Search results for "Ape"
showing 10 items of 8919 documents
Land-use dynamics and socioeconomic change: An example from the Polop Alto valley
1999
AbstractThe Polop Alto valley, in eastern Spain, serves as the focus of a study of long-term temporal and spatial dynamics in human land use. The data discussed here derive from intensive, pedestrian, non-site survey. We employ the concept of artifact taphonomy to assess the various natural and cultural processes responsible for accumulation and distribution patterns of artifacts. Our results suggest that the most significant land-use changes in the Polop Alto took place at the end of the Pleistocene and accompanying the late Neolithic, while much less notable changes in land-use patterns are associated with the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition and the initial use of domestic plants and …
Connecting Gien Castle to its Landscape: Faunal, Environmental and Buildings Analyses (Loiret, France)
2021
International audience; Gien castle is a listed monument of French architectural heritage. Today it houses the National Museum of Hunting and its collection. Organised visits to the site have traditionally lacked any clear mention of the castle’s historical background. Recently, however, archaeological excavations and building analysis in 2011–2015 produced a wealth of new knowledge about the castle’s medieval origins and history, and about its relationship to its landscape. During the ninth and tenth centuries and then in the fifteenth century the castle occupied a strategically exceptional position reflecting the connection with its environment, notably the strong connection between the c…
Morphometry of Middle Bronze Age palstaves. Part II - spatial distribution of shapes in two typological groups, implications for production and expor…
2013
10 pages; International audience; For archaeologists, metallic artifacts are key materials to assess Middle Bronze Age production areas and cultural exchanges. Here, a set of 629 bronze palstaves excavated in northern France, belonging to Breton and Norman typological groups, was treated by (open) outline-based morphometrics with orthogonal polynomial regression. Using robust statistics developed for outlier detection, these Norman and Breton palstave outlines can be divided into two groups: those for which the shape fluctuates close to the standard shape, called "congruent" axes, and those which are far enough from this standard to be considered as "non-congruent", although they possess mo…
Oppida, Agglomerations, and Suburbia: the Bibracte Environs and New Perspectives on Late Iron Age Urbanism in Central-eastern France
2013
This paper explores the nature and chronology of La Tène and early Roman unenclosed agglomerations in central-eastern France. It has been prompted by the discovery of a c. 115 ha La Tène D2b/Augustan (c. 50 BC to AD 15) site close to Bibracte in the Morvan, located around the source of the River Yonne. This complex provides a new perspective on the chronology and role of Late La Tène and early Roman unenclosed settlements, adding further complexity to the story of the development of Late La Tène oppida. It indicates that these ‘agglomerations’ followed remarkably varied chronological trajectories, raising important issues concerning the nature of landscape and social change at the end of th…
Tracking archaeological and historical mines using mineral prospectivity mapping.
2014
13 pages; International audience; The present study proposes a technological transfer from modern mining prospection to the field of archaeology, providing a methodology to facilitate the discovery of ancient mining sites. This method takes advantage of the thousands of geochemical analyses of streambed sediments, performed by national geological surveys to inventory mineral substances. In order to delineate geochemical anomalies, the datasets are treated following two different approaches: Exploratory Data Analysis and a fractal-based method often recognised as more powerful. Mineral prospectivity maps are then obtained by combining the results with a geographical information system. The s…
New data about the landscape of the first occupation of Mallorca: Coval Simó (Escorca, Mallorca)
2020
The Coval Simó shelter provides some of the oldest evidence for settlement on the island of Mallorca and the Balearic archipelago. It also has the peculiarity of being a habitat in a mountain area, so that the human groups that settled there had to adapt their agricultural and farming system to this environment. The plant remains (wood charcoal and seeds) recovered in the occupation levels allow us to address these issues, since they are the result of the different activities developed in this cavity: fuel for domestic activities, food for livestock, etc. The results of this study show that between the III and II millennium cal BC, an agricultural system based on livestock and cereal farmi…
Direct terrestrial–marine correlation demonstrates surprisingly late onset of the last interglacial in central Europe
2011
AbstractAn interdisciplinary study of a small sedimentary basin at Neumark Nord 2 (NN2), Germany, has yielded a high-resolution record of the palaeomagnetic Blake Event, which we are able to place at the early part of the last interglacial pollen sequence documented from the same section. We use this data to calculate the duration of this stratigraphically important event at 3400 ± 350 yr. More importantly, the Neumark Nord 2 data enables precise terrestrial–marine correlation for the Eemian stage in central Europe. This shows a remarkably large time lag of ca. 5000 yr between the MIS 5e ‘peak’ in the marine record and the start of the last interglacial in this region.
Bioavailable 87Sr/86Sr in different environmental samples — Effects of anthropogenic contamination and implications for isoscapes in past migration s…
2012
(87)Sr/(86)Sr reference maps (isoscapes) are a key tool for investigating past human and animal migrations. However, there is little understanding of which biosphere samples are best proxies for local bioavailable Sr when dealing with movements of past populations. In this study, biological and geological samples (ground vegetation, tree leaves, rock leachates, water, soil extracts, as well as modern and archeological animal teeth and snail shells) were collected in the vicinity of two early medieval cemeteries ("Thuringians", 5-6th century AD) in central Germany, in order to characterize (87)Sr/(86)Sr of the local biosphere. Animal tooth enamel is not appropriate in this specific context t…
The Late Ordovician glacial sedimentary system of the North Gondwana platform.
2009
International audience; The Late Ordovician (Hirnantian) glaciation is examined through the North Gondwana record. This domain extended from southern high palaeo-latitudes (southeastern Mauritania, Niger) to northern lower palaeo-latitudes (Morocco, Turkey) and covered a more than 4000 km-wide section perpendicular to ice-flow lines. A major mid-Hirnantian deglaciation event subdividing the Hirnantian glaciation in two first-order cycles is recognised. As best illustrated by the glacial record in western Libya, each cycle comprises 2-3 glacial phases separated by ice-front retreats several hundreds kilometres to the south. From ice-proximal to ice-distal regions, the number of glacial surfa…
Experimental socioecology: Integrative science for anthropocene landscape dynamics
2016
Abstract The emergence of coupled natural and human landscapes marked a transformative interval in the human past that set our species on the road to the urbanized, industrial world in which we live. This emergence enabled technologies and social institutions responsible for human-natural couplings in domains beyond rural, agricultural settings. The Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics Project (MedLand) is studying the interacting social and biophysical processes associated with these novel socioecological systems and their long-term consequences using a new form of 'experimental socioecology' made possible by recent advances in computation. We briefly describe the MedLand modeling laboratory, …