Archaeologies-Journal of the World Archaeological Congress最新文献

Earthen architecture, an enduring legacy of human ingenuity, has historically served as a source of durable and sustainable shelter across civilizations. Despite this significance, several of the world’s earthen architectural sites are now facing abandonment and obsolescence, as is the case of Ksar Khanguet Sidi Nadji in the Algerian Sahara. To address this critical situation, we propose a sustainable, eco-friendly, and cost-effective solution for the restoration of the urban fabric of the Ksar that takes into account the needs of its residents and its heritage value. Our approach utilizes the anastylosis method which implies that we reuse original on-site components as building materials whenever possible. We introduce new materials only when necessary, after subjecting them to rigorous testing and control. Additionally, we take into account the complex challenges of human, natural, and technical factors involved in the restoration process, offering a practical solution to restore and preserve the earthen heritage of the Ksar while benefiting its residents.

The fields of Design and Archaeology keenly understand culture as viewed through a material and technological prism. At a time when data are viewed as a ‘new material’, one that can be stored, compressed, collected, and mined, digital tools are snapshots of our technological capabilities and cultural interests. The making of design for debate objects is a practice employed to raise questions and test the boundaries of what is expected of the material world around us. This article details a series of design works of knapped flint hand-axes that were 3D-scanned, processed, and worked in their malleable digital material state and reborn into the physical world using various contemporary fabrication technologies and materials. The pairing of a 3D-printed nylon object with its lithic-technology previous self allows for a glimpse at the journey traveled, both materially and technologically, and in terms of time and our species' evolution.

What is knowable about stone tool users’ knowledge? The people of the New Guinea Highlands were among the last to use stone implements routinely in their daily lives. These comprised both lithic flake tools and polished stone axes. Their classification of these objects challenges our notion of taxonomic knowledge, which involves agreement over defined classes, whereas they evidence considerable disagreement with unclear categories. It is necessary to situate stone within the egalitarian acephalous cultures where reciprocity features centrally to appreciate the ontological status of stone.

Ethnographic and ethnohistoric research concerning Maya conceptions of stone illustrate that the Maya consider stone animate. In archaeology, discussions of animate stone focus on ritual contexts. ‘Utilitarian’ objects, like debitage, are recognized as symbolic when deposited in ritual spaces but not in quotidian ones. However, the animate nature of stone suggests that its significance should be discussed in quotidian contexts. We compare chert debitage from ritual and production areas in the Maya lowlands utilizing ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and epigraphic information about the agency of stone, specifically chert. These discussions highlight the integration of Indigenous perceptions of non-human objects in archaeology interpretation.

The enigmatic presence of uniquely shaped, spherical stones attracted the attention of archaeologists at Oldowan sites in Africa as early as a century ago. Shaped stone balls (SSBs) are among the oldest implements used by humans. For nearly 2 million years, they accompanied ancient humans as a stable cultural anchor throughout the Lower Paleolithic period and beyond. These tools reflect techno-cultural processes and Lower Paleolithic human perceptions of their relationships with the non-human animal world. Nonetheless, the few techno-functional studies focussing on these items have only scraped the surface of their research potential. In this paper, I will explore evidence suggesting that SSBs embody the relations of ancient humans with a particular animal—the horse—and propose that they might have played an active role in the social and cosmological realms of Lower Paleolithic (LP) ontology. Several previous studies indicate that they were shaped through a meticulous process. Traces of use and organic residues of marrow/fat associate them with bone-breaking activities. Furthermore, a comprehensive contextual analysis points to a correlation, observed at various sites, between SSBs and large herbivores, specifically horses. This correlation supports the premise that early humans relied on SSBs to extract calories from horses and points to a possible link between the simultaneous disappearance of large horses and SSBs from the Levantine landscape at the end of the LP. The role of horses in Paleolithic diet and culture is well reflected in the archaeological record. Following recent anthropological views, I advocate that SSBs played an important role in the human–horse alignment, embodying within them the world of perceptions and relationships of ancient humans with this non-human animal who shared their habitat.

Late Neolithic long barrows are commonly found throughout Central and Northwestern Europe, within the Funnel Beaker Culture territory. The sites of this Culture are known from Bohemia covering a period between 3900 and 3400 BC. However, long barrows have not been detected in Bohemia for a long time. The main reason is that they are located in areas where they were affected by modern ploughing. A significant contribution to their recognition was the remote sensing of modern fields, especially aerial archaeology. Current research in Bohemia provided new evidence of dozens of long barrows of several types, significantly expanding our knowledge of this phenomenon in the southeastern margins of its distribution. A new type of long barrow has been identified in Bohemia using remote sensing and current excavation data. The characteristic parameters of the long barrows in Bohemia are an east-west orientation with the ceremonial place in the eastern front and the delineation of the perimeter by a palisade trough or a ditch. The mounds can be divided into at least two structural and chronological forms. The first is the narrow and sometimes extremely long mound with perimeter defined by a palisade trough dating to the 3900–3800 BC. The second type of barrow is enclosed by a trapezoidal ditch. Based on radiocarbon dating, these structures were constructed during the 3700–3600 BC. This type of monument is currently known exclusively from Bohemia.

Bored stones are prolific in South Africa and found across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Most are surface finds, but some have been excavated from Pleistocene Stone Age deposits dating to between about 11,000 to 45,000 years ago. Others are found in association with late Holocene Iron Age farmer occupations, and in some places, they have been used during historical times. The relationships between humans and these objects, therefore, transcend socio-economical boundaries. The stones are mostly thought of as weights for digging sticks—but some groups in sub-Saharan Africa also had/have ritualised, symbolic relationships with them. Here, I explore bored stones in their ritual and spiritual contexts, drawing largely on historical accounts. I also provide a summary of archaeological finds to demonstrate the possible time depth of such relationships.

The inherent qualities of stone (hardness, durability, etc.) can explain why it serves as a prime medium of the sacred in different cultures, and stones commonly fix boundaries and territorialize the religious landscape. An investigation of the qualia of stone thus provides a useful baseline for cross-cultural comparison. However, an analysis of Andean and Angkorian rock veneration demonstrates that the power of stones often lies not in their obdurate stasis but in their fluid capacity to interact with liquids and precipitate metamorphosis and deterritorialization. Ultimately, the worlds created by stony beings varied significantly, as determined by historically specific cosmologies.

Evidence from the Levantine Late Lower Paleolithic sites of Jaljulia and Qesem Cave suggests that Quina scrapers, an innovation in a category of tools used mostly for butchery, emerged with changes in hunting practices. Quina scrapers were often made of non-local flint from the Samarian highlands, a home range of fallow deer populations throughout the ages. The predominance of fallow deer in the human diet following the disappearance of megafauna made scrapers key tools in human subsistence. Particular stone tools and particular prey animals, thus, became embedded in an array of practical, cosmological, and ontological conceptions whose origin we trace back to Paleolithic times. The mountains of Samaria, a source of both animals and stone under discussion, were part of this nexus. We present archaeological and ethnographic evidence of the practical and perceptual bonds between Paleolithic humans, animals, stones, and the landscape they shared.

Human dependency on stone has its origins in Lower Paleolithic times, and some of the most primordial elements in human-stone relationships are rooted in those early days. In this paper, we focus our attention on extensive Paleolithic stone quarries discovered and studied in the Galilee, Israel. We propose a triadic model that connects stone outcrops, elephants, and water bodies to shed light on what made stone quarries places of significance, beginning in the Lower Paleolithic, and continuing throughout the ages.