30 research outputs found
Network analysis of a corpus of undeciphered Indus civilization inscriptions indicates syntactic organization
Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization
(2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large
number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To
date there is no generally accepted decipherment of these sign sequences and
there have been suggestions that the signs could be non-linguistic. Here we
apply complex network analysis techniques to a database of available Indus
inscriptions, with the aim of detecting patterns indicative of syntactic
organization. Our results show the presence of patterns, e.g., recursive
structures in the segmentation trees of the sequences, that suggest the
existence of a grammar underlying these inscriptions.Comment: 17 pages (includes 4 page appendix containing Indus sign list), 14
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Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies
The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes
Changing the prehistory of Sindh and Las Bela coast: twenty-five years of Italian contribution
The paper discusses the prehistory of Lowr Sindh and Las Bela Coast, and the role played by the Italian archaeologists since the 1980's. New date are presented regarding mainly the radiocarbon chronology the Indus Delta settlement on rocky outcrops and the shell middens of Las Bela