Journal of Archaeological Science

The study of the human past has conventionally been divided between two distinct academic disciplines depending upon the kind of evidence under investigation: "history", with its focus on written records, and "archaeology", which analyzes the remains of material culture. Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East aims to bridge this disciplinary divide by providing an international forum for scholarly discussions which integrate the studies of material culture with written documents. Interdisciplinary by nature, the journal offers a platform for professional historians and archaeologists alike to critically investigate points of confluence and divergence between the textual and the artifactual. We seek contributions from scholars working in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Contributions with a theoretical or methodological focus on the interface between archaeology and text are especially encouraged. By publishing all of its articles online, the Archaeology and Text seeks to disseminate its published papers immediately after the peer-review and editorial processes have been completed, providing timely publication and convenient access.

Archaeological work in advance of construction at a site on the edge of York, UK, yielded human remains of prehistoric to Romano-British date. Amongst these was a mandible and cranium, the intra-cranial space of which contained shrunken but macroscopically recognizable remains of a brain. Although the distinctive surface morphology of the organ is preserved, little recognizable brain histology survives. Though rare, the survival of brain tissue in otherwise skeletalised human remains from wet burial environments is not unique. A survey of the literature shows that similar brain masses have been previously reported in diverse circumstances. We argue for a greater awareness of these brain masses and for more attention to be paid to their detection and identification in order to improve the reporting rate and to allow a more comprehensive study of this rare archaeological survival.

Until now, the oldest known human hair was from a 9000-year-old South American mummy. Here we report fossil hairs of probable human origin that exceed that age by about 200,000 years. The hairs have been discovered in a brown hyaena (Parahyaena brunnea) coprolite from Gladysvale cave in South Africa. The coprolite is part of a hyaena latrine preserved in calcified cave sediment dated between 195,000 and 257,000 years ago. This find supports the hypothesis that hyaenas accumulated some of the early hominin remains found in cave sites, and provides a new source of information on Pleistocene mammals in the Sterkfontein Valley.

Auroral reports from ancient Chinese records and from Greece and Italy, from historical sources (Bamboo Annals, Tai ping yu lan, Ch'unch'iu period and Aristotle, Anaxagoras, Seneca, Pliny, Livy, respectively) in the 1 st millennium B.C., are discussed in relation to the geomagnetic pole (GP) coordinates through archaeo-magnetic inclination and declination data. It is shown that the expected auroral oval with its extension to a maximum of radius 30 o around the GP occasionally reaches the Chinese / Southern Mediterranean mid latitudes and eastern longitudes: for China 35 ο-40 ο and 95 ο-125 ο respectively, and for Greece/Central Italy, 35 ο-40 ο and 10 ο-25 ο respectively; two distant regions where two great cultures flourished. Of the nine Chinese records those of 1000-900 B.C., 687 B.C., 193 B.C., 139 B.C., 32 B.C., 30 B.C. and 15 B.C. records are justified by a mid latitude geomagnetic pole which gives certain mid latitude aurorae. For the 166 B.C. and 154 B.C. available archaeomagnetic data the position of the VGP does not justify observation of aurorae. Archaeo-magnetic data for Chinese accounts derived from South Korea, Japan and England reduced to mid China location are also used to determine GP at a reduced site of common latitude in China, but due attention and discussion of non-dipole magnetic sources and their calculated drift rates is made, to explain the unattainable observation of aurorae at central Chinese latitudes. Similarly, in southern Eastern Mediterranean area (Greece, Italy) 33 data are used and most are commensurable with the inclined GP towards mid latitudes, included within the auroral oval or at its southern maximum extension taking into account associated errors. Highly acceptable aurorae accounts and problematic ones are explained in terms of smooth or rapid, respectively , changes in the magnetic inclination and declination positions, reinforced by large age errors. Virtual Geomagnetic poles (VGP) for examined regions are ranging between 51 o to 71 o for latitude and between 1 o to 123 o for longitude for auroral observation dates of the 1st millennium B.C. to 1 st century A.D.

A B S T R A C T This paper argues that many of the existing cluster algorithms employed by practitioners are too unspecific for archaeological purposes. Based on a large landscape archaeological dataset a cluster algorithm for archaeological applications is developed. It accounts for shortfalls in generic cluster algorithms like the difficulty to cluster point clouds with varying densities in DBSCAN or the absence of a notion of noise in k-means. The application of the Archsphere algorithm is geared towards archaeological problem sets using readily available data from surveys and excavations as input. The introduced method performs the task of spatially dividing an archaeological dataset of monuments into clusters in a more meaningful way than is possible with standard procedures, effectively setting a solid foundation for a scale-consistent landscape archaeological analysis of monument assemblages.

Over the past twenty years our understanding of the Middle Preclassic (900–300 BCE) period has become much clearer through archaeological investigations at a number of sites located in the Upper Belize River Valley region of the eastern Maya Lowlands. While the picture of Middle Preclassic Maya life, including their material culture, has sharpened, there are aspects that remain uninvestigated. One artifact type, identified as greenstone triangulates, has been found at several Belize Valley sites and in a variety of contexts. Although a number of these multifaceted, polished groundstone items have been recovered, little research has focused on their distribution and function in the archaeological record. An evaluation of these items from primary contexts provides data for determining how they were used in daily social and/or ritual activities throughout the lowlands. Comparative data from other regions of Mesoamerica are also discussed. A detailed geological and petrographic pilot study of a sample of greenstone triangulates is provided, pointing conclusively to early, long-distance and complex exchange networks in exotic raw materials. Follow the linked URL for free access before November 11th, 2016. After that date, I will be happy to provide copies for personal use upon request. - SH