The Ancient Past: Learning a Language to Connect Materials with Users

Archives of the ancient world evince the longevity of our shared interests in preserving and documenting the culture, government, and knowledge of civilization. Whether studied by global travelers, classical archaeologists and historians, or filmmakers and television producers, archival materials from the ancient Mediterranean are contributing to collective memory, educational programming, and institutional collections. In this vein, the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) in the Department of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin fosters research and scholarship on the use of writing in Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, and the island of Cyprus during the Bronze Age. There is a special focus on two early writing systems: Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphics (1900–1450 BCE) and Linear B (1400–1200 BCE). The program boasts an international base of researchers and users, and in recent years, staff have improved collection accessibility by reconfiguring physical spaces, advancing digitization projects, preserving endangered email accounts, and expanding the scope of collections to provide better access to these important materials.Classic

Renewing the link between cognitive archeology and cognitive science

In cognitive archeology, theories of cognition are used to guide interpretation of archeological evidence. This process provides useful feedback on the theories themselves. The attempt to accommodate archeological data helps shape ideas about how human cognition has evolved and thus—by extension—how the modern form functions. But the implications that archeology has for cognitive science particularly relate to traditional proposals from the field involving modular decomposition, symbolic thought and the mediating role of language. There is a need to make a connection with more recent approaches, which more strongly emphasize information, probabilistic reasoning and exploitation of embodiment. Proposals from cognitive archeology, in which evolution of cognition is seen to involve a transition to symbolic thought need to be realigned with theories from cognitive science that no longer give symbolic reasoning a central role. The present paper develops an informational approach, in which the transition is understood to involve cumulative development of information-rich generalizations

Sustaining Economic Exploitation of Complex Ecosystems in Computational Models of Coupled Human-Natural Networks

Understanding ecological complexity has stymied scientists for decades. Recent elucidation of the famously coined "devious strategies for stability in enduring natural systems" has opened up a new field of computational analyses of complex ecological networks where the nonlinear dynamics of many interacting species can be more realistically mod-eled and understood. Here, we describe the first extension of this field to include coupled human-natural systems. This extension elucidates new strategies for sustaining extraction of biomass (e.g., fish, forests, fiber) from ecosystems that account for ecological complexity and can pursue multiple goals such as maximizing economic profit, employment and carbon sequestration by ecosystems. Our more realistic modeling of ecosystems helps explain why simpler "maxi-mum sustainable yield" bioeconomic models underpinning much natural resource extraction policy leads to less profit, biomass, and biodiversity than predicted by those simple models. Current research directions of this integrated natu-ral and social science include applying artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and multiplayer online games

Galaxy Genesis -- unravelling the epoch of dissipation in the early disk

So how did the Galactic disk form and can the sequence of events ever be unravelled from the vast stellar inventory? This will require that some of the residual inhomogeneities from prehistory escaped the dissipative process at an early stage. Fossil hunting to date has concentrated mostly on the stellar halo, but a key source of information will be the thick disk. This is believed to be a 'snap frozen' relic which formed during or shortly after the last major epoch of dissipation, or it may have formed from infalling systems early in the life of the Galaxy. As part of the KAOS Galaxy Genesis project, we explore the early history of the halo and the thick disk by looking for discrete substructures, either due to infall or in situ star formation, through chemical tagging. This will require high signal to noise, echelle spectroscopy of up to a million stars throughout the disk. Our program has a short-term and a long-term goal.Comment: 5th Workshop on Galaxy Chemodynamics, eds. B.K. Gibson, D. Kawata; PASA, accepted (11 pages, 6 GIF figures, 3 style files

‘The finest set of cup and ring marks in existence’: the story of the Cochno Stone, West Dunbartonshire

The Cochno Stone is one of the most extensive and highly decorated prehistoric rock-art outcrops in Britain. It is located on the northern urban fringe of West Dunbartonshire beside Faifley, Clydebank, in a park in the foothills of the Kilpatrick Hills. First re-discovered by antiquarians toward the end of the nineteenth century, this outcrop subsequently became the focus of the attentions of Ludovic McLellan Mann in the 1930s, who decorated the stone with an elaborate painted colour-scheme. Expanding urbanisation, visitor numbers and graffiti prompted the authorities to bury the stone beneath soil for its own protection in 1965. During two seasons of fieldwork in 2015 and 2016, the Cochno Stone was exposed for short periods of time to allow for an assessment to be made of the condition of the stone surface, and digital and photogrammetric recording to take place. Provisional results of the fieldwork are reported on here, but the main focus of this paper is to present as fully as possible for the first time the biography of the Cochno Stone from antiquarian discovery to the present day. The paper concludes with thoughts about the future of this monument

Mass-density relationship in molecular cloud clumps

We study the mass-density relationship n ~ m^x in molecular cloud condensations (clumps), considering various equipartition relations between their gravitational, kinetic, internal and magnetic energies. Clumps are described statistically, with a density distribution that reflects a lognormal probability density function (pdf) in turbulent cold interstellar medium. The clump mass-density exponent $x$ derived at different scales $L$ varies in most of the cases within the range $-2.5\lesssim x \lesssim-0.2$, with a pronounced scale dependence and in consistency with observations. When derived from the global size-mass relationship m ~ l^{\gamma_{glob}} for set of clumps, generated at all scales, the clump mass-density exponent has typical values $-3.0\lesssim x(\gamma_{glob}) \lesssim -0.3$ that depend on the forms of energy, included in the equipartition relations and on the velocity scaling law whereas the description of clump geometry is important when magnetic energy is taken into account.Comment: Accepted in MNRAS, 14 pages, 8 figure

A single ion as a three-body reaction center in an ultracold atomic gas

We report on three-body recombination of a single trapped Rb^+ ion and two neutral Rb atoms in an ultracold atom cloud. We observe that the corresponding rate coefficient K_3 depends on collision energy and is about a factor of 1000 larger than for three colliding neutral Rb atoms. In the three-body recombination process large energies up to several 0.1eV are released leading to an ejection of the ion from the atom cloud. It is sympathetically recooled back into the cloud via elastic binary collisions with cold atoms. Further, we find that the final ionic product of the three-body processes is again an atomic Rb^+ ion suggesting that the ion merely acts as a catalyzer, possibly in the formation of deeply bound Rb_2 molecules.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

The Great God Pan is Not Dead – A. N. Whitehead and the Psychedelic Mode of Perception

Through Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics, the Philosophy of Organism, it will be argued that psychedelic experience is a vertical, lateral and temporal integration of sentience

Katherine Mansfield and anima mundi

This presentation proposes a reading of Katherine Mansfield’s work that will begin with the medieval theories of anima mundi or world soul, the concept of an animistic universe in which the earth can be revivified through a spiritus mundi. It will refer to the French theological scholars of the 12th century who were influential in promoting the Pythagoraean-Platonic doctrine of anima mundi through allegories of ‘Dame Nature’: Bernard de Sylvestris of Tours (De Universitate Mundi) and Alanus of Insulis (De Planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus), Jean de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s Le Roman de la Rose. This strand of medieval culture and cosmology - often considered as tangential to mainstream European intellectual and Christian religious belief — was popular throughout the Renaissance and has survived in various literary forms in modernist writing, often as a vigorous rebuttal of modernization from an environmental perspective. Although no direct connection with the anima mundi tradition can be traced in Mansfield’s work, her close identification with nature and the non-human is undeniable, and some familiarity with popular survivals of the tradition of nature personified appear, for example, in her interest in the Greek god, Pan. Her creation of transitive, linking relations between herself and the natural world recalls the close participation between man and the rest of creation characteristic of the medieval world view. Certainly anthropomorphic thinking and the perception of human subjectivity as rooted in non-human nature underpin the sense of wonder and the marvellous found in her representations of the created world and her emphasis on its mystery and splendour. This Arcadian, pastoral orientation also appears in her empathy with living creatures, flowers, plants and trees, while cultivated gardens and wild outdoor spaces are settings for epiphanies, sites of revelation and transformation. Yet, I will argue, Mansfield also introduced her own modernist, gendered critique of the tropes and images associated with nature worship. The talk will refer to the traditions associated with anima mundi in relation to stories like ‘Epilogue II’, ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, ‘The Escape’, ‘See-Saw’ and ‘Prelude’, read as modernist adaptations of classical/medieval topoi of the locus amoenus (pleasant place), the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), and the sacred tree

Increasing contextual information by merging existing archaeological data with the state of the art laser scanning in the prehistoric funerary deposit of Pastora Cave, Eastern Spain

In this paper we present a virtual reconstruction of prehistoric funerary practices in Pastora Cave,a collective burial site in Eastern Spain that dates from the Late Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. Modern data of the cave was captured by 3D laser scanning techniques and added to recorded archaeological data and 3D graphic information. The combination of these data sets allowed us to create a hypothetical reconstruction to analyze the material excavated in the 1940s and 50s in greater spatial context. A 3D model of the current cave was created in order to serve as a basis for modeling the relative stratigraphic information available. We present the methodology employed and the results and implications of the analysis for Pastora Cave with particular emphasis on the spatial and chronological data