Journal of Archaeological Science最新文献

Here we present a novel approach that combines soil micromorphology with the analysis of magnetically oriented samples to improve the interpretation of archaeomagnetic results. The aim is to test whether irregular archaeomagnetic data can be examined with micromorphological soil analysis in a single sample methodology, allowing said archaeomagnetic data to contribute to more meaningful archaeological interpretation. Experimental work included reusing oriented magnetic samples previously treated with sodium silicate resin, which were then re-impregnated with polyester or epoxy resins to produce thin sections. Initial experimentation was conducted to understand the potential effects of sodium silicate treatment on the optical and mechanical qualities of the thin sections. When no significant optical anomalies were identified, the methodology was tested using samples gathered from hearths at level X (ca. 52 ky BP) at the Middle Palaeolithic site of El Salt, Spain. Thin section analysis was conducted on archaeological hearth samples to identify syn- and post-depositional processes influencing the magnetic data. Micromorphological analysis of magnetic samples can identify the causes of anomalous magnetic direction, attributing them to specific sedimentary features rather than sampling or measurement errors. Discrepancies in magnetic signatures are linked to the presence or absence of certain combustion layers, such as black and white layers, as well as the impact of bioturbation and mechanical deformation. This integrative approach improves the interpretive potential of archaeomagnetic studies by not only validating the magnetic data as representative of the deposit but also providing a visual understanding of the sedimentary structure creating the magnetic signature. Our findings advocate for the routine inclusion of thin section inspection in archaeomagnetic research, particularly when dealing with complex sedimentary sequences and ambiguous magnetic data.

Age estimation plays a significant role in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology. However, widely-used traditional methods involving macroscopic observation suffer from subjectivity and statistical bias. The present research aims to minimize both issues by applying computational and mathematical approaches. A laser scanner was used to reconstruct 890 auricular surfaces of adult individuals from three known-age European skeletal collections. Dirichlet Normal Energy (DNE) was applied to assess the curvature of the auricular surface and its relationship with known age-at-death. Ten variables had high correlations, including total DNE per Total polygon faces, Mean value of DNE on apex, proportion of polygon faces with DNE of less than 0.0001 and proportion of polygon faces with DNE of over 0.6. The variables were used to develop age prediction models which are freely available in a novel R package, JSDNE. The package predicts age mathematically, objectively, and user-independently. It includes three functions: principal component quadratic discriminant analysis (PCQDA), principal component regression analysis (PCR), and principal component logistic regression analysis (PCLR), which produce age estimates with 91%, 76%, and 92.9% levels of accuracy, respectively. JSDNE package (https://cran.r-project.org/package=JSDNE) can be downloaded automatically using install.packages("JSDNE"). The detailed code and the raw data of this study are openly available at https://github.com/jisunjang19/cran-JSDNE, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.12708779 or ‘JSDNE’ package.

The farming-pastoral ecotone (FPE) is considered to be the most sensitive and unstable area in relation to the surrounding environment in northern China. The ecological improvement during the Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO) profoundly influenced livelihoods and adaptability of early sedentary communities. The reason for diverse utilization of mammals and specific subsistence strategies among different FPE sites remains unclear due to the lack of reconstructions demonstrating explicit spatial distribution and abundance of species that people ate. In five case studies during HCO from FPE in China, I illustrate what palaeodistribution modelling powered by Species Distribution Models (SDMs) tells us about three different large and medium-sized mammal species, and how the integration of this information with Site Catchment Analysis (SCA) helps to understand resource choices and subsistence strategies in these different sites. Analysis indicates that reduced residential mobility at FPE during HCO is associated with the spatial distribution of mammals within site catchments. Inhabitants of the ecotone may adapt to distinct mammal resources by long-distance logistical mobility, high residential mobility, improving technological flexibility, or intensifying the utilization of certain wild species. This evidence provides valuable insights into the highly flexible adaptability of early sedentism in FPE.

Qanats are a remarkable type of ancient hydraulic structure for sustainable water distribution in arid environments that use subterranean channels to transport water from highland or mountainous areas. The presence of the qanat system is marked by a line of regularly spaced shafts visible from the surface, which can be used to detect qanats using satellite imagery. Typically, qanats have been documented by field mapping or manual digitisation within a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. This process is time-consuming due to the numerous shafts within each qanat line. However, several automated methods for detecting qanat structures have been explored, using techniques such as morphological filters, custom convolutional neural networks (CNN) and, more recently, YOLOv5 and Mask R-CNN. These approaches used high-resolution RGB images and CORONA images. However, the use of black and white CORONA in CNNs has been limited in its applicability due to a high rate of false positives.

This paper explores the potential of YOLOv9 in processing the black and white HEXAGON (KH-9) high-resolution spy satellite system launched in 1971. Two areas in Afghanistan (Maiwand) and Iran (Gorgan Plain) were selected to train the system images extracted from HEXAGON imagery and artificial synthetic data. The training dataset was augmented using the Albumentation library, which increased the number of tiles used. The model was tested using two types of HEXAGON imagery for selected areas in Afghanistan (Maiwand), Iran (Gorgan Plain) and Morocco (Rissani), and CORONA imagery in Iran (Gorgan Plain).

Our study provided a model capable of predicting the location of qanat shafts with a precision of over 0.881 and a recall of 0.627 for most of the case studies tested. This is the first case study aimed at detecting qanats in different landscapes using different types of satellite imagery. Using real, augmented, and artificial data allowed us to generalise the representation of qanats into lineal groups of circular features. Thanks to applying labelling for individual qanats and their pairs as separate classes, our approach eliminated most of the isolated and clustered false positives.

The age of prehistoric human sites serves as a fundamental basis for studying the relationship between human activities and landscape changes in the humid subtropical mountains of South China. The presence of pottery in these archaeological sites is widespread and offers a valuable resource for precise dating purposes. The Longtoushan (LTS) site, located in the northern mountains of Fujian Province, contains a rich variety of pottery types from various periods, representing a rare multi-period stratigraphic overlap in this area and playing a crucial role in constructing the cultural sequence and lineage of prehistoric and ancient times in this region. In this study, we employed thermoluminescence (TL) and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) techniques to establish the age of pottery samples collected from the LTS site situated in the upper Minjiang River region of southeast China for the first time, while also comparing our findings with other dating methods to construct a chronological framework for the site. The results showed that: (1) The samples analyzed in this study can be classified according to the peak strength of 325 °C TL signal at natural and regenerative doses of quartz. Samples with weak TL signal at 325 °C (type II samples) showed high recuperation and equivalent dose underestimation at a low preheat temperature (220 °C) in OSL test. (2) Conventional SAR procedures employed for type I samples are not suitable for type II samples. Type II samples require additional OSL stimulation towards the end of the cycle and an extended stimulation duration. (3) The application of various dating methods has revealed that the LTS site represents a long-term settlement in the humid subtropical mountains of South China, commencing around 4.6–4.4 thousand years ago (ka). Specifically, the dating of pottery pieces from kiln sites and tombs in the late Neolithic period provides a specific temporal reference for further understanding of prehistoric human culture and production behavior in the humid mountains of Fujian.

Moated sites are crucial for revealing the formation of early civilizations and societies in Southeast Asia, and a significant amount of effort has been expended in investigating their distribution. This work is the first application of deep learning object detection methods to identify moated sites from time series satellite images. We presented multi-information fusion data (N-RGB) based on the fusion of multispectral and vegetation indices from Sentinel-2 time series imagery, generated a dataset of moated sites via the data augmentation method, and improved the YOLOv5s model by adding bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) structures for automatically identifying moated sites. The results indicate that the model trained with time series N-RGB data improves precision, recall, and mAP by more than 20.0% compared with single image data. The improved model was able to enhance the identification of small, moated sites and achieved 100% detection in a test of 100 moated sites. Ultimately, 629 targets were detected in northeast Thailand, with a false-negative rate of less than 3%, and 116 probable sites were identified. Among these, 6 probable sites were highly likely to be moated sites, as visually verified by high-resolution GEE imagery. In addition, among the targets automatically detected in other regions of continental Southeast Asia, the 5, 3, 2, 1, and 7 most probable sites were identified in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and other regions of Thailand, respectively. In summary, our approach enables the automatic detection of exposed and visible moated sites from satellite imagery, and could improve site discovery and documentation capabilities, opening new perspectives in larger geographic site units and even in civilization surveys.

The 1st millennium CE represents a period of significant change in the agricultural landscape of southern Italy. Sheep and goats are among the most common faunal remains recovered from archaeological excavations of this period, but the contribution of these animals to the agricultural economy (particularly wool production) is often discussed through textual sources. This paper synthesises caprine taxonomic abundance trends using a Bayesian multilevel modelling approach that employs a beta-binomial distribution to address the problems of overdispersion and unequal assemblage/group sizes. Our models contribute directly to the problem by suggesting a period of change in livestock management practices around the 4th and 6th centuries CE, when the region's shift to cereal farming appears to be accompanied by an increase in sheep and goat numbers.

There is a long-standing view that, in the Roman world, transport by sea and river was very much cheaper than by land. Previous analyses of transport costs have relied primarily on a few surviving historical records, notably the Edict on Maximum Prices issued by Diocletian in 301 CE. Here we outline an alternative method for deriving relative costs of transportation by different modes using materials recovered in archaeological excavations. We apply this to the distribution of Late Romano-British pottery (c. 250–400 CE) to calculate the cost ratios of transportation by road, river and sea to rural settlements and towns in lowland Britannia. The analysis suggests a best fit cost ratio of road to rivers and sea of 1:3:4 (i.e. transport by road was three times as costly as by river and four times that by sea), with 95% confidence interval of roads to rivers 1:1–5 and roads to sea of 1:1–9. These values are broadly consistent with transport cost ratios of 1:4:8 in England in the first half of the fourteenth century, when the country's transport network had reached a degree of integration comparable with late Roman Britain.

During the Longshan Era, the production and use of jade, including bi-discs, cong-tubes, axes, and other artifacts, were prevalent in several regions situated along the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River. The exchanges and interactions between them have been discussed by many scholars. Among these societies that valued jades, Ganqing region of Qijia Culture is regarded as a significant source of some valuable jade materials like nephrite. The non-destructive testing of jade artifacts excavated from the Lajia site, a central settlement of the Qijia culture, revealed a comparatively high proportion of nephrite, as well as a rich variety of materials. This demonstrates the acknowledgment and utilization of jade materials, particularly the valuable nephrite in the surrounding region. The availability of jade materials and uncomplicated jade processing created the conditions for household production of jade. Needs for ritual and exchange are considered as potiential driving force behind such production. Evidences of producing and using amazonite artifacts and trumpet-shaped tubes suggests long-distance exchange and influence of jade artifacts/materials. The circulation of nephrite materials may also have been embedded in this network of exchange.