Zooarchaeology, improvement and the British agricultural revolution

This paper seeks to revisit the debate concerning the nature and timing of the British Agricultural Revolution. Specifically, it considers how zooarchaeological evidence can be employed to investigate later-medieval and post-medieval ‘improvements’ in animal husbandry. Previous studies of animal bone assemblages have indicated that the size of many domestic species in England increases from the 15th century - an observation that has been used to support the writings of those historians that have argued that the Agricultural Revolution occurred several centuries prior to the traditionally ascribed date of 1760-1840. Here, zooarchaeological data are presented which suggest that the size of cattle, sheep, pig and domestic fowl were increasing from as early as the 14th century. However, it is argued that the description of these changes as revolutionary is misleading and disguises the interplay of factors that influenced agricultural practice in the post-Black Death period. This paper concludes with a plea for greater awareness of the value of collecting and analysing faunal data from the 18th and 19th centuries to enable the historically-attested productivity increases of the traditionally dated Agricultural Revolution to be examined archaeologically

Characterizing word problems of groups

The word problem of a finitely generated group is a fundamental notion in group theory; it can be defined as the set of all the words in the generators of the group that represent the identity element of the group. This definition allows us to consider a word problem as a formal language and a rich topic of research concerns the connection between the complexity of this language and the algebraic structure of the corresponding group. Another interesting problem is that of characterizing which languages are word problems of groups. There is a known necessary and sufficient criterion for a language to be a word problem of a group; however a natural question is what other characterizations there are. In this paper we investigate this question, using sentences expressed in first-order logic where the relations we consider are membership of the language in question and concatenation of words. We choose some natural conditions that apply to word problems and then characterize which sets of these conditions are sufficient to guarantee that the language in question really is the word problem of a group. We finish by investigating the decidability of these conditions for the families of regular and one-counter languages

Word problems of groups: Formal languages, characterizations and decidability

Let G be a group and let φ:Σ ⁎ →G be a monoid homomorphism from the set of all strings Σ ⁎ over some finite alphabet Σ onto the group G. The set Σ is then called a generating set for G and the language {1}φ −1 ⊆Σ ⁎ is called the word problem of G with respect to the generating set Σ (via the homomorphism φ) and is denoted by W(G,Σ). We consider nine conditions that hold in each such language of the form W(G,Σ) and determine which combinations of these conditions are equivalent to the property of the language in question being the word problem of a group. We show that each of these nine conditions is decidable for the family of regular languages but that each is undecidable for the family of one-counter languages (the languages accepted by one-counter pushdown automata). We also show that the property of a language being the word problem of a group is undecidable for the family of one-counter languages but is decidable for the family of deterministic context-free languages (the languages accepted by deterministic pushdown automata)

Differential diagnosis of vertebral spinous process deviations in archaeological and modern domestic dogs

Paleopathological study of domestic animal remains can elucidate human-domesticate relationships, when all reasonable differential diagnoses are considered. Deviated spinous processes found on ancient domesticated dog vertebrae have been assumed to result from pack burdens, although consideration of diagnostic alternatives has been unclear. To more thoroughly assess the potential significance of these features, we first generated an extensive differential diagnosis of potential causes. Broad causal categories included: (i) morphological; (ii) infectious; (iii) taphonomic; (iv) life history (in utero to death), with numerous subcategories that sometimes overlap. We then evaluated these possibilities through an observational and radiology study of 15 ancient deliberate domestic dog burials (191 vertebrae) from the midwestern USA, dating between 10,130 and 200 years ago. Archaeological specimens from the UK were included to evaluate for geographic uniqueness of our observations. We characterized deviations of spinous processes of cervical (n = 74), thoracic (n = 51), lumbar (n = 60), and sacral (n = 6) vertebrae. Affected spinous processes were found in 34% of cervical vertebrae, 63% of thoracic vertebrae, 78% of lumbar vertebrae, and 50% of sacral vertebrae. Four types of spinous process deviations were observed: (a) lateral leaning from the base but not otherwise deviated; (b) lateral curving at some point above the base; (c) bowing because of multiple curves; and (d) torsion along the vertical axis. Computed tomography and micro-computed tomography were essential tools for establishing differential diagnoses