New perspective on Neolithic rectangular features using artefact analysis, soil micromorphology and ethnohistorical analogies: A case study from Střelice u Brna, South Moravia, Czech Republic (advance online)

Neue Perspektiven auf rechteckigeneolithische Befunde durch Artefaktanalyse, Bodenmikromorphologie und ethnohistorische Analogien. EineFallstudie aus Střelice u Brna, Südmähren, Tschechien.Die Funktion eingetiefter rechteckiger Strukturen währenddes Spätneolithikums ist in Mitteleuropa seit vielenJahren Gegenstand von Untersuchungen. Gruben dieserArt werden selten gefunden. Eines der jüngsten Beispieleist ein quadratischer Lengyel-Befund aus der Gemeinde: The function of sunken rectangular features inthe Late Neolithic has been a subject of interest in CentralEurope for many years. This type of pit is not found veryoften. One of the latest examples is a square Lengyelfeature in the village of Střelice near Brno. A study of themicrostratigraphy of the fill has made it possible to qualitatively move the debate to a new level. The qualitativeassessment of bone micro-fragments is also innovativefor the method of micromorphology in the archaeologicalcontext. The study also includes an analysis of artefactsin the actual fill of feature 562, especially the deposits offragments of “other lithic industry”, pottery and parts of an animal’s body. The discovered situation is theninterpreted in the context of other known contemporaryfeatures of this type. The presence of excrement withdigested bone micro-fragments in the lower layer and theabsence of a floor treatment, tread horizon or bedding canbe interpreted in the context of ethnohistorical analogies,e.  g., as the short-term use of a faecal pit for an omnivorous or carnivorous species (bear) with a subsequentritual ending

A Comparison of Genetic Representations for Multi-objective Shortest Path Problems on Multigraphs

The use of multi-graphs in modelling multi-objective transportation problems is gaining popularity, necessitating the consideration of the Multi-objective Shortest Path Problem (MSPP) on multigraphs. This problem is encountered in time-dependent vehicle routing, multimodal transportation planning and in optimising airport operations. This problem is more complex than the NP-hard simple graph MSPP, and thus approximate solution methods are needed to find a good representation of the true Pareto front in a given time budget. Evolutionary algorithms have been applied with success to the simple graph MSPP, however their performances on multigraph MSPP were not systematically investigated. To this aim, we extend the most popular genetic representations to the multigraph case and compare the achieved performances. We find that the priority based encodings outperform the direct ones with purely random initialisation. We further introduce a novel heuristic initialisation technique, that is generic enough for many representations, and that further improves the convergence speed and solution quality of the algorithms. The results are encouraging for later application to the time constrained multigraph MSPP