Archaeological Investigations at the Walnut Branch (41CE47), Ross I (41CE485), and Ross II (41CE486) Sites, Cherokee County, Texas

The Walnut Branch site (41CE47) was recorded by George Kegley and Dan Witter in 1969 as part of an archaeological survey funded by the Texas Building Commission (now the Texas Historical Commission) in Cherokee County and adjacent counties. This ancestral Caddo site is located about six miles southwest of the city of Rusk, in the Box’s Creek valley in the Neches River basin; Box’s Creek is a generally southern-flowing tributary to the Neches River, and enters the river not far to the westnorthwest of the George C. Davis site (41CE19), otherwise known as Caddo Mounds State Historic Site. The landowner’s son had previously collected ceramic sherds and a ceramic pipe from the Walnut Branch site, and a Caddo burial (and associated ceramic vessel, about which nothing is known) had been found at the site in 1964. Kegley obtained surface collections of ceramic sherds and lithic tools from different parts of the Walnut Branch site, including a number of ceramic sherds (n=69) and one tool fragment from the Walnut Branch stream bed, a tributary to Box’s Creek; at that time, the bank of the stream was actively eroding, exposing artifacts on the surface. Kegley also excavated two small “test pits” or shovel tests at the site, and they contained a small number of ceramic sherds in the archaeological deposits. The sediments in those “test pits” had different zones of alluvial sands to a depth of at least 58 cm. In 2017, the junior author obtained permission to reexamine the Walnut Branch site, and determine its current condition and research significance. This work consisted of an intensive program of shovel testing across a large field and floodplain north of Walnut Branch and east of Box’s Creek, which is discussed below. He also obtained a substantial collection of ancestral Caddo ceramic vessel sherds from the Walnut Branch stream bed just below the Walnut Branch site and the Ross I site; this surface collection was taken before the shovel testing work was initiated. The intensive shovel testing has demonstrated that the large pasture that contains the Walnut Branch site also contains two other spatially related ancestral Caddo sites (Ross I, 41CE485 and Ross II, 41CE486) to the west and northeast, respectively, of the Walnut Branch site; the findings from these other sites will also be discussed in this article

Improving a Satellite Mission System by means of a Semantic Grid Architecture

The use of a semantic grid architecture can make easier the deployment of complex applications, in which several organizations are involved and diverse resources are shared. This paper presents the application of the architecture defined in the Ontogrid project (S-OGSA) into a scenario for the analysis of the quality of the products of satellite missions

On ideal triangulations of surfaces up to branched transit equivalences

We consider triangulations of closed surfaces S with a given set of vertices V; every triangulation can be branched that is enhanced to a Delta-complex. Branched triangulations are considered up to the b-transit equivalence generated by b-flips (i.e. branched diagonal exchanges) and isotopy keeping V point-wise fixed. We extend a well known connectivity result for `naked' triangulations; in particular in the generic case when S has negative Euler-Poincare' characteristic c(S), we show that branched triangulations are equivalent to each other if c(S) is even, while this holds also for odd c(S) possibly after the complete inversion of one of the two branchings. Moreover we show that under a mild assumption, two branchings on a same triangulation are connected via a sequence of inversions of ambiguous edges (and possibly the total inversion of one of them). A natural organization of the b-flips in subfamilies gives rise to restricted transit equivalences with non trivial (even infinite) quotient sets. We analyze them in terms of certain preserved structures of differential topological nature carried by any branched triangulations; in particular a pair of transverse foliations with determined singular sets contained in V, including as particular cases the configuration of the vertical and horizontal foliations of the square of an Abelian differential on a Riemann surface.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figure

Toward Reverse Engineering of VBA Based Excel Spreadsheet Applications

Modern spreadsheet systems can be used to implement complex spreadsheet applications including data sheets, customized user forms and executable procedures written in a scripting language. These applications are often developed by practitioners that do not follow any software engineering practice and do not produce any design documentation. Thus, spreadsheet applications may be very difficult to be maintained or restructured. In this position paper we present in a nutshell two reverse engineering techniques and a tool that we are currently realizing for the abstraction of conceptual data models and business logic models.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets (http://spreadsheetlab.org/sems15/

41SM195A, The Browning Site

A surface collection of early 19 \u27 century historic sherds led to archaeological investigations in 2002 and 2003 at the Browning site (41SM195A) in eastern Smith County, Texas. My interest was whetted by mention in the original land abstract that the property had once been deeded to the Cherokee Indians. In all, a total of 6.5 cubic meters of archaeological deposits was excavated at the site, including 22 shovel tests and 10 1 x 1 m test units, and fine-screen and flotation samples were taken from a prehistoric midden deposit identified during the work. As a result, 1075 prehistoric and historic artifacts were recovered, along with new information about Woodland period archaeology in this part of East Texas. The initial shovel tests found, in addition to the historic component, a buried midden with evidence of Woodland period occupation. Based on the excavations, the midden covered approximately 500 square meters. The 19th century historic artifacts were found in the upper sediment zone, a brown sandy loam that was mostly gravel- free) covering the midden. The buried midden was a dark yellowish-brown gravelly loam that contained prehistoric pottery, animal bone, charred wood and nutshells, lithic materials, including lithic debris, flake tools, arrow and dart points, and ground stone tools. A calibrated radiocarbon date of A.D. 625 to 880, with a calibrated intercept of A.D. 685, was obtained on charred nutshell from 40-50 em bs in the midden zone. A series of Oxidizable Carbon Ratio (OCR) dates from the midden indicate that the midden began to from about A.D. 147, with dates of A.D. 357-815 from the main part of the midden, indicating when the Browning site was most intensively occupied in prehistoric times

41SM195A, The Browning Site

A surface collection of early 19th century historic sherds led to archeological investigations in 2002 and 2003 at the Browning site (41SM195A) in Smith County, Texas. My interest was whetted by mention in the original land abstract that the property had once been deeded to the Cherokee. In all, a total of 6.5 cubic meters was excavated, including twenty-two shovel tests and 10 1 x 1 m test units, and a fine-screen sample was taken from the midden. As a result, 1076 prehistoric and historic artifacts were recovered, along with new information about the Woodland period archeology in this part of East Texas. The initial shovel tests found, in addition to the historic component, a buried midden with evidence of Woodland period occupation. Based on the excavations, the midden covered approximately 500 m2. The 19th century historic artifacts were found in the upper sediment zone (a light brown sandy loam that was mostly gravel-free) covering the midden. The buried midden was a dark yellowish-brown gravelly loam that contained prehistoric pottery, bone, charred wood and nutshells, lithic materials, including lithic debris, flake tools, arrow and dart points, and ground stone tools. A calibrated radiocarbon date of AD 625 to 880 (2 sigma), with a calibrated intercept of AD 685, was obtained on charred nutshell from 40-50 cm bs in the midden zone. A series of Oxidizable Carbon Ratio dates from the midden indicate that the midden began to form about AD 147, with dates of AD 359-817 from the main part of the midden, indicating when the Browning site was most intensively occupied in prehistoric times

Inkjet Printing of Functional Electronic Memory Cells: A Step Forward to Green Electronics

open access journalNowadays, the environmental issues surrounding the production of electronics, from the perspectives of both the materials used and the manufacturing process, are of major concern. The usage, storage, disposal protocol and volume of waste material continue to increase the environmental footprint of our increasingly “throw away society”. Almost ironically, society is increasingly involved in pollution prevention, resource consumption issues and post-consumer waste management. Clearly, a dichotomy between environmentally aware usage and consumerism exists. The current technology used to manufacture functional materials and electronic devices requires high temperatures for material deposition processes, which results in the generation of harmful chemicals and radiation. With such issues in mind, it is imperative to explore new electronic functional materials and new manufacturing pathways. Here, we explore the potential of additive layer manufacturing, inkjet printing technology which provides an innovative manufacturing pathway for functional materials (metal nanoparticles and polymers), and explore a fully printed two terminal electronic memory cell. In this work, inkjetable materials (silver (Ag) and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)-poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS)) were first printed by a piezoelectric Epson Stylus P50 inkjet printer as stand-alone layers, and secondly as part of a metal (Ag)/active layer (PEDOT:PSS)/metal (Ag) crossbar architecture. The quality of the individual multi-layers of the printed Ag and PEDOT:PSS was first evaluated via optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Furthermore, an electrical characterisation of the printed memory elements was performed using an HP4140B picoammeter

The Caddoan Ceramics from the Gray\u27s Pasture Site (41HS524), Harrison County, Texas

This paper discusses the Caddoan ceramics recovered during the 1992 Northeast Texas Archeological Society Field School at the Gray\u27s Pasture site (41HS524) on Clark\u27s Creek, a few miles south of Hallsville, Texas and about 2 miles from the Sabine River floodplain. During the course of the excavations, an extensive Caddoan settlement was documented on a series of knolls on a broad terrace landform overlooking the Clark\u27s Creek floodplain, and each of those areas contains Caddoan ceramics. Most notably, a dense concentration of Caddoan ceramics, as well as two burials with whole ceramic vessels, was encountered in the northwestern part of the site, and the majority of the ceramics are from this area. The four site areas include Areal (Unit 1) on a knoll at the northeastern part of the site, Area II on the terrace at the far eastern end of the site (Units 3 and 7), Area lll on the crest of the landform in the central and southwestern part of the site (Units 2, 5, and 6), and Area IV in the northwestern part of the site (Units 8, 8X, 10-16). Unit 4 belongs in Area III, and contained a number of sherds, but these artifacts are missing, except for one plain sherd. Unit 9, in the southeastern part of the site only had a few plain sherds. A total of 2352 sherds and four vessels comprise the Caddoan ceramic assemblage from Gray\u27s Pasture. This includes 1740 plain body and base sherds, 61 plain rims, and 551 decorated rim and body sherds. About 81% of the sherds are from ArealV, with 9.3% of the sherds from Area III. There are 71 decorated rim sherds and 480 decorated body sherds (not including 11 red slipped sherds). The plain/decorated sherd ratio is 3.27 for the site as a whole, and ranges from 3.21 to 3.69 by site area. This is consistent with other pre-A.D. 1200 Caddoan sites in the Red, middle Sabine, and Neches-Angelina river basins, where such sites have plain/decorated sherd ratios that range between 2.97-4.80. Thirteenth and 14th century sites in these areas have plain/decorated sherd ratios of 1.30- 1.61, and Late Caddoan sites dating between ca. A.D. 1450--1650 have ratios of 0.56- 1.03. Through time, more Caddoan vessels are decorated, and vessels are more completely covered with decoration, rather than having the decoration confined primarily to the rim