THE ANCIENT WORLD passed from the Stone Age through the Bronze and Iron Ages to our modern developed society—a society that is dependent on metals and alloys for its very existence. However, an impressive body of metallurgical knowledge developed in the thousands of years since ancient man first found copper and became curious enough to investigate the behavior of this naturally occurring, rela...

Casting had symbolic significance and was strictly controlled in the Shang dynasty of ancient China. Vessel casting was mainly distributed around the Shang capital, Yin Ruins, which indicates a rigorous centralization of authority. Thus, for a casting mold to be excavated far from the capital region is rare. In addition to some bronze vessel molds excavated at the Buyao Village site, another ke...

Compound casting refers to a process that used to produce bimetals. This study investigates the interface of Mo40/C93200 that is produced by compound casting process. In this research, molten bronze is poured around steel core, interaction between liquid and solid creates a diffusion zone and followed by a transition layer which leads to the creation of diffused region between the interfaces of...

The Canaanites inhabited the Levant region during the Bronze Age and established a culture that became influential in the Near East and beyond. However, the Canaanites, unlike most other ancient Near Easterners of this period, left few surviving textual records and thus their origin and relationship to ancient and present-day populations remain unclear. In this study, we sequenced five whole ge...

Early human societies and their interactions with the natural world have been extensively explored in palaeoenvironmental studies across Central and Western Europe. Yet, despite an extensive body of scholarship, there is little consideration of the environmental impacts of proto-historic urbanisation. Typically palaeoenvironmental studies of Bronze and Iron Age societies discuss human impact in...

The aim of this research is to compare the cloth cultures of Europe and Egypt in the Bronze Age and New Kingdom. The comparison focuses on the fourteenth century BC and includes four geographically separate areas including the oak coffin burials of southern Scandinavia, the Hallstatt salt mines of central Europe, the Final Palace period of Crete and the tombs and towns of the later eighteenth D...

Some scholars explain the absence of settlements in the Bohemian and Moravian Late Eneolithic (Corded Ware archaeological culture) as a consequence of pastoral subsistence with a high degree of mobility. However, recent archaeological studies argued that the archaeological record of the Late Eneolithic in Central Europe exhibits evidence for sedentary subsistence with mixed agriculture, similar...

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...

It has been known since the time of Faraday that vertically vibrated fine grains may spontaneously form piles through their interaction with a fluid. More recently, it has been observed that a fine binary mixture may separate under vertical vibration through the differential influence of the fluid on the two granular components. Here, we report a detailed study of a system of water-immersed bro...