Connecting arrowheads: Differential transmission of information at the dawn of the Bronze Age

The study of the relationships between prehistoric social groups is one of the main targets in present day archaeology. A useful tool to entangle this issue is social network analysis (SNA). Some of the advantages brought by this mathematic approach refer to the possibility of studying relationships through the material culture items, or its capability to integrate different scales of analysis (macro-micro). Moreover, SNA combined with the application of bayesian statistical methods of chronological attribution can create long range diachronic series of relational information, connected with prehistoric social groups dynamics. This methodology enables archaeologists to study archaeological big data from a totally different perspective, not only focused on a descriptive or morphometric point of view. The objective of this work is to apply an SNA procedure, together with a recently developed bayesian tool of chronological attribution, to archaeological sites located in the East of the Iberian Peninsula during the 4th and 3rd millennium cal. BCE using chert arrowheads as an archaeological proxy, due to the chronologic implications their morphology has, in the referred geographic frame. It is our specific target to analyse the transition between the Bell-Beaker world and the Bronze Age, through the differential transmission of information and the time-space variability present in the archaeological record, through the study of relationships between chert arrowheads assemblages. In order to do so, we will build a relational framework between the social communities present in the Late Neolithic-Copper Age through the chert arrowheads morphologic typologies, and we will apply SNA to characterize the resulting networks. Furthermore, we will propose a new metric to quantify the cultural fragmentation using community detection algorithms, in a diachronic axis, to identify groups of sites with homogeneous technological behaviour, to check the initial hypothesis which points to the existence of periods of cultural homogeneity followed by others in which fragmentation-regionalization is dominant

Blank predetermination in the Iberian Acheulean. Insight from the cleaver on flake assemblage of Casal do Azemel site (Leiria, Portugal) by a Geometric Morphometric approach

Over the last decades, the increase of data available for the study of the archaeological topic in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Pleistocene has favoured the understanding of the technological trends of the Iberian Acheulean assemblages. These have features of a Large Flake Acheulean (LFA), displaying, among other traits, a significant presence of cleavers on flake, a specific tool type that is of great cultural and technological value. Particularly, these artefacts are privileged to discuss the importance of blank predetermination in the Acheulean techno-complex. Following this reason, in the present work we aimed to explore this topic through the 2D Geometric Morphometric Analysis of the cleaver on flake assemblage from Casal do Azemel (Leiria, Portugal), an example of a paradigmatic Iberian Acheulean site that has one of the largest collections of this type of tools in Western Europe. The results obtained revealed that no significant morphological differences were found according to the technological solutions applied to the acquisition of the blank and its secondary transformation. Considering that in most of the cases these tools display a low degree of secondary transformation, these data suggest that underlying the production of Casal do Azemel’s cleaver on flake assemblage was not only a technological and cognitive flexibility (given its typological composition), but also a conceptual, structural, and morphological standardisation. These observations allowed us to discuss the significance of blank predetermination in the Acheulean, implying the existence of greatly structured technical and cognitive prerequisites

གལ་སྲིད་ང་རང་གཞན་ཡུལ་དུ་ཤི་ན། - "If I were to die in exile" and སུ་ཡིས? - 'Who would?"

The poems offer an intimate meditation on the author`s experience of being seperated from his homeland of Tibet and family members there. Both poems center around the possible scenario of dying in exile and never seeing his beloved homeland and loved ones again.  Note: To have Tibetan script correctly displayed, please download the PDF file and open it in a desktop application.&nbsp

Working Out in “Sunlight Happiness Gym”

What might it mean to strive for well-being and a viable life in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)? What are the temporal rhythms of urban life for government-employed Tibetan women in their mid-twenties? This article engages with these questions by foregrounding seemingly mundane activities related to fitness and sport as they are experienced by Yangkyi and Tselha, two highly educated government workers in their mid-20s. It draws on seven months of ethnographic research, followed up by communication on social media, to examine the everyday routines and concerns of the two women, exploring how “Sunlight Happiness Gym,” a high-end fitness studio catering to the city’s growing middle classes, emerged as significant in their efforts to be well. The article shows how working out created its own temporal rhythms for Yangkyi and Tselha and opened up potentials for self-making that were more difficult to create in other domains of their lives. By demonstrating that, for Yangkyi and Tselha, ideas and practices of well-being, self-care, and fitness get intertwined through going to the gym, I argue that working out plays an important part in their attempts to create joy, meaningful relationships, and in an environment characterized by often overwhelming structural. Note: To have Tibetan script correctly displayed, please download the PDF file and open it in a desktop application.&nbsp

Eros and the nature of ‘interest’

In Greek archaic literature and philosophy, Eros, the god of love and desire, has numerous origin stories, which lead to different understandings of his nature. These extend to both orthodox and heterodox texts within the economic canon, whose definitions of interest rearticulate the mythological subtext of desire. What might have happened if the Western world had not discarded the passions in its quest for material progress

On the Water Shed of Becoming Old

Abstract   This paper is about the relations between work, rhythm and life course among a group of elderly members of a rice paddy collective in Kyoto, Japan. Through the stories of people’s professional work, personal lives and recreational activities, I portray and discuss their understanding of aging and elderhood. Also, by illustrating the rhythms of two elderly people on their retirement and in their post-work activities, I argue that underlying the particular changes of their rhythms is their reminiscences of their working lives.   Key words: rhythm, aging, life course, professional wor

The Vultures, The Cows and The People

Ethnographic drawings and poetry based on Thom van Dooren’s article ‘Vultures and their People in India: Equity and Entanglement in a Time of Extinction’ (2011)

Chemokine receptors in GtoPdb v.2023.1

Chemokine receptors (nomenclature as agreed by the NC-IUPHAR Subcommittee on Chemokine Receptors [438, 437, 32]) comprise a large subfamily of 7TM proteins that bind one or more chemokines, a large family of small cytokines typically possessing chemotactic activity for leukocytes. Additional hematopoietic and non-hematopoietic roles have been identified for many chemokines in the areas of embryonic development, immune cell proliferation, activation and death, viral infection, and as antibacterials, among others. Chemokine receptors can be divided by function into two main groups: G protein-coupled chemokine receptors, which mediate leukocyte trafficking, and "Atypical chemokine receptors", which may signal through non-G protein-coupled mechanisms and act as chemokine scavengers to downregulate inflammation or shape chemokine gradients [32].Chemokines in turn can be divided by structure into four subclasses by the number and arrangement of conserved cysteines. CC (also known as β-chemokines; n= 28), CXC (also known as α-chemokines; n= 17) and CX3C (n= 1) chemokines all have four conserved cysteines, with zero, one and three amino acids separating the first two cysteines respectively. C chemokines (n= 2) have only the second and fourth cysteines found in other chemokines. Chemokines can also be classified by function into homeostatic and inflammatory subgroups. Most chemokine receptors are able to bind multiple high-affinity chemokine ligands, but the ligands for a given receptor are almost always restricted to the same structural subclass. Most chemokines bind to more than one receptor subtype. Receptors for inflammatory chemokines are typically highly promiscuous with regard to ligand specificity, and may lack a selective endogenous ligand. G protein-coupled chemokine receptors are named acccording to the class of chemokines bound, whereas ACKR is the root acronym for atypical chemokine receptors [33]. There can be substantial cross-species differences in the sequences of both chemokines and chemokine receptors, and in the pharmacology and biology of chemokine receptors. Endogenous and microbial non-chemokine ligands have also been identified for chemokine receptors. Many chemokine receptors function as HIV co-receptors, but CCR5 is the only one demonstrated to play an essential role in HIV/AIDS pathogenesis. The tables include both standard chemokine receptor names [693] and aliases

Class C Orphans in GtoPdb v.2023.1

This set contains class C 'orphan' G protein coupled receptors where the endogenous ligand(s) is not known