A 3D Digital Approach to the Stylistic and Typo-Technological Study of Small Figurines from Ayia Irini, Cyprus

The thesis aims to develop a 3D digital approach to the stylistic and typo-technological study of coroplastic, focusing on small figurines. The case study to test the method is a sample of terracotta statuettes from an assemblage of approximately 2000 statues and figurines found at the beginning of the 20th century in a rural open-air sanctuary at Ayia Irini (Cyprus) by the archaeologists of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. The excavators identified continuity of worship at the sanctuary from the Late Cypriot III (circa 1200 BC) to the end of the Cypro-Archaic II period (ca. 475 BC). They attributed the small figurines to the Cypro-Archaic I-II. Although the excavation was one of the first performed through the newly established stratigraphic method, the archaeologists studied the site and its material following a traditional, merely qualitative approach. Theanalysis of the published results identified a classification of the material with no-clear-cut criteria, and their overlap between types highlights ambiguities in creating groups and classes. Similarly, stratigraphic arguments and different opinions among archaeologists highlight the need for revising. Moreover, pastlegislation allowed the excavators to export half of the excavated antiquities, creating a dispersion of the assemblage. Today, the assemblage is still partly exhibited at the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia and in four different museums in Sweden. Such a setting prevents to study, analyse and interpret the assemblageholistically. This research proposes a 3D chaîne opératoire methodology to study the collection’s small terracotta figurines, aiming to understand the context’s function and social role as reflected by the classification obtained with the 3D digital approach. The integration proposed in this research of traditional archaeological studies, and computer-assisted investigation based on quantitative criteria, identified and defined with 3D measurements and analytical investigations, is adopted as a solution to the biases of a solely qualitative approach. The 3D geometric analysis of the figurines focuses on the objects’ shape and components, mode of manufacture, level of expertise, specialisation or skills of the craftsman and production techniques. The analysis leads to the creation of classes of artefacts which allow archaeologists to formulate hypotheses on the production process, identify a common production (e.g., same hand, same workshop) and establish a relative chronological sequence. 3D reconstruction of the excavation’s area contributes to the virtual re-unification of the assemblage for its holistic study, the relative chronological dating of the figurines and the interpretation of their social and ritual purposes. The results obtained from the selected sample prove the efficacy of the proposed 3D approach and support the expansion of the analysis to the whole assemblage, and possibly initiate quantitative and systematic studies on Cypriot coroplastic production

Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, Vol. 23, Nos. 3 and 4

The Hawes Site: A Burial Stone Bowl Complex (Arthur C. Lord, Sr.) The Seaver Farm Site (Karl S. Dodge) Woodworking: An Important Industry (William S. Fowler) The Car-Tracks Site, Wareham (Bernard H. Stockley) Two Barnstable Pots (George K. Johnson) How Aboriginal Planters Stored Food (Howard S. Russell) A Cache of Artifacts from Martha’s Vineyard (E.G. Huntington) Index of Back Bulletin Issues Available for Sal

Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals

Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands). The linguistic (Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea), bioanthropological/ human genetic, and Neolithic archaeological records each carry signals of expansion from these two source regions. A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone. The fundamental process of human behavior involved in such expansion-population dispersal linked to increases in human population size-is significant for explaining the early spreads of food production and language families in many parts of the world. This article is concerned mainly with the archaeological record for the expansion of early food producers, Austronesian languages, and Neolithic technologies through Taiwan into the northern Philippines as an early stage in what was to become the greatest dispersal of an ethnolinguistic population in world history before AD 1500

3D Pedestrian Tracking and Virtual Reconstruction of Ceramic Vessels Using Geometric and Color Cues

Object tracking using cameras has many applications ranging from monitoring children and the elderly, to behavior analysis, entertainment, and homeland security. This thesis concentrates on the problem of tracking person(s) of interest in crowded scenes (e.g., airports, train stations, malls, etc.), rendering their locations in time and space along with high quality close-up images of the person for recognition. The tracking is achieved using a combination of overhead cameras for 3D tracking and a network of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras to obtain close-up frontal face images. Based on projective geometry, the overhead cameras track people using salient and easily computable feature points such as head points. When the obtained head point is not accurate enough, the color information of the head tops across subsequent frames is integrated to detect and track people. To capture the best frontal face images of a target across time, a PTZ camera scheduling is proposed, where the 'best' PTZ camera is selected based on the capture quality (as close as possible to frontal view) and handoff success (response time needed by the newly selected camera to move from current to desired state) probabilities. The experiments show the 3D tracking errors are very small (less than 5 cm with 14 people crowding an area of around 4 m2) and the frontal face images are captured effectively with most of them centering in the frames. Computational archaeology is becoming a success story of applying computational tools in the reconstruction of vessels obtained from digs, freeing the expert from hours of intensive labor in manually stitching shards into meaningful vessels. In this thesis, we concentrate on the use of geometric and color information of the fragments for 3D virtual reconstruction of broken ceramic vessels. Generic models generated by the experts as a rendition of what the original vessel may have looked like are also utilized. The generic models need not to be identical to the original vessel, but are within a geometric transformation of it in most of its parts. The markings on the 3D surfaces of fragments and generic models are extracted based on their color cues. Ceramic fragments are then aligned against the corresponding generic models based on the geometric relation between the extracted markings. The alignments yield sub-scanner resolution fitting errors.Ph.D., Electrical Engineering -- Drexel University, 201

Ceramic micropalaentology : the analysis of microfossils in archaeological ceramics with special reference to its application in the southern Aegean.

Within the scientific analysis of archaeological ceramics, four principal aims can be specified: description, classification, the reconstruction of ceramic technology and the determination of provenance. In order to achieve these, sophisticated methods of thin section analysis have been developed which permit the retrieval of detailed information about the nature of the rock and mineral inclusions as well as the textural features of the ceramic micromass. One important group of inclusions which occur in many archaeological ceramics are the organic or mineralised remains of various microscopic animals and plants, collectively referred to as microfossils. Microfossils are studied in detail only rarely by ceramic petrographers, however they contain information pertaining to the geological age and palaeoenvironment in which their host sediment was deposited, and as such can be used to characterise and provenance the raw materials of ceramic manufacture. Whilst holding great potential for the analysis of archaeological pottery, there are also a variety of problems associated with these types of inclusions, such as their alteration and removal by various processes during the production and post-depositional history of ceramics. Specialist analyses of microfossils in archaeological ceramics are small in number and biased towards the investigation of diatoms from the Neolithic to Iron Age pottery of north-west Europe. This thesis represents the first comprehensive study of the occurrence and utility of all microfossils in archaeological ceramics and is divided into two main sections. The first comprises a detailed account of the occurrence, preservation, methods of analysis, behaviour upon firing, and utility of all groups of microfossils in archaeological ceramics. This reappraisal is followed by several individual case studies from the Bronze Age of Crete and elsewhere in the Mediterranean which utilise calcareous microfossils to address a variety of archaeological questions of varying geographical scale and detail concerning ceramic provenance and technology

Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, Vol. 42, No. 1

Editorial Greeting (Barbara E. Luedtke) Nature’s Transformations and Other Pitfalls: Toward a Better Understanding of Post-Occupational Changes in Archaeological Site Morphology in the Northeast. Part II: Invertebrates (Alan E. Strauss) A Middle/Late Woodland Shell Midden at Peace Haven 2 (Roy Athearn, Arthur Staples, and Carol Barnes) The Mattequecham Wigwam Murder (Elizabeth A. Little