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showing 10 items of 25013 documents
Ofrendas y rituales postclásicos dedicados a Chaahk en el sitio maya de Chilonché (Petén, Guatemala)
2020
La adaptación de los mayas postclásicos a las nuevas condiciones de vida surgidas a raíz de la crisis generalizada del final del período Clásico mediante respuestas resilientes se ha convertido en un tema de creciente interés por parte de los investigadores mayistas en las últimas décadas. El estudio de vestigios arqueológicos adscritos al Postclásico puede ayudar a entender por qué ciertas tradiciones fueron abandonadas, mientras que otras han perdurado a lo largo del tiempo, como es el caso de las ceremonias del culto a la lluvia. Ejemplo de ello son los hallazgos de ofrendas y otros vestigios arquitectónicos realizados en Chilonché, un antiguo asentamiento urbano maya fundado en la cuenc…
Ivory Craftsmanship, Trade and Social Significance in the Southern Iberian Copper Age: The Evidence from the PP4-Montelirio Sector of Valencina de la…
2013
Because of its great potential to provide data on contacts and overseas trade, ivory has aroused a great deal of interest since the very start of research into Iberian late prehistory. Research recently undertaken by the German Archaeological Institute in Madrid in collaboration with a number of other institutions has provided valuable contributions to the study of ivory in the Iberian Copper Age and Early Bronze Age. One of the archaeological sites that is contributing the most data for analysing ivory from the Copper Age in southern Iberia is Valencina de la Concepción (Seville), which is currently the focus of several debates on the development of social complexity. This article contribu…
The influence of religious identity and socio-economic status on diet over time, an example from medieval France
2019
International audience; In Southern France as in other parts of Europe, significant changes occurred in settlement patterns between the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Small communities gathered to form, by the tenth century, villages organized around a church. This development was the result of a new social and agrarian organization. Its impact on lifestyles and, more precisely, on diet is still poorly understood. The analysis of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bone collagen from the inhabitants of the well-preserved medieval rural site Missignac-Saint Gilles le Vieux (fifth to thirteenth centuries, Gard, France) provides insight into their dietary practices and enab…
Causes and consequences of past and projected Scandinavian summer temperatures, 500-2100 AD
2011
Tree rings dominate millennium-long temperature reconstructions and many records originate from Scandinavia, an area for which the relative roles of external forcing and internal variation on climatic changes are, however, not yet fully understood. Here we compile 1,179 series of maximum latewood density measurements from 25 conifer sites in northern Scandinavia, establish a suite of 36 subset chronologies, and analyse their climate signal. A new reconstruction for the 1483–2006 period correlates at 0.80 with June–August temperatures back to 1860. Summer cooling during the early 17th century and peak warming in the 1930s translate into a decadal amplitude of 2.9°C, which agrees with existin…
Cultural evolution and environmental change in Central Europe between 40 and 15 ka
2020
The role of environmental change in the evolution of cultural traits is a topic of long-standing scientific debate with strongly contrasting views. Major obstacles for assessing environmental impacts on the evolution of material culture are the fragmentary nature of archaeological and – to a somewhat lesser extent – geoscientific archives and the insufficient chronological resolution of these archives and related proxy data. Together these aspects are causing difficulties in data synchronization. By no means does this paper attempt to solve these issues, but rather aims at shifting the focus from demonstrating strict chains of causes and events to describing roughly contemporaneous developm…
Needles made of human bones from Xochimilco
2018
Abstract This paper presents the study of needles made of long human bones (Homo sapiens) from the region of Xochimilco, now a quarter in Mexico City, which in pre-Hispanic times was one of the cities conquered by the Aztec empire. We shall discuss the development and use of these needles, as well as the identification of the raw material they are made of and a proposal about what people these bones were obtained from: captives or craftsmen's relatives? The archaeological household at San Pedro, in Xochimilco, presents in its early stages (12th century–15th century) stone technology, and in its final stages (16th century, around the time of arrival of the Spanish conquerors) the possible us…
Climate indices in historical climate reconstructions: a global state of the art
2021
Narrative evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important record of climate variability for periods prior to the onset of systematic meteorological data collection. A common approach used by historical climatologists to convert such qualitative information into continuous quantitative proxy data is through the generation of ordinal-scale climate indices. There is, however, considerable variability in the types of phenomena reconstructed using an index approach and the practice of index development in different parts of the world. This review, written by members of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) CRIAS working group – a collective of climate historians a…
Recent advances in paleoflood hydrology: From new archives to data compilation and analysis
2018
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Introduction. Leave no stone unturned: Perspectives on ground stone artefact research
2016
Ground stone tools served in many physical and social contexts through millennia, reflecting a wide variety of functions. Although ground stone tool studies were neglected for much of early archaeology, the last few decades witnessed a notable international uptick in the way archaeologists confront this multifaceted topic. Today, with the advance of archaeology as a discipline, research into ground stone artefacts is moving into a new phase that integrates high resolution documentation with new methodological, analytical techniques, and technological approaches. These open new vistas for an array of studies and wide-ranging interpretive endeavours related to understanding ground stone tool …
Introducing the Human Factor in Predictive Modelling: a Work in Progress
2012
International audience; In this paper we present the results of a study into integrating socio-cultural factors into predictive modelling. So far, predictive modelling has largely neglected the social and cultural dimensions of past landscapes. To maintain its value for archaeological research, therefore, it needs new methodologies, concepts and theories. For this study, we have departed from the methodology developed in the 1990s during the Archaeomedes Project. In this project, cross-regional comparisons of settlement location factors were made by analyzing the environmental context of Roman settlements in the French Rhône Valley. For the current research, we expanded the set of variables…