Trmun (north-eastern Italy): Multi-scale remote and ground-based sensing of a Bronze Age and post-Roman fortification

We have used multi-scale remote sensing to investigate a little known archaeological site in northern Istria (north-eastern Italy). Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) and archaeological field surveys have allowed us to identify the position and extension of a large Protohistoric hillfort. Its highest and best-preserved sector, corresponding to a modest elevation at the eastern margin of the settlement, has been further investigated through thermal imaging, high-resolution ALS, drone Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry and 3D Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), leading to a detailed identification of unexpected buried features. An excavation campaign conducted in 2022 has confirmed the remote and ground-based sensing results. This excavation has led to the discovery of a Bronze Age fortification, partially reused and modified with the construction of 2 or 3 square towers during the post-Roman period. Our results demonstrate that the combined analysis of multi-scale remote and ground-based sensing is crucial to planning archaeological exploration in the field. Digital methods provide high-resolution topography and detect buried features that assist in monitoring and managing cultural heritage

X-ray computed microtomography of late copper age decorated bowls with cross-shaped foots from central Slovenia and the Trieste Karst (North-Eastern Italy): technology and paste characterization.

About 20 Late Copper Age bowls with cross-shaped foots from Deschmann\u2019s pile dwellings (Ljubljansko barje, central Slovenia) and Trieste Karst (North-Eastern Italy) have been investigated using X-ray computed microtomography (microCT) in order to study the vessel-forming technique, to characterise their pastes and to test the hypothesis that some Karst bowls could have been imported from nowadays central Slovenia or even more distant regions. In three selected virtual slices per sample, clay, lithic inclusions and pores have been segmented and quantified. In addition, the area, maximum length and width of each lithic inclusion have been calculated. Then, the microCT-derived results have been statistically analysed by principal component analysis (PCA). The orientation of pores and disjunctions in microCT volumes show that the basins of the bowls were built using mainly the coiling technique, while the base was shaped starting from a central piece, to which a layer of clay was added and then reshaped in order to produce the foots. The Slovenian bowls include both medium/coarse-grained and very fine- or fine-grained vessels mainly tempered with carbonate inclusions. The pastes of the Karst bowls are considerably heterogeneous. One bowl was most likely imported to the Karst but not from central Slovenia as it shows peculiar components, shape and decoration. The other two imported vessels show a very fine-grained paste comparable to the one of several samples from Deschmann\u2019s pile dwellings. Such technological similarity is confirmed by PCA of microCT data and petrographic observations. Our study confirms the existence of strong cultural connections between central Slovenia and the northernmost Adriatic coast during the Late Copper Age

Do columnar defects produce bulk pinning?

From magneto-optical imaging performed on heavy-ion irradiated YBaCuO single crystals, it is found that at fields and temperatures where strong single vortex pinning by individual irradiation-induced amorphous columnar defects is to be expected, vortex motion is limited by the nucleation of vortex kinks at the specimen surface rather than by half-loop nucleation in the bulk. In the material bulk, vortex motion occurs through (easy) kink sliding. Depinning in the bulk determines the screening current only at fields comparable to or larger than the matching field, at which the majority of moving vortices is not trapped by an ion track.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Vortex-line liquid phases: Longitudinal superconductivity in the lattice London model

We study the vortex-line lattice and liquid phases of a clean type-II superconductor by means of Monte Carlo simulations of the lattice London model. Motivated by a recent controversy regarding the presence, within this model, of a vortex-liquid regime with longitudinal superconducting coherence over long length scales, we directly compare two different ways to calculate the longitudinal coherence. For an isotropic superconductor, we interpret our results in terms of a temperature regime within the liquid phase in which longitudinal superconducting coherence extends over length scales larger than the system thickness studied. We note that this regime disappears in the moderately anisotropic case due to a proliferation, close to the flux-line lattice melting temperature, of vortex loops between the layers.Comment: 8 pages, Revtex, with eps figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Measurement properties of the Minimal Insomnia Symptom Scale (MISS) in an elderly population in Sweden

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Insomnia is common among elderly people and associated with poor health. The Minimal Insomnia Symptom Scale (MISS) is a three item screening instrument that has been found to be psychometrically sound and capable of identifying insomnia in the general population (20-64 years). However, its measurement properties have not been studied in an elderly population. Our aim was to test the measurement properties of the MISS among people aged 65 + in Sweden, by replicating the original study in an elderly sample.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Data from a cross-sectional survey of 548 elderly individuals were analysed in terms of assumptions of summation of items, floor/ceiling effects, reliability and optimal cut-off score by means of ROC-curve analysis and compared with self-reported insomnia criteria.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Corrected item-total correlations ranged between 0.64-0.70, floor/ceiling effects were 6.6/0.6% and reliability was 0.81. ROC analysis identified the optimal cut-off score as ≥7 (sensitivity, 0.93; specificity, 0.84; positive/negative predictive values, 0.256/0.995). Using this cut-off score, the prevalence of insomnia in the study sample was 21.7% and most frequent among women and the oldest old.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Data support the measurement properties of the MISS as a possible insomnia screening instrument for elderly persons. This study make evident that the MISS is useful for identifying elderly people with insomnia-like sleep problems. Further studies are needed to assess its usefulness in identifying clinically defined insomnia.</p

The Flux-Line Lattice in Superconductors

Magnetic flux can penetrate a type-II superconductor in form of Abrikosov vortices. These tend to arrange in a triangular flux-line lattice (FLL) which is more or less perturbed by material inhomogeneities that pin the flux lines, and in high-$T_c$ supercon- ductors (HTSC's) also by thermal fluctuations. Many properties of the FLL are well described by the phenomenological Ginzburg-Landau theory or by the electromagnetic London theory, which treats the vortex core as a singularity. In Nb alloys and HTSC's the FLL is very soft mainly because of the large magnetic penetration depth: The shear modulus of the FLL is thus small and the tilt modulus is dispersive and becomes very small for short distortion wavelength. This softness of the FLL is enhanced further by the pronounced anisotropy and layered structure of HTSC's, which strongly increases the penetration depth for currents along the c-axis of these uniaxial crystals and may even cause a decoupling of two-dimensional vortex lattices in the Cu-O layers. Thermal fluctuations and softening may melt the FLL and cause thermally activated depinning of the flux lines or of the 2D pancake vortices in the layers. Various phase transitions are predicted for the FLL in layered HTSC's. The linear and nonlinear magnetic response of HTSC's gives rise to interesting effects which strongly depend on the geometry of the experiment.Comment: Review paper for Rep.Prog.Phys., 124 narrow pages. The 30 figures do not exist as postscript file

Eneolitico e Carso triestino: dati e problemi aperti

When dealing with a specific topic in a specific area, it is fundamental to keep in mind that what we call “archaeology” is actually the combination of three main elements - practice, i.e. field discoveries, methods of inquiry and theory - as C. Renfrew &amp; P. Bahn (2004: 21) clearly state: The history of archaeology is commonly seen as the history of great discoveries: the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt, the lost Maya cities of Mexico… But even more than that it is the story of how we can come to look with fresh eyes at the material evidence for the human past, and with new methods to aid us in our task. This threefold combination is reflected in this paper on the Eneolithic in the Trieste Karst, which presents a brief overview of the basic data and the interpretative problems still open. The area under study, in the easternmost region of northern Italy, is part of the Classical Karst, a limestone plateau crossed by two flysch belts, characterized by a high number of natural caves - ca. 3100 - ranging from wide horizontal ones to vertical pits. Caves had been used by human groups since prehistory, and traces of their presence had been discovered during speleological explorations as well as scientific investigations from the last decades of the 19th century till ca. the 1980s. Many of these findings remained partially or totally unpublished till the early 1990s, when systematic revisions started on the most important complexes, ca. 30 till the present, out of about 180 with anthropic/paleontological evidence. The revisions are based on a traditional typological-comparative approach, which has allowed to increase considerably the database of various categories of material culture. In the case of the local, Danilo-Vlaška Neolithic (ca. 5600-4000 BC), this has meant the possibility of recognizing it as a coherent entity with identified components whose basic association, when it varies, is likely to be site-use-specific. On the contrary, the following two millennia are still quite blurred, because after the disappearance of the Danilo-Vlaška components it is more difficult to detect a shared material culture, somehow rooted in the territory, that could have interacted with elements of foreign origin (stone and possibly pottery) or influence (pottery) (Ferrari et al. 2018: 70-71). This difficulty is due to elements related to all the three basic components of archaeology, as defined above: field discoveries, often carried out in ways that are not considered appropriate according to modern standards; methods, of recovery as just said, but also of study, when this is limited to typology, inevitably highly subjective; theory, because the elements whose presence in an archaeological context would allow scholars to label it as Eneolithic are disputable and disputed, in Italy and abroad. For S. Forenbaher, for instance, the concepts of culture and period should be dismissed in favour of that of style, an idea discussed in detail in a recent paper edited in 2018, Ljubljana and Cetina: Pottery Styles of the Third Millennium BC in the Eastern Adriatic. Some richly decorated bowls on cross-shaped foot, discovered between the last decades of the 19th century and the 1970s in the Trieste Karst, had been traditionally related to the Ljubljana Culture of Slovenia, although it had been soon noticed that the Karst bowls are similar but different from the Slovene ones. Since the typological-comparative approach alone is insufficient to verify this impression, new methods of study have been recently introduced, based on archaeometric analyses already used to investigate polished stone axes - in some cases associated also with bowls - by an interdisciplinary international team based in Trieste. These analyses have opened up new prospects, and new research is in progress to check them

Asce forate in pietra levigata e altri indicatori di scambi e contatti nel Caput Adriae tra IV e III millennio a.C.

A long-term project has allowed the provenance identification of the main groups of Neolithic and Copper Age stone axes from Caput Adriae. Stone artefacts can indeed be scientifically analysed to detect the geological origin of the raw materials and thus try to recognize ancient exchange networks. This contribution summarizes the lithology, typology, distribution and origin of the main groups of Copper Age shaft-hole axes, using their geological signature, together with other available archaeological indicators of medium- and long-distance connections, to reconstruct the main cultural developments that occurred in the investigated area. The main groups of Copper Age shaft-hole axes - Ljubljana type, serpentinite and metadolerite artefacts - were produced from raw materials outcropping in the Eisenkappler Diabaszug complex (Austria), the Hohe Tauern (Austria) and probably the Banija Ophiolite Complex (Croatia) respectively, all areas rich in copper ore deposits. These data demonstrate that since the 4th millennium BC, the exchange network responsible for the distribution of stone axes in the Caput Adriae changed from long-distance Neolithic connection systems based mainly on Italian jades and eclogites to a more complex one, characterized by a new interest for the eastern Alpine and northern Balkan world. The association of lithic raw materials used for axe production and copper minerals shows that the changes in raw material exploitation strategies between the Neolithic and Copper Age are probably related to the development of the first metallurgy. Archaeological evidence, including the distribution of Ljubljana type stone axes, S. Antonino/ Kozarac copper axes, and Vučedol and Ljubljana style pottery, shows that the coastal belt of Caput Adriae, from the Friuli plain to the Istrian peninsula and beyond, was strongly connected with nowadays central Slovenia at least since the last centuries of the 4th millennium BC to the mid 3rd millennium BC. The association of the lithic raw materials used for the production of the pierced axes of the Caput Adriae with areas rich in copper suggests that the changes in the strategies of exploitation of raw materials between the Neolithic and the Copper age were probably linked to the spread and development of early metallurgy and the economic and socio-cultural changes connected to it. In the area of the Ljubljansko barje, not far to the east, all the main types of pierced axes are encountered and the processing of copper is unequivocally documented as early as the early part of the 4th millennium BC. This area seems to play a central role in the connection systems existing between the eastern Alps, the northern Balkans and north-eastern Italy, extending its influence mainly in the area of the Karst but also in the plain of Friuli (particularly in the area of Aquileia) and in Istria. As already mentioned, other classes of materials, such as the copper axes of the S. Antonino / Kozarac type from the Friuli plain and ceramic finds from the Karst caves - typologically comparable to the Vučedol materials or those attributable to the Culture of Ljubljana - clearly testify to how the north-eastern coast of the Adriatic between the end of the 4th and the first half of the 3rd millennium BC is closely linked to the sites of present-day central Slovenia (Bernardini 2018; Bernardini et al. 2019; Leghissa et al. 2020)

Le coppe su piede del Carso triestino: contatti e scambi nel III millennio a.C. tra Caput Adriae ed Europa centrale

One of the most interesting finds of the III millennium BC are undoubtedly the cross-footed bowls distributed over a large area of Central and Southeast Europe. They are particularly numerous in the sites ascribed to the Vučedol culture and also appear in other closely related contemporary or partly contemporary cultures in Southern and Central Europe. These bowls, which are in a different state of preservation, have also been found in six caves in the Trieste Karst: Ciclami, Cotariova, Pettine, Edera, Zingari and Pettirosso (Figs. 1 e 2). The main feature of the Karst bowls are the rich decorations, mostly executed with impressions of double twisted cord. Several scientists have linked these bowls, together with other finds from the Trieste Karst, with the finds from the Deschmann’s pile-dwellings near Ig in the Ljubljansko barje in central Slovenia. In the latter pile dwellings this type of bowl is particularly numerous and is related to the recently redefined Ljubljansko barje variant of the Vučedol culture. According to the latest study, two main phases in the life of the Deschmann’s pile dwellings can be identified: the older phase is characterized by ceramics attributed to the variant of the Vučedol culture and those indicating an influential sphere of the Central European cultures. The younger phase is attributed to the recently redefined Ljubljana Culture, which comprises fine-grained vessels decorated with impressions of cord wrapped around a plate, and mostly undecorated fine and coarse ware, which bears numerous similarities to the ceramics of the Somogyvar-Vinkovci and Mako-Kosihy-Čaka cultures. With the aim of identifying possible imports and other links between the areas studied, an international team (University of Trieste; Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste; Multidisciplinary Laboratory of the Multidisciplinary Laboratory of the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics; ZRC SAZU, Institute of Archeology, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Budapest Neutron Center, Hungary) has carried out several traditional and innovative scientific analyses on a large number of samples. Mostly non-destructive analyses were carried out, in particular X-ray computed microtomography (microCT) and Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis (PGAA). The analyses showed that only one bowl from the Karst (n. 139461 from Cotariova - Fig. 3: 4) could have been imported from Ljubljansko barje. Another 4 Karst bowls (n. 20591 from Ciclami - Fig. 3: 1; n. 20419 from Cotariova - Fig. 3: 3; nn. 139463 e 139462 from Pettine - Fig. 3: 7 and 8) were most likely also imported, but not from central Slovenia. According to the results of the PGAA analysis, including a relatively high K2O content, and comparative typological data, two bowls (n. 20591 from Ciclami and n. 20419 from Cotariova; Figs 12 and 13) could have been imported from Central Europe

Immediate Implant Placement After Removal of Maxillary Impacted Canine Teeth : A Technical Note

Impacted maxillary canine teeth commonly occur in the general population. The traditional therapeutic approach comprises fenestration and orthodontic traction; however, if traction is not feasible or the patient refuses orthodontic treatment, an alternative solution is to remove the impacted tooth and immediately place an implant. This technical note describes a novel surgical approach to rehabilitation after impacted canine tooth removal, entailing immediate placement of a long implant in combination with regenerative materials and a barrier. Of note, this procedure preserves the apical ridge bone crest, allowing implant anchorage and primary stability to be achieved