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Publication date: July 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 71 Author(s): Thomas S. DyeThe tempo plot, a statistical graphic designed for the archaeological study of rhythms of the long term that embodies a theory of archaeological evidence for the occurrence of events, is introduced. The graphic summarizes the tempo of change in the occurrence of archaeological events using the model states generated by the Markov Chain Monte Carlo routine at the heart of Bayesian calibration software. Tempo plots are applied to the archaeological record of Hawai‘i to expose rhythms of i) tradition in taro pond-field construction, ii) innovation in temple construction, and iii) fashion in the harvest of branch coral for use as a religious offering. Rhythms of the long term identify a hitherto unrecognized transformation of religious practice in Hawai‘i, establish temporal coincidence in temple construction in leeward sections of Maui and Hawai‘i Islands previously described as regionally idiosyncratic, suggest shallow temporal limits to the use of the direct historical approach in Hawai‘i, and disclose processes at work in the political economy recorded at the time of western Contact.

Publication date: August 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 72 Author(s): Vladimír Sládek, Martin Hora, Kristýna Farkašová, Thomas R. RocekThis paper proposes and tests the idea that a major change in technology associated with the grinding of cereals may account for changes in asymmetry in the upper arms of women in the Neolithic through Iron Age across a large area of Europe. It has been observed that bilateral asymmetry in humeral strength (i.e., polar section modulus) decreased to near zero in early agricultural females, but increased again during the Iron Age. These changes in asymmetry in females have been interpreted as the direct consequence of the adoption of the saddle quern at the start of the Neolithic and its subsequent replacement by the rotary quern in the Iron Age. To test the impact of these alternative cereal grinding methods, we tested the efficiency of saddle and rotary quern grinding with 16 female volunteers and the effect of grinding on muscle activity of the upper limb with 20 female volunteers. We used electromyography to measure muscle activity in the pectoralis, deltoideus, infraspinatus and triceps muscles and adjusted muscle activity for efficiency and muscle size. Saddle quern grinding was 4.3 times less efficient than rotary quern grinding and produced a significantly higher amount of coarse- and middle-grained flour but a significantly lower amount of very fine grained flour than rotary quern grinding. Saddle quern grinding showed symmetrical muscle activity in all four studied muscles, whereas rotary quern grinding yielded consistent directional asymmetry in a majority of muscles even during bimanual rotation. Saddle quern grinding required about twice as much muscle activity per kg of grain when adjusted for muscle size than rotary quern grinding. Our results support the view that saddle quern grinding may have played a major role in the decrease in directional asymmetry in humeral strength in early agricultural females and that the adoption of the rotary quern during the Iron Age may have increased humeral directional asymmetry mainly because of increased asymmetrical loading and the reduced time needed for grinding in favor of other manipulative tasks.

Publication date: September 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 73 Author(s): Sarah Maltoni, Alberta Silvestri, Alessandra Marcante, Gianmario MolinThe present paper focuses on the archaeological, chemical and isotopic characterisation of glass finds from the Domus of Tito Macro (former Domus dei Fondi Cossar) in Aquileia (Italy), dated between the 1st and the 7th century AD. The assemblage comprises both vessels and glassworking residues, including a few chunks. Aims of the study are the identification of the main glass compositions and their contextualisation in Roman and Late Antique reference groups, and of provenance of primary glass. Chemical analyses were conducted by XRF and EPMA. All the analysed fragments are silica-soda-lime glasses, produced with natron as a flux, and are compositionally similar to the Roman coloured (intentionally and unintentionally) and colourless (antimony-, manganese-, and antimony + manganese-decoloured) groups and to the Late Antique groups HIMT, Série 3.2 and Levantine 1. Specific compositional traits of HIMT glass circulating in the north-Adriatic area and a scarcity of Levantine 1 glass are evidenced. The presence of rare HIT blue glasses including a chunk suggests that colouring took place also at primary stage of production. Sr and Nd isotopic analyses, performed on a selection of samples, confirmed the eastern Mediterranean origin of the glasses, although with minor internal differences depending on the compositional group. Chemical and isotopic data suggest a continuity between the Roman and Late Antique glassmaking in terms of sand deposits and sand/flux ratio, although with a major change in the decolouring technique after the 4th century AD. The prompt reception of the Late Antique glass compositions took place in Aquileia alongside the persistence of earlier compositions, probably with the aim of satisfying different segments of the glass market.

Publication date: August 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 72 Author(s): Nohemi Sala, Ana Pantoja-Pérez, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Adrián Pablos, Ignacio MartínezThe Sima de los Huesos (SH) site has provided the largest collection of hominin crania in the fossil record, offering an unprecedented opportunity to perform a complete Forensic-Taphonomic study on a population from the Middle Pleistocene. The fractures found in seventeen crania from SH display a postmortem fracturation pattern, which occurred in the dry bone stage and is compatible with collective burial assemblages. Nevertheless, in addition to the postmortem fractures, eight crania also display some typical perimortem traumas. By using CT images we analyzed these fractures in detail. Interpersonal violence as a cause for the perimortem fractures can be confirmed for one of the skulls, Cranium 17 and also probable for Cranium 5 and Cranium 11. For the rest of the crania, although other causes cannot be absolutely ruled out, the violence-related traumas are the most plausible scenario for the perimortem fractures. If this hypothesis is confirmed, we could interpret that interpersonal violence was a recurrent behavior in this population from the Middle Pleistocene.

Publication date: June 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 70 Author(s): Monica MărgăritRaw materials deriving from the aquatic environment were systematically used for personal ornamentation by modern humans throughout their entire history. In this study we analyse three types of raw materials: Lithoglyphus sp. shells, Unio sp. valves and Cyprinus carpio opercular bones. The central purpose of this paper is to initiate a database of the way in which wear develops according to the system of attachment and the longevity of use. In order to identify the costs invested in the manufacturing of these types of items, both from the point of view of time and effort, an experimental programme has been developed, which permits the recording of all the variables (means of gathering the raw material, technological stages, time recorded for each operation, and tools used). Furthermore, it was set the task of wearing the beads experimentally processed, as adornments, for two years, and of periodically evaluating the perforation and the surface of the pieces under a microscope. Moreover, observations made on archaeological specimens were compared to experimental replicas. The archaeological assemblages from the Romanian Neolithic were used as a case study to illustrate the relevance of the results.

Publication date: September 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 73 Author(s): Juan José Ibáñez, Patricia C. Anderson, Jesús González-Urquijo, Juan GibajaWhen and where cereal cultivation and domestication took place in the Near East are still matters of debate. This quantitative analysis, using confocal microscopy to study “sickle gloss” texture on flint tools used for cereal harvesting, shows that wild cereals were most probably cultivated during the 13th millennium BP in the Middle Euphrates. At that moment, a local and continuous process of cereal domestication began to unfold in this region of the Northern Levant, lasting for over 3 millennia and culminating at the end of the 10th millennium BP. Thus, our research provides a new method for investigating the origins of agriculture, while the data gathered allow us to support the hypothesis of early cereal cultivation during the Younger Dryas and the protracted model of plant domestication, pointing to the Middle Euphrates as one region where this process occurred.

Publication date: July 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 71 Author(s): Pascale Gerbault, Rosalind Gillis, Jean-Denis Vigne, Anne Tresset, Stéphanie Bréhard, Mark G. ThomasArchaeozoological mortality profiles have been used to infer site-specific subsistence strategies. There is however no common agreement on the best way to present these profiles and confidence intervals around age class proportions. In order to deal with these issues, we propose the use of the Dirichlet distribution and present a new approach to perform age-at-death multivariate graphical comparisons. We demonstrate the efficiency of this approach using domestic sheep/goat dental remains from 10 Cardial sites (Early Neolithic) located in South France and the Iberian Peninsula. We show that the Dirichlet distribution in age-at-death analysis can be used: (i) to generate Bayesian credible intervals around each age class of a mortality profile, even when not all age classes are observed; and (ii) to create 95% kernel density contours around each age-at-death frequency distribution when multiple sites are compared using correspondence analysis. The statistical procedure we present is applicable to the analysis of any categorical count data and particularly well-suited to archaeological data (e.g. potsherds, arrow heads) where sample sizes are typically small.

Publication date: August 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 72 Author(s): Michael Holton PriceI extend Metcalfe and Barlow’s field processing model to account for the opportunity cost of home labor and test the model using ethnographic observations of clove harvesting, cacao harvesting, and sago processing on the island of Seram in eastern Indonesia. The ethnographic observations are consistent with the opportunity cost of home labor time being between 0.58 and 0.96 that of field labor time. Since the Metcalfe-Barlow model assumes that the opportunity cost of home labor is zero, this refinement of the Metcalfe-Barlow model is warranted in the social and ecological context in which the data was collected and in archaeological contexts where the opportunity cost of home labor cannot clearly be ignored. The extended model predicts a lower threshold than the Metcalfe-Barlow model for the critical transport time beyond which field processing should occur, which has broad implications for recognizing and explaining archaeological and paleoecological signatures of subsistence transitions. I illustrate this by showing that for sago processing the extended model predicts a threshold that is less than half that predicted by the Metcalfe-Barlow model. This low threshold suggests that sago is unlikely to be processed at home. Given this and the perishable nature of both sago starch and traditional containers used to transport it, the limited evidence for sago in archaeological assemblages should not be taken as evidence that it was an unimportant resource in prehistory.

Publication date: July 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 71 Author(s): Jean-Victor Pradeau, Didier Binder, Chrystèle Vérati, Jean-Marc Lardeaux, Stéphan Dubernet, Yannick Lefrais, Martine RegertIn the N.-W. Mediterranean area, the development of the Neolithic way of life during the 6th millennium cal. BCE is related to the spread of sailing pioneer groups. In the course of the 5th millennium cal. BCE, more stable agro-pastoral settlements expand their hold on the hinterland and exchange networks increase in complexity (obsidian, flints, clastic rocks). Although previous research showed high variability in the N.W. Mediterranean Neolithic diffusion modalities, the place of colouring materials, naturally abundant in this area, has received scant attention despite their technical and symbolic value. With the aim of assessing the place of these materials in the initial Neolithic package and within the development of the neolithisation process, we investigated series of more than 2000 blocks of colouring materials from two key-sites (Pendimoun and Giribaldi) recently excavated by one of us (DB), with dates ranging from 5750 to 3650 cal. BCE. This study was implemented by geological surveys that allowed the establishment of cartography of putative sources of raw colouring materials and the determination of their nature and composition. Combining petrographic examination and physico-chemical-characterisation (SEM-EDS, XRD), we determined a wide range of raw materials: psammitic sandstone, allochthonous and parallochthonous bauxite, oolithic ironstone, oxidised marcasite and ferruginous rocks derived from weathered glauconitic limestones. Comparing archaeological series to this frame of reference highlights two contrasting economic systems: one based on exploitation of local sources from the Early to the Middle Neolithic, the other one founded on a dual use of both close geomaterials and exogenous rocks during Middle Neolithic.

Publication date: August 2016Source:Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 72 Author(s): Eleanor Blakelock, Susan La Niece, Chris FernThe Staffordshire Hoard is the largest ever find of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork. The collection comprises many hundreds of objects, in approximately 3900 fragments. Most objects are fittings from swords, but there are also fragments from at least one helmet, and a small but significant collection of Christian objects.An initial study of 16 gold objects from the collection suggested that some form of deliberately induced depletion gilding had taken place to remove both silver and copper from the surface of the metal (Blakelock, In press). Subsequently, both surface and quantitative core alloy SEM-EDX analysis was undertaken on a further 114 Hoard objects. Over 222 individual components (i.e. different parts of objects) were analysed during this study.This is the largest quantitative survey of Anglo-Saxon gold and, contrary to expectations, no reliable relationship was found between the fineness of alloy used and object date, although the low copper content is consistent with the use of recycled coinage as a source of gold. However, over 100 components were judged to be deliberately depleted in silver at their surface which, it is argued, was the result of a deliberate and probably widespread Anglo-Saxon workshop practice. Previously unrecognised, this involved the depletion gilding of sheet gold to create contrast between decorative components, as well as to enhance colour. Furthermore, in the light of the identification of this systematic surface enrichment, similar approaches should be considered to investigate goldsmithing practices in other cultures and time frames.