Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Historic Times (historic + time)
Selected AbstractsFROM SUSA TO ANURADHAPURA: RECONSTRUCTING ASPECTS OF TRADE AND EXCHANGE IN BITUMEN-COATED CERAMIC VESSELS BETWEEN IRAN AND SRI LANKA FROM THE THIRD TO THE NINTH CENTURIES AD*ARCHAEOMETRY, Issue 3 2008B. STERN In contrast with artefactual studies of long-distance trade and exchange in South Asia during the Prehistoric and Early Historic periods (Ardika et al. 1993; Gogte 1997; Krishnan and Coningham 1997; Tomber 2000; Gupta et al. 2001; Ford et al. 2005), few scientifically orientated analyses have focused on artefacts from the region's Historic period. During excavations at the ancient city of Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, a number of buff ware ceramics with a putative organic coating on the interior were recovered (Coningham 2006). Dated stylistically to between the third and ninth centuries ad, analysis of the coatings using gas chromatography,mass spectrometry (GC,MS) and stable isotope analysis (carbon and deuterium) confirmed that the coatings are bitumen,an organic product associated with petroleum deposits. There are no known bitumen sources in Sri Lanka, and biomarker distributions and isotopic signatures suggest that the majority of the samples appear to have come from a single bitumen source near Susa in Iran. The relationship between the bitumen coatings and the vessels is discussed, and it is suggested that the coatings were used to seal permeable ceramic containers to allow them to transport liquid commodities. This study enhances our knowledge of networks of trade and exchange between Sri Lanka and western Asia during Historic times. [source] New perspectives on Holocene landscape development in the southern English chalklands: The upper Allen valley, Cranborne Chase, DorsetGEOARCHAEOLOGY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005C. French A combination of on- and off-site paleoenvironmental and archaeological investigations of the upper Allen valley of Dorset, conducted from 1998,2002, has begun to indicate a different model of prehistoric landscape development to those previously put forward for this part of the southern English chalk downlands. Woodland growth in the earlier Holocene appears to have been slower and patchier than the presumed model of full climax deciduous woodland rapidly attained in a warming environment. With open areas still strongly present in the Mesolithic, the area witnessed its first exploitation, thus slowing and altering soil development. Consequently, many areas perhaps never developed thick, well-structured, brown forest earths, but more probably thin brown earths. By the later Neolithic period, these soils had become thin rendzinas, largely as a consequence of human exploitation and the predominance of pastoral land use. The early presence of thinner and less well-developed soils over large areas of downland removes the necessity for envisaging extensive soil erosion and the accumulation of thick colluvial and alluvial deposits in the dry valleys and valley floor as often postulated. If there were major changes in the vegetation and soil complexes in this area of chalk downland, these had already occurred by the Neolithic rather than the Bronze Age as often suggested, and the area has remained relatively stable ever since. This has major implications for models of prehistoric land use in the southern chalkland region, such as a much greater degree of stability in prehistoric and historic times, variability within sub-regions, and differences between different parts of the chalk downlands than had previously been envisaged. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Seeking a Holocene drift ice proxy: non-clay mineral variations from the SW to N-central Iceland shelf: trends, regime shifts, and periodicities,JOURNAL OF QUATERNARY SCIENCE, Issue 7 2009John T. Andrews Abstract Quantitative X-ray diffraction analysis of the <2,mm sediment fraction was carried out on 1257 samples (from the seafloor and 16 cores) from the Iceland shelf west of 18° W. All but one core (B997-347PC) were from transects along troughs on the NW to N-central shelf, an area that in modern and historic times has been affected by drift ice. The paper focuses on the non-clay mineralogy of the sediments (excluding calcite and volcanic glass). Quartz and potassium feldspars occupy similar positions in an R-mode principal component analysis, and oligoclase feldspar tracks quartz; these minerals are used as a proxy for ice-rafted detritus (IRD). Accordingly, the sum of these largely foreign minerals (Q&K) (to Icelandic bedrock) is used as a proxy for drift ice. A stacked, equi-spaced 100 a record is developed which shows both low-frequency trends and higher-frequency events. The detrended stacked record compares well with the flux of quartz (mg,cm,2,a,1) at MD99-2269 off N Iceland. The multi-taper method indicated that there are three significant frequencies at the 95% confidence level with periods of ca. 2500, 445 and 304 a. Regime shift analysis pinpoints intervals when there was a statistically significant shift in the average Q&K weight %, and identifies four IRD-rich events separated by intervals with lower inputs. There is some association between peaks of IRD input, less dense surface waters (from ,18O data on planktonic foraminifera) and intervals of moraine building. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Anthropogenic changes in the landscape of west Java (Indonesia) during historic times, inferred from a sediment and pollen record from Teluk BantenJOURNAL OF QUATERNARY SCIENCE, Issue 3 2004Sander van der Kaars Abstract Palynological and charcoal analyses of shallow marine core 98-28 from the northern coastal area of West Java provide a regional vegetation history during the last few centuries. Reliable chronostratigraphical control is provided by 210Pb analyses and the occurrence of the 1883 Krakatau ash/tsunami layer as a time marker. The results permit the distinction of four successive stages, reflecting increased disturbance and land clearance, with some evidence for the presence of deciduous lowland forests in the Banten area during the early Holocene. The establishment of coconut and pine plantations and the severe loss of biodiversity in the last few decennia are also echoed in the pollen record. The effect of the Krakatau eruption was insignificant compared with human impact on vegetation in the Banten area. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] The Languages of SiberiaLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2009Edward J. Vajda Although Russian today is the dominant language in virtually every corner of North Asia, Siberia and the Northern Pacific Rim of Asia remain home to over three dozen mutually unintelligible indigenous language varieties. Except for Tuvan, Buryat, and Yakut, most are rapidly losing ground to Russian if not already critically endangered. Several more have already become extinct in the four centuries since the area's incorporation into the Russian state. From an ethnographic perspective, Siberian languages merit attention for their interplay of pastoral and hunter,gatherer influences and also for the fact that Siberia represents the staging ground for prehistoric migrations into the Americas. North Asia contains several autochthonous microfamilies and isolates not found outside this region , the so-called ,Paleo-Asiatic' (or ,Paleosiberian') languages Ket, Yukaghir, Nivkh, and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan microfamily, which includes Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen. Ainu, formerly spoken on Sakhalin and the Kuriles as well as in Hokkaido, and the three varieties of Eskimoan spoken in historic times on the Russian side of Bering Strait, likewise belong to the earlier, non-food producing layers of ethnolinguistic diversity in North Asia. All of these languages, aside from Eskimoan, are entirely autochthonous to the northern half of Asia. Siberian languages spoken by pastoral groups, on the other hand, belong to families represented more prominently elsewhere. Families, such as Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic, and especially Tungusic (the northern branch of the Tungus-Manchu family), became dominant in Siberia long before the coming of the Russians. As an extension of pastoral Inner Eurasia, Siberia displays many traits characteristic of a linguistic area: suffixal agglutination, widespread dependent marking typology, a fairly elaborate system of spatial case markers, and the use of case suffixes or postpositions to signal syntactic subordination. There are also notable idiosyncratic features, particularly among the so-called Paleo-Siberian languages. These include the areally atypical feature of possessive prefixes and verb-internal subject/object prefixes in Ket, the unique verb-internal focus markers of Yukaghir, the extensive numeral allomorphs that serve as nominal classifiers in Nivkh, and the reduplicative stem augmentation used by Chukchi nouns to express the absolutive singular (in contrast to plurals and oblique case forms, where the stem is simple). While North Asia has long been the preserve of linguists writing in Russian or German (including many Finns and Hungarians), since the collapse of the Soviet Union the number of English-language treatments of Siberian languages is increasing. [source] Age of A2 Horizon Charcoal and Forest Structure near Porto Trombetas, Pará, Brazil,BIOTROPICA, Issue 3 2001John K. Francis ABSTRACT To study the structure and composition of old-growth forest in the Saracá-Taquera National Forest near Porto Trombetas, Brazil, we established 36 0.25 ha plots and described the vegetation. We collected charcoal from the A2 soil horizon of each plot for radiocarbon dating. Although fires have been very rare in this forest during historic times, the presence of charcoal in these soils indicates fire at some earlier period. The ages (conventional radiocarbon age adjusted to 1997) of the charcoal ranged from 177 to 1547 years. These ages, however, did not correlate significantly with any of several measures of biodiversity or stand characteristics. The relative uniformity of the current old-growth forest indicates that either the prehistoric fires were of such low intensity that they had little long-term effect on the vegetation or that the present stands have progressed to near steady state. [source] | ||||||||||