Archaeology - Science topic

Human occupation typically increases the concentration of elements like K in soil because they are present at appreciable concentrations in plants.

Dear Abdul Adil Paray I am interested in the role of Central Asia in the diffusion of Eurasian languages and megalithism, you can read my paper Best regards, Xavier

Machine learning (ML) is rapidly being adopted by archaeologists interested in analyzing a range of geospatial, material cultural, textual, natural, and artistic data. The algorithms are particularly suited toward rapid identification and classification of archaeological features and objects. The results of these new studies include identification of many new sites around the world and improved classification of large archaeological datasets. ML fits well with more traditional methods used in archaeological analysis, and it remains subject to both the benefits and difficulties of those approaches. Small datasets associated with archaeological work make ML vulnerable to hidden complexity, systemic bias, and high validation costs if not managed appropriately. ML's scalability, flexibility, and rapid development, however, make it an essential part of twenty-first-century archaeological practice. This review briefly describes what ML is, how it is being used in archaeology today, and where it might be used in the future for archaeological purposes.

Along the coast of France, during the last ice age when the Cosquer cave was inhabited by a prehistoric society, the level of the sea was 120 meters lower than it is today. If the oceans were that much lower than today, because of Glacial formation isn't it possible for the The Yonaguni Monument to have been carved out of rock by human hands?

Is the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey a one off, did it just appeared out of no where. The Sahara desert hasn't given up any of it's secrets, nor the Jungles of Africa or the southern Americas nor the ice covered polar poles. Any pre-glacial civil structures found along the western coast of North America has been pulled under the earth's crust and turned into metamorphic rock.

Didn't the World's space program use satellite penetrating radar to map the world surface and they found buried structural signs of human construction everywhere?

A 25,000-year-old Ice Age structure made from the bones of 60 wooly mammoths has been unearthed in Russia. Any wooden structures found in jungle settings have probably rotted away, long ago. But prehistoric caves are found all over the world, showing signs of human occupation.

Somewhat! Because of the economic, political and military problems... all of these directly and indirectly affected not only the interest in antiquities, but most of that... But archaeologists are still continuing to study and excavate antiquities, maintain and care for them... Modern and advanced machines help them in the excavation operations. Conservation and information recording ... Also, many archaeologists publish several articles on antiquities and their preservation.

Thomas Schuermann Please do not forget the Sumerian civilization that provided immense contribution to the Middle East and to the shaping of today's civilizations. See following article:

There is an abundance of literature on the history of Rapa Nui ("Easter Island"). Most scientists studying Rapa Nui will find the generalized statement of becoming "unsustainable" unjustified. Note that what we are looking at was not a singular catastrophic event in time, but a very gradual process. It is also imortant to keep in mind that there wasn't anything like "last survivors", nor did they "travel" anywhere. Rapa Nui displays continuous habitation throuought its history, albeit with significant demographic fluctuations. The cultural and environmental history of Rapa Nui is very complex. It doesn't do justice to the proud Rapa Nui people to display their island's history as a showcase of "sustainability failure".

Most think that is too early a date. More likely to be around 1200... Mary Grey

Hi Thomas, perhaps you should allow a little more long-term influence to Mesopotamian beliefs than you are. Consider the multiple similarities between the reported life of Gilgamesh and that of Jesus of Nazareth. For example, they both have a God as a parent and end up being worshipped as a God themselves.

Note: I refer specifically to the relatively new translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh by Benjamin R. Foster.

Best

James

The idea of the shepherd as the guide and guard of human groups long predates Christianity, and Judaism. It can be found in early Mesopotamian cities, where it clearly came from. The city was the pen, the people the flock, the king the shepherd.

Good luck

ليس لديه اي معلومات بهذا الخصوص

By comparing photos and analyzes at different times

📷

New book by K Linduff and K Rubenson "Pazyryk Culture Up in the Altai", Routledge, Abingdon and New York 2022

Flavia Rinaldi ..

Thank you very much for your suggestion.. But we have an ancient building that cannot make holes in the walls.

I will try to access the indicated site.

Genetic evidence, particularly Y-chromosome phylogenies, rules out the scenario of multiple pre-14 kya migrations that you are positing (unless you think #s 1-6 left no descendants, which is possible if improbable). You are looking at those archeological sites uncritically.

Religious stories are nothing but symbols of real historical facts... Archaeological investigations revealed some of them...

Dear Ian,

Thank you for raising the question among a broad range of scholars. A few of us, social scientists, have been raising questions like this and trying to create a predictive science of how humans will live in space and how human cultures will adapt in various ways, which include the cultural issues from the perspectives of anthropology. It is interesting to see how you are raising this question about other intelligent forms of life in different environments, which comes at the question of culture from a different perspective. You might want to try raising this question among the "Astrosociology" group (which you should be able to find easily in a search) and the "Astropolitics" group (which has a journal). I have reviewed the anthropological perspective, including the issue of culture that you raise, with a review of the literature up to the time of the article and of a work that included many fields that was new at the time (2011). For many reasons, the field hasn't developed sufficiently to answer your questions and you may have to try on your own, using the existing work as a springboard, but just raising the question helps the field and perhaps promotes future collaborations. Here is where you can find my piece. “The Cultural, Social and Political Dynamics of Living in Space,” (Review Essay using “Living in Space: Cultural and Social Dynamics, Opportunities and Challenges in Permanent Space Habitats,” ed. by Sherry Bell and Langdon Morris, as a take-off point), Astropolitics, April, 2011, Vol 9, No. 1, 84-111.Best, David

Dear Vidyanand Malik ,

As indicated by Mohammed O. Al-Amr it is no longer a legit journal, it is hijacked. See for all arguments why, the following discussions here on RG:

In short: when it comes the journal “PalArch's Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/ Egyptology” it is clear that Scopus is ‘struggling’ with this journal https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100286805you can see this by looking at the coverage that looks odd (just click on ‘Scopus content coverage where you can see that between 0-3 papers a year are indexed).

Best regards.

Hi, Jeffrey. Attach you foto and file.

Visit:

Article The origin of cultivated Coffea arabica L. varieties reveale...

Article Unveiling a unique genetic diversity of cultivated Coffea ar...

Clothing or creation of body covering probably correlates with the loss of body hair and the necessity of keeping warm. At the same time, perhaps, the use of fire began as a source of warmth. So the use of clothing and fire together perhaps sets humans apart.

The answer is on the same site

Kiel University

Dear Olivier,

You may want to have a look on the paper of my former colleagues Tomaž Podobnikar:

Kind regards,

Balázs

I think it is going to start very soon.

Hi both,

I don't think the Department is not making money, not at all. In fact, as far as I know, the economic figures have not been disclosed by the university. I think the University Executive Board believes they could make more money investing in STEM departments as lecturers cost the same but these typically attract more students. There also a more systemic problem with the UK government reducing funds for arts and humanities departments. I wonder which model of education (and society) are they promoting. In any case, Archaeology at Sheffield is a very successful department and it is probably generating much more money than it requires.

Probably option C, those are what we would call "archaeological theories" that set the floor to explain what we find in the archeological record by integrating them into a set of principles that explain the evolution and behavior of human societies.

Thanks for your reply Edmond; I'll take a look at your citations and will write to you my reactions. Again, I appreciate the time you took to write your response to my Q.

Greetings from Florida

Have a nice day!

Dimitrios Dendrinos

"Evolves", where are you going?

Lou

Rock art, ancient or prehistoric drawing, painting, or similar work on or of stone. Rock art includes pictographs (drawings or paintings), petroglyphs (carvings or inscriptions), engravings (incised motifs), petroforms (rocks laid out in patterns), and geoglyphs (ground drawings).

Depends. Contact source or primary researchers first. Most will likely send you for free. Institutions and centers often charge a fee.

You may think of studying palaeo-environment and how human have affected the same in yours study area, may be identified/ shortlisted base don previous literature. Similarly, in identified study area, you may study how climate change has taken place and further how man or more precisely anthropogenic activities have affected its pace.

Tim, Thank you for your answer and the article. Can I write you a private message for more details? Anna

Dear.,

Using FTIR-DRIFT is different from ATR MIR spectra. using FTIR, sample's powder is used but in ATR may suspension is used.

The conventional methods of analysis are laborious, slow, costly, harming environment, consuming lot of chemicals, and need more samples preparation.

Compared to conventional methods, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy using Fourier Transform Infra Red in the range of Mid Infra-Red spectra (2.5 to 16 micrometer) is much easier, rapid, not need much sample preparation, no need for chemicals and this method is environment-friendly.

Sam Lin makes an excellent set of points about learning in traditional societies, particular in regard to hunter-gatherers where accurate scientific knowledge about environments and their common and unusual variations are critical to the success of this economic form of human adaptations. The importance of experiential learning cannot be overstated in the current intellectual debates about how transmission is accomplished. I wish to comment on the use of the term "mythical stories". In my opinion and experience, the continued use of the term "myth" is generally a under appreciation of the empirical scientific knowledge of traditional populations. Elsewhere on RG I have recounted scientifically accurate "stories" about natural events that are couched in metaphors in traditional languages, and may sound quaint or uninformed in translation to fieldworkers who have not learned the language of a particular population (referenced in my 1 March answer here). I have had many such experience in my work with the Pume of Venezuela, where I would ask informants about some of their behaviors, and had to wait up to 1.5 years for them to provide a detailed answer beyond "because" (as I've mentioned on RG before, this is the automatic response to a child's kind of question of ignorance, even by young adult anthropologist or greyhead). I want to recount an interesting Australian example, from the problematic divulgences of Richard Gould in his book 1969 book Yiwara: Foragers of the Australian Desert. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Gould offended some (many?) Ptjantjara, Ngatajara, and other Aboriginal peoples for including photographs of sacred elements in a waterhole, and possibly some of his descriptions of the events surrounding a teaching went at this location. I wish to recount what I feel is the important learning event that was described, and discuss the use of the term "sacred" by traditional populations that includes practical environmental knowledge. I have spoken extensively with Dick Gould about this event, He identified the visit to the Pukura waterhole (pp. 120-128, as an example of the importance of experiential environmental learning and he agrees that what he described in Yiwara as a set of "ritual" activities is really just science as we conceive of it, although it includes a level of cultural importance that can be approximated by some of our anthropological and popular terms implying r"religious" significance, but is not mythological. Gould begins this discussion referencing Norman Tindale's point that alleged "myths" about landscape features and initiations were practical teaching. When they arrived at the waterhole, Gould describes the men clearing off the vegetation grown around it, adding mud from within the waterhole all around its banks, and then coat it with red ochre. As they removed mud from the bottom of the waterhole that , they also retrieved 47 stones and sticks from within the waterhole. These objects were discussed in detail, they had individual stories. These objects were then replaced at the bottom f the waterhole. What was accomplished at Pukura was to stabilize the margins of this waterhole and dredge sediments that had accumulated in it to re-establish its maximum capacity. The 47 objects retrieved were markers of the maximum base of the pool. The activities associated with this event are not "myth', they were mnemonics about what needed to be done to accomplish environmental stewardship of a critical resource. The stories, dances, songs, costumes, etc. associated with not only Australian Aboriginal practices such as this but in many societies are "sacred" in a sense that maintaining a healthy, functioning environment for hunting & gathering is a critically important cultural practice. I believe that many traditional people identify a number of practices as sacred or part of their "religious" life because they understand that (at least now in what we hope is a more tolerant social milieu that does no denigrate practices outside of the more common Abrahamic, Buddhist, Shinto, and other religions of larger populations) these are afforded a certain level of protection, whereas their own views on environmental stewardship have been run roughshod by outsiders for centuries. Only relatively recently have forest managers in Australia recognized that Aboriginal practices of fire management prevent larger, destructive fires. Recent research by Bliege-Bird, Bird, and Codding have demonstrated that smaller fires also create more productive post-fire mosaic environments with more diverse resources (as following recovery, smaller fires create a patchwork of different recovery flora & fauna compared with more monolithic and less diverse succession in the wake of more extensive fires. Traditional peoples are very wise to identify the terms outsiders might respect as the vessel for much of their profound, empirically-based scientific knowledge. Like their kinship systems, Australian Desert peoples have an amazingly diverse set of complex practices that perpetuate the details of environmental variation, distribute that knowledge among a dispersed and interacting set of "different" language population groups, and have developed to make life possible for tens of thousands of years in an extremely challenging kind of environment. Many so-called "initiation rituals" are a forms of making certain that a diversity of environmental knowledge is maintained in a cultural system; another way that humans are able to feed on high value foods and use hunting & gathering as a viable and economic practice even into the 21st century. Learning in traditional societies is infinitely more complex than our modeling expectations about simplistic transmission of information about how to make particular tools or maintain "cultural norms". They actual practices are situationally responsive, constantly updating new information, may cover vast areas depending of the kinds of geography we look at (and that diversity can only be minimally sampled even in long-term ethnographic fieldwork), and have a much greater temporal record of utility than the "schooling" or "apprentice" perspectives that dominate our current modeling approaches to transmission of cultural knowledge. To use a popular culture analogy, the calculus-like complexity of these systems make Mr. Spock's 3-D chess (and many of our modeling assumptions) look like tiddlywinks. Science is astonishing when we confront our own ignorance about how the world works. We must encourage our students to go to the field and explore what is still practiced that can help us better understand the real-life concerns of foragers about managing economic options that are critical to such successful life ways, and will help us more informatively develop models to address what is challenging in archaeological research of past human activities and cultural maintenance of their profound scientific knowledge.

Some journals will accept conceptual papers, i.e. not based on empirical data collection. But you would still need to draw on the academic literature.

Here is my recommended structure for a conceptual paper:

Contrary to what we're taught, tradition is not a static thing. Times change, generations change, and what we know changes. The most stable aspect of any tradition may be its ability to change, making it able to accommodate changing times, changing generations and changing information. Otherwise, no matter how old and once revered, a tradition can disappear like a magician's bouquet, to resurface if--and only if--it becomes timely and relevant again.

If this were not true, we would all still be sacrificing animals on hilltops to reach the ears of our various gods; on the other hand, we can retain a tradition by reinterpreting it. Eighty years ago the majority of people in the USA believed that the story of Adam and Eve was the natural history of the world. Some still do. But the mainstream no longer does, and has retained the tradition by reinterpreting it as an allegory, or poetry, about the beginning of time and the fate of mortals. Where we locate the sacred realm (in the celestial dome or the womb of the earth), our aesthetics, assumptions, aspirations and animosities will shape every aspect of our expressive behavior, and every mark we leave on earth.

We have to trust people to recreate the past, interpret the present and shape the future in their own best interest--no outsider knows better what that is. To best respect tradition, we have to stand back and watch it change, and seek in those changes, the spirit and mentality of the people who generate, modify and maintain these traditions over time, free of molestation from those who purport to know better than they.

Its only when powerful outsiders interfere in the process of a peoples' own strategic and creative changes in tradition, or try to take over; to guide, shape, change, or prevent change in tradition, that harm is done. Instead, stand by. Watch. And learn. Speak out when powerful interests try to take over a peoples' traditions to suit their own interests and agendas. Then let life happen, let tradition adjust, and learn what we can from the changes. Some things will inevitably be lost, yes--but some will always be gained. Watching and learning would be us at our most respectful and creative. If it seems an imperfect solution, its still most likely the best we can do.

Wowie-ka-zowie!!

Ramiro Vasconcelos dos Santos Júnior, here's the call.

FredErick,

are you offering obsidian from Ghana? if you’ve got some I’ll take it I guess...

Hi! If there is land-use continuity (what you need to be sure about.... ususally archaeology is recorded right in the modern villages/settlement spots.. rather due to built-up change and infrastructure then due to the fact that the patterns show 'realistic' archaeological land-use opportunities) you can integrate the NDVI in your friction surface by recalculating the value of the vegetation density:

produce your NDVI map with a remote sensing software (eg multispec, find the guidance for the channel recalculation attached. Download the multicpec software here: https://engineering.purdue.edu/~biehl/MultiSpec/

in your GIS, you can recalculate the values of your raster image to any range you like and finally create no-movement corridors (high values) and potential movement corridors (low values). I am not sure that high vegetation areas would enable movement though...

adding all your raster values to one final raster would result in a friction surface.

in general, you might want to have a look at these books for technical guidance (C/L) and a methodical overview (P):

Conolly/Lake:

Geographical Information Systems in Archaeology (Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology)

Parcak:

Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology

Good luck

Michael

Other people read a history book and believe it. Archaeologists read it but believe nothing until they see it in the ground. History tells us that slaves were fed by their masters and did not own firearms. Dr. Charles Fairbanks dug slave cabins and studied the documents. By the huge amount of work documented he knew they ate a lot of calories. But there wasn't that much food bought by the plantations. Gun flints were found in the cabins; slaves hunted and raised food, etc. (Other People's Garbage video).

Archaeologists can envision what could lay out of site, but not out of their minds. Edward S. Big Ed Rutsch (1936-2002) knew from a lifetime of digging on Tel New York, that one had to be absolutely sure one had reached culturally sterile subsoil. That is why he discovered the NYC African Burial Ground National Monument about 25 ft (7.5m) below West Broadway.

thank you very much for your answer. that was my problem, the basis of archaeological material for determining these values and ratios. now the divisions of each weights values by ratios is the lowest weight value.

Dear Mrs. Fantucci,

lichens have also successully been used.

With kind regards

H.G.Dill

Dear Dr. Jacobson,

There are speleothems in tomb TT 33 (mainly in room XIII), located on the west bank of Luxor (Asasif necropolis), dated to the 7th Century BC.

- Some speleothems can be distinguished on this photo (ceiling) :

- Maps of the tomb :

- Location of the tomb :

search for "TT033" : https://scgis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=cff7333a8b61461eb9d438d91c93ff61

- Geological context of the Theban Necropolis (Tarawan Chalk) :

Yours sincerely,

Isabelle Régen.

yes

Hi, you can also use 'modern' data to some extent: satellite imagery to detect palaeoriver channels, potential agricultural areas and settlement spots (including flooding vulnerability). A GIS-based analysis would enhance your knowledge by multivariate landscape modelling ... an integrative approach.

check corine CLC to start with and include the riparian dataset if you are close to a river...

good luck!

Michael

PS

theories behind that:

landscape vs. environment, see e.g. Ingold, Gillings, Llobera etc.

landscape affordances, see Gibson and further Knappett, Gillings etc.

How is your archaeological database biased by modern land-use and heritage management (see van Leusen etc. ah, see Verhagen for general methods on landscape reconstruction..

and many many others...

Breaking News.

From what I've read of it since first posting this question, Gobleki Tepe appears to have developed a a regular ritual assembly point for hunter-gather communities. (I'm grossly oversimplifying here.) It was not a place of human settlement.

News coming on line in the past few days has now revealed the discovery of an ancient city housing 2,000+ people, close to modern Jerusalem. This city appears to have been roughly as old as Gobekli Tepe. The site apparently includes large buildings, dwelling, ritual, public function and burial places, with alleys between the buildings.

You can read about it here.

And here

The latter, and other news reports does include a photo of what looks like a bronze spearhead that is anachronistic. This may be just journalistic licence - and ignorance, or an artifact found on site during the excavations from a much later time period that overlay the much older city.

No is not difficult

Dear Selene ...

اختصاصك العلمي رائع لو وظف بشكل علمي لخدمة الاثار بشكل مشروع بحثى كيفية عمل التلف البايولوجية بمادة الاثار

Olá Marcos,

Puedes enviarme un correo a isabeltravancas@yahoo.com y decirme que artículo tienes interes que te lo envio.

Saludos

Isabel

Here on the limes area in Southwestern Germany there some hoards belonging to Late Antiquity containing iron bells. I think that they belonged to animals growth. There are also elder examples, maybe ated to the 3d century A.D. There is still the question how the Romans cope to degree vegetation in the foreland of the limes. Did seheep and gotas carry out this work ?

Grazie Claudia per l'invito che terrò presente.

Paolo

NO!

Jeśli jest Pan zainteresowany dam znać, gdy ukaże się ten tekst poświęcony znaleziskom z Kujaw.

Pozdrawiam, Bartosz Kontny

Joachim, it seems likely they were part of a generally populated area, their position indicates that, and therefore more likely to have fulfilled a domestic purpose. Other questions as well: the assumption is they are the same age as the status buildings nearby: they could be more recent, as even more recent cultures built in stone: why have they remained when other structures have disappeared?

That's one of several names for Kel’bedzhar, Kechel Dag, and Merkasar, which lies within an area claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan. I haven't been there (yet), and not many geoarchaeologically-minded people have... Jim Blackman visited in the 1990s, and I have only a tiny scrap of material left from his visit. His NAA data are published in his 1998 chapter in the Big Red Book.

This way you may may be forced to put spots on a plan of what you interpret, lets say, as a burial, in a publicly available account. And the site may seem attractive, judging from the size of the barrow, to those who should not be there. Everybody thinks that the bigger the barrow the richer the burial. Maybe low probability, but we have had cases of grave robberies made by someone who seemed to be well familiar with archaeological literature. So I think if you are going to use geophysics you should be ready to excavate, too.

But at this stage, I only wish to do my best in searching something similar anywhere abroad. This could aid in working out strategies. If I get to it. If I just detect the barrow dates back to, say, 500-600 AD, this tells almost nothing new to me.

Dear Joseba,

Professor David S.G. Thomas at Oxford

has decades of experience applying OSL in that region.

Best wishes,

Nathan

I appreciate colleagues for the comments and for the suggestions.

The Brazilian press (newspapers etc.) is biased and shallow and I don’t take it too seriously. On the other hand, article published yesterday (4/9) in The Guardian had the following title: ‘Brazil National Museum: as much as 90% of collection destroyed in fire.’ At the moment, two considerations must be made: (i) this percentage should vary greatly among the different sectors of the institution (from 0% to 100% of loss); and (ii) the fact is that no one yet knows the extent of the losses.

I don’t work in the National Museum (MN) and I don’t even live in the city of Rio de Janeiro. However, a friend of mine who works at the MN sent me today (5/9) some enlightening information (especially about the biological collections), as can be read below:

(1) The so-called Imperial Palace housed most of the collections of the MN. In this building were, among others, the Department of Entomology (except part of Diptera) and part of the collections of mollusks and arachnids. Total loss: collections of insects, including several hundreds of types (e.g., about 1.300 beetle holotypes), in addition to the collections of mollusks and arachnids (but 80% of the types of mollusks have been preserved, because they were in a building annex). The departments of Geology & Paleontology and Anthropology also stayed in this main building. Total loss: the collection of Egyptian relicts (e.g., mummies) and the social anthropology library. However, some items (e.g., meteorites) are being found and collected. The building still housed an electron microscope.

(2) Outside the Palace are the following sectors: the central library; the departments of Vertebrates and of Botany; a small part of Archaeology and some laboratories of invertebrates. All are preserved.

(3) An annex to the Palace (‘Annex Alípio de Miranda Ribeiro’) was preserved. In this building are part of the the sector of dipterology and the collections of invertebrates (except mollusks and arachnids).

Chris De Vos Of course. Thus, we can underline the link between astronomy, astrology and divine understanding: even if astrology had been seen as an esotheric knowledge for many centuries, we can’t ignore that the contemplation of the stars - and of the sky as a whole- defined the will to reach a better comprehension of God. Since early antiquity, we can see how this attitude was shared in the Jewish tradition, in particular during the first six centuries BCE. I do think that this aspect became important also in almost all the Western civilisation, especially in its theological dimension.

In general terms you should be looking for "archaeological prospection", "archaeometry", "near-surface geophysics", and remote sensing techniques such as "airborne laser scanning". Please check the scientific journal "Archaeological Prospection": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10990763

You could consider becoming a member of the " International Society for Archaeological Prospection":

Computer technology plays a vital role in the collection, processing, visualisation and interpretation of archaeological prospection data. All data collected should be enetred into a Geographical Information System (e.g. QGIS): https://qgis.org/en/site/

University courses in archaeological prospection are for instance offered by Vienna University, the University of Bradford or Southampton. There are plenty of text books out there. Regarding IT skills, any common programming language (C, C++, C#) and certainly Python skills should get you a long way.

Many thanks for your hint, Jens. I shall have a look. The most useful I have found so far is V. Schaltenbrand Obrecht, 2012 STILUS. Kulturhistorische, typologisch-chronologische und technologische Untersuchungen an römischen Schreibgriffeln von Augusta Raurica und weiteren Fundorten, Forschungen in Augst 45. Römermuseum Augst, Augst (http://www.augustaraurica.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/2_Arch%C3%A4ologie/7_Literatur%20und%20Verlag/02_Forschungen_in_Augst/FiA45_1.pdf).

However, she was quite discouraging regarding my quest of finding slate styli in the Roman period. According to her, we can't expect them much before the 14th century.

Incidentally, both my mother as well as Michel Feugère were still taught their basic writing skills on slate tablets, writng with slate styli. I still used the tablets, but we were already using chalk to write with.

This looks like a terrific conference! I will distribute to colleagues and students. Good luck!~

Je suis plus phytosociologue mais je vous recommande l ouvrage de Hachid M. ''Aux sources de l Afrique 50 siècles avant les pyramides