‘Order’-ing Excavations: Constitution of Archaeology as Legal Evidence in the Ayodhya Case

This paper examines the case of the court-ordered excavations at Ayodhya to understand the process by which archaeological evidence as expert opinion was reconfigured into judicial evidence in a civil lawsuit. Being an exceptional site of enquiry where two institutions of the Indian state — the High Court of Allahabad and the Archaeological Survey of India — come together, the Ayodhya case allows us to complicate the uses and abuses of archaeology. An examination of the orders and documents related to the excavations and the judgment made by the Allahabad High Court shows the production of archaeological knowledge at Ayodhya as highly mediated. The paper argues that this process is determined by the notions shared by both the institutions about archaeology-as-science and about scientific/archaeological expertise, regulated at each stage through judicial interventions and informed by the role that the Archaeological Survey of India and the archaeology profession has played in the production of a nationalist past in India. The employment of archaeology as legal evidence in the Ayodhya case is contingent upon the masking of these mediating roles.     

Stories about building history told by wooden elements – case studies from Eastern Austria

The intention of this article is to show the benefit of an interdisciplinary approach within the various disciplines of building research (architectural archeology, art history, archive research, dendrochronology, etc.).

The exact determination of the age of historical timber is undoubtedly the most important contribution of dendrochronology to building research. The significance of dendrochronological dates is discussed in detail—problems of reuse, repair, drying time, and differences between felling and building dates are demonstrated. Several case studies in Eastern Austria showed a difference of two to four years between felling and building.

To answer questions of where the timber came from, dendroprovenancing was introduced to Eastern Austria. First results showed that it will be possible to differentiate the origin of timber between Eastern Austria and regions where rafts started towards Vienna, via the river Danube. The results showed that it is important to combine building archaeology and archival analyses with the dendrochronological results.     

Investigating the processes necessary for satisfactory freeze-drying of waterlogged archaeological wood

Preliminary studies into methods for improving and safeguarding the preservation of waterlogged archaeological wooden artefacts are presented. Mannitol, sorbitol and trehalose have been tested as replacements for polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a treatment prior to freeze-drying of wooden archaeological objects. The highest anti-shrink efficiency achieved in this short experiment was (70 ± 15) % using a 20% weight per volume solution of sorbitol after soaking for one week. The collapse or eutectic temperature of each solution used was determined using a freeze-drying microscope. Importantly, it was noted that the collapse temperature of the solutions was reduced by several degrees after use for treatment of the wood samples for one month. A freeze-drying microscope with a cold light source has been used to observe the real-time freeze-drying behaviour of various treatments inside a thin section of wood, confirming that this novel technique is indeed possible and useful. Lastly, the effects of magnesium phytate as an iron chelator have been studied. It was found that the treatment lowers the collapse temperature of a PEG 600/2000 solution by roughly 3 °C meaning that objects must be freeze-dried at a correspondingly lower temperature. Iron K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy analysis showed that the treatment extracted approximately half of the iron(III) ions present in the timbers.     

江苏丹阳葛城遗址勘探试掘简报

江苏丹阳葛城吴文化遗址,经勘探试掘,确认其为一座吴国城址.城址内分布有窖穴、房基、水井、水沟,城址外分布有土墩墓.遗址中出土有较丰富的陶器、石器、青铜器等吴文化遗物.通过对出土陶器分析,可将该文化遗存分为三期:早期为西周中晚期,中期为春秋前期,晚期为春秋后期,三者之间连续无缺环.经与江、浙、皖地区同类吴文化遗存对比,可推知丹阳葛城古城是目前所发现的最早、延续使用时间最长、保存状况较为完好的吴国城址.     

Sample-specific (universal) metric approaches for determining the sex of immature human skeletal remains using permanent tooth dimensions

In this paper, three approaches for developing sample-specific sex determination methods of immature skeletal remains based on permanent tooth dimensions are proposed and tested using a sample of identified skeletons. The sample comprises adult and subadult individuals selected from the Lisbon documented skeletal collection, housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Lisbon, Portugal. Faciolingual and mesiodistal diameters were the tooth dimensions utilized. In the first approach, sex-specific logistic regression formulae based on adult tooth dimensions are developed and then used to determine the sex of the subadult sample. The second and third approaches are based on the sectioning point procedure, which uses the overall mean of a measurement (tooth diameter) collected from the sample as the discriminant criteria for determining the sex of the individuals in that sample. While in the second approach the adult overall mean of each dimension is used as the discriminant criteria for determining the sex of the subadults, in the third approach it is the subadult overall mean of each dimension that comprises the discriminant criteria that is applied back to the subadults for determining sex. Results show that the canines are the teeth with the highest sexual dimorphism and methods of sex determination based on canine dimensions provide correct allocation accuracies between 58.8% and 100% depending on the diameter and the approach that is being used. Canine faciolingual dimensions provide the best overall results. Combinations of measurements from the same and different teeth do not increase significantly the accuracy of the methods and approaches. Some of the problems of subadult sex determination methods based on adult tooth dimensions result from differing levels of sexual dimorphism between the adult and subadult segment of the sample. Mortality or cultural bias may increase or decrease the sexual dimorphism of the subadults compared to the adults. Small subadult samples utilized in this study may also raise questions regarding the accuracy of the three different sample-specific approaches. However, high consistency of results using the canine and different approaches, suggests that adult and subadult canine dimensions can be reliable sex discriminators of immature skeletal remains in archaeological samples. The major advantage of the approaches presented here is that they can be used to derive sample-specific methods and, therefore, eliminate the problem of applying morphological or metric methods to individuals originating from a population that differs from the one that contributed to the development of the method.