Three hundred years of Palmyrene history. Unlocking archaeological data for studying past societal transformations

While archaeological sciences have made great advances over the last decades through combining archaeological evidence and natural sciences in order to push borders for the understanding of archaeological contexts, traditional archaeology still holds an immense latent potential. Such potential can be realized through baseline projects that pull together unexplored bodies of material culture and study these in detail in order to investigate their significance for the understanding of the human past. This paper presents such a large-scale baseline study and focuses on the presentation of the results emerging from the recently compiled corpus of more than 3700 funerary portraits stemming from one location in the ancient world, Roman Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian Desert. The analysis of the chronological development of the numerous portraits allows us to follow the fluctuations in the production of these portraits over approximately 300 years. Here we discuss and review the developments in connection with historical sources and discuss until now unknown events, which have emerged through the data analysis. The paper brings to the forefront the significance of social science baseline projects, which often do not receive enough attention or funding, but which in fact are fundamental for furthering our understanding of the human past and push borders for the directions in which we can take such studies in the future.

The Song of the Science Mermaid: A Philosophical Trilogue on the Osteological Paradox

As a modern academic Ulysses, the historical scientist is enticed by numerous plausible scientific theories that can explain the historical data in search of the truth. However, the predicament of her work is to inevitably crash onto the rocks and cliffs of uncertainty. The problem discussed in this paper is that several scientific models can be suitable to account for the same empirical observations. The risk of falling into speculation is looming, and exceedingly dangerous in science. This is also the case in archaeological sciences, such as bioarchaeology. A bioarchaeologist frequently encounters traces of disease in ancient skeletons, and pertinent patterns may often result from equally probable different causes. This is a methodological issue commonly encountered in the interpretation of pathological patterns in human remains, and constitutes part of the problem known in bioarchaeology as the osteological paradox. During an informal trilogue, three characters discuss the osteological paradox, and attempt to define it in philosophical terms. The aim of this work is to present the problems of scientists with the philosophical approach to the debate between scientific realism and antirealism, focusing in particular on the so-called problem of underdetermination. Our original approach is to apply the distinction between ‘how-possibly’ models and ‘how-actually’ models by Alisa Bokulich to archaeological issues, integrating various fields of science with a multidisciplinary and omnivorous approach. The trilogue ends providing the historical scientist with reasons and means to believe in her ability to conceive of true and reliable scientific models to interpret the historical past.

Bodily Entanglements: Gender, Archaeological Sciences and the More-than-ness of Archaeological Bodies

Critical feminist Posthumanism provides novel ways of dealing with bodies as material-discursive phenomena. As such, bodies come about, change and dissolve by re-workings of entangled relations. Such relationships are making human bodies more-than-human. Bodies can be understood as full of excesses—that will not be captured by, for example, gender or age categories alone—albeit occasionally materially shaped by them. Examples of such excessive relations are captured by DNA analysis or various isotope analyses—where diet as well as geological habitat gets imprinted into the body and become a part of the personhood—and can be discussed as the landscape within. This paper deals with some misunderstandings around Posthumanism, but also with how critical posthumanist feminist theory can breathe new life into archaeological gender studies and thereby also forge new relationships with the archaeological sciences.

RADIOCARBON PROTOCOLS AND FIRST INTERCOMPARISON RESULTS FROM THE CHRONOS 14CARBON-CYCLE FACILITY, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

ABSTRACT The Chronos 14Carbon-Cycle Facility is a new radiocarbon laboratory at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Built around an Ionplus 200 kV MIni-CArbon DAting System (MICADAS) Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) installed in October 2019, the facility was established to address major challenges in the Earth, Environmental and Archaeological sciences. Here we report an overview of the Chronos facility, the pretreatment methods currently employed (bones, carbonates, peat, pollen, charcoal, and wood) and results of radiocarbon and stable isotope measurements undertaken on a wide range of sample types. Measurements on international standards, known-age and blank samples demonstrate the facility is capable of measuring 14C samples from the Anthropocene back to nearly 50,000 years ago. Future work will focus on improving our understanding of the Earth system and managing resources in a future warmer world.

Forensic Electrochemical Presumptive Blood Test Based on the Voltammetric Behaviour of Methylene Blue and Whole Blood

The ability to identify the presence of blood residues is important in a number of fields, such as in the forensic and archaeological sciences. A number of tests presently exist;...

Research on the Kingdom of Judah in the Last Decade, 2010–2020

In the last decade (2010–2020), various discoveries have been made concerning the Kingdom of Judah, which existed from the tenth century BCE until the destruction of the First Temple in the early sixth century BCE (ca. 1000–586 BCE). The main discoveries are organized in four chronological stages: one stage for every hundred years. The new data gives us a better understanding of the various stages in the kingdom's history. The discoveries from the tenth and ninth centuries BCE, which are the subjects of intense debate between different research approaches, are particularly notable. In the last decade we saw a tremendous contribution by interdisciplinary studies in "archaeological sciences". These are summarized separately, as they are not necessarily related to a particular century. Beyond the various viewpoints and debates, the most important development, in my view, is the awarness that drawing a hasty and unfounded connection to historical events to explain any archeological phenomenon in the Kingdom of Judah is a mistake. So is the notion that any development in the Kingdom of Judah was necessarily the result of foreign influence. Detailed research shows that the Kingdom of Judah evolved gradually as a result of local factors.

From Digital Archaeology to Data-Centric Archaeological Research

Since the end of the 20th century the widespread use of digital applications in archaeology has legitimized their inclusion in the archaeological toolbox. Together with archaeological sciences, databases, GIS and other computer-based methods are nowadays present in every respectable archaeological investigation. This makes archaeology a peculiar discipline, where the scientific method combines with the historical one to produce new knowledge. However, the large availability of archaeological data creates the risk of a data deluge and may suggest using online information just to collect previous interpretations rather than to re-use the data supporting them. A ‘Grand Challenges’ list compiled some years ago includes important research questions that undergird contemporary issues and require an appropriate digital methodology to be addressed. The present paper discusses the benefits, or better the absolute need, of a data-centric methodology to address large-scale research. It argues that an acritical use of the so-called ‘Big Data’ approach may be questionable. It suggests how the combination of artificial intelligence with human intelligence is the key to progress into the understanding of phenomena of paramount societal importance for researchers and for the public at large.

The first reported case of the rare mitochondrial haplotype H4a1 in ancient Egypt

Takabuti, was a female who lived in ancient Egypt during the 25th Dynasty, c.660 BCE. Her mummified remains were brought to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1834 and are currently displayed in the Ulster Museum. To gain insight into Takabuti’s ancestry, we used deep sampling of vertebral bone, under X-ray control, to obtain non-contaminated bone tissue from which we extracted ancient DNA (aDNA) using established protocols. We targeted the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), known to be highly informative for human ancestry, and identified 38 single nucleotide variants using next generation sequencing. The specific combination of these SNVs suggests that Takabuti belonged to mitochondrial haplogroup H4a1. Neither H4 nor H4a1 have been reported in ancient Egyptian samples, prior to this study. The modern distribution of H4a1 is rare and sporadic and has been identified in areas including the Canary Islands, southern Iberia and the Lebanon. H4a1 has also been reported in ancient samples from Bell Beaker and Unetice contexts in Germany, as well as Bronze Age Bulgaria. We believe that this is an important finding because first, it adds to the depth of knowledge about the distribution of the H4a1 haplogroup in existing mtDNA, thus creating a baseline for future occurrences of this haplogroup in ancient Egyptian remains. Second, it is of great importance for archaeological sciences, since a predominantly European haplogroup has been identified in an Egyptian individual in Southern Egypt, prior to the Roman and Greek influx (332BCE).

Human land-use change and biodiversity trends in the British Isles

<p>Conservation and promotion of biodiverse landscapes is a major target for ecological conservation and landscape management, as biodiversity is a key determinant of ecosystem functioning. Recent accelerations in the intensity of human land-use have been implicated for changes in biodiversity, but the relationships between land-use change and diversity are complex, include important historical legacies and major transformations are likely to have occurred across much longer time-scales than those covered by direct observation records. This collaborative research between Historic England and the Universities of Plymouth and Birmingham, is synthesising palaeoecological datasets from across the British Isles from both the natural and archaeological sciences to reconstruct biodiversity patterns and evaluate relationships between these patterns and land-use over multi-millennial time-scales. The fossil remains of plants, pollen and insects preserved in sediments are being compared and critically evaluated with the aim to provide valuable information about past land-use strategies, biodiversity, habitat resilience to disturbance and recovery rates. Exploring environmental change within the context of the Holocene (the last 11,700 years) allows comparison of ecosystem states across a wide range of land-use strategies, from hunter-gathering to complex patterns of land-use in later prehistoric and historical periods.</p>