4500-Year old domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) from the Tilemsi Valley,Mali: new insights into an alternative cereal domestication pathway

We report here new evidence from the Lower Tilemsi Valley in northeastern Mali, which constitutes the earliest archaeobotanical evidence for domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), predating other finds from Africa or India by several centuries. These materials provide further morphological details on the earliest cultivated pearl millet. Our results demonstrate that pearl millet non-shattering evolved earlier than the start of grain size increases and that once domesticated, pearl millet spread widely and rapidly. Additional attention is given to the dating of these materials, highlighting potential flaws in the use of organic chaff tempered pottery to date occurrences of pearl millet. A revised chronology, based on detailed Bayesian modelling, is presented for the Lower Tilemsi region.     

Linking Scottish vital event records using family groups

Abstract

The reconstitution of populations through linkage of historical records is a powerful approach to generate longitudinal historical microdata resources of interest to researchers in various fields. Here we consider automated linking of the vital events recorded in the civil registers of birth, death and marriage compiled in Scotland, to bring together the various records associated with the demographic events in the life course of each individual in the population. From the histories, the genealogical structure of the population can then be built up. Rather than apply standard linkage techniques to link the individuals on the available certificates, we explore an alternative approach, inspired by the family reconstitution techniques adopted by historical demographers, in which the births of siblings are first linked to form family groups, after which intergenerational links between families can be established. We report a small-scale evaluation of this approach, using two district-level data sets from Scotland in the late nineteenth century, for which sibling links have already been created by demographers. We show that quality measures of up to 83% can be achieved on these data sets (using F-Measure, a combination of precision and recall). In the future, we intend to compare the results with a standard linkage approach and to investigate how these various methods may be used in a project which aims to link the entire Scottish population from 1856 to 1973.     

Beyond Iron Age ‘towns’: Examining oppida as examples of low‐density urbanism

The question of whether Late Iron Age oppida in Europe were truly ‘urban’ has dominated debate over these sites since the nineteenth century. Oppida have been surprisingly absent from comparative urban studies, however, despite increasingly nuanced perspectives on the nature and diversity of the urban phenomenon. In particular, Roland Fletcher's implication that oppida might represent part of a broader alternative form of low‐density urbanism has been largely overlooked, by Iron Age scholars and urbanism specialists alike. With the complex nature of many oppida now becoming increasingly apparent, I suggest it is a pertinent time to assess Fletcher's claim and examine whether oppida can be convincingly compared to low‐density urbanism elsewhere in the world and, if so, what implications this might have for understanding Iron Age societies. This paper argues that oppida do indeed display aspects of low‐density urbanism and that this is likely to be due to the negotiated nature of power in Iron Age societies.