An island-wide assessment of the chronology of settlement and land use on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) based on radiocarbon data

The archaeological landscape on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) contains a palimpsest of surface archaeological features reflecting a long history of settlement and land use. The popular narrative of societal collapse prior to European contact relies on chronometric data from the late pre-European contact period and also cites major settlement shifts as evidence for societal collapse and socio-political reorganization. This paper explores the archaeological evidence for proposed changes in settlement by assessing the spatial and temporal distribution of radiocarbon determinations collected from archaeological and landscape contexts. A corpus of over 300 determinations is placed into an island-wide GIS database and analysed. The results of this study suggest that Rapa Nui settlement and land use exhibit continuity rather than punctuated, detrimental change during the late pre-European contact period.     

Statistical tool for dating and interpreting archaeological contexts using pottery

Analyzing chronological patterns is one of the major issues in archaeology. How can the date of a specific context be estimated? Is it possible to identify residual and intrusive material in it at the same time? Numerous statistical methodological approaches have been developed and implemented to estimate dates but have less often addressed the issue of socio-economic area or the functional interpretation of contexts. This article deals with the construction and analysis of two different probability estimate density curves of context dates using pottery. By contrasting the two curves we can define the boundaries of the socio-economic area and make a chrono-functional interpretation of a context. This statistical tool allows the archaeologist to visualize and analyze chronological patterns easily. The method is applied to the analysis of contexts in the town of Tours in particular and more generally in the centre-west of France, based on collected pottery finds.     

The gravity model: monitoring the formation and development of the Tripolye culture giant-settlements in Ukraine

The formation, development and decline of the Tripolye culture giant-settlements in Chalcolitic Ukraine are strictly linked to complex processes of migration and settlement relocation. Despite being traceable through pottery typological analyses linked to contextual seriations, their identification is sometime not obvious. This paper shows how the application of the ‘gravity model’ not only facilitates their recognition, but it also helps increase the reliability of determining diachronic and/or synchronic occupations, shedding at the same time light upon the crucial ‘internal’ development of single settlements. Instead of clear-cut consecutive occupations, a more gradual settlement rotation with some synchronous phases seems to have prevailed.     

来自夏商周断代工程的报告

夏商周断代工程的实施,是中国学术史上的一件盛事;工程的组织形式、科研方法值得总结和借鉴;工程所取得的成果,对21世纪的人文社会科学发展,将会产生深远的影响.     

‘With utmost certainty’: two late medieval pioneers of technical chronology

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the chronological methods developed and deployed by two little known medieval scholars, Giles of Lessines (active in the 1260s) and Heinrich Selder (1370s), both of whom made noteworthy advances in the use of astronomy to establish dates and intervals between events in ancient history. Based on their reading of Ptolemy's Almagest, both authors emphasised the importance of dated astronomical observations, such as eclipses, arguing that the recorded intervals between these observations were endowed with a unique degree of reliability. Several key examples of how they mobilised Ptolemy's astronomical data to rectify parts of the timeline between the creation of the world and the present will be discussed. These show that the technical arguments contained in Giles’ and Selder's writings reached a level of sophistication and accuracy that has previously only been associated with chronologers of the early modern and later periods.