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Graham Connah, Forgotten Africa, An introduction to its archaeology. (Abingdon 2004).
Connah Forgotten-Africa-Abb.zip
Aspasia Bizopoulou, Task Profiles and Gender Wage-Gaps Within Occupations, Preliminary Draft. unpublished conference proceedings (Bristol 2017), 1–22.
Recent literature for the US, Germany and Australia shows that a significant proportion of the unexplained gender wage-gap can be found within very narrowly defined occupations. I find that this pattern also holds true in European countries. This finding raises the question of why men and women working in very similar jobs are paid substantially different wages. Using a newly available dataset with detailed job-task and occupational information, I investigate whether task segregation by gender within a narrowly defined occupation can account for within-occupational gender wage-gaps. I find that higher levels of task segregation by gender increase the wage-gap within an occupation, in favour of men. I also find that, within occupations, the effect of task segregation on wages is driven by certain tasks that carry a significant wage premium and which are consistently performed by men much more than by women.
Keywords: task approach | gender wage-gap | occupations.
Emery N. Brown & Marlene Behrmann, Controversy in statistical analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data. PNAS 114 (2017), E3368–E3369.
The overstatements of the original paper and the subsequent media attention cast doubt on fMRI as a technique for studying brain function, and possibly even caused damage to the field of cognitive neuroscience (2–4). In PNAS, Cox et al. (7) and Kessler et al. (8) offer clarifications about the original paper and its revision. Eklund et al. have added their rejoinder (9). Several scientific points have now been mostly resolved.
Robert W. Cox, Gang Chen, Daniel R. Glen, Richard C. Reynolds & Paul A. Taylor, fMRI clustering and false-positive rates. PNAS 114 (2017), E3370–E3371.
We strongly disagree with Eklund et al.’s (1) summary statement: “Alarmingly, the parametric methods can give a very high degree of false positives (up to 70 %, compared with the nominal 5 %).” For comparison, their own nonparametric method’s results actually showed up to 40 % FPR. When characterizing results, medians or percentile ranges are generally more informative summary statistics than maxima.
Anders Eklund, Thomas E. Nichols & Hans Knutsson, Data and code sharing is the way forward for fMRI, Reply to Brown and Behrmann, Cox et al., and Kessler et al.: PNAS 114 (2017), E3374–E3375.
Finally, we would like to note the importance of data and code sharing. Cox et al. (3, 6) replicated and extended our findings with the same open fMRI data (10) as in our original paper (1) (and made use of our processing scripts available on github, \url{http://github.com/wanderine/ParametricMultisubjectfMRI}), ultimately resulting in improvements to the AFNI software. Furthermore, we never would have been able to identify the bug in 3dClustSim were AFNI not open-source software. Kessler et al. (4) also used the same task datasets from OpenfMRI (8) to find the empirical cluster FDR. Together, these examples show the importance of data sharing (11, 12), opensource software (13), code sharing (14, 15), and reproducibility (16).
Daniel Kessler, Mike Angstadt & Chandra S. Sripada, Reevaluating “cluster failure” in fMRI using nonparametric control of the false discovery rate. PNAS 114 (2017), E3372–E3373.
To suggest caution is reasonable but incomplete; we require concrete, quantitative guidelines to enable appropriate calibration of skepticism. Here, we undertake an initial attempt at such guidance. We heed Eklund et al.’s (1) warning and prefer nonparametric null distributions to RFT. However, we focus on the false discovery rate (FDR) (2), which is a more natural target for multiple testing control [as recognized by Nichols and coworkers in previous work (3)]: A researcher is naturally more concerned with the proportion of reported clusters that are false positives (FDR) than whether any are false positives (FWE). Thus, a reader considering a table of clusters significant under RFT–FWE might ask which of these results would have survived had the study instead used a nonparametric FDR-based method.
Steven R. Holen et al., A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA. nature 544 (2017), 479–483.
n544-0479-Supplement1.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement2.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement3.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement4.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement5.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement6.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement7.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement8.mp4, n544-0479-Supplement9.pdf
Steven R. Holen, Thomas A. Deméré, Daniel C. Fisher, Richard Fullagar, James B. Paces, George T. Jefferson, Jared M. Beeton, Richard A. Cerutti, Adam N. Rountrey, Lawrence Vescera & Kathleen A. Holen
The earliest dispersal of humans into North America is a contentious subject, and proposed early sites are required to meet the following criteria for acceptance: (1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context; (2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating; (3) multiple lines of evidence from interdisciplinary studies provide consistent results; and (4) unquestionable artefacts are found in primary context1,2. Here we describe the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site, an archaeological site from the early late Pleistocene epoch, where in situ hammerstones and stone anvils occur in spatio-temporal association with fragmentary remains of a single mastodon (Mammut americanum). The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh. Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion. The occurrence and distribution of bone, molar and stone refits suggest that breakage occurred at the site of burial. Five large cobbles (hammerstones and anvils) in the CM bone bed display use-wear and impact marks, and are hydraulically anomalous relative to the low-energy context of the enclosing sandy silt stratum. 230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production. Systematic proboscidean bone reduction, evident at the CM site, fits within a broader pattern of Palaeolithic bone percussion technology in Africa3–6, Eurasia7–9 and North America10–12. The CM site is, to our knowledge, the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas.
Hovers, Unexpectedly early signs of Americans. nature 544 (2017), 420–421.
Humans are thought to have reached the Americas less than 15,000 years ago. But evidence of stone tool use on an animal carcass excavated in California points to a much earlier arrival of human relatives from the genus Homo.
Kristian Kristiansen, Towards a New Paradigm? The Third Science Revolution and its Possible Consequences in Archaeology. Current Swedish Archaeology 22 (2014), 11–71.
I feel that we are right now experiencing the most exciting of times in archaeology – at least during my own lifetime. The 1950s must have held some of the same excitement, at least for some: suddenly you could walk back into the museum stores and select material for absolute dating. A dream fulfilled. Like now: we can once again walk back into the museum stores and select material that will tell us whole life stories of individuals, their diet, mobility and close family stories, as well as their larger genetic family stories from prehistory until the present. A new door has been opened to previously hidden absolute knowledge that once again will reduce the amount of qualified guessing and thus both refine and redefine theory and interpretation.
Robert Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle, The Family Chronicle of Ahima’az ben Paltiel. Studies in Jewish History and Culture 22 (Leiden 2009).
Catherine Hezser, Torah als „Gesetz“? Überlegungen zum Torahverständnis im antiken Judentum. In: Udo Rüterswörden (Hg.) (Hrsg.), Ist die Tora Gesetz? Zum Gesetzesverständnis im Alten Testament, Frühjudentum und Neuen Testament. Biblisch-Theologische Studien 167 (Göttingen 2017), 119–139.
Der Begriff der “Mündlichen Torah” macht auch deutlich, dass sich die Rabbinen ihrer religionsrechtlichen Innovation bewusst waren. Bei der sich nach 70 entwickelnden rabbinischen Halakhah handelt es sich ja nicht einfach um Torahauslegung (die im Midrasch zu findende Exegese hat eher sekundäre Bedeutung), sondern um die Ausarbeitung and Weiterentwicklung biblischen Rechts zu einem das gesamte Alltagsleben umfassenden religiösen Lebensstil. Biblische Rechtssätze waren viel zu knapp um praktikabel zu sein. Zum Beispiel heisst es in Ex. 20:10 lediglich, dass man am siebten Tag keine Arbeit verrichten soll. Es wird aber nicht weiter erklärt, was unter Arbeit zu verstehen ist, d.h., wie man dieses Gebot konkret befolgen kann. Indem sie biblische Regeln im Hinblick auf ihre Anwendbarkeit im täglichen Leben diskutierten und auf konkrete Situationen ausweiteten, machten die Rabbinen biblisches Recht erst praktikabel. Erst die rabbinische Halakhah ermöglicht individuelle Observanz im Alltagleben, allerdings nicht so sehr die wortwörtliche Observanz der Torah, sondern die Observanz bestimmter rabbinischer Regeln.
George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewisch Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah, A historical and literary introduction. (London 1981).
Marcia-Anne Dobres & Christopher R. Hoffman, Social Agency and the Dynamics of Prehistoric Technology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 1 (1994), 211–258.
Technology is not only the material means of making artifacts, but a dynamic cultural phenomenon embedded in social action, worldviews, and social reproduction. This paper explores the theoretical foundations for an anthropology of technology that is compatible with this definition. Because of its focus on social agency, practice theory provides an appropriate starting point for a social theory of technology. In addition, three other themes require explicit attention: scale, context, and the materiality of technology. Four case studies demonstrate how archaeologists are beginning to take technology beyond its material dimensions, and additional questions are proposed stemming from the theoretical issues raised in the paper. The purpose of this essay is to synthesize a diverse set of emerging ideas and approaches to understand better dynamic community-level social processes of prehistoric material culture production.
Keywords: technology | social agency | worldviews | microscale.
Bryan Pfaffenberger, Social Anthropology of Technology. Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992), 491–516.
The sociotechnical systems of the Machine Age do differ rom their preindustrial predecessors, but the Standard View grossly exaggerates these differences. For example, most mdem definitions of technology assert that, unlike their preindustrial predecessors, modem technological systems are systems for the application of science, drawing their productive power from objective, linguistically encoded knowledge. But on closer examination we see here the influence of Standard View mythology. Historians of technology tell us that virtually none of the technologies that structure our current social landscape were produced by the application of science; on the contrary, science and organized objective knowledge are more commonly the result of technology.
To grasp the evolutionary significance of human technological activity, I suggest that anthropologists lay aside the myths of the Standard View (“necessity is the mother of invention,“ “the meaning of an artifact is a surface matter of style,“ and “the history of technology is a unilinear progression from tools to machines”), and view human technological activity using the concept of the sociotechnical system. Once we do so, we can begin to construct hypotheses about the universals of human technology-universals that highlight what is distinctly human about activities as diverse as mking stone tools and launching space vehicles.
Keywords: activity systems | technological change | sociotechnical systems | ritual | artifacts
Daniel Berger, Ernst Pernicka, Bianka Nessel, Gerhard Brügmann, Carolin Frank & Nicole Lockhoff, Neue Wege zur Herkunftsbestimmung des bronzezeitlichen Zinns. Blickpunkt Archäologie 2014 , iv, 76–82.
Am Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie Mannheim und der Universität Heidelberg wird seit Mitte 2013 im Rahmen eines von der EU geförderten Projektes einer Frage nachgegangen, die wie kaum eine andere Archäologen, Historiker und Naturwissenschaftler gleichermaßen beschäftigt: Woher kam das Zinn für die frühesten Bronzen der Menschheit?
Gerhard Brügmann, Daniel Berger, Ernst Pernicka & Bianka Nessel, Zinn-Isotope und die Frage nach der Herkunft prähistorischen Zinns. Metalla (2015), Sonderheft 7, 189–191.
Mathias Mehofer, Çukuriçi Höyük, Ein Metallurgiezentrum des frühen 3. Jts. v. Chr. in der Westtürkei. In: Martin Bartelheim, Barbara Horejs & Raiko Krauß (Hrsg.), Von Baden bis Troia – Ressourcennutzung, Metallurgie und Wissenstransfer, Jubiläumsschrift für Ernst Pernicka. Oriental and European Archaeology 3 (Rahden 2016), 359–373.
Im Rahmen der Forschungen auf dem Çukuriçi Höyük, Westtürkei, konnte eine Siedlung ausgegraben werden, die in die Frühbronzezeit 1 zu stellen ist. Die durchgeführten 14C-Analysen ermöglichen es, diese in den Zeitraum von 2850–2750 calBC zu datieren. In den aufgedeckten Räumen und Gebäuden fanden sich diverse Siedlungsreste, die auf allgemeine Haushaltsaktivitäten, wie etwa Kochen oder Spinnen, hinweisen. Gleichzeitig konnten aber in diesen Räumen umfangreiche metallurgische Ensembles ausgegraben werden, die darauf schließen lassen, dass dort auch eine intensive Metallverarbeitung stattfand. Tiegelfragmente, Düsen, Gussreste, Halbfertigprodukte, Fertigprodukte und auch Öfen fanden sich in großer Zahl auf dem Tell. An den verschlackten Innenlächen der Tiegel fanden sich zahlreiche Metalleinschlüsse mit sehr hohen Arsenkonzentrationen (18–20 Masse %) sowie andere intermetallische Phasen. Dieser bemerkenswert hohe Arsenanteil lässt in Kombination mit den Resultaten eines weiteren Fundstückes, das Kupferstein und Speis enthält, darauf schließen, dass auf dem Tell auch Arsenkupfer produziert wurde. Die Untersuchung dieser metallurgischen Reste, die sich unter dem Begriff “Tiegelmetallurgie” subsummieren lassen, ermöglichte es, nahezu alle Produktionsstufen von Arsenkupfergegenständen zu beschreiben.
Keywords: Türkei | Westanatolien | Frühbronzezeit 1 | Entwicklung der Metallurgie | Arsenkupfer | Arsenopyrit | Kupferverarbeitung | Bronze | Archäometallurgie
Miljana Radivojevic, Archaeometallurgy of the Vinca culture, A case study of the site of Belovode in eastern Serbia. Historical Metallurgy 47 (2013), 13–32.
The site of Belovode came to fame within the archaeological community with the discovery of the earliest metallurgy so far known. The evidence is several pieces of copper slag dated to c5000 BC (Radivojevic et al 2010). Extensive compositional, microstructural and provenance analyses of this material showed a consistent smelting technology over the c400 years of the site’s occupation. This paper provides a detailed analytical account of 12 further samples from Belovode indicating copper mineral use and archaeometallurgical activities. Particular emphasis is given to production debris from the ‘metallurgical’ Trench 3, although other significant metallurgical contexts are also included. The overall aim is to investigate technological relationships between the specimens presented here and those previously published by Radivojevic et al (2010). Their technological associations provide a more coherent image of the archaeometallurgical activities in this part of Eurasia at the dawn of metallurgy.
Miljana Radivojevic & Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic, Copper Minerals and Archaeometallurgical Materials from the Vinca Culture Sites of Belovode and Plocnik, Overview of the Evidence and New Data. Starinar 64 (2014), 7–30.
The Vinca culture sites of Belovode and Plocnik have been attracting scholarly attention for decades now, due to numerous discoveries indicative of copper mineral and metal use in these settlements, which are confirmed as, currently, the earliest worldwide and very likely developed independently in Eurasia.1 The authors attempt to give an overview of already published data along with new results stemming from the recently completed doctoral research of the primary author.2 All materials related to copper mineral use and pyrometallurgical activities are presented through the concept of metallurgical chaîne opératoire, following the established sequence of operations,3 which is adjusted for this specific case study and divided into three categories: copper mineral processing, (s)melting debris, and the making and working of finished metal objects. The qualitative overview of available data is therefore focused mainly around the material side of the studied samples and provides an insight into the technological choices for making copper mineral ornaments and copper metal artefacts in the sites of Belovode and Plocnik. Accordingly, it provides a model for the understanding of similar material assemblages that occur in other Vinca culture sites, or beyond.
Keywords: Belovode | Plocnik | Vinca culture | malachite | copper metal | tin bronze | malachite beads | chaîne opératoire | slag | Serbia.
Axel E. Nielsen, Carlos I. Angiorama & Florencia Avila, Ritual as Interaction with Non-Humans, Prehispanic Mountain Pass Shrines in the Southern Andes. In: Silvana A. Rosenfeld & Stefanie L. Bautista (Hrsg.), Rituals of the Past, Prehispanic and Colonial Case Studies in Andean Archaeology. (Boulder 2017), 241–266.
A key theoretical debate in archaeology and other social sciences today concerns the notion that in practice, agency is a faculty that can be displayed by nonhuman beings, which, depending on worldview and context, may include anything from ghosts to places or artifacts.
Building on this idea and on the tradition that conceives of ritual as religious practice, we can tentatively define ritual as social action that addresses non-human agents who have a significant influence on human fate. This definition encompasses important aspects of ritual that have been stressed by the many authors who have written about the subject.
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