0000000001305309
AUTHOR
Andreu Ollé
Coping with arid environments: A critical threshold for human expansion in Europe at the Marine Isotope Stage 12/11 transition? The case of the Iberian Peninsula.
Abstract Archaeological remains have highlighted the fact that the interglacial Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11 was a threshold from the perspective of hominin evolution in Europe. After the MIS 12 glaciation, considered one of the major climate-driven crises experienced by hominins, the archaeological records show an increasing number of occupations, evidence of new subsistence behaviors, and significant technical innovations. Here, we used statistical and geographic techniques to analyze the amphibian- and reptile-based paleoclimate and habitat reconstructions generated from a large data set of the Iberian Peninsula to (1) investigate if temperature, precipitation, and/or forest cover may h…
Animal husbandry in Sicilian prehistory: The zooarchaeological perspective from Vallone Inferno (Scillato, Palermo)
Starting in the mid-6th millennium cal BCE, Neolithic groups occupied the midlands of Sicily. The economy of these groups was based primarily on livestock farming. Archaeological and archaeobotanical data indicate an intensification of livestock practices during the Early Bronze Age, leading to a change in the landscape in the form of more open forests. The Vallone Inferno rockshelter in the Madonie massif is one of the few sites that has been systematically excavated in these midlands, and has yielded evidence of Middle Neolithic and Early Bronze Age occupations. This work focuses on the study of prehistoric husbandry in the Sicilian midlands and highlands through the analysis of the Vallo…
New data on Sicilian prehistoric and historic evolution in a mountain context, Vallone Inferno (Scillato, Italy)
Vallone Inferno rock-shelter is an archaeological site located in the Madonie mountain range in Sicily. Archaeological excavation and research have provided a long prehistoric and historic sequence from the Neolithic to the medieval period, this being the most complete work in this area at present. In this paper we present the preliminary data provided by a multidisciplinary study based on pottery, lithic, human, faunal and plant remains. Stratigraphic studies have identified four complexes, of which complex 3 has provided almost all the archaeological remains. 14C AMS dates, obtained from four samples, place the human activities between 2601 cal BC and 644 cal AD. These dates are coherent …
La Cova de Dalt del Tossal de la Font
Estado de las excavaciones y estudios realizados en La Cova de Dalt del Tossal de la Font (Castellón).
Early pastoral communities in the mountains of Sicily. Prehistoric evidence from Vallone Inferno (Scillato) in the palaeoenvironmental framework of the Madonie mountain range
Abstract This paper discusses the Middle Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age phases of the occupation of a rock shelter at Vallone Inferno (Scillato, Palermo) in Sicily. Vallone Inferno is a key site for studying the early establishment and development of pastoralism in the prehistoric mountainous environments of Sicily. Seasonal use of the site as a shelter is documented for the earliest pastoral communities that exploited the Madonie mountain range. The results of the analysis of pottery and lithic assemblages contribute to the definition of two chronocultural frameworks that were linked by the same economic subsistence base. The special role of obsidian emerges, while the mobility pattern…
Polish is quantitatively different on quartzite flakes used on different worked materials.
Metrology has been successfully used in the last decade to quantify use-wear on stone tools. Such techniques have been mostly applied to fine-grained rocks (chert), while studies on coarse-grained raw materials have been relatively infrequent. In this study, confocal microscopy was employed to investigate polished surfaces on a coarse-grained lithology, quartzite. Wear originating from contact with five different worked materials were classified in a data-driven approach using machine learning. Two different classifiers, a decision tree and a support-vector machine, were used to assign the different textures to a worked material based on a selected number of parameters (Mean density of furr…
Polish is quantitatively different on quartzite flakes used on different worked materials [ConfoMap analysis]
Each surface has been processed with two templates: 1) Extract two 50x50 µm sub-areas and extract topography layer from each sub-area. Export sub-areas as SUR files. File names start with "A35" or "VSH4". 2) Process all extracted sub-areas for quantitative analysis. File names start with "processing-quartzite-final". All ConfoMap templates are saved in MNT format (including all original and processed surfaces, as well as results). Each template has also been exported to a PDF file. Instructions to download all files at once are given here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4011952 Additionally, the results of the second template are collated into "proce…
Polish is quantitatively different on quartzite flakes used on different worked materials [Python analysis]
This upload includes the following files related to the Python analysis: 1. Raw data as a XLSX table (processing-quartzite-final-2020-04-29.xlsx) is the output from R Script #1 (see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3979139), even though the filename is slightly different. Plus, for each analysis (full and restricted datasets), included in the corresponding ZIP archive: 2. Jupyter notebooks of the analysis (Classification_RandSplitFeature_Revision_VXX.ipynb) rendered to HTML file (Classification_RandSplitFeature_Revision_VXX.html) 3. Dataframe including the artificially filled datapoints 4. Output of the analysis as PDF: • Confusion matrices ("CM&qu…
Polish is quantitatively different on quartzite flakes used on different worked materials [R analysis]
This upload includes the following files related to the R analysis: - Raw data as a CSV table (processing-quartzite-final.csv), i.e. results from the ConfoMap analysis (see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3979116) - RStudio project (Quantification quartzite final.Rproj) - R scripts as R Markdown files (*.Rmd) - R scripts knitted to HTML files (*.html) - An R script (RStudioVersion.R) to write the used version of RStudio to a text file (RStudioVersion.txt) - Output from script #1: processing-quartzite-final.Rbin and processing-quartzite-final.xlsx - Output from script #2: processing-quartzite-final_summary-stats.xlsx - Output from script #3: all plots as PDF files. Note that for running the s…