1,720,960 research outputs found
New insights into Middle Neolithic life from the Wiltshire Museum collections
No full textThis paper presents microwear analysis of an edge-ground blade knife and antler macehead from the Wiltshire Museum collections. The paper will provide a brief background to the broader PhD research within which this analysis was conducted, alongside more detailed results of the microwear analysis. This will highlight the breadth or information which can gained from the detailed studies of this kind
A stone bead from flagstones, Dorchester: evidence for middle neolithic textile adornment
No full textRecent reanalysis of the cremation burials from the Flagstones enclosure, Dorchester has revealed one deposit, from ditch segment 16, was associated with a single small limestone bead. Although beads have been associated with a small number of Neolithic inhumation burials, this find presents the first Neolithic cremation burial in Britain to be accompanied by an artefact of this type. This paper presents a biographical analysis of this object and discusses the find within its broader Middle Neolithic context. Use-wear analysis has revealed the bead had a long use-life prior to deposition and provides the earliest, securely dated evidence for the adornment of textiles and leatherwork in Neolithic Britain
Beyond symbols of power: An integrated multi-scalar study of the life histories of Middle Neolithic elaborate objects
No full textThe British Middle Neolithic (c.3500-2900 BC) is now recognised as a time of significant social and cultural change. In lowland Britain at least, the period sees striking changes in subsistence (likely a move from mixed agriculture to pastoralism), the cessation of activity at flint mines and axe quarries (c. 3500 BC), alongside the appearance of new mortuary practices, and new monument forms. Coincident is the appearance of a range of novel artefact forms. Of these, the ceramics – Peterborough and Impressed Wares – are relatively well-studied. However, that is not the case with a number of elaborate artefact forms without indigenous precedent such as jet sliders, antler and stone maceheads, boar’s tusk implements, transverse arrowheads, lozenge arrowheads, waisted adzeheads and axeheads, fully-ground rectangular knives, edge-ground blade knives and lozenge points, many of which are marked out by their highly skilled and/or time-consuming manufacture. These objects occur in a restricted range of contexts, most notably as personal grave goods within burials, which raise critical questions about their role. This research presents the first integrated, multi-scalar study of the life histories of a number of these elaborate objects which appear in Britain during the Middle Neolithic. It explores their creation, distribution and life-histories through studies of their context, materiality, technologies of production and use-wear analysis, alongside experimental replication, to generate detailed understandings of the varied roles these objects played in life and death in Middle Neolithic Britain
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
Towards an understanding of retouch flakes: a use-wear blind test on knapped stone microdebitage
No full textThe retouching and resharpening of lithic tools during their production and maintenance leads to the production of large numbers of small flakes and chips known as microdebitage. Standard analytical approaches to this material involves the mapping of microartefact densities to identify activity areas, and the creation of techno-typologies to characterise the form of retouch flakes from different types of tools. Whilst use-wear analysis is a common approach to the analysis of tools, it has been applied much less commonly to microdebitage. This paper contends that the use-wear analysis of microdebitage holds great potential for identifying activity areas on archaeological sites, representing a relatively unexplored analytical resource within microartefact assemblages. In order to test the range of factors that affect the identification of use-wear traces on small retouch flakes, a blind test consisting of 40 retouch flakes was conducted. The results show that wear traces can be identified with comparable levels of accuracy to those reported for historic blind tests of standard lithic tools suggesting that the use-wear analysis of retouch flakes can be a useful analytical tool in understanding site function, and in increasing sample sizes in cases where assemblages contain few tools
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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