In ancient navigation, the safety of a ship depended in no small measure on the stability of her anchors, and this crucial role at sea was not overlooked in the ritual symbolism of maritime communities. Accordingly, there is a general consensus on the fact that the anchors deposited at Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age temples were important carriers of meaning for seafaring...
Despite interest in preindustrial markets, archaeological discussions have largely been limited to proposing methods to determine the presence or absence of market exchange in ancient societies. While these contributions are important, methodological limitations have prevented theoretical considerations of the emergence and evolution of marketplaces and market exchange in...
Over the last several decades, the application of aDNA and strontium isotope analyses on archaeologically recovered human remains has provided new avenues for the investigation of mobility in past societies. Data on human mobility can be valuable in the reconstruction of prehistoric residential patterns and kinship systems, which are at the center of human social organization and...
Archaeological studies of early weaponry have relied for decades on ethnographic parallels—whether from ethnohistorical accounts, ethnographic literature, or from objects studied in museum collections. While such accounts and collected objects provided key data in the past, including of morphometrics and functionality, few studies have explored the quality of such data. In this...
Today, mercury is a matter of concern for health and environmental authorities across western countries, and legislation has been passed and programs have been implemented for its total elimination from human activity. But this was not always the case: mercury and its compounds have been highly appreciated and used since remote times all over the world with very diverse purposes...
The main objective of this paper is to develop quantitative measures for describing the diversity, homogeneity, and similarity of archaeological data. It presents new approaches to characterize the relationship between archaeological assemblages by utilizing entropy and its related attributes, primarily diversity, and by drawing inspiration from ecology. Our starting premise is...
A unique property of the Paleolithic record is the possibility to observe human societies in large areas and over long periods of time. At these large spatial and temporal scales, a number of interesting phenomena can be observed, such as dynamics in the distribution of populations in relation to equally large-scale environmental patterns. In this paper, we focus on phenological...
In this paper, I investigate the possibilities and limitations of fractal analysis methods applied to archaeological and synthetic settlement plans, with the goal of providing quantitative measures of spatial randomness or noise, as well as potential tools for automated culture-historical attribution of settlement plans and socio-economic intra-site differentiation. The...
Linking the likelihood of convergent evolution to the technologies’ complexity, this paper identifies the scales of technological diffusion and convergence, i.e., the evolving of structures that are similar, but not related to a common “ancestor.” Our study provides quantitative measures for understanding complexity and connectivity in technologies. The utility of our approach is...
Many studies in complexity theory employ agent-based models whose interactions can be expressed as networks. In such models, the pattern of interactions between actors is crucial, and the network topology that emerges from the raw data can be characterized through many metrics. One tool previously used in archaeology studies has the potential to deal with networks in social...
Prehistoric and Archaeological research has pointed out the role of marine resources in modern humans’ cognitive and cultural developments. Maritime adaptations constitute a key component of the sociocultural evolution in Eastern Arabia. During the Neolithic (c. 6500–3300 BCE), it is expressed by the colonisation of offshore islands supported by advanced seafaring and the...
Explaining material traces of movement as proxies for past movement is fundamental for understanding the processes behind why people in the past traversed the landscape in the way that they did. For this, least-cost path analysis and the use of slope-based cost functions for estimating the cost of movement when walking have become commonplace. Despite their prevalence, current...
The potential applications of microCT scanning in the field of archaeobotany are only just beginning to be explored. The imaging technique can extract new archaeobotanical information from existing archaeobotanical collections as well as create new archaeobotanical assemblages within ancient ceramics and other artefact types. The technique could aid in answering archaeobotanical...
Understanding the ontogenetic age and sex composition of zooarchaeological assemblages can reveal details about past human hunting and herding strategies as well as past animal morphology and behavior. As such, the accuracy of our estimates underlies our ability to ascertain details about site formation and gain insights into how people interacted with different animals in the...
There has recently been a great deal of interest in the effects of the sizes of communities on the social and economic conditions of settlements, drawing on theoretical and empirical work on complex systems. However, although it is clear that there is a series of relationships between the sizes of sites and their various attributes in a range of modern and non-modern contexts, it...
The introduction of the rotary quern into the Iberian Peninsula during the Iron Age represents a great technological innovation with regard to processing cereals. These mechanisms arrived several centuries later in the Canarian archipelago with the first North African colonists. Contacts with the African continent appear to have either been cut off or minimised a short time later...
The role that humans played in the extinction of Pleistocene proboscideans is highly controversial. Ethnohistoric records of elephant hunting, in concert with theoretical rationales, are often used as proxy evidence to support the view that ancient humans regularly and efficiently targeted large-sized proboscideans to the point of extinction. This paper examines the socioeconomic...
In this study, we assess competing interpretations of a burnt ceremonial structure from the terminal Middle Formative period (ca. 300–100 BCE) by analyzing the stepped platform mound at Chiripa, Bolivia, through a systematic reconstruction of the fire that destroyed it. We developed a model of potential fire pathways, their social contexts, and material indicators. Our approach...
The cross-fertilisation between biological and cultural evolution has led to an extensive borrowing of key concepts, theories, and statistical methods for studying temporal variation in the frequency of cultural variants. Archaeologists have been among the front-runners of those engaging with this endeavour, and the last 2 decades have seen a number of case studies where modes of...
This paper discusses the applicability of the Principal Component Analysis-Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (PCA-AHC) approach to provenance studies of non-ferrous metals using combined Pb isotope and chemistry data. Pb isotopic ratios were converted to the natural abundance of individual isotopes and then to weight units. Next, all relevant variables (Pb isotopes and trace...
In line with engineering research focusing on metal tools, techniques to record the attribute of ‘edge sharpness’ on stone tools can include both mechanical and micro-geometric approaches. Mechanically-defined sharpness techniques used in lithic studies are now well established and align with engineering research. The single micro-geometrically-defined technique—tip curvature—is...
Studies of cultural transmission—whether approached by archaeological or ethnographic means—have made great strides in identifying formal teaching and learning arrangements, which in turn can be closely aligned with models of social learning. While novices and apprentices are often in focus in such studies, younger children and their engagement with material culture have received...