Exploring Pompeii: discovering hospitality through research synergy

Hospitality research continues to broaden through an ever-increasing dialogue and alignment with a greater number of academic disciplines. This paper demonstrates how an enhanced understanding of hospitality can be achieved through synergy between archaeology, the classics and sociology. It focuses on classical Roman life, in particular Pompeii, to illustrate the potential for research synergy and collaboration, to advance the debate on hospitality research and to encourage divergence in research approaches. It demonstrates evidence of commercial hospitality activities through the excavation hotels, bars and taverns, restaurants and fast food sites. The paper also provides an example of the benefits to be gained from multidisciplinary analysis of hospitality and tourism

Measurement of corrosion content of archaeological lead artifacts by their Meissner response in the superconducting state; a new dating method

Meissner fraction in the superconducting state of lead archaeological artifacts is used to evaluate the mass of the uncorroded metal in the sample. Knowing the total mass of the sample the mass of all corrosion products is established. It is shown that this mass correlates with the archaeological age of the lead artifacts over a time span of ~2500 years. Well-dated untreated lead samples from Tel-Dor, the Persian period, Caesarea, the Byzantine and the Crusader periods as well as contemporary data were used to establish the dating correlation. This new chemical dating method is apparently applicable to lead artifacts buried in soils with the pH>6.5. In such soils the corrosion process is very slow and the corrosion products, mainly PbO and PbCO3, accumulate over hundreds of years. The method presented is in principle non-destructive. (corresponding author: )Comment: File ARCH_4.pdf 14 pages including 1 table and 5 figure

Archaeology and Language: The Indo-Iranians

This review of recent archaeological work in Central Asia and Eurasia attempts to trace and date the movements of the IndoIraniansspeakers of languages of the eastern branch of ProtoIndoEuropean that later split into the Iranian and Vedic families. Russian and Central Asian scholars working on the contemporary but very different Andronovo and Bactrian Margiana archaeological complexes of the 2d millennium b.c. have identified both as IndoIranian, and particular sites so identified are being used for nationalist purposes. There is, however, no compelling archaeological evidence that they had a common ancestor or that either is IndoIranian. Ethnicity and language are not easily linked with an archaeological signature, and the identity of the IndoIranians remains elusive

Women's views about a free breast pump service: an online survey to inform intervention development.

Improving breastfeeding outcomes is a global priority, however, in the UK continuation of breastfeeding remains low. Growing empirical evidence suggests a free breast pump service might be an acceptable and feasible incentive intervention to improve breastfeeding outcomes and reduce heath inequalities. To inform intervention development we conducted an on?line survey with women recruited via social media using snowball sampling. Data were analysed descriptively (closed questions) with qualitative thematic analysis (free text). The survey was completed by 666 women, most of whom had recently breastfed and used a breast pump. Participants agreed that free pump hire (rental/loan) (567 women; 85.1%) or a free pump to keep (408; 61.3%) should be provided. Free text comments provided by 408 women (free pump) and 309 women (free hire) highlighted potential benefits: helping women to continue breastfeeding, express milk; overcome difficulties; and pump choice. Concerns are possible effect on breastmilk supply, reduced breastfeeding, pumps replacing good support for breastfeeding and pump hire hygiene. Personal and societal costs are important issues. Some suggested a pump service should be for low?income mothers, those with feeding difficulties or sick/preterm infants. A one?size service would not suit all and vouchers were proposed. Some suggested fees and deposits to prevent waste. To our knowledge this is the first study reporting views about the acceptability of providing a free breast pump hire service. Mothers support and wish to have a say in breast pump service development. Future evaluations should address impact on feeding outcomes, professional support, hygiene for hired pumps, and costs

Interview with Laura Fortunato, Winner of the 2011 Gabriel W. Lasker Prize

An international jury composed of Michael Crawford (University of Kansas, USA), Dennis O\u27Rourke (University of Utah, USA), and Stephen Shennan (University College London, UK) has awarded the Gabriel Ward Lasker Prize 2011 to Dr. Laura Fortunato for her articles entitled Reconstructing the History of Residence Strategies in Indo-European–Speaking Societies and Reconstructing the History of Marriage Strategies in Indo-European–Speaking Societies considered as the best contribution to the 83rd volume of Human Biology (2011). Laura Fortunato is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from University College London in 2009; her doctoral research focused on the evolution of kinship and marriage systems. In particular, she has investigated the evolution of marriage strategies, wealth transfers at marriage, residence strategies, and inheritance strategies. Laura\u27s current research activities apply conceptual and methodological tools developed in evolutionary biology to a diverse range of topics in anthropology, from matrilineal kinship organization to cultural evolution

Artificial Sequences and Complexity Measures

In this paper we exploit concepts of information theory to address the fundamental problem of identifying and defining the most suitable tools to extract, in a automatic and agnostic way, information from a generic string of characters. We introduce in particular a class of methods which use in a crucial way data compression techniques in order to define a measure of remoteness and distance between pairs of sequences of characters (e.g. texts) based on their relative information content. We also discuss in detail how specific features of data compression techniques could be used to introduce the notion of dictionary of a given sequence and of Artificial Text and we show how these new tools can be used for information extraction purposes. We point out the versatility and generality of our method that applies to any kind of corpora of character strings independently of the type of coding behind them. We consider as a case study linguistic motivated problems and we present results for automatic language recognition, authorship attribution and self consistent-classification.Comment: Revised version, with major changes, of previous "Data Compression approach to Information Extraction and Classification" by A. Baronchelli and V. Loreto. 15 pages; 5 figure

Modeling resilience and sustainability in ancient agricultural systems

The reasons why people adopt unsustainable agricultural practices, and the ultimate environmental implications of those practices, remain incompletely understood in the present world. Archaeology, however, offers unique datasets on coincident cultural and ecological change, and their social and environmental effects. This article applies concepts derived from ecological resilience thinking to assess the sustainability of agricultural practices as a result of long-term interactions between political, economic, and environmental systems. Using the urban center of Gordion, in central Turkey, as a case study, it is possible to identify mismatched social and ecological processes on temporal, spatial, and organizational scales, which help to resolve thresholds of resilience. Results of this analysis implicate temporal and spatial mismatches as a cause for local environmental degradation, and increasing extralocal economic pressures as an ultimate cause for the adoption of unsustainable land-use practices. This analysis suggests that a research approach that integrates environmental archaeology with a resilience perspective has considerable potential for explicating regional patterns of agricultural change and environmental degradation in the past

Water supply of ancient Egyptian settlements: the role of the state. Overview of a relatively equitable scheme from the Old to New Kingdom (ca. 2543-1077 BC).

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12685-015-0150-xThe study of the textual and archaeological evidence shows that the water supply of the settlements of ancient Egypt seems to have worked on a simple and a relatively equitable scheme, at least from the Old Kingdom until the New Kingdom (ca. 2543-1077). The water supply of the inhabitants was completely managed by the state, through the local administration which was charged to bring the water, in general from a rural area, into towns and cities and to redistribute it to the inhabitants. The method of supply is illustrated by several sources of evidence, in particular by the well known case of the "water-carriers" of the village of Deir el-Medina. Thus, drawing together text and archaeology, this paper will demonstrate that over an extended period, even when the city was far from a water source, the state did not set up complex installations such as pipe networks or wells to bring water, but preferred a simpler system using the manpower available

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The Role of the Amundsen Sea Continental Shelf in Exchanges Between Ocean and Ice Shelves

The Amundsen Sea is a key region of Antarctica where ocean, atmosphere, sea ice, and ice sheet interact. For much of Antarctica, the relatively warm water of the open Southern Ocean (a few degrees above freezing) does not reach the Antarctic continental shelf in large volumes under current climate conditions. However, in the Amundsen Sea, warm water penetrates onto the continental shelf and provides heat that can melt the underside of the area’s floating ice shelves, thinning them. Here, we discuss how the ocean’s role in melting has come under increased scrutiny, present 2014 observations from the Amundsen Sea, and discuss their implications, highlighting aspects where understanding is still incomplete