1,721,029 research outputs found
Empires and the acceleration of wealth inequality in the pre-Islamic Near East: an archaeological approach
Full text linkWe present an approach comparing wealth inequality between c. 3000 BCE and 224 CE in the Near East using house sizes and urban area from 1060 houses in 98 archaeological sites. We divide this dataset into two chronological phases, firstly c. 3000-800 BCE and secondly 800 BCE - 224 CE. The first phase is characterised by small, relatively weak states, while the second phase is characterised by major empires and large states, termed as the Age of Empire (AoE). For these two periods, inequality is measured using house size in relation to settlement scaling, and applying, in addition, the Gini and Atkinson indices on house sizes. Results demonstrate that pre-AoE houses have a lower scaling metric (β) that measures house size relative to site size (0.24), while for the AoE the value is higher (0.41). This indicates more rapid median house size expansion during the AoE as cities grew larger. For the pre-AoE, Gini and Atkinson inequality measures result in 0.45 and 0.16, respectively, while the AoE demonstrates 0.54 and 0.24 for the same measures, respectively. This demonstrates greater house size inequality in the AoE. Overall, we see that wealth inequality is not only greater in the AoE, but that increased wealth inequality has a likely power law relationship to increased settlement area. Alternative metrics to minimise data biases affecting results, including median house size and bootstrap sampling, are applied to strengthen these results and overall conclusions
Finding a Relatively Flat Archaeological Site with Minimal Ceramics: A Case Study from Iraqi Kurdistan
No full textWe present a new technique to detect flat archaeological sites with minimal ceramics using an unmanned aerial vehicle that maps surface stone concentrations. Methods deployed include point pattern analysis of stone concentrations and a machine-learning technique using unsupervised classification of visible stone signature qualities, which are used in simple linear regressions to compare with geophysical and ceramic surface survey results of a site in Iraqi Kurdistan. There is a stronger fit (r2= 0.77) between surface stone concentrations and architecture identified by geophysical measurement, while surveyed ceramics show a weaker fit to defined architecture (r2= 0.31). Surface stone concentrations are potentially a better proxy than ceramics for determining the presence of past settlement in regions where stone was commonly used, sites are relatively flat, and ceramics are found in low concentrations. The methods advanced here can be scaled to wider areas, particularly in mountainous regions, where surface stone features are present
Quantifying object similarity: Applying locality sensitive hashing for comparing material culture
No full textWe present a novel technique that compares and quantifies images used here to compare similarities between material cultures. This method is based on locality sensitive hashing (LSH), which uses a relatively fast and flexible algorithm to compare image data and determine their level of similarity. This technique is applied to a dataset of sculpture faces from the Aegean, Anatolia, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Indus/Gandhara, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. Results indicate that the objects can be differentiated based on regional differences and show similarities to other locations that share specific material culture traits. Images from known locations enable a network of compared objects to be constructed, where inverse closeness centrality and link weights are used to indicate areas that have a greater or less cultural similarity to other regions. Different periods are assessed, and the results demonstrate that objects from earlier than the 9th century BCE show greater similarity to other local and Egyptian items. Objects from between the 9th and 4th centuries BCE increasingly show interregional similarity, with the eastern Mediterranean, including the Aegean, Anatolia, Egypt, and Cyprus, having close similarity to multiple regions. After the 4th century BCE, greater sculptural similarity is found across a wide area, including the Aegean, Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Gandhara. In general, sculptures from more distant areas increase in similarity in later periods, that is starting from the 9th century BCE. The results demonstrate that the technique can be applied to quantifying object similarity and extended to a broad range of archaeological objects, while also being a tool for rapid analysis that requires minimal data compared to some machine learning techniques. The code and data are provided as part of the outputs
Salinization Model with links to source files
No full textThis computational model of irrigation agriculture is used to study the effects of salinization in Mesopotamia. Scholars have long suspected that central and southern Mesopotamia present environments which limited agricultural production over long-term periods. In regions such as central Mesopotamia, where salinization likely affected settlement in different periods but was more manageable than in more southern regions, fallowing regimes, natural and engineered leaching, and decisions made on when to crop were strategies applied in order to limit the effects of salinization. The model is used to assess the effectiveness of these coping strategies by incorporating projected climate, soil, and landscape conditions with agricultural practices. The simulation results not only demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of techniques to inhibiting progressive salinization but can be compared with the archaeological record in order to determine if the results correspond to past events and help to interpret past settlement history
Salinization MASS Model Version
No full textThis salinization simulation enables irrigation salinity, capillary rise, rainfall, leaching, salt mitigation strategies via fallowing, and other functions that are addressed in a coupled social-environment model applied to southern Mesopotamia. The simulation is applied to the Modeling Ancient Settlement Systems Project supported by the University of Chicago, Durham University, and Argonne National Laboratory. The simulation can be used for other regions
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The structure, centrality, and scale of urban street networks: cases from Pre-Industrial Afro-Eurasia
Full text linkCities and towns have often developed infrastructure that enabled a variety of socio-economic interactions. Street networks within these urban settings provide key access to resources, neighborhoods, and cultural facilities. Studies on settlement scaling have also demonstrated that a variety of urban infrastructure and resources indicate clear population scaling relationships in both modern and ancient settings. This article presents an approach that investigates past street network centrality and its relationship to population scaling in urban contexts. Centrality results are compared statistically among different urban settings, which are categorized as orthogonal (i.e., planned) or self-organizing (i.e., organic) urban settings, with places having both characteristics classified as hybrid. Results demonstrate that street nodes have a power law relationship to urban area, where the number of nodes increases and node density decreases in a sub-linear manner for larger sites. Most median centrality values decrease in a negative sub-linear manner as sites are larger, with organic and hybrid urban sites’ centrality being generally less and diminishing more rapidly than orthogonal settings. Diminishing centrality shows comparability to modern urban systems, where larger urban districts may restrict overall interaction due to increasing transport costs over wider areas. Centrality results indicate that scaling results have multiples of approximately ⅙ or ⅓ that are comparable to other urban and road infrastructure, suggesting a potential relationship between different infrastructure features and population in urban centers. The results have implications for archaeological settlements where urban street plans are incomplete or undetermined, as it allows forecasts to be made on past urban sites’ street network centrality. Additionally, a tool to enable analysis of street networks and centrality is provided as part of the contribution
Documentation of settlement structures in the ancient near east
No full textCode, data, and instructions for using a spatial interaction entropy maximization (SIEM) model for studying settlement structures. The settlement data include settlements from the Khabur Triangle and Southern Mesopotamia for the Late Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age, Middle Bronze Age, and Iron Age. The model is in Java and applied within Repast Simphony 2.2
Early urbanism in Mesopotamia coincided with increased moisture between 6500 to 5500 years BP
No full textClimate change is thought to have played a significant role in the rise and demise of complex Mesopotamian societies throughout the mid- to late Holocene. However, assessing the links between societal change and climate variability has been historically challenging, in part due to an absence of long-term, well-dated palaeoclimate archives located in close proximity to key archaeological sites. Here, we synthesise proxy data with archaeological information from Mesopotamia to demonstrate that the earliest urban development documented in this region coincides with increasing and potentially peak effective moisture in the mid-Holocene by
5500 BP. We posit that increasing moisture availability likely facilitated the expansion and development of the earliest cities, with resource extraction under favourable climatic conditions providing new opportunities for urban centres to expand their resource areas into new domains, and far beyond what is evident in earlier periods. Following
5200 BP, these same archives show increasing aridity coincident with the end of the Late Chalcolithic, and abandonment of several key settlements. Taken together, our work contextualises the evolution of critical urban centres in Mesopotamia between 6500 to 5500 yrs BP, and underscores the sensitivity of these centres to climatological variability
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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