Re Bingham Cemetery

Commemorating bodies and lives at Kish’s ‘A Cemetery’: (Re)presenting social memory

Over the course of a decade, the Joint Oxford-Field Museum Expedition to Kish recovered artifacts and skeletal remains from one of the most influential city-states in ancient Mesopotamia. We focus here on the process of commemoration of the dead as evidenced in the graves excavated from Kish’s ‘A Cemetery’. We use skeletal remains, fieldnotes, and artifactual evidence to situate these individua...

A re-assessment of Basketmaker II cave 7: massacre site or cemetery context

Our ongoing investigation of early maize farming in the American Southwest has entailed stable isotope analysis and accelerator radiocarbon dating of Basketmaker II remains from sites in the Four Corners region. Here we report radiocarbon dates on a large mortuary assemblage excavated by RichardWetherill in 1893 from a burial cave in southeastern Utah. It has long been thought that all individu...

On the Fisher-Bingham distribution

This paper primarily is concerned with the sampling of the Fisher–Bingham distribution and we describe a slice sampling algorithm for doing this. A by-product of this task gave us an infinite mixture representation of the Fisher–Bingham distribution; the mixing distributions being based on the Dirichlet distribution. Finite numerical approximations are considered and a sampling algorithm based ...

Le Morne Cemetery: Archaeological Investigations

Exact Bayesian inference for the Bingham distribution

This paper is concerned with making Bayesian inference from data that are assumed to be drawn from a Bingham distribution. A barrier to the Bayesian approach is the parameter-dependent normalising constant of the Bingham distribution, which, even when it can be evaluated or accurately approximated, would have to be calculated at each iteration of an MCMC scheme, thereby greatly increasing the c...