scholarly journals Obsidian from the Neolithic Layers of “Grotta di San Michele Arcangelo di Saracena” (Cosenza), Italy. A Preliminary Report

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 615-630
Author(s):  
Vincenza Forgia ◽  
Robert H. Tykot ◽  
Andrea Vianello ◽  
Elena Natali

Abstract The paper presents the results obtained by techno-typological analysis of a lithic assemblage from the Neolithic layers of Grotta San Michele Arcangelo di Saracena (Cosenza) together with the results of micro-wear analysis obtained from a preliminary selection of obsidian artifacts with different provenances distinguished by pXRF analysis. The site provides one of the best preserved Neolithic sequences in the area, from the earliest Impressed Wares (or Impresse Arcaiche) (early sixth millennium BC) to the Spatarella pottery style (end fifth – early fourth millennium BC). Along the Neolithic sequence, it is possible to observe some major changes within lithic resources management. In particular, it is possible to notice some techno-typological breakages between the Early Neolithic and the further stages, until the second phase of the Late Neolithic, when another rupture, corresponding to the Spatarella facies, is evident.

Author(s):  
Torben Ballin ◽  
Ian Suddaby ◽  
M Cressey ◽  
M Hastie ◽  
A Jackson ◽  
...  

Prehistoric remains were recorded by CFA Archaeology Ltd (CFA) in 2002-03 during a programme of fieldwork at the landfill site within the boundaries of Stoneyhill Farm, which lies 7km to the southwest of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire. These included a clearance cairn with a Late Bronze Age lithic assemblage and a burial cairn, with Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age lithics and Beaker ceramics. Other lithic scatters of similar date had no certain associations, although pits containing near-contemporary Impressed Wares were nearby. Additional lithic assemblages included material dated to the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic. What may be proto-Unstan Wares in an isolated pit were associated with radiocarbon dates (barley) of the first half of the fourth millennium bc. These findings represent a substantial addition to the local area's archaeological record and form an important contribution to the understanding of lithic technology and ceramics in earlier prehistoric Scotland.This paper is dedicated to the memory of Ian Shepherd, whose site visits enlightened this and other projects undertaken by one of the authors (IS).


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
David MacInnes

The nature of social organization during the Orcadian Neolithic has been the subject of discussion for several decades with much of the debate focused on answering an insightful question posed by Colin Renfrew in 1979. He asked, how was society organised to construct the larger, innovative monuments of the Orcadian Late Neolithic that were centralised in the western Mainland? There are many possible answers to the question but little evidence pointing to a probable solution, so the discussion has continued for many years. This paper takes a new approach by asking a different question: what can be learned about Orcadian Neolithic social organization from the quantitative and qualitative evidence accumulating from excavated domestic structures and settlements?In an attempt to answer this question, quantitative and qualitative data about domestic structures and about settlements was collected from published reports on 15 Orcadian Neolithic excavated sites. The published data is less extensive than hoped but is sufficient to support a provisional answer: a social hierarchy probably did not develop in the Early Neolithic but almost certainly did in the Late Neolithic, for which the data is more comprehensive.While this is only one approach of several possible ways to consider the question, it is by exploring different methods of analysis and comparing them that an understanding of the Orcadian Neolithic can move forward.


2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1867) ◽  
pp. 20171540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Tassi ◽  
Stefania Vai ◽  
Silvia Ghirotto ◽  
Martina Lari ◽  
Alessandra Modi ◽  
...  

It is unclear whether Indo-European languages in Europe spread from the Pontic steppes in the late Neolithic, or from Anatolia in the Early Neolithic. Under the former hypothesis, people of the Globular Amphorae culture (GAC) would be descended from Eastern ancestors, likely representing the Yamnaya culture. However, nuclear (six individuals typed for 597 573 SNPs) and mitochondrial (11 complete sequences) DNA from the GAC appear closer to those of earlier Neolithic groups than to the DNA of all other populations related to the Pontic steppe migration. Explicit comparisons of alternative demographic models via approximate Bayesian computation confirmed this pattern. These results are not in contrast to Late Neolithic gene flow from the Pontic steppes into Central Europe. However, they add nuance to this model, showing that the eastern affinities of the GAC in the archaeological record reflect cultural influences from other groups from the East, rather than the movement of people.


Complexity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiwen Zhang ◽  
Yuanyuan Zhou ◽  
Xing Guo ◽  
Jintao Wu ◽  
Qiang He ◽  
...  

The K-means algorithm is one of the ten classic algorithms in the area of data mining and has been studied by researchers in numerous fields for a long time. However, the value of the clustering number k in the K-means algorithm is not always easy to be determined, and the selection of the initial centers is vulnerable to outliers. This paper proposes an improved K-means clustering algorithm called the covering K-means algorithm (C-K-means). The C-K-means algorithm can not only acquire efficient and accurate clustering results but also self-adaptively provide a reasonable numbers of clusters based on the data features. It includes two phases: the initialization of the covering algorithm (CA) and the Lloyd iteration of the K-means. The first phase executes the CA. CA self-organizes and recognizes the number of clusters k based on the similarities in the data, and it requires neither the number of clusters to be prespecified nor the initial centers to be manually selected. Therefore, it has a “blind” feature, that is, k is not preselected. The second phase performs the Lloyd iteration based on the results of the first phase. The C-K-means algorithm combines the advantages of CA and K-means. Experiments are carried out on the Spark platform, and the results verify the good scalability of the C-K-means algorithm. This algorithm can effectively solve the problem of large-scale data clustering. Extensive experiments on real data sets show that the accuracy and efficiency of the C-K-means algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms under both sequential and parallel conditions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Konstantin Mihailovich Andreev

The article analyses the problem of different Neolitization origins in specified regions. In early Neolithic Age the contacts had a small coverage. Wide-ranging penetration of Lower Volga pin- scratched pottery ornamentation tradition carriers into forest steppe refers to VI and V centuries BC. It was caused by natural and climatic reasons. Up to the late Neolithic Age the influence was one-way - from south to north.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Sawicki ◽  
Marcin Kiciński ◽  
Szymon Fierek

This paper deals with the problem of selection the most suitable trip-modelling tool (TMT), which is a part of the more complex integrated transport planning system (ITPS) at the regional scale. Since an application of TMT is not autonomous and several different users exist the selection problem is not a trivial. In this paper, an original five-phase selection procedure is presented. The first phase consists in specifica¬tion of both, detailed expectations of all identified users and technical requirements of ITPS. Second phase deals with research on available TMT while a third one is concentrated on defining a comprehensive set of criteria. In this phase critical criteria as well as selection criteria are defined. First one is utilised to eliminate unacceptable TMTs in phase four and second one to evaluate and select most adequate TMT in phase five. In the paper an exemplary application of this procedure is presented. The authors have defined 2 critical criteria and a set of 19 selection criteria. The last one is divided into 3 main subsets, i.e. functional, technical and financial contexts of selection process. All the selection criteria are characterised by 43 sub-criteria and some of them are more detailed extended. Using this procedure 3 out of 6 alternative TMTs including Emme, Aimsun and Visum have been initially accepted and next evaluated. Finally, Visum has been selected and recommended for application into ITPS.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 694-716
Author(s):  
Yavuz ÖZDEMİR ◽  
Kemal Gökhan NALBANT

The main objective in the selection of personnel is to select the most appropriate candidate for a job. Personnel selection for human resources management is a very important issue.The aim of this paper is to determine the best-performing personnel for promotion using an application of a Multi Criteria Decision Making(MCDM) method, generalized Choquet integral, to a real personnel selection problem of a case study in Turkey and 17 alternatives are ranked according to personnel selection criteria (22 subcriteria are classified under 5 main criteria). The main contribution of this paper is to determine the interdependency among main criteria and subcriteria, the nonlinear relationship among them and the environmental uncertainties while selecting personnel alternatives using the generalized Choquet integral method with the experts’ view. To the authors’ knowledge, this will be the first study which uses the generalized Choquet Integral methodology for human resources. 


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