The term “taphonomy” was originally defined by paleontologist I.A. Efremov in 1940 as “the study of the transition (in all its details) of animal remains from the biosphere into the lithosphere”. The term evolved to include plant remains because Efremov also indicated that taphonomy concerned the “transition from the biosphere to the lithosphere”. The concept and the term were both adopted by z...

The archaeology of East Africa during the last ~65,000 years plays a central role in debates about the origins and dispersal of modern humans, Homo sapiens. Despite the historical importance of the region to these discussions, reliable chronologies for the nature, tempo, and timing of human behavioral changes seen among Middle Stone Age (MSA) and Later Stone Age (LSA) archaeological assemblages...

Searching for signatures of cosmic-scale archaeological artifacts such as Dyson spheres or Kardashev civilizations is an interesting alternative to conventional SETI. Uncovering such an artifact does not require the intentional transmission of a signal on the part of the original civilization. This type of search is called interstellar archaeology or sometimes cosmic archaeology. The detection ...

From Roman gladiatorial combat to Egyptian animal mummies, the capture and manipulation of carnivores was instrumental in helping to shape social hierarchies throughout the ancient world. This paper investigates the historical inflection point when humans began to control animals not only as alimental resources but as ritual symbols and social actors in the New World. At Teotihuacan (A.D. 1-550...

Preservation and dissemination of archaeological material has always been an issue of concern for the academic research community. On the one hand, the fragility of the material limits their study. On the other hand, such material is housed in museums, libraries, and institutions worldwide, something that significantly thwarts their accessibility. Technology, high resolution 2D pictures, and el...

CONNECTING THE DOTS: TOWARDS ARCHAEOLOGICAL NETWORK ANALYSIS Summary. In recent years network analysis has been applied in archaeological research to examine the structure of archaeological relationships of whatever sort. However, these archaeological applications share a number of issues concerning 1) the role of archaeological data in networks; 2) the diversity of network structures, their co...

Creating an appropriate mesh is one of demanding tasks of many global illumination algorithms. Discontinuity meshing proved to diminish artifacts caused by other meshing strategies. Since naive discontinuity meshing would produce a great amount of geometric computations, accelerating techniques are usually involved. In this paper, we present results obtained with help of k-discrete orientation ...

A combination of geophysical methods could be very a useful and a practical way of verifying the origin and precise localisation of archaeological situations identified by different remote sensing techniques. The results of different methods (and scales) of monitoring these fully non-destructive methods provide distinct data and often complement each other. The presented examples of combination...

Until the early 1950s, it was believed that the archaeological record of eastern Washington state did not exceed 4000 years. That belief changed in the middle 1950s after discovery of the Lind Coulee site (45GR97), originally dated to the Holocene on the basis of geochronological data and subsequently dated via radiocarbon to 8700 B.P. Geochronology and geoarchaeology provided temporal control ...