1,721,029 research outputs found
Chapter 1 - Archaeological studies of Maltese prehistory for the FRAGSUS Project 2013–18 (Temple places: Excavating cultural sustainability in prehistoric Malta)
Full text linkThe FRAGSUS Project (‘Fragility and Sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory’) was devised to explore issues of prehistoric island sustainability set against the background of environmental change and instability. The Project set out with four explicit objectives. These aimed to establish the factors that led to the growth, sustainability and apparent demise of the Neolithic Temple Culture civilization of Malta. The scenario set by previous research (Malone & Stoddart 2013; Trump 1976) identified that the collapse of this long-lived civilization was caused perhaps by isolation and a deteriorating unstable ecosystem amongst other possible factors. The objectives designed to explore the socio-economic changes that took place were to:
1) Reconstruct the past environment to investigate the environmental context of and human impact on ancient Malta. This would be achieved through an assessment of vegetation and landscape stability before, during and after the establishment, maintenance and collapse of the Neolithic civilization; and gathering data for comparisons with the later protohistoric and historical periods. 2) Improve the existing chronological framework by developing a reliable, precise and accurate time frame that would integrate events and trends determined from environmental, landscape and human-archaeological records. The chronology was to be achieved through the implementation of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon, isotopic and Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating methods (tephra analysis was undertaken in order to enable cross-dating with the AMS-dated pollen sequence, within which sparse tephra shards were found). The resulting determinations would give precision to the already unusually detailed artefactual framework, and all results would then be assessed using a Bayesian approach.
3) Establish the population history of early Malta by applying multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of the ancient population using previously excavated human remains from Xagħra. These remains were to be sampled to establish population structure, chronology, diet, stress, activity, disease, taphonomy and external origins.
4) Reconstruct the settlement, subsistence and landscape history of early Malta through study of the changing socio-economic patterns of early settlement, landuse and resource exploitation in prehistory. This would be combined with understanding the impact of deforestation, soil erosion and climate instability on early farming societies by sampling ‘time capsules’ of settlement and palaeoeconomic activity. [Excerpt from Introduction]peer-reviewe
Chapter 3 - Excavations at Tac-Cawla, Rabat, Gozo, 2014 (Temple places: Excavating cultural sustainability in prehistoric Malta)
Full text linkp.s. Vella Nicholas C. co-author appears on the print version but not the online version.In this chapter, we present the results of archaeological excavations at the prehistoric settlement known as Taċ-Ċawla, Rabat, Gozo (site code TCC14), undertaken by the FRAGSUS Project from 27 March to 17 July 2014. This exercise involved sampling intact archaeological deposits for dateable environmental and economic remains, and identifying and interpreting new features found at a significant settlement site. The site had potential to tackle the fundamental research questions posed by the FRAGSUS Project (§1.5) and expand knowledge of early domestic settlement on Malta. [Excerpt from Introduction]peer-reviewe
Chapter 6 - Kordin III (Temple places: Excavating cultural sustainability in prehistoric Malta)
Full text linkIntroduction: The following presents the results of the four-week excavation campaign at the Kordin III megalithic complex in June–July 2015 (site code: KRD2015), Paola, Malta (Fig. 6.1). The excavations were undertaken by the FRAGSUS1 research team, with assistance from students from the University of Malta. The excavations at Kordin III were aimed at locating intact archaeological deposits related to the Temple Period in order to retrieve samples for radiocarbon dating, as well as palaeoenvironmental and palaeoeconomic reconstruction. Following the findings of previous excavation campaigns at Taċ-Ċawla, Santa Verna, Ġgantija and In-Nuffara, all located on Gozo, the Kordin III excavations sought to establish a relative and absolute chronology for the site and the wider Temple Period on Malta, as well as to understand the environmental and geoarchaeological setting of the Kordin III complex and consider its relationship with the lost sites of Kordin I and II (see Fig. 6.8)peer-reviewe
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
Index (Temple landscapes Fragility, change and resilience of Holocene environments in the Maltese Islands)
Full text linkThe ERC-funded FRAGSUS Project (Fragility and sustainability in small island environments: adaptation, cultural change and collapse in prehistory, 2013–18), led by Caroline Malone (Queens University Belfast) has explored issues of environmental fragility and Neolithic social resilience and sustainability during the Holocene period in the Maltese Islands. This, the first volume of three, presents the palaeo-environmental story of early Maltese landscapes. The project employed a programme of high-resolution chronological and stratigraphic investigations of the valley systems on Malta and Gozo. Buried deposits extracted through coring and geoarchaeological study yielded rich and chronologically controlled data that allow an important new understanding of environmental change in the islands. The study combined AMS radiocarbon and OSL chronologies with detailed palynological, molluscan and geoarchaeological analyses. These enable environmental reconstruction of prehistoric landscapes and the changing resources exploited by the islanders between the seventh and second millennia bc. The interdisciplinary studies combined with excavated economic and environmental materials from archaeological sites allows Temple landscapes to examine the dramatic and damaging impacts made by the first farming communities on the islands’ soil and resources. The project reveals the remarkable resilience of the soil-vegetational system of the island landscapes, as well as the adaptations made by Neolithic communities to harness their productivity, in the face of climatic change and inexorable soil erosion. Neolithic people evidently understood how to maintain soil fertility and cope with the inherently unstable changing landscapes of Malta. In contrast, second millennium bc Bronze Age societies failed to adapt effectively to the long-term aridifying trend so clearly highlighted in the soil and vegetation record. This failure led to severe and irreversible erosion and very different and short-lived socio-economic systems across the Maltese islands
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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