The historiography of landscape research on Crete

This study aimed to construct a historiography of archaeological landscape research on the island of Crete and evaluate the knowledge acquired through different approaches of over more than a century’s intense archaeological work. It provides a detailed analysis of relevant projects, which are seen within a wider historical framework of archaeological landscape research from the beginnings of the discipline (19th century) to the present day. The five (5) major ‘traditions’ or else ‘approaches’ of studying past landscapes that are identified, demonstrate certain common attributes in questions asked, methodology followed and interpretative suggestions. Analysis, however, has shown that these ‘traditions’ have been in a continuous interplay and have each their own limitations as well as worthy contribution to the study of the Cretan past. The assessment of archaeological landscape work on Crete and the use of landscape data in a case study area for the historical reconstruction of human activity, concluded on the need to be explicit regarding 1) the relationship between data and interpretations and 2) the kind of information we need to produce and publish from landscape research so that we promote archaeological knowledge and allow a higher level of communication within the archaeological community.LEI Universiteit LeidenSaripoleio Foundation, School of Philosophy, University of AthensClassical and Mediterranean Archaeolog

Author Correction: Amplitude of travelling front as inferred from 14C predicts levels of genetic admixture among European early farmers.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper

Language tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin

Languages, like genes, provide vital clues about human history. The origin of the Indo-European language family is 'the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics'. Numerous genetic studies of Indo-European origins have produced inconclusive results. Here we analyse linguistic data using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology. We test between two theories of Indo-European origin - the 'Kurgan expansion' and 'Anatolian farming' hypotheses. The former centres on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion into Europe and the near-East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the sixth millennium BP. The latter claims that Indo-European languages expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around 8,000 to 9,500BP. In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between 7,800BP and 9,800BP. The results were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees and priors in the Bayesian analysis