1,720,969 research outputs found
Beyond villages and open fields: the origins and development of a historic landscape characterized by dispersed settlement in South-West England
No full textPollen evidence has, to date, made little contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of the medieval landscape. Compared to the prehistoric period, relatively few long palaeoenvironmental sequences provide a continuous record for the past two millennia, and those that have been analysed are mostly located in upland locations that lay beyond areas settled during this period. The nine sequences reported here from central Devon and the edges of Exmoor start to redress that imbalance. They suggest substantial clearance of woodland in lowland areas and the upland fringe by the Late Iron Age, and that the incorporation of this region into the Roman world had little impact on patterns of landscape exploitation. In a region that lay beyond the main area of Romanisation, it is not surprising that the 5th century saw little discernible change in management of the landscape. These palaeoenvironmental sequences suggest that around the 7th-8th centuries, however, there was a significant change in the patterns of land-use, which it is suggested relates to the introduction of a regionally distinctive system of agriculture known as 'convertible husbandry'. This may also have been the context for the creation of today's historic landscape of small hamlets and isolated farmsteads set within a near continuous fieldscape, replacing the late prehistoric/Romano-British/post-Roman landscape of small, enclosed settlements with only very localised evidence for field systems. This transformation appears to be roughly contemporary with, or even earlier than, the creation of nucleated villages in the 'Central Province' of England, suggesting that the 'great replanning' was just one of several regionally distinctive trajectories of landscape change in the later 1st millennium A.D
Vegetational change and human activity in the Exe Valley, Devon, UK
No full textThis paper presents the results of the first investigation of vegetation change and human activity from a river valley west of the Somerset Levels. The record is contrasted with the pollen and archaeological record from South West uplands (Dartmoor and Exmoor) and the Somerset Levels. Vegetation change and archaeological evidence are shown to be generally consistent, with evidence from the middle valley of Mesolithic vegetation disturbance (with nearby lithics), Neolithic clearance of terraces and slopes in the lower valley and Neolithic-Bronze Age ceremonial and domestic activity, but in the upper reach the maintenance of wooded valley floor conditions probably with management until historic times. The valley floor and surrounding slope vegetation history is found to be significantly different to that of the uplands with lime and elm being significant components of the prehistoric woodland record. The data suggest that lime is restricted to terraces and lowlands below 200 metres OD throughout the prehistoric period. The pollen data from the valley suggests the lowlands had a rich and mixed ecology providing a wide range of resources and that, despite less visible archaeological remains, human activity is manifest through palynological evidence from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age. The largest expanse of valley-floor terrace, the Nether Exe Basin, which was at least partially deforested in the early Neolithic contains a rich assemblage of Neolithic-Bronze Age ceremonial, funerary and domestic archaeology associated with an early and clear palynological record of woodland clearance, arable and pastoral activity
Mid- to late-Holocene vegetation history of Greater Exmoor, UK: estimating the spatial extent of human-induced vegetation change
No full textThis paper presents the results from three pollen profiles from a group of small spring mire sites on the southern edge of Exmoor in south west England. The size and topography of these sites allow detailed local landscape histories around each site to be reconstructed which broadly cover the mid- to late-Holocene. Comparison of the individual local landscape histories demonstrates the scale of spatial variation in vegetation around the upland edge, and facilitates understanding of human-landscape interactions from the early Neolithic onward. In the early Neolithic significant short-term woodland disturbance is recorded around the upland fringe, including clearance of oak-hazel-elm woodland, suggesting that the shift from Mesolithic to Neolithic is not marked by a gradual environmental transition. Following this, there is clear evidence of Neolithic management of upland heath using fire, presumably for the management of upland grazing. Woodland clearances are recorded throughout the later Prehistoric period; however, the use of multiple profiling suggests that woodland clearance is spatially discrete, even within an area of 4 km2. Pastoral land use is dominant around the uplands until around 900–1,000 a.d., and there is no discernible Roman or post-Roman period impact in the vegetation, suggesting cultural stability from the late Iron Age to the early Medieval period. By 1,100 a.d., there is a shift to mixed arable-pastoral farming which appears to continue well into the post-Medieval period
Historical context and chronology of Bronze Age land enclosure on Dartmoor, UK
No full textThe upland of Dartmoor, southwest England, is one of the flagship prehistoric landscapes within Britain owing to the excellent survival of extensive prehistoric coaxial field systems. Archaeological surveys and rescue excavations during the 1970s and 1980s did much to further the understanding of this landscape; however, much remains to be explored, in particular the chronology of enclosure, the nature of the pre-enclosure landscape and the relationship between Bronze Age communities and their environment. Reconsideration of this landscape is important, given the place it holds in our understanding of subdivision of the landscape across northwest Europe during prehistory. This paper presents new palaeoecological data recovered as part of an integrated archaeological and palaeoecological project on northeast Dartmoor. The sequences detailed here include the first dated Neolithic period palaeoenvironmental data from within the prehistoric enclosed land on the moor, providing a longer-term context for enclosure. Neolithic groups are implicated in the first establishment of heathland in the study area at around 3630–3370 cal BC. During the early Bronze Age, reestablishment of hazel scrub in the study area implies reduced use of the upland, although it is not clear whether this is local or indicative of the wider landscape. A combination of pollen and fungal spore data indicates a substantial shift to species-rich grassland with grazing animals at c.1480 cal BC in a phase that lasted 400 years. The later Bronze Age and early Iron Age are characterised by low intensity use of the upland. These data provide new chronological data for land cover change on Dartmoor and whilst they broadly confirm existing models of upland land use in later prehistory, their proximity to the standing archaeology affords a more nuanced interpretation of local change
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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