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Comment on Arnold et al. “Drought and the collapse of the Tiwanaku Civilization: New evidence from Lake Orurillo, Peru” [Quat. Sci. Rev. 251 (2021): 106693]
No full textThis paper revives a fascinating debate: did a drought start before, during, or after the collapse of the Andean polity of Tiwanaku? Here we present an alternate age model that highlights the real issue: the data from Lake Orurillo, no matter the age model, are too imprecise to address the question. The authors neglect the significance of four-century error ranges (95% probability) for a drought that lasted a single century, according to their estimates. They are content to treat an imprecise correlation between drought and collapse as a causal relationship. Future efforts will require much greater attention to refining both paleoclimate and cultural chronologies, which is a necessary first step in understanding complex episodes of human–environment interaction.Fil: Marsh, Erik Johnson. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Básicas. - Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Instituto Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Básicas; ArgentinaFil: Contreras, Daniel. University of Florida; Estados UnidosFil: Bruno, Maria C.. Dickinson College; Estados UnidosFil: Vranich, Alexei. University of Texas at San Antonio; Estados UnidosFil: Roddick, Andrew P.. Mcmaster University; Canad
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Visions of Tiwanaku
Get PDF“What was Tiwanaku?” This question was posed to a select group of scholars that gathered for an intensive two-day conference at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. For over half a millennium, the megalithic ruins in the highlands of the Andes mountains have stood as proxy for the desires and ambitions of various empires and political agendas; in the last hundred years, scholars have attempted to answer this question by interpreting the shattered remains from a distant preliterate past. The conference pooled the decades of experience of a dozen leading scholars together with the recent field data of junior scholars (published separately in Volumes 2 and 3 of Advances in Titicaca Basin Archaeology). This volume contains twelve papers from senior scholars, whose contributions discuss subjects from the farthest points of the southern Andes, where the iconic artifacts of Tiwanaku appear as offerings to the departed, to the heralded ruins weathered by time and burdened by centuries of interpretation and speculation. Visions of Tiwanaku stays true to its name by providing a platform for each scholar to present an informed view on the nature of this enigmatic place that seems so familiar, yet continues to elude understanding by falling outside our established models for early cities and states.Series: Monographs 7
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Advances in Titicaca Basin Archaeology-2
Get PDFThis volume, the second in a series of studies on the archaeology of the Titicaca Basin, serves as an excellent springboard for broader discussions of the roles of ritual, authority, coercion, and the intensification of resources and trade for the development of archaic states worldwide. Over the last hundred years, scholars have painstakingly pieced together fragments of the incredible cultural history of the Titicaca Basin, an area that encompasses over 50,000 square kilometers, achieving a basic understanding of settlement patterns and chronology. While large-scale surveys need to continue and areas will need to be revisited to further refine chronologies and knowledge of site-formation processes, the maturation of the field now allows archaeologists to invest energy fruitfully in individual locations and specialized topics. The contributions in this volume focus on the southern region of the Basin, the area that would become the core of the Tiwanaku heartland
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Spatial and Temporal Variation in Stone Raw Material Provisioning in the Chivay Obsidian Source Area
Get PDFLa pirámide de Akapana: reconsiderando el centro monumental de Tiwanaku
No full textLos restos más visibles de la civilización de Tiwanaku se encuentran en el casco urbano de su propia capital. Desde hace más de un siglo han sido la meta lógica de toda clase de excavaciones y análisis de datos; hasta la actualidad, sin embargo, persiste una notable penuria de información comprobable respecto al fechado, a su forma elusiva y construcción compleja, pobreza que, a su vez, afecta la comprensión de la forma y desarrollo de este impresionante centro urbano ceremonial.En el presente artículo se vuelve a analizar la pirámide de Akapana, monumento principal de Tiwanaku, con el propósito de realizar, a la luz de recientes datos suministrados por las investigaciones llevadas a cabo entre 1999 y 2000, una nueva evaluación de los últimos estudios publicados sobre las cuestiones de su fechado, forma y construcción. Al encontrar insuficiencias en la manera en que se excavaron y se analizaron los monumentos en el pasado, se propone un proceder alternativo a fin de brindar una nueva interpretación de los datos. Con ella se llega a un entendimiento más viable de la pirámide de Akapana y se examina su relevancia para la forma de este centro urbano preeuropeo desde una perspectiva nueva.The Akapana Pyramid: Reconsidering Tiwanaku's Monumental CenterThe most visible remains of the Tiwanaku civilization are the monuments found at the site of Tiwanaku. Although the target of extensive excavation and analysis in the last 100 years, there is a serious lack of substantiated information about important aspects such as dating, form, and construction of these monuments. This in turn affects our understanding of the development of this impressive urban ceremonial center. In the following article I examine the principle monument at Tiwanaku, the Akapana pyramid, evaluating the most recently published interpretations of its dating, form and construction in light of information collected during my 1999 and 2000 field seasons. Finding inadequacies with the manner in which monuments have been excavated and interpreted in the past, I propose an alternative method and reinterpret the available evidence. I conclude with an alternative explanation for the Akapana pyramid and explore the ramifications of my new perspective on this monument for broader understandings of the pre-Columbian center's urban form
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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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