Open-archaeo: A Resource for Documenting Archaeological Software Development Practices

Open-archaeo (https://open-archaeo.info) is a comprehensive list of open software and resources created by and for archaeologists. It is a living collection—itself an open project—which as of writing includes 548 entries and associated metadata. Open-archaeo documents what kinds of software and resources archaeologists have produced, enabling further investigation of research software engineering and digital peer-production practices in the discipline, both under-explored aspects of archaeological research practice

Open archaeology, open source? Collaborative practices in an emerging community of archaeological software engineers

Surveying the first quarter-century of computer applications in archaeology, Scollar (1999) lamented that the field relied almost exclusively on ‘hand-me-down’ tools repurposed from other disciplines. Twenty-five years later, this is no longer the case: computational archaeologists often find themselves practising the dual roles of data analyst and research software engineer (Baxter et al. 2012; Schmidt and Marwick 2020), developing and applying new tools that are tailored specifically to archaeological problems and archaeological methods. Though this trend can be traced to the very earliest days of the field (Cowgill 1967), its most recent manifestation is distinguished by its apparent embrace of practices from free and open-source software. Most prominently, since around 2015, there has been a rapid uptake of workflow tools designed for open-source development communities, such as the version control system git and associated online source code management platforms (e.g. GitHub, GitLab). These tools facilitate collaboration among developers and users of open source software using patterns that can diverge quite radically from conventional scholarly norms (Tennant et al. 2020). In this article, we investigate modes of collaboration in this emerging community of practice using 'open-archaeo', a curated list of archaeological software, and data on the activity of associated GitHub repositories and users. We conduct an exploratory quantitative analysis to characterise the nature and intensity of these collaborations and map the collaborative networks that emerge from them. We document uneven adoption of open source collaborative practices beyond the basic use of git as a version control system and GitHub to host source code. Most projects do make use of collaborative features and, through shared contributions, we can trace a collaborative network that includes the majority of archaeologists active on GitHub. However, a majority of repositories have 1-3 contributors, with only a few projects distinguished by an active and diverse developer base. Direct collaboration on code or other repository content - as opposed to the more passive, social media-style interaction that GitHub supports – remains very limited. In other words, there is little evidence that archaeologists' adoption of open-source tools (git and GitHub) has been accompanied by the decentralised, participatory forms of collaboration that characterise other open-source communities. On the contrary, our results indicate that research software engineering in archaeology remains largely embedded in conventional professional norms and organisational structures of academia

Indigenous knowledge of marine ecosystems. Consumption, commercialization and management in the Miskito community of Sandy Bay and the Rama community of Punta Aguila, Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua

This thesis an effort is made to present the indigenous knowledge of marine ecosystems in the communities of Sandy bay (Miskito) and Punta Aguila (Rama) of Nicaragua. The aim is to identify and show how these fishing communities are using and transmitting their knowledge for resource harvesting and management. As indigenous people are facing changes in their daily life; conflict of resources use, land tenure, variation in the ecosystem and the environment in which they live their knowledge change and the communities to adopt new methods of management. The people Punta Aguila and Sandy Bay harvest lobster, turtle, fish from the sea. They also do agriculture activities for their subsistence. My research problem focuses on their knowledge of the marine ecosystem and whether their knowledge is used for management purpoes. How are these perceptions, ideas and beliefs shared within the communities? The theories of indigenous knowledge is the theoretical framework for this thesis . The methods used to collect primary data during the two months of fieldwork in the two communities, undertaken in July and August, 2004 were; • structured, intensive interviews with fishermen and –women who live from the sea , • conversations on tape recorder, • workshop and groups discussion to identify the different fishing grounds • observation of activities and daily life in the communities . The presentation of the primary data is mostly of qualitative character. The material presented shows that these indigenous communities do have extensive knowledge of the ecosystem. Despite their knowledge, and in spite of the management systems introduced by the government and other institutions, the marine resources are threatened with overfishing. I also found that outside fishing operations were seen as an intrusion and as a threat to the natural resources. While the communities may have knowledge relevant to the management of the natural resources and the balance of the ecosystem, management authorities pay little attention to such knowledge. This knowledge has been a way of interacting with nature and the environment for improving their lives and bringing harmony with their God

Revisiting the concept of the ‘Neolithic Founder Crops’ in southwest Asia

Zohary and Hopf coined the term ‘founder crops’ to refer to a specific group of eight plants, namely three cereals (einkorn, emmer and barley), four legumes (lentil, pea, bitter vetch and chickpea), and a fibre/oil crop (flax), that founded early Neolithic agriculture in southwest Asia. Zohary considered these taxa as the first cultivated and domesticated species, as well as those that agricultural communities exploited and eventually spread to Europe and other regions. As a result, these eight species soon become the hallmark of the Neolithic plant-based subsistence. However, the ‘founder crops’ concept was defined at the end of the 1980s, when the development of agriculture was considered a rapid event, and therefore, terms like domestication, agriculture and plant cultivation were used interchangeably in the literature. The aim of this paper is thus to revisit concept of the ‘Neolithic founder crops’. Through a critical review of the archaeobotanical evidence gathered in the last 40 years, we evaluate the relative contribution of the ‘eight founder crop’ species to the plant-based subsistence across different periods of the southwest Asian Neolithic. We conclude that multiple groups of ‘founder’ species could be defined depending on whether one seeks to represent the most exploited plants of the Neolithic period, the first cultivated and domesticated crops, or the species that agricultural communities cultivated and eventually spread to Europe. Improved understanding of Neolithic plant-based subsistence in general, and agriculture in particular, will be attained by moving beyond conventional narratives and exploring the evolutionary history of plants other than the original ‘founder’ species.Funding was provided by H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (840228) and Juan de la Cierva –Incorporación- Fellowship (IJC2019-039647-I)

Governmental Policies and the Parochial Schools

The purpose of this study is to make an investigation of certain governmental policies in relation to parochial schools and to ascertain reasons why parents enroll their children in parochial schools instead of public schools

Dietary Variability in the Varna Chalcolithic Cemeteries

This article presents the results of AMS radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and FRUITS dietary modelling to investigate dietary variability among sixty individuals buried at Varna in the mid-fifth millennium BC. The principal pattern was the isotopic clustering of some forty-three per cent of the population, which suggests a ‘Varna core diet’, with the remainder showing a wider variety of isotopic profiles. While there is a slight trend for heightened meat and fish consumption among male individuals compared to female and undetermined individuals, the authors found no clear correlation between dietary variation and the well-attested differentiation in material culture in the graves. Three children had isotopic profile and estimated diets unmatched by any of the adults in the sample. Two scenarios, dubbed ‘regional’ and ‘local’, are presented to explain such dietary variability at Varna

Identifying the chaîne opératoire of club-rush (Bolboschoenus glaucus (Lam.) S.G.Sm) tuber exploitation during the Early Natufian in the Black Desert (northeastern Jordan)

Club-rush (Bolboschoenus spp. (Asch.) Palla) is one of the most common edible wild plant taxa found at Epipaleolithic and Neolithic sites in southwest Asia. At the Early Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 (Black Desert, Jordan) thousands of club-rush rhizome-tuber remains and hundreds of fragments of prepared meals were found. The evidence indicated that the underground storage organs of this plant were recurrently used as a source of food 14,600 years ago. To determine how Early Natufian communities gathered, processed and transformed club-rush tubers into food, we designed an interdisciplinary study that combined experimental archaeology, archaeobotany, and ground and chipped stone tool analyses. We conducted more than 50 specific experiments over three years, and based on the experimental materials produced we inferred that 1) the best season for club-rush rhizome-tuber collection in the region was spring-summer time; 2) that the primary method to harvest the plant would have been uprooting; and 3) that the most efficient approaches to obtain perfectly peeled and clean rhizome-tubers could have entailed drying, roasting and gentle grinding of the tubers. Overall, our work provides important information to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire for club-rush tuber exploitation in the past. The experimental data and modern reference datasets allow us to interpret the archaeological material found at Shubayqa 1, and start identifying some of the activities that Natufian communities in the Black Desert undertook in relation to the exploitation of this particular source of food.Funding to carry out the experiments described in this paper was provided by the H.P. Mindefondet for Dansk Palæstinaforskning, Ingeniør Svend G. Fiedler og Hustrus legat til fremme af botanisk og arkæologisk forskning, the Danish Institute in Damascus, and the “Changing Foodways Project” granted by the Danish council for Independent Research (grant nos. DFF-4001-00068, DFF-801-00133B) to Dr. T. Richter, University of Copenhagen. Permission to conduct excavations at Shubayqa 1 was granted to Dr. T. Richter under license agreement with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. Data analyses, interpretation and writing were carried out under A. Arranz-Otaegui’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (“FOUNDERS”, MSCAIF grant no. 840228) and Juan de la Cierva Incorporación grant (IJC2019-039647-I). Ingeniør Svend G. Fiedler og Hustrus legat til fremme af botanisk og arkæologisk forskning and the Danish Institute in Damascus provided additional funding for ground stone analysis conducted by P. N. Pedersen. Note that the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We also want to thank Department of Antiquities of Jordan, the Qasr Burqu’ staff, and several members of the Shubayqa Archaeological Project, including T. Richter, A. Shakaiteer, A. Ruter, L. Yeomans, and M. Bangsborg Thuessen among many others, for helping us in the various stages of the work over these years

20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia.

The Fertile Crescent, its hilly flanks and surrounding drylands has been a critical region for studying how climate has influenced societal change, and this review focuses on the region over the last 20,000 years. The complex social, economic, and environmental landscapes in the region today are not new phenomena and understanding their interactions requires a nuanced, multidisciplinary understanding of the past. This review builds on a history of collaboration between the social and natural palaeoscience disciplines. We provide a multidisciplinary, multiscalar perspective on the relevance of past climate, environmental, and archaeological research in assessing present day vulnerabilities and risks for the populations of southwest Asia. We discuss the complexity of palaeoclimatic data interpretation, particularly in relation to hydrology, and provide an overview of key time periods of palaeoclimatic interest. We discuss the critical role that vegetation plays in the human-climate-environment nexus and discuss the implications of the available palaeoclimate and archaeological data, and their interpretation, for palaeonarratives of the region, both climatically and socially. We also provide an overview of how modelling can improve our understanding of past climate impacts and associated change in risk to societies. We conclude by looking to future work, and identify themes of "scale" and "seasonality" as still requiring further focus. We suggest that by appreciating a given locale's place in the regional hydroscape, be it an archaeological site or palaeoenvironmental archive, more robust links to climate can be made where appropriate and interpretations drawn will demand the resolution of factors acting across multiple scales. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water as Imagined and RepresentedScience of Water > Water and Environmental ChangeWater and Life > Nature of Freshwater Ecosystems

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A

Recorded Mental Health Recovery Narratives as a Resource for People Affected by Mental Health Problems: Development of the Narrative Experiences Online (NEON) Intervention.

BACKGROUND: The internet enables sharing of narratives about health concerns on a substantial scale, and some digital health narratives have been integrated into digital health interventions. Narratives describing recovery from health problems are a focus of research, including those presented in recorded (eg, invariant) form. No clinical trial has been conducted on a web-based intervention providing access to a collection of Recorded Recovery Narratives (RRNs). OBJECTIVE: This study presents knowledge produced through the development of the Narrative Experiences Online (NEON) Intervention, a web-based intervention incorporating the algorithmic recommendation of RRNs. METHODS: Knowledge was gathered through knowledge integration (KI) activities. KI1 synthesized previous studies to produce the NEON Impact Model describing how accessing RRNs produces health-related outcomes. KI2 developed curation principles for the NEON Collection of RRNs through consultation with the NEON Lived Experience Advisory Panel and the curation of a preliminary collection. KI3 identified harm minimization strategies for the NEON Intervention through consultation with the NEON International Advisory Board and Lived Experience Advisory Panel. The NEON Intervention was finalized through 2 research studies (RS). In RS1, mental health service users (N=40) rated the immediate impact of randomly presented narratives to validate narrative feedback questions used to inform the recommendation algorithm. In RS2, mental health service users (n=25) were interviewed about their immediate response to a prototype of the NEON Intervention and trial procedures and then were interviewed again after 1 month of use. The usability and acceptability of the prototype and trial procedures were evaluated and refinements were made. RESULTS: KI1 produced the NEON Impact Model, which identifies moderators (recipient and context), mechanisms of connection (reflection, comparison, learning, and empathy), processes (identification of change from narrative structure or content and internalization of observed change), and outcomes (helpful and unhelpful). KI2 identified 22 curation principles, including a mission to build a large, heterogeneous collection to maximize opportunities for connection. KI3 identified seven harm minimization strategies, including content warnings, proactive and reactive blocking of narratives, and providing resources for the self-management of emotional distress. RS1 found variation in the impact of narratives on different participants, indicating that participant-level feedback on individual narratives is needed to inform a recommender system. The order of presentation did not predict narrative feedback. RS2 identified amendments to web-based trial procedures and the NEON Intervention. Participants accessed some narratives multiple times, use reduced over the 4-week period, and narrative feedback was provided for 31.8% (105/330) of narrative accesses. CONCLUSIONS: RRNs can be integrated into web-based interventions. Evaluating the NEON Intervention in a clinical trial is feasible. The mixed methods design for developing the NEON Intervention can guide its extension to other clinical populations, the design of other web-based mental health interventions, and the development of narrative-based interventions in mental health