Significance
Goats were among the first domestic animals and today are an important livestock species; archaeozoological evidence from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran indicates that goats were ...managed by the late ninth/early eighth millennium. We assess goat assemblages from Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein, two Aceramic Neolithic Zagros sites, using complementary archaeozoological and archaeogenomic approaches. Nuclear and mitochondrial genomes indicate that these goats were genetically diverse and ancestral to later domestic goats and already distinct from wild goats. Demographic profiles from bone remains, differential diversity patterns of uniparental markers, and presence of long runs of homozygosity reveal the practicing and consequences of management, thus expanding our understanding of the beginnings of animal husbandry.
The Aceramic Neolithic (∼9600 to 7000 cal BC) period in the Zagros Mountains, western Iran, provides some of the earliest archaeological evidence of goat (
Capra hircus
) management and husbandry by circa 8200 cal BC, with detectable morphological change appearing ∼1,000 y later. To examine the genomic imprint of initial management and its implications for the goat domestication process, we analyzed 14 novel nuclear genomes (mean coverage 1.13X) and 32 mitochondrial (mtDNA) genomes (mean coverage 143X) from two such sites, Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein. These genomes show two distinct clusters: those with domestic affinity and a minority group with stronger wild affinity, indicating that managed goats were genetically distinct from wild goats at this early horizon. This genetic duality, the presence of long runs of homozygosity, shared ancestry with later Neolithic populations, a sex bias in archaeozoological remains, and demographic profiles from across all layers of Ganj Dareh support management of genetically domestic goat by circa 8200 cal BC, and represent the oldest to-this-date reported livestock genomes. In these sites a combination of high autosomal and mtDNA diversity, contrasting limited Y chromosomal lineage diversity, an absence of reported selection signatures for pigmentation, and the wild morphology of bone remains illustrates domestication as an extended process lacking a strong initial bottleneck, beginning with spatial control, demographic manipulation via biased male culling, captive breeding, and subsequently phenotypic and genomic selection.
The Museum of Cultural History (MCH) at the University of Oslo, Norway, has undertaken a series of infrastructure projects with the aim of improving the standardisation of archaeological data and ...increasing data integration at both a national and international level. This builds on decades of earlier work and includes a revision of shared National database systems (unimus), integration of previously disparate data types and spatial data (ADED), and more recently the development of a 3D publishing platform (BItFROST). These projects feed into broader aims of large-scale data integration as part of the European-wide ARIADNE Research Infrastructure. This article provides an overview of the history and development of these systems in Norway and takes a look at some of the roads still ahead.
The appearance of rich and diverse funerary practices is one of the hallmarks of the Late Epipalaeolithic Natufian in the Levant. Numerous burials at a number of sites excavated mostly in the ...Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant have fed into the interpretation of the Natufian as a sedentary society of complex hunter-gatherers. Here, we report on the human remains recovered from Shubayqa 1, a well-dated early to late Natufian site in northeast Jordan. The majority of the minimum of 23 individuals that are represented are perinates and infants, which represents an atypical population profile. Ground stone artifacts and traces of colorants are associated with some of these individuals, providing a rare insight into funerary treatment of subadults in Natufian contexts. We interpret the Shubayqa 1 evidence in the light of current and ongoing debates concerning Natufian burial practices and the issue of social complexity.
The use of animal bones to form figurative representations is well documented ethnographically and archaeologically. In this paper, we describe an intriguing group of bones from Shubayqa 6, a ...transitional Late Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site in north-east Jordan, and consider the possibility that these bones are figurative representations. The assemblage is comprised of sets of articulating phalanges, from 21 limbs of wild sheep and gazelle, found as part of a group of artefacts. If this tentative interpretation for the Shubayqa 6 bones is correct, future discussions on the frequency of figurative representations by communities at the transition from hunting and foraging to agriculture in Southwest Asia may benefit from broader consideration of bones clusters.
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•Pre-Columbian textiles were studied using hyperspectral imaging (400–2500 nm).•Spectral unmixing was used to identify endmembers of possible dye mixes.•Both an a priori and an ...automatic processing approach were used to define endmembers.•The selected endmembers were mapped to reveal patterns of dyes and fiber materials.•A comparison between maps obtained with the two selection approaches is provided.
In this study, two pre-Columbian textiles belonging to the Middle Orizon and Necropolis Paracas Cultures are studied by means of reflectance imaging spectroscopy. The non-invasive analysis of artifacts is a fundamental step when investigating the constituent materials and their state of conservation in order to target subsequent sampling campaigns in specific areas. The paper aims to explore the spectral properties in the Visible Near-Infrared (VNIR) and Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) intervals and investigate the spectral correlation between the relevant identified regions of interest. Two ways of selecting relevant spectral signatures are proposed: manual selection and automatic filtering. According to these two selections, the regions of interest undergo spectral unmixing in the VNIR interval to investigate which dyes had been used as such. The hyperspectral images are then mapped according to the selected endmembers in both VNIR and SWIR intervals. Small areas that feature the usage of a peculiar black thread have been given particular attention and imaged with a macro objective. The SWIR mapping on one of the samples has helped to reveal a pattern that can be ascribed to the manufacturing processes or the burial conditions.
Visualizations and reconstructions (here used largely interchangeably) can play an invaluable role in developing and communicating an understanding of complex archaeological evidence, both within a ...research group and to broader audiences. They can draw on and incorporate both models and simulations (see Champion 2016 for a good discussion of the distinction), and are most visibly created for academic articles or exhibition in the public domain (museum displays, news features, etc.). Denard (2013:265) reminds us that whatever the end use or target audience, heritage visualizations are ultimately a “hypothesis machine”—a shared space in which specialists with in-depth knowledge drawn from
•An interdisciplinary approach is used to identify the chaîne opératoire of club-rush tuber exploitation.•20 experimental gathering and processing experiments are carried out and ...evaluated.•Archaeological and experimental tuber assemblages are compared.•How club-rush tubers were exploited by Early Natufians is determined.
Club-rush (Bolboschoenus spp. (Asch.) Palla) is one of the most common edible wild plant taxa found at Epipaleolithic and Neolithic sites in southwest Asia. At the Early Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 (Black Desert, Jordan) thousands of club-rush rhizome-tuber remains and hundreds of fragments of prepared meals were found. The evidence indicated that the underground storage organs of this plant were recurrently used as a source of food 14,600 years ago. To determine how Early Natufian communities gathered, processed and transformed club-rush tubers into food, we designed an interdisciplinary study that combined experimental archaeology, archaeobotany, and ground and chipped stone tool analyses. We conducted more than 50 specific experiments over three years, and based on the experimental materials produced we inferred that 1) the best season for club-rush rhizome-tuber collection in the region was spring-summer time; 2) that the primary method to harvest the plant would have been uprooting; and 3) that the most efficient approaches to obtain perfectly peeled and clean rhizome-tubers could have entailed drying, roasting and gentle grinding of the tubers. Overall, our work provides important information to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire for club-rush tuber exploitation in the past. The experimental data and modern reference datasets allow us to interpret the archaeological material found at Shubayqa 1, and start identifying some of the activities that Natufian communities in the Black Desert undertook in relation to the exploitation of this particular source of food.
Climate resilience in the desert areas of Egypt Bunbury, Judith; Litherland, Piers; Litherland, Jenny ...
Claroscuro. Revista del Centro de Estudios sobre Diversidad Cultural,
05/2024
22
Journal Article
Today the Saharan region is known as a hyper-arid environment with minimal human activity outside the few oases. However, archaeological evidence suggests that, in the past, the landscape was more ...accessible and that settlements sprang up around springs and wells that were linked by well-used routes. Our studies suggest that this activity was concentrated into historical periods when fresh water was available, particularly the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom and the Graeco-Roman Period. Comparison with records of global temperature proxies in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project show that these periods of activity were also times of high global temperatures, leading to the conclusion times of global warming produce increased rainfall in the Saharan region that supports ecosystems and activity in the desert.
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