Spatial and Temporal Changes in Marine-terminating Glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula since the 1940s

The numerous glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula are highly sensitive to environmental changes, with potential to make a significant contribution to sea-level rise, and yet they have been distinctly under studied. An absence of fundamental details on glacier characteristics and behaviour is due in part to the inaccessibility of the region. In this research, the production of a new topographic model and an inventory of 1590 glacier drainage basins between 63-70° S have enabled detailed analysis of these glaciers for the first time. Area change measurements since the 1940s reveal that 90% of the 860 marine-terminating glaciers have retreated. Greatest glacier area loss has occurred in the north-east, primarily due to the demise of ice shelves. In the west, an increasing gradient of overall ice loss from north to south is observed, as well as a distinct region in the north-west where glaciers have remained stable. There are also clear trends over time, such as reduction in glacier retreat rates in the late 1980s, and acceleration in retreat since the late 1990s. These statistically significant trends indicate that there are external control factors currently outweighing local glaciological controls on glacier extent. Analysis of atmospheric and ocean temperature data reveals that, to the west of the peninsula, patterns in ocean temperatures have a strong synchroneity with glacier area change. An increasing ocean temperature gradient from north to south, which strengthens with depth, is closely correlated with glacier front changes. Furthermore, a warming at mid ocean depths has occurred since the 1990s. This research suggests that although the atmosphere is rapidly warming, melt by the ocean is the primary cause of glacier retreat along the western peninsula. With persistent warm ocean temperatures, glacier retreat and associated mass loss is set to continue, leading to an increasing contribution to sea-level rise

Ways and Capacity in Archaeological Data Management in Serbia

Over the past year and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire world has witnessed inequalities across borders and societies. They also include access to archaeological resources, both physical and digital. Both archaeological data creators and users spent a lot of time working from their homes, away from artefact collections and research data. However, this was the perfect moment to understand the importance of making data freely and openly available, both nationally and internationally. This is why the authors of this paper chose to make a selection of data bases from various institutions responsible for preservation and protection of cultural heritage, in order to understand their policies regarding accessibility and usage of the data they keep. This will be done by simple visits to various web-sites or data bases. They intend to check on the volume and content, but also importance of the offered archaeological heritage. In addition, the authors will estimate whether the heritage has adequately been classified and described and also check whether data is available in foreign languages. It needs to be seen whether it is possible to access digital objects (documents and the accompanying metadata), whether access is opened for all users or it requires a certain hierarchy access, what is the policy of usage, reusage and distribution etc. It remains to be seen whether there are public API or whether it is possible to collect data through API. In case that there is a public API, one needs to check whether datasets are interoperable or messy, requiring data cleaning. After having visited a certain number of web-sites, the authors expect to collect enough data to make a satisfactory conclusion about accessibility and usage of Serbian archaeological data web bases

Neolithic land-use in the Dutch wetlands: estimating the land-use implications of resource exploitation strategies in the Middle Swifterbant Culture (4600-3900 BCE)

The Dutch wetlands witness the gradual adoption of Neolithic novelties by foraging societies during the Swifterbant period. Recent analyses provide new insights into the subsistence palette of Middle Swifterbant societies. Small-scale livestock herding and cultivation are in evidence at this time, but their importance if unclear. Within the framework of PAGES Land-use at 6000BP project, we aim to translate the information on resource exploitation into information on land-use that can be incorporated into global climate modelling efforts, with attention for the importance of agriculture. A reconstruction of patterns of resource exploitation and their land-use dimensions is complicated by methodological issues in comparing the results of varied recent investigations. Analyses of organic residues in ceramics have attested to the cooking of aquatic foods, ruminant meat, porcine meat, as well as rare cases of dairy. In terms of vegetative matter, some ceramics exclusively yielded evidence of wild plants, while others preserve cereal remains. Elevated δ15N values of human were interpreted as demonstrating an important aquatic component of the diet well into the 4th millennium BC. Yet recent assays on livestock remains suggest grazing on salt marshes partly accounts for the human values. Finally, renewed archaeozoological investigations have shown the early presence of domestic animals to be more limited than previously thought. We discuss the relative importance of exploited resources to produce a best-fit interpretation of changing patterns of land-use during the Middle Swifterbant phase. Our review combines recent archaeological data with wider data on anthropogenic influence on the landscape. Combining the results of plant macroremains, information from pollen cores about vegetation development, the structure of faunal assemblages, and finds of arable fields and dairy residue, we suggest the most parsimonious interpretation is one of a limited land-use footprint of cultivation and livestock keeping in Dutch wetlands between 4600 and 3900 BCE.NWOVidi 276-60-004Human Origin

Taphonomy, environment or human plant exploitation strategies?: Deciphering changes in Pleistocene-Holocene plant representation at Umhlatuzana rockshelter, South Africa

The period between ~40 and 20 ka BP encompassing the Middle Stone Age (MSA) and Later Stone Age (LSA) transition has long been of interest because of the associated technological change. Understanding this transition in southern Africa is complicated by the paucity of archaeological sites that span this period. With its occupation sequence spanning the last ~70,000 years, Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter is one of the few sites that record this transition. Umhlatuzana thus offers a great opportunity to study past environmental dynamics from the Late Pleistocene (MIS 4) to the Late Holocene, and past human subsistence strategies, their social organisation, technological and symbolic innovations. Although organic preservation is poor (bones, seeds, and charcoal) at the site, silica phytoliths preserve generally well throughout the sequence. These microscopic silica particles can identify different plant types that are no longer visible at the site because of decomposition or burning to a reliable taxonomical level. Thus, to trace site occupation, plant resource use, and in turn reconstruct past vegetation, we applied phytolith analyses to sediment samples of the newly excavated Umhlatuzana sequence. We present results of the phytolith assemblage variability to determine change in plant use from the Pleistocene to the Holocene and discuss them in relation to taphonomical processes and human plant gathering strategies and activities. This study ultimately seeks to provide a palaeoenvironmental context for modes of occupation and will shed light on past human-environmental interactions in eastern South Africa.NWOVidi 276-60-004Human Origin

From Frugality To Exuberance: Architecture And The City In Israel 1923-1977

ABSTRACT This dissertation argues for the emergence of a new materiality in Israeli architecture in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It examines these decades in an extended historical time frame beginning with the British Mandate for Palestine. Materiality refers to local Israeli socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions. It also reflects the literal use, handling and finishing of materials in architecture. During this period first and second stages are described. The first was shaped by objective circumstances in which architecture operated in response to scarcity and demonstrated a realist attitude, one also embedded in the concept of asceticism. It was manifest in restrained formal gestures, abstention from material extravagance, the use of local materials, and an appeal to rational building procedures. The second stage emerging in the 60s had a different syntax. The analytical, skeletal frame constructions of the 50s turned synthetic, monolithic, and earth-bound. Compositions turned sculptural and exuberant. An appeal to the architect’s expressive ingenuity became a recognized design objective. The issue of banality versus extraordinariness in design surfaced at this point. My analysis of materiality is based on the following disciplinary themes: typology, public space, craft, and topography. These were dimensions of a broader search for a situated architecture undertaken by Israeli architects since the 1930s in which they sought to localize the importation of modern architecture from Europe. Typology offered an opportunity to synthesize modern building practices with vernacular models. It revealed the reciprocal interchange between cultures. Architects and planners perceived public space as a means to consolidate new communities, and represent the collective ethos of the new nation. Public space regained its value as a structural constituent in built fabrics. Building craft and use of local materials made architecture place-specific, of-its-time. Topographical awareness, and the mutual inscription between building and setting represented an ongoing desire to overcome the lack of an unmediated connection between the immigrants and their old/new territorial home. These disciplinary themes address a variety of scales from detail, building, neighborhood, city, and region. They demonstrate how Israeli architects adjusted the modernist appeal to abstraction and universalism with a perceptive recognition of their concrete reality

Ancient Tahitian Society

“Tahiti is far famed yet too little known.” Thus wrote J. M. Orsmond in 1848, and the same assertion can be made in 1972. Thousands of pages had been published about Tahiti and its neighboring islands when Orsmond uttered his judgment, and tens of thousands have been published since that time, but a unified, comprehensive, and detailed description of the pre-European ways of life of the inhabitants of those Islands is yet to appear in print. The present work, lengthy as it is, makes no such claim to comprehensiveness; rather, it is concerned mainly with the social relations of those inhabitants, and it serves up only enough about their technology, their religion, their aesthetic expressions, and so forth to place descriptions of their social relations in context and render them more comprehensible. Volumes 1 and 2 of this work are a reconstruction of the Islanders’ way of life as it was believed to have been just before it began to be transformed by European influence—a period labeled the Late Indigenous Era. Volume 3 covers events in Tahiti and Mo‘orea from about 1767 to 1815—a period labeled the Early European Era

The social forest : landowners, development conflict and the state in Solomon Islands

This work develops an historically substantiated anthropological thesis about non-state local governance and its relations with the State in Solomon Islandsover time. Set in the context of the coup and subsequent crisis of the State in Solomon Islands, the thesis takes as an example Kolombangara, a forest resource rich Western Province island. The thesis argues that the consequences of successive local negotiations of world influences from early contact times through colonialism and on to the post Independence period are embedded in present-day social structures and political events at the local level. This process of local negotiation draws on cultural resources held within the local society but in so doing repositions actors in relation to those resources, creating social tensions that further drive politics at the local level. The form of these negotiations is specific to any one place in Solomon Islands. Nevertheless, the logic applied by actors in any one place is informative of processes more widespread across the country. For Kolombangara these processes begin with a reorganisation of frontier period (late C19) maritime exchange oriented 'house groups' into landoriented descent groups as a response to early colonialism. A process of social mobility follows this as the State is nationalised, resulting in stratification of local society (the 'Honiara elite'). This articulates with a fractionation of loca] society into groups competing for 'large scale' or 'small scale' forest resource development. The crosscutting social differentiation drives conflict between 'entrepreneurial landowners' and ' raditionalist smallholders' over forest resources and generates competing island-level political associations. Such island-level dynamics drive the Western Province 'statehood' agenda for control of resource management and revenue distribution. This development pathway competes at the national level against the interests of resource-poor provinces. The result has been one of the major political dynamics involved in the recent crisis of the State in Solomon Islands

CIMODE 2016: 3º Congresso Internacional de Moda e Design: proceedings

O CIMODE 2016 é o terceiro Congresso Internacional de Moda e Design, a decorrer de 9 a 12 de maio de 2016 na cidade de Buenos Aires, subordinado ao tema : EM--‐TRAMAS. A presente edição é organizada pela Faculdade de Arquitetura, Desenho e Urbanismo da Universidade de Buenos Aires, em conjunto com o Departamento de Engenharia Têxtil da Universidade do Minho e com a ABEPEM – Associação Brasileira de Estudos e Pesquisa em Moda.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio