A Multi-Disciplinary Study of Woodcrafts and Plant Remains that Reveals the History of Pontevedra’s Harbour (Northwest Iberia) Between the 13th and 19th Centuries AD

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Martín-Seijo ◽  
Miguel Sartal Lorenzo ◽  
Joeri Kaal ◽  
Andrés Teira-Brión
2019 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 400-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Carney ◽  
Jade d'Alpoim Guedes ◽  
Kevin J. Lyons ◽  
Melissa Goodman Elgar

This project considered the deposition history of a burned structure located on the Kalispel Tribe of Indians ancestral lands at the Flying Goose site in northeastern Washington. Excavation of the structure revealed stratified deposits that do not conform to established Columbia Plateau architectural types. The small size, location, and absence of artifacts lead us to hypothesize that this site was once a non-domestic structure. We tested this hypothesis with paleoethnobotanical, bulk geoarchaeological, thin section, and experimental firing data to deduce the structural remains and the post-occupation sequence. The structure burned at a relatively low temperature, was buried soon afterward with imported rubified sediment, and was exposed to seasonal river inundation. Subsequently, a second fire consumed a unique assemblage of plant remains. Drawing on recent approaches to structured deposition and historic processes, we incorporate ethnography to argue that this structure was a menstrual lodge. These structures are common in ethnographic descriptions, although no menstrual lodges have been positively identified in the archaeological record of the North American Pacific Northwest. This interpretation is important to understanding the development and time depth of gendered practices of Interior Northwest groups.


The Holocene ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilia Allevato ◽  
Antonio Saracino ◽  
Silvio Fici ◽  
Gaetano Di Pasquale

1906 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis J. Lewis

The following paper deals with an investigation of the successive zones of plant remains contained in the deeper peat deposits covering areas in the Scottish Southern Uplands. The field work was carried on during the summer and early autumn of 1904, and the detailed examination of the peat in the laboratory during part of the winter. No attempt has been made to work out the detailed flora of the different zones, but attention has chiefly been directed to the dominant plant remains found at different horizons in the mosses. Whilst the list of plants from each zone is small, the general facies of the flora of any layer can be gauged from the abundant presence of a few characteristic plants such as Salix reticulata and Empetrum, or Sphagnum and Eriophorum. Thus, while the investigation is incomplete as regards any addition to the history of the British Flora, it will, I hope, throw some light upon the succession of vegetation over the older peat mosses since their origin.


1984 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 619-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy W. Barnosky

A comparison of pollen records and associated plant remains from sites along a major precipitation gradient in southwestern Washington enables reconstruction of the late Quaternary environment during glacial and early Holocene time. During the Evans Creek Stade (25 000 – 17 000 years BP) little moisture reached lowlands east of the Olympic Mountains and as a result both the Puget Trough and the Columbia Basin featured a cold dry climate and parkland–tundra vegetation In glacial time, greatest aridity seems to have occurred between 19 000 and 17 000 years BP. After 17 000 years BP the development of mesophytic subalpine parkland suggests that maritime conditions extended farther east into the Puget Trough, and the Cascade Range became an important precipitation divide. Conditions warmer and (or) drier than today developed throughout western Washington between 10 000 and 8000–6000 years BP. Vegetation on opposite sides of the Cascade Range became dissimilar as early as 17 000 years BP, but this trend was accentuated in late glacial and early Holocene time.


Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia are geographically so closely related that they can he called Fuego-Patagonia. Its two main units are the Andes and the region of the mesetas to the east of them. As a result of the predominantly westerly winds, the rainfall and the forests are concentrated in the Andes whereas in the region of the mesetas and the plains there are steppes and semideserts. The boundary between them seems to be a zone of struggle between the forest and the steppe. Its past oscillations can be studied against the background of palaeogeographic evolution especially since the last ice age. The stratigraphy of bogs and alluvial clays provides most important evidence on this topic. Tierra del Fuego is especially suitable as a study area since bogs are present all over the main island. In order to separate the ice ages with certainty, and thus to find out how many ice ages there were in Fuego-Patagonia, I looked for organic interglacial layers. Those found are the only ones so far recorded in South America. The southernmost is on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego in a till cliff facing the Atlantic Ocean, about 20 km from the Viamonte estancia (figure 26). The peat is, according to a dating at the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory, over 41000 years old. Its macro- and microscopic plant remains reflect a richer flora than the present one.


The Holocene ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 1141-1150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Xiaozhong Huang ◽  
Zongli Wang ◽  
Tianlong Yan ◽  
En’yuan Zhang

The sparsity of long-term reliable climatic records hampers our understanding of human–environment interactions in the semi-arid Hexi Corridor, NW China. Here, we present a late-Holocene pollen record from a small alpine lake, Tian’E, in the western Qilian Mountains. The chronology is provided by nine accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) 14C dates from terrestrial plant remains. The ratios of Artemisia and Amaranthaceae (A/C) are used to reconstruct the history of regional humidity: An unstable climate occurred during 1530–1270 BC; there were three relatively wet periods, at 1270 BC–AD 400, AD 1200–1350, and AD 1600–present; and there were two dry periods, from AD 400 to 1200 and from AD 1350 to 1600. Comparison with tree-ring data indicates that continuous droughts were responsible for the abandonment of several archaeological sites and ancient cities in the region, including the major city of Dunhuang, which was abandoned in AD 1372 and AD 1524 for nearly 200 years.


1907 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Wills
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  

The counties of Warwick and Worcester have yielded the majority of Keuper fossils recorded from England. The history of their discovery commenced about seventy years ago with a paper by Murchison and Strickland, where there is a description of the area. They distinguished two divisions, the lower of which they identified as Bunter, chiefly on the evidence of a plant, Echinostdchys oblovgus, Brongn. This division was found to be, for the most part, composed of sandstones, and contained in Worcestershire plant remains and in Warwickshire bones and teeth. The localities where fossils were found were Ombersley, Hadley, Elmley Lovett, all on the west side of the Droitwich basin, Bromsgrove on the east of it, and in the Warwick district.


The strata from which the plant-remains to be described in this paper are derived are those which are grouped as Downtonian in the extended sense of this term employed by Mr. W. Wickham King. They therefore include not only the Ludlow Bone-bed, the Downton Sandstone, and the Temeside Shales, i.e ., the Grey Downtonian, but a much greater thickness of red marls and sandstones that were formerly classed with the Lower Old Red Sandstone, but are now spoken of as the Red Downtonian. This way of regarding the rocks of this horizon has been fully discussed in the light of the history of opinions by O. T. Jones (1929, pp. 110- 121) and need not be considered further here. These strata have been included at different times in the Silurian or in the Old Red Sandstone. It is not necessary here to enter into the question as to the best limit between the Silurian and the Devonian. Reference may be made to Stamp (1923), O. T. Jones (1929), and to Wickham King’s recent paper (1934). It is sufficient for the purposes of this study of the plants to recognize that the Downtonian strata come above the more definitely marine Ludlovian rocks and below the more definitely continental beds of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. The transitional nature of the Grey Downtonian has long been accepted and can readily be extended to the succeeding beds included in the Downtonian by Wickham King.


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Nowak ◽  
Magdalena Moskal-Del Hoyo ◽  
Aldona Mueller-Bieniek ◽  
Maria Lityńska-Zając ◽  
Krzysztof Kotynia

Abstract Radiocarbon dating of the plant material is important for chronology of archaeological sites. Therefore, a selection of suitable plant samples is an important task. The contribution emphasizes the necessity of taxonomical identification prior to radiocarbon dating as a crucial element of such selection. The benefits and weaknesses of dating of taxonomically undetermined and identified samples will be analysed based on several case studies referring to Neolithic sites from Hungary, Slovakia and Poland. These examples better illustrate the significance of the taxonomical identification since plant materials of the Neolithic age include only a limited number of cultivated species (e.g. hulled wheats) and typically do not contain remains of late arrived plants (e.g. Carpinus betulus and Fagus sylvatica). For more accurate dating results cereal grains, fruits and seeds, which reflect a single vegetative season, are preferred. Among charred wood, fragments of twigs, branches and external rings should mainly be taken into account, while those of trunks belonging to long-lived trees should be avoided. Besides the absolute chronology of archaeological features and artefacts, radiocarbon dating of identified plant remains might significantly contribute to the history of local vegetation and food production systems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 508
Author(s):  
Stephanie H. Arcusa ◽  
Tobias Schneider ◽  
Pablo V. Mosquera ◽  
Hendrik Vogel ◽  
Darrell Kaufman ◽  
...  

Lakes located downwind of active volcanoes serve as a natural repository for volcanic ash (tephra) produced during eruptive events. In this study, sediment cores from four lakes in Cajas National Park, southern Ecuador, situated approximately 200 km downwind of active volcanoes in the Northern Andes Volcanic Zone, were analysed to document the regional history of tephra fall extending back around 3,000 a cal BP. The ages of the lacustrine sedimentary sequences were constrained using a total of 20 AMS radiocarbon ages on plant remains. The tephra layers were correlated among the lakes based on their radiocarbon age, elemental composition, colour, and grain morphology. We found five unique tephra layers, each at least 0.2 cm thick, and further constrained their ages by combining the results from two age-depth modelling approaches (clam and rbacon). The tephra layers were deposited 3,034±621, 2,027±41, 1,557±177, 733±112, and 450±70 a cal BP. The ages of all but the youngest tephra layer overlap with those of known eruptions from Tungurahua. Some tephra layers are missing as macroscopic layers in several cores, with only two of the five tephra layers visible in the sediment of three lakes. Likewise, previous studies of lake sediment cores from the region are missing the four youngest tephra layers, further highlighting the need to sample multiple lakes to reconstruct a comprehensive history of fallout events. The newly documented stratigraphic marker layers will benefit future studies of lake sediments in Cajas National Park.


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