Identifying Social Transformations and Crisis during the Pre-Monastic to Post-Viking era on Iona : New Insights from a Palynological and Palaeoentomological Perspective

Acknowledgements: Special acknowledgements go to Audrey Innes for her laboratory support, to Historic Environment Scotland and to the Leverhulme Trust who have helped fund this project and to the University of Glasgow who have helped support this work.Peer reviewedPostprin

Meals for the dead:investigating Romano-British accessory vessels in burials using organic residue analysis

Accessory vessels, including platters, dishes, beakers, flagons, jars, and amphorae, are a common feature of Romano-British burials, raising questions as to their provenance; for example, were such vessels recycled from the domestic sphere or made specially for funerary purposes? Furthermore, uncertainty surrounds their purpose: did they contain foods for the deceased, possibly for their final journey to the underworld? Interestingly, organic residue analysis of vessels from Baginton, a site adjacent to The Lunt fort, Coventry, an early (mid to late first century) Roman military cremation cemetery did not yield evidence for food offerings and may have reflected the use of seconds or damaged vessels in burials, perhaps to provide a symbolic meal. In contrast, here we provide, for the first time, direct chemical and isotopic evidence for ‘meals for the dead’, comprising mainly dairy products, often mixed with leafy plants, extracted from somewhat unusual accessory vessels found in a small, enclosed inhumation cemetery, perhaps associated with a family group, which dates to the late (third to late fourth century, or early fifth century A.D) in urban Canterbury. Thus, we can confirm that accessory vessels found in later Romano-British burials were, in this instance, used in the laying out of funerary meals, presumably to nourish the soul on the journey to the underworld. These preliminary insights on vessel use and burial practices across the span of the Roman occupation of Britain thus provide a strong hint at the diversity of Roman burial practices

Pleistocene environments, climate, and human activity in Britain during Marine Isotope Stage 7: insights from Oak Tree Fields, Cerney Wick, Gloucestershire

Investigations at Oak Tree Fields, Cerney Wick, Gloucestershire, in western England have revealed a sequence of fluvial deposits dating from Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage (MIS) 7 to 5. At the base of the sequence, a series of gravel and sand facies were deposited, initially as part of a meandering river. Reductions in flow energy of the latter and avulsion led to the development of short-lived channels and episodic backwater environments, the deposits of which are recorded as Facies Associations 1–3. Poorly sorted, probably colluvial deposits formed beyond the limit of the channel (Facies Association 4). Mollusca, Coleoptera, plant macrofossils, pollen and vertebrates recovered from the channel facies indicate broadly similar climatic conditions throughout accretion. Temperature ranges derived from mutual climatic range analysis of the Coleoptera almost completely overlap with those of Cerney Wick at the present day, albeit that winters may have been cooler when the channel was active. Further, the floral and faunal data suggest that the meandering river flowed through an open grassland environment, the latter heavily grazed by large vertebrates, most notably mammoth. Most of the botanical and faunal remains, together with four optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) age estimates ranging from 225 ± 23 to 187 ± 19 ka, suggest correlation of the channel deposits with MIS 7. The basal deposits (Facies Association 1) yielded the majority of vertebrate remains and all the lithic artefacts, most of which seem likely to have travelled only a short distance. Although only a few artefacts were recovered, they add to the relatively limited evidence of human activity from the upper Thames. The channel deposits are overlain by sheet gravels (Facies Association 5) which are attributed to the Northmoor Member of the Upper Thames Formation. These were likely to have been deposited as bedload in a braided stream environment, while two OSL age estimates of 129 ± 14 and 112 ± 11 ka suggest accumulation during MIS 5

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Palaeoenvironmental Investigations

The final full text is available open access at https://universitypress.whiterose.ac.uk/site/chapters/10.22599/book2.e/The results of the palaeoenvironmental analyse

Modelling prehistoric topography and vegetation in the lower Thames Valley, UK: Palaeoenvironmental context for wetland archaeology and evidence for Neolithic Landnám from north Woolwich

Multi-proxy investigations at 2 Pier Road, North Woolwich, London, UK, have revealed deposits spanning the Middle-Late Holocene from the late Mesolithic (c. 4360 cal BC) onwards. Pollen data show an Elm Decline at c. 4210–3950 cal BC followed by landnám clearances at c. 4210–3910 cal BC and c. 3710–3030 cal BC and the first appearance of cereal at c. 3540–3030 cal BC. These events are potentially contemporary with the construction of nearby Neolithic trackways, providing indirect evidence for agriculture and settlement. REVEALS modelling shows the first significant reduction in woodland cover is coincident with the Neolithic Elm decline, but the main step-change to open conditions occurred in the Early Bronze Age, following a decline in lime at c. 2110–1630 cal BC. Palaeo-topographic modelling of the region shows that although the trend towards increasing openness coincides with gradual wetland expansion, the shift to open vegetation cover cannot be explained by this and is probably the result of human activity. This study highlights the value of combining deposit and vegetation cover modelling to contextualise wetland archaeology and shows that together these provide useful proxies for landscape-scale human activity that can identify ephemeral signals of prehistoric activity.</p