Unsupervised Classification of Neolithic Pottery From the Northern Alpine Space Using t-SNE and HDBSCAN

Terms of “Neolithic cultures” are still used to describe spatial and temporal differences in pottery styles across central Europe. These terms date back to research periods when absolute dating methods were lacking and typological classification was used to establish chronologies. Those terms are charged with problematic, biasing notions of social configurations: cultural homogeneity, spatial boundedness, and immobility. In this article, we present an alternative approach to pottery classification by using ceramics from dendrochronologically and C14-dated sites of the 40th–38th c. BC located in the northern Alpine Foreland. The newly developed methodology uses a computational unsupervised classification based on profile shape and additional nominal characteristics using t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding and Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise for cluster analyses. Its role in our project was to provide a quantitative, algorithm-based approach to classify large datasets of pottery while simultaneously account for a large number of variables. This enabled us to find similarity structures that would escape human cognitive capacities on which typological classification is based on. It formed one pilar of a mixed method research approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods of pottery classification. Our results show that the premises of cultural homogeneity are untenable but can be methodologically overcome by using the proposed classification approaches

Paläoökologische Aspekte

Seedorf, Lobsigesee ist eine der wenigen jungneolithischen Moorsiedlungen im Drei-Seen-Land. Während am Bieler-, Neuenburger- und Murtensee zahlreiche neolithische Seeufersiedlungen belegt und diese Siedlungsräume somit gut bekannt sind, bietet die Fundstelle am Lobsigesee Einblicke in die damalige Lebenswelt im Hinterland, abseits der grossen Seen

Wider die Krise? Archäologie nach der Postmoderne

Unlängst wurde die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die Archäologie in eine epistemologische Krise geraten sei. Ein neuer Realismus würde die idealistische Haltung der postprozessualen Archäologie herausfordern. Versteht man eine Krise als schwierige Lage oder Zeit, die den Höhe- und Wendepunkt einer bedrohlich erscheinenden Entwicklung darstellt, so wird deutlich, dass deren Diagnostizierung standpunktabhängig und daher stets strittig bleiben muss. Konsensfähiger ist die Beobachtung, dass sich die Archäologie in einer Phase tiefgreifender Transformationen befindet. In diesem Essay gehe ich der Frage nach, ob diese zu einem epistemologischen Paradigmenwechsel führen könnten, der die Archäologie über den Postprozessualismus der Postmoderne hinausführt. Die Archäologie – verstanden als ein dynamisches, über unterschiedliche Sprach-, Erkenntnis- und Wissensformen hinausreichendes materiell-diskursives Geflecht sozialer Praktiken – kann meiner Meinung nach nicht losgelöst von gesellschaftlichen Prozessen betrachtet werden. Eine breitere Perspektive einnehmend, scheint die postmoderne Strömung insgesamt an Zugkraft zu verlieren. Wiederkehrende bewaffnete Konflikte, Finanz- und Flüchtlingskrisen, die SARS-CoV-2 Pandemie, Ressourcenknappheit, Umweltverschmutzung und Klimaerwärmung, die Entwicklung von künstlicher Intelligenz (AI) oder das Internet der Dinge mit seinen Technologien zur Verbindung von physischen und virtuellen Erfahrungsbereichen führen zu einer verstärkten Auseinandersetzung mit dem Realen. Diese gesamtgesellschaftlichen Prozesse könnten als epochaler Umbruch verstanden werden: Von der Post- zur Metamoderne. Letztere kennzeichnet das Oszillieren zwischen Idealismus und Materialismus, Rea- lismus und Konstruktivismus und damit Modernismus und Postmodernismus. Vergleichbare Tendenzen sind auch in der Archäologie erkennbar: der Science Turn, Digital Turn und Big Data beschreiben die zunehmende Relevanz naturwissenschaftlicher Methoden, der Digitalisierung und Quantifizierung. Außerdem führen neue philosophische, geistes- und sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven wie der Material Turn (Neuer Materialismus) und der Ontological Turn (Neuer Realismus) die Archäologie von anthropozentrischen, idealistischen Haltungen weg. Gleichzeitig bleiben postmoderne Erkenntnisse zur Subjektivität, Situativität, Kontextualität und Historizität in der Wissenskonstruktion bedeutsam. Wie könnte eine metamoderne Archäologie mit diesen unterschiedlichen Haltungen umgehen, ohne sich in Widersprüchen zu verfangen? Wie ich aufzeigen möchte, müssten keine völlig neuen Denkgebäude ausgearbeitet werden, da Archäolog*innen auf bisher wenig beachtete Dritt-Weg-Epistemologien zurückgreifen könnten

Mobility as resilience capacity in northern Alpine Neolithic settlement communities

Resilience has recently become an insightful conceptual framework that helps scholars explore how communities respond to external shocks, such as environmental changes. In prehistoric archaeology, this notion has primarily been investigated using the Resilience Theory (RT) and the Adaptive Cycle model (AC), developed by Gunderson and Holling, which are applied to adaptive systems in order to understand the source and role of change. However, such systems-theoretical approaches, which derive from ecology and psychology, bear the danger of leading to a top-down application of deductive models when appropriated to the fragmented archaeological sources. In other words, the risk is to assume the RT and AC model first and then to fit archaeological data within those assumptions. In this paper, we propose an alternative, inductive bottom-up approach in which we define resilience as a set of adaptive capacities grounded in social practices that enabled communities to cope with and respond to challenges. We use the Neolithic wetland sites from the Three-Lakes Region in the northern Alpine foreland of western Switzerland as a case study. These sites provide an abundance of archaeological and palaeoecological information, which can be used to examine the resilience of settlement communities to climate fluctuations. We will evaluate whether a causal relationship might have existed between climate changes in the period between 3600 and 3200 BCE and an observable decline of settlement activities on the shores of the large lakes. In addition to year-accurate reconstructions of settlement histories, we will apply statistical significance tests on archaeological and palaeoclimatic time series to question the correlation and causality between settlement activities and climate fluctuations. Besides the settlement frequency curve, we will use the radioactive beryllium-10 isotope (Be10) content in the GISP2 ice core from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the δ18O values of well-dated speleothems as proxies for temperature and precipitation, respectively. The inferred hypothesis, i.e. that periodically rising lake levels led to the flooding of former inhabitable spaces on the lakes’ shore zones and forced communities to relocate their settlements to the hinterland, will further be tested. Therefore, we apply multivariate statistics to pollen data to evaluate human influence on vegetation (land clearing) taken as settlement activity beyond the shores of large lakes. In addition, we examine the relevance of transformations in pottery styles as further indicators for spatial mobility

Pottery beyond Cultures - A praxeological Approach to Mobility, Entanglements and Transformations in Prehistoric Societies

Life in the 21st century seems to be particularly shaped by mobility, from daily commuter movements to poverty-, war- or climate-induced migration. But what role has spatial mobility played in the prehistoric past? Surprisingly, we still do know rather little about it. This is particularly true for the European Neolithic societies. Questionable premises like concepts of social and cultural coherence of residence groups and the ethnic interpretation of archaeological cultures fostered ideas of static and homogeneous social entities with fixed borders. Beyond that farming – understood as the core of the Neolithic way of life - was rather associated with sedentariness than with mobility. Yet the numerous outstandingly preserved Neolithic UNESCO World Heritage wetland sites of the Northern Alpine Foreland dating to 4th millennium BC are a solid research basis to address such questions. In particular, many of the dendrochronologically dated settlements on Lake Zurich and Lake Constance of the period between 3950 and 3800 BCE offer a rare opportunity to investigate cultural, social and economic processes with a high temporal and spatial resolution. In this paper we will use them as a case study to inquire the role of spatial mobility, for cultural entanglements and transformations in prehistoric societies. Taking three recent paradigmatic shifts as a theoretical starting point – the mobility, practice and material turn –, we have developed a mixed-methodology to investigate spatial mobility using ceramics. While qualitative methods (impressionistic classification of vessel designs) allow us to understand social practices of pottery production from the actors' perspective (micro level), quantitative methods (computational autoclassification of vessels shapes) make it possible to explore structural patterns of pottery consumption practice across several settlements (macro perspective). Through the combination of both perspectives, farreaching entanglements between regions become visible, as well as mobility-related local appropriations and transformations of pottery practices in the rhythm of decades. In this way, the usual culture historic models of homogenous societies can be deconstructed and replaced by entanglements between different communities of practice

Mobilities, Entanglements, Transformations. Outline of a Research Project on Pottery Practices in Neolithic Wetland Sites of the Swiss Plateau

A large number of later Neolithic sites (3900–3500BC) in Switzerland, Southern Germany and Eastern France offer outstandingly well preserved archaeological materials from cultural layers. Due to the wide use of dendrochronology, settlement remains and artefact assemblages can now be placed into a precise and fixed chronological framework, thus presenting a unique case within prehistoric archaeology. In earlier research, chronological and regional units were constructed on the basis of pottery. These spacial and temporal units of typical pottery sets were understood as Neolithic cultures, as culturally more or less homogenous entities connected with (ethnic) identities. Today, with a larger data corpus of excavated settlements at hand, we can begin to understand that this period of the past was in fact characterised by a multitude of cultural entanglements and transformations. This is indicated by the occurrence of local and non-local pottery styles in one and the same settlement: for example typically local Cortaillod pottery is found together with NMB-styled pottery in settlements at Lake Neuchâtel or Michelsberg pottery is regularly occurring in settlements at Lake Constance where Pfyn pottery style is the typical local one. These and many more examples show that there must have been complex entanglements of social ties expanding between Eastern France, Southern Germany and the Swiss Plateau. Given these circumstances the former notions of Neolithic culture should be critically revised. Therefore, in late 2014, the Prehistoric Archaeology Department at the Archaeological Institute of University of Berne started a four-year research project funded by Swiss National Science Foundation in late 2014: ‘Mobilities, Entanglements and Transformations in Neolithic Societies of the Swiss Plateau (3900-3500 BC)’. It’s objective is to address the topic sketched above by adopting a mixed methods research (MMR)-design combining qualitative and quantitative approaches from archaeology and archaeometry. The approach is theoretically based on Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology and his concept of habitus but includes further concepts of practice theories. By shifting the focus to the movement of people, ideas and things – to pottery production practices in contexts of mobility – a deeper understanding of the transformative capacities of encounters can be achieved. This opens the path for new insights of Neolithic societies including social, cultural and economic dynamics that were underestimated in former research

Linking Neolithic lakeshore settlements through raw material of siliceous artefacts

This paper presents the results of the provenience analysis of siliceous artefacts from Neolithic lakeshore settlements studied in the scope of the SNSF-project MET (“Mobilities, entanglements and transformations in Neolithic societies on the Swiss Plateau (3900-3500 BCE) supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project No 100011 156205). The aim of this paper is to compare the cultural entanglements as defined by the pottery studies with the regions of origins of the knappable siliceous sedimentary rocks (KSSR) raw materials. The analysed siliceous artefacts were found in cultural layers of wetland settlements in the Northern Alpine Foreland, most of which are dated dendrochronologically with extreme precision. The sources of the raw materials were determined by the identification of the sedimentary microfacies of the siliceous artefacts, which allows the accurate location of the exploited outcrops without destroying the artefacts. This enabled detailed insights into complex entanglements, ties and mobility patterns in the raw material procurement between settlement communities on the Swiss Plateau, southern Germany and eastern France. Furthermore, these results were compared visually with stylistic entanglements in the pottery of the 4th millennium BCE. As a first attempt in this direction, this paper shows the potential of studies on mobility patterns when different find categories are studied in combination regarding their raw materials but also their typology

Vers une géographie expérientielle à l’école : l’exemple de l’espace proche

Notre recherche est née de l’observation du rapport des élèves à leur espace proche. En effet ils possèdent une expérience personnelle de leur espace mais ne l’articulent pas aux savoirs scolaires. Le champ de la didactique nous permet ainsi d’explorer sous la forme d’une recherche collaborative et d’éprouver sur le terrain une démarche expérientielle de l’enseignement de la géographie de l’espace proche que nous avons modélisée. Celle-ci apparait comme un levier pédagogique pertinent pour permettre l’articulation entre une géographie spontanée et une géographie raisonnée inhérente à la géographie scolaire en renouvellement. Cette géographie expérientielle permet donc à l’élève de penser autrement son espace proche, de donner du sens aux apprentissages réalisés, de construire un récit géographique.Our research was born from the observation of the students' relationship to their close space. Indeed, they have personal experience of their space but do not articulate it with academic knowledge. The field of didactics thus allows us to explore in the form of collaborative research and to test in the field an experiential approach to teaching the geography of the near space that we have modeled. This appeared to be a relevant pedagogical lever to allow the articulation between a spontaneous geography and a reasoned geography inherent in the school geography in renewal. This experiential geography thus allows the student to think differently about his or her immediate space, to give meaning to the learning carried out, to construct a geographically narrative and thus to be part of a conscious citizenship