throughout south‐east Arabia and the Gulf. Chlorite and steatite occur naturally in the al‐Hajar Mountains of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman; but until now, apart from the discovery of a few unfinished pieces, ancient production of soft‐stone vessels had yet to be documented in Arabia. This paper reports the discovery and preliminary analysis of soft‐stone vessel production at the site of Aqir al‐Shamoos. At this small and secluded mountain village, a range of soft‐stone vessels that are well known in the south‐east Arabian Iron Age were produced on a scale far beyond what was needed for local consumption.     

Holocene land-use evolution and associated soil erosion in the French Prealps inferred from Lake Paladru sediments and archaeological evidences

A source-to-sink multi-proxy approach has been performed within Lake Paladru (492 m a.s.l., French Prealps) catchment and a 6-m long sediment sequence retrieved from the central lacustrine basin. The combination of minerogenic signal, specific organic markers of autochthonous and allochthonous supply and archaeological data allows the reconstruction of a continuous record of past human disturbances. Over the last 10,000 years, the lacustrine sedimentation was dominated by autochthonous carbonates and the watershed was mostly forest-covered. However, seven phases of higher accumulation rate, soil erosion, algal productivity and landscape disturbances have been identified and dated from 8400 to 7900, 6000 to 4800, 4500 to 3200, 2700 to 2050 cal BP as well as AD 350–850, AD 1250–1850 and after AD 1970. Before 5200 cal BP, soil erosion is interpreted as resulting from climatic deterioration phases towards cooler and wetter conditions. During the Mid-Late Holocene period, erosion fluxes and landscape disturbances are always associated with prehistorical and historical human activities and amplified by climatic oscillations. Such changes in human land-used led to increasing minerogenic supply and nutrients loading that affected lacustrine trophic levels, especially during the last 1600 years. In addition, organic and molecular markers document previously unknown human settlements around Lake Paladru during the Bronze and the Iron Ages.     

New archaeozoological evidence for the introduction of the guinea pig to Europe

The remains are described of a guinea pig dated to the end of the 16th - beginning of the 17th c. AD. The animal was discovered at a site in Mons, Belgium, and is the first European archaeozoological find dated with certainty on the basis of both the archaeological context and a radiocarbon dating of its bone. This find confirms that the guinea pig was introduced to Europe soon after the conquest of South America. The morphological and metrical analyses performed on the skeletal remains are in agreement with the iconographic and literary sources indicating the domestic status of the animals imported to Europe. While a previous discovery in England suggested that the guinea pig was a prestigious animal, the present study argues that it was accessible to several classes of the population which may be related to the rapid spread of this prolific animal after its introduction in Europe.     

CONSUMER PERCEPTIONS OF SPONSORSHIP IN THE ARTS

This article investigates consumers’ perceptions of three types of sponsors that play a role in backing financially Canadian artistic and cultural organisations: government ministries (or departments), Crown corporations and private companies. In addition to the type of sponsor and the nature of the sponsorship (philanthropic or commercial), the perceived congruence between the sponsor and the sponsored event (strong as opposed to weak), and the form of arts and cultural events (high art versus popular art and performing arts versus heritage arts) are explored in an experimental setting combining within‐subjects and between‐subjects factors. The main hypothesis of this research was that consumers’ perceptions are not the same when it comes to the different kinds of sponsors that evolve in the cultural and art fields. As the researchers explored this issue, they observed that significant differences do exist. It is believed that the rich findings of this study will be useful to civil servants.     

Tempi of Change: When Soloists don’t play Together. Arrhythmia in ‘Continuous’ Change

This contribution is centered on the question of tempi of change and the possibility of defining ternary scales of changes in a long archaeological sequence, which could match F. Braudel’s interpretative framework. Although I had recently considered a ternary scale of change to be a satisfactory framework even for a single category of artifacts, further analyses for this volume, on a longer time scale, revealed it as an intellectual construct that entirely depends on the choice of criteria. In addition, observed arrhythmia in change between two sets of data from the Franchthi Cave (Greece), chipped stone assemblages and ornaments, demonstrate the difficulty of defining global phases of change within a continuous sequence. In turn, this raises the fundamental problem of the choice of proxies used to define the prehistoric cultural entities whose transformations we seek to understand.