The concept of the barbarian has been an enduring presence in the antiquarian and archaeological study of European societies. Indeed the idea of the barbarian as an adjective and concept continues to influence both scholarly and popular perceptions of Prehistory, the Ancient World and Early Medieval societies. Moving beyond studies of the shifting attitudes to the barbarian within successive an...

The heyday of the ideas of group mind and group agent seems to be well over. Why dig up these corpses that seem to have been buried ages ago? I will try to give at least a partial answer to this question in this chapter. Yet the main task below is to clarify these notions when viewed from a naturalistic point of view and compatibly with current theorizing in the collective intentionality litera...

In the conclusion to first book of Treatise, Hume’s skeptical reflections have plunged him into melancholy. He then proceeds through a complex series stages, resulting in renewed interest philosophy. Interpreters struggled explain connection between stages. I argue that repeated invocation four humors ancient and medieval medicine explains succession, sheds new light on significance skepticism....

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population ...

introducing three principal methods of determining the solar orbital eccentricity in the ancient and medieval astronomy (i.e., the method of seasons, of mid-signs, of three–points), the accuracy of the results obtained from each is being investigated. in doing so, two main goals have been targeted: (1) to determine the accuracy and the intrinsic limitation of each method with regard to their st...

Analysis of DNA from archeological remains is a valuable tool to interpret the history of ancient animal populations. So far most studies of ancient DNA target mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which reveals maternal lineages, but only partially the relationships of current breeds and ancient populations. In this study we explore the feasibility of nuclear DNA analysis. DNA was extracted from 1000-yea...

As an ancient scourge, plague caused deadly epidemics in medieval Europe, and in the 20th century, it caused extensive mortality in India and Vietnam. Crossing into the 21st century, it has attracted particular attention as a potential bioweapon, for which a new vaccine needs to be developed. Human plague syndromes are mainly bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic, all caused by the bacterium Yersi...

Multiple geographical regions have been proposed for the domestication of Equus caballus. It has been suggested, based on zooarchaeological and genetic analyses that wild horses from the Iberian Peninsula were involved in the process, and the overrepresentation of mitochondrial D1 cluster in modern Iberian horses supports this suggestion. To test this hypothesis, we analysed mitochondrial DNA f...