Andrew Bevan

• University College London

Quantifiable, spatially-resolved, large-scale evidence about traditional food storage facilities is extremely rare, and yet highly insightful for researchers across subjects such as human ecology, anthropology, agronomy, archaeology and economic history. This paper takes advantage of some unusually detailed French colonial era records of cereal sto...

The origins of composite tiles, one of the oldest forms of roofing, are still unclear. This study is based on a set of over 5000 clay tile fragments excavated from a single context in the Qiaocun site on the Chinese Loess Plateau, dated to ~ 2400–2200 BCE (Early Longshan Period). By combining morphological measurement statistics, 3D modeling, compu...

Geostatistics has become a powerful method for investigating complex spatial variations of prehistoric settlements in floodplains and other geomorphological settings. A geoarchaeological drilling program that covers most of the Sha‐Ying River Basin provides a rare opportunity with unusually detailed environmental data to contest and develop the geo...

In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the past 10,000 years1. Although the selection of LP and the consumption of prehistoric milk must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configu...

To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates for the whole Near East from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene (15,000 – 1,500 cal. yr. BP). It is composed of 11,027 radiocarbon dates from 1,023 sites that have been collected comprehensively by cross-checking...

The Italian peninsula offers an excellent case study within which to investigate long- term regional demographic trends and their response to climate fluctuations, espe- cially given its diverse landscapes, latitudinal range and varied elevations. In the past two decades, summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates have becom...

This paper illustrates long-term trends in human population and climate from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene (14,000–2500 cal. yr. BP) in order to assess to what degree climate change impacted human societies in the Near East. It draws on a large corpus of archaeo-demographic data, including anthropogenic radiocarbon dates (n = 10,653) an...

This paper illustrates long-term trends in human population and climate from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene (14,000–2500 cal. yr. BP) in order to assess to what degree climate change impacted human societies in the Near East. It draws on a large corpus of archaeo-demographic data, including anthropogenic radiocarbon dates (n = 10,653) an...

The authors of this article consider the relationship in European prehistory between the procurement of high-quality stones (for axeheads, daggers, and other tools) on the one hand, and the early mining, crafting, and deposition of copper on the other. The data consist of radiocarbon dates for the exploitation of stone quarries, flint mines, and co...

Biodiversity plays an important role in ecosystem functioning, habitat recovery following disturbance and resilience to global environmental change. Long‐term ecological records can be used to explore biodiversity patterns and trends over centennial to multi‐millennial time‐scales across broad regions. Fossil pollen grains preserved in sediment ove...

Neolithic stone axeheads from Britain provide an unusually rich, well-provenanced set of evidence with which to consider patterns of prehistoric production and exchange. It is no surprise then that these objects have often been subject to spatial analysis in terms of the relationship between particular stone source areas and the distribution of axe...

Due to a typesetting mistake, the images of Figs 2 and 3 were mistakenly switched. The original version has been corrected.

This paper responds to a resurgence of interest in constructing long-term time proxies of human activity, especially but not limited to models of population change over the Pleistocene and/or Holocene. While very much agreeing with the need for this increased attention, we emphasize three important issues that can all be thought of as modifiable re...

Rising sea levels have been associated with human migration and behavioral shifts throughout prehistory, often with an emphasis on landscape submergence and consequent societal collapse. However, the assumption that future sea-level rise will drive similar adaptive responses is overly simplistic. While the change from land to sea represents a drama...

The last decade has seen the development of a range of new statistical and computational techniques for analysing large collections of radiocarbon (14 C) dates, often but not exclusively to make inferences about human population change in the past. Here we introduce rcarbon, an open-source software package for the R statistical computing language w...

This dataset is the outcome of an INSTAP-funded project “An Aegean Prehistory Written in Radiocarbon Dates”. It includes 3159 14C dates from 353 sites in Greece and reflects an attempt to exhaustively collect and cross-check all published radiocarbon dates from existing databases, original publications and preliminary reports using both internation...

The MedAfriCarbon radiocarbon database and its accompanying web application are outcomes of the MedAfrica project — Archaeological deep history and dynamics of Mediterranean Africa, ca. 9600–700 BC. The dataset presented here in Version 1.0 of the database includes 1587 archaeological 14C dates from 368 sites in Mediterranean Africa. The database i...

Keeping plants and animals beyond their natural shelf life is a central human challenge, both as a matter of immediate survival and for the social and economic opportunities that stored foods offer. Understanding different food storage and preservation strategies in the past is key to a whole series of other research agendas, but remains challengin...

This article addresses a 250-year episode of human colonisation, community growth and subsequent decline on the small Greek island of Antikythera ( ad 1770 to present), focusing on rich documentary sources from four decades of British rule in the early nineteenth century. In particular, a series of nominal censuses and accompanying agricultural sta...

New radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dates suggest a simultaneous appearance of two technologically and geographically distinct axe production practices in Neolithic Britain; igneous open-air quarries in Great Langdale, Cumbria, and from flint mines in southern England at ~4000–3700 cal BC. In light of the recent evidence that farming was introduced at this tim...

It is well known that Neolithic megalithic landscapes are the result of complex locational logics governing where communities chose to site their funerary monuments. These logics in turn respond to broader environmental and cultural affordances, and the relationship between these has been a major topic in the megalithic archaeological literature fo...

Abstract :This paper describes long-term changes in human population and vegetation cover in southern France, using summed radiocarbon probability distributions and site count data as population proxies and information from fossil pollen cores as a proxy for past land cover. Southern France is particularly wellsuited to this type of study as a resu...

Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. While climate plays a key role in determining the species pools within different regions and exerts a strong influence on broad vegetation patterning, the role of humans, particularly during prehistory, is less clear. The aim of this paper is to assess the...

This paper explores long-term trends in human population and vegetation change in the Levant from the early to the late Holocene in order to assess when and how human impact has shaped the region’s landscapes over the millennia. To do so, we employed multiple proxies and compared archaeological, pollen and palaeoclimate data within a multi-scalar a...

This paper introduces a special issue on The Changing Face of the Mediterranean: Land Cover, Demography, and Environmental Change, which brings together up-to-date regional or thematic perspectives on major long-term trends in Mediterranean human–environment relations. Particularly, important insights are provided by palynology to reconstruct past...

This paper offers a comparative study of land use and demographic development in northern and southern Greece from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period. Results from summed probability densities (SPD) of archaeological radiocarbon dates and settlement numbers derived from archaeological site surveys are combined with results from cluster-based ana...

This paper compares changes in vegetation structure and composition (using synthetic fossil pollen data) with proxy data for population levels (including settlements and radiocarbon dates) over the course of the last 10 millennia in Tyrrhenian central Italy. These data show generalised patterns of clearance of woodland in response both to early agr...

Southern Anatolia is a highly significant area within the Mediterranean, particularly in terms of understanding how agriculture moved into Europe from neighbouring regions. This study uses pollen, palaeoclimate and archaeological evidence to investigate the relationships between demography and vegetation change, and to explore how the development o...

This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean regions, from Iberia and Morocco to the Levant, have been transformed by human and natural agencies during the past 10 millennia. It draws on a range of data sources: notably (1) archaeological site surveys (n = 32,000) and 14C dates (n = 12,000) as proxies f...

This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean regions, from Iberia and Morocco to the Levant, have been transformed by human and natural agencies during the past 10 millennia. It draws on a range of data sources: notably (1) archaeological site surveys (n = 32,000) and ¹⁴C dates (n = 12,000) as proxies f...

For forty years, there has been a widely held belief that over 2,000 years ago the Chinese Qin developed an advanced chromate conversion coating technology (CCC) to prevent metal corrosion. This belief was based on the detection of chromium traces on the surface of bronze weapons buried with the Chinese Terracotta Army, and the same weapons’ very g...

The extent to which non-agricultural production in prehistory had cost-benefit motivations has long been a subject of discussion. This paper addresses the topic by looking at the evidence for Neolithic quarrying and mining in Britain and continental northwest Europe and asks whether changing production through time was influenced by changing demand...

This paper draws upon the experience of several years of running a multi-application crowdsourcing platform, as well as a longitudinal evaluation of participant profiles, motivations and behaviour, to argue that heritage crowdsourcing cannot straightforwardly be considered a democratising form of cultural participation. While we agree that crowdsou...

Abstract At the heart of bureaucratic practice during Warring States and early Imperial China were regular, small acts of accountancy in which objects and people were marked so that their movements could be kept track of, their quality checked and their numbers marshalled. In the mausoleum complex of the Qin Shihuang (259-210 bc, the First Emperor...

Planting and rain-beckoning rituals are an extremely common way in which past and present human communities have confronted the risk of drought across a range of environments worldwide. In tropical environments, such ceremonies are particularly salient despite widespread assumptions that water supplies are unproblematic in such regions. We demonstr...

This paper builds spatial models of Bronze Age settlement using published survey datasets from the Mirabello region in east Crete. Methodologically, we examine how point process modelling can account for uncertainties in legacy survey datasets, and thereafter can highlight patterns of both cultural change and continuity in Mirabello settlement. Com...

MedSTACH is the acronym for an AGILE-supported Teaming Phase 1 project (one year duration) aiming to design a Cyprus-based Eastern Mediterranean Science and Technology Centre of Excellence for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (CH).

MedSTACH is the acronym for an AGILE-supported Teaming Phase 1 project (one year duration) aiming to design a Cyprus-based Eastern Mediterranean Science and Technology Centre of Excellence for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (CH). MedSTACH’s mission encompasses the development of the necessary scientific and technological environment for advancin...

We review and evaluate human adaptations during the last glacial-interglacial climatic transition in southwest Asia. Stable isotope data imply that climatic change was synchronous across the region within the limits of dating uncertainty. Changes in vegetation, as indicated from pollen and charcoal, mirror step-wise shifts between cold-dry and warm...

To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository of archaeological settlement (7,383 sites) and radiocarbon data (816 samples) for central Italy, spanning the period from the Late Mesolithic (ca. 8,000 BC) to the fall of the Roman Empire (500 AD). This dataset is also one of the six case studies in a...

Large clay jars have long been popular for both wet and dry storage, but are particularly associated with Mediterranean wines and olive oil. Such ‘pithoi’ also underpin important historical shifts in social complexity and landscape investment, play prominent roles in Mediterranean social life, and thus offer an excellent opportunity to think about...

Significance The relationship between human population, food production, and climate change is a pressing concern in need of high-resolution, long-term perspectives. Archaeological radiocarbon dates have increasingly been used to reconstruct past population dynamics, and Britain and Ireland provide both radiocarbon sampling densities and species-le...

Raw counts of archaeological sites, estimates of changing settlement size and summed radiocarbon probability distributions have all become popular ways to investigate long-term regional trends in human population. Nevertheless, these three archaeological proxies have rarely been compared. This paper therefore explores the strengths and weaknesses o...

Summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates are an increasingly popular means by which to reconstruct prehistoric population dynamics, enabling more thorough cross-regional comparison and more robust hypothesis testing, for example with regard to the impact of climate change on past human demography. Here we review another use of such sum...

http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=440506#{%22issue_id%22:440506,%22page%22:10}

Full text: https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/349042 This paper presents the results and preliminary conclusions of the 2016 season of the Crowded Desert Project, aiming to find out about the nomadic occupation and its relations with the settled peoples in the region. Activities includes extensive and intensive surveys and excavations in the are...

Several recent approaches to Minoan urbanism have revisited the kinds of formal models and analyses first developed in fields such as urban studies or statistical physics. The goal of such applications is usually to better capture and understand the relationship between people, paths, places, and cultural interaction in terms of nodes, networks, an...

Gurga Chiya and Tepe Marani are small, adjacent mounds located close to the town of Halabja in the southern part of the Shahrizor Plain, one of the most fertile regions of Iraqi Kurdistan. Survey and excavation at these previously unexplored sites is beginning to produce evidence for human settlement spanning the sixth to the fourth millennia, c ....

Simulations of spatial interaction in archaeology have been successful in predicting the emergence of central sites, and political and economic hierarchies that match observed long-term settlement patterns. It still remains unclear, however, to what degree such models can effectively allow for uncertainty in the archaeological record, especially wh...

Archaeology has wandered into exciting but daunting territory. It faces floods of new evidence about the human past that are largely digital, frequently spatial, increasingly open and often remotely sensed. The resulting terrain is littered, both with data that are wholly new and data that were long known about but previously considered junk. This...

We have compiled an extensive database of archaeological evidence for rice across Asia, including 400 sites from mainland East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. This dataset is used to compare several models for the geographical origins of rice cultivation and infer the most likely region(s) for its origins and subsequent outward diffusion. The...

This article reviews existing case studies in the ‘crowd-funding’ of community archaeology, as well as offering preliminary results from a small-scale experiment conducted alongside the wider crowd-sourcing efforts of the MicroPasts project (http://micropasts.org). In so-doing, it also considers the possible role of a hybrid reward- and donation-ba...

Peer comment on Mapping the Structure of the Archaeological Web by Shawn Graham

There are thousands of forgotten archaeological archives hidden away in repositories all over the world, lost worlds where many scholars have toiled away for years, trying to record every detail and bit of information available about rare and precious archaeological objects in an attempt to bring order and understanding to an almost incomprehensibl...

The MicroPasts project is a novel experiment in the use of crowd-based methodologies to enable participatory archaeological research. Building on a long tradition of offline community archaeology in the UK, this initiative aims to integrate crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding and forum-based discussion to encourage groups of academics and volunteers to c...

Archaeology has a long tradition of volunteer involvement but also faces considerable challenges in protecting and understanding a geographically widespread, rapidly dwindling and ever threatened cultural resource. This paper considers a newly launched, multi-application crowdsourcing project called MicroPasts that enables both community-led and ma...

This paper offers a brief introduction to MicroPasts, a web-enabled crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding project whose overall goal is to promote the collection and use of high quality research data via institutional and community collaborations, both on- and off-line. In addition to introducing this initiative, the discussion below is a reflection of...

This paper explores the integration of chemical data with metric studies and spatial analyses of archaeological artifacts to investigate questions of specialization, standardization, and production organization behind large-scale technological enterprises. The main analytical focus is placed on the 40,000 bronze arrowheads recovered with the Terrac...

Structure-from-motion and multiview-stereo together offer a computer vision technique for reconstructing detailed 3D models from overlapping images of anything from large landscapes to microscopic features. Because such models can be generated from ordinary photographs taken with standard cameras in ordinary lighting conditions, these techniques ar...

The Mediterranean has long played host to unusually intense patterns of maritime-led exchange, involving both products made beyond the basin and local, culturally distinctive goods such as oils and wines that continue to be well-known markers of the region’s economies and lifestyles today. Protecting these commodities, and sometimes highly emblemat...

This paper addresses the use of open source, structure from motion methods for creating 3d pointclouds from photographs and compares these with alternative workflows in other software, and relative accuracy compared to other 3D modelling methods. It describes a series of case studies that use structure from motion to record standing buildings and c...

This paper explores the way cultural traits are transmitted between individuals, and the degree to which this is affected by the location, size and configuration of human settlements, as well as other aspects of the intervening landscape. Drawing upon case studies from the large Greek island of Cere, we first consider dialectal variants of variants...

The Terracotta Army that protected the tomb of the Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang offers an evocative image of the power and organisation of the Qin armies who unified China through conquest in the third century BC. It also provides evidence for the craft production and administrative control that underpinned the Qin state. Bronze trigger mechanisms...

A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it -­‐ subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-­‐alike” (http://opendefinition.org/). Driven by demands for greater transparency from government, general freedom of information and an increased awareness of the unanticipated re-­‐use values...

Archaeology has a long tradition of volunteer involvement but also faces considerable challenges in protecting and understanding a geographically widespread, rapidly dwindling and ever threatened cultural resource. This paper considers a newly launched, multi-application crowdsourcing project called MicroPasts that enables both community-led and ma...

Inferring dynamic past behaviours from the static archaeological record is always a challenge, but computational and quantitative techniques can be helpful. In particular, they can provide useful insight on patterns of movement and interaction, by better characterising existing archaeological evidence, suggesting simple models of mobile decision-­‐...

We describe a simple way to construct new statistical models for spatial point pattern data. Taking two or more existing models (finite Gibbs spatial point processes) we multiply the probability densities together and renormalise to obtain a new probability density. We call the resulting model a hybrid. We discuss stochastic properties of hybrids,...

Mediterranean landscape ecology, island cultures and long-term human history have all emerged as major research agendas over the past half-century, engaging large swathes of the social and natural sciences. This book brings these traditions together in considering Antikythera, a tiny island perched on the edge of the Aegean and Ionian seas, over th...