Wooden material culture and long-term historical processes in Heping Dao (Keelung, Taiwan)

Despite being a perishable material, wood can nonetheless show in its full complexity the materiality of daily life activities, identity construction, economic exploitation, and adaptation in colonial processes. The study of two sets of wood samples in well-defined archaeological colonial contexts from the site of Heping Dao, on the northern coast of Taiwan, has unveiled otherwise unknown aspects of native exchange, adoption of indigenous practices, and differences and similarities between early European colonialism and Japanese imperialism in Asia- Pacific. Despite the constraints of taxonomic identification in subtropical (and tropical) areas, the use of different coniferous wood types has been recorded: Cupressaceae, cf. Chamaecyparis spp., cf. Cryptomeria japonica and cf. Cunninghamia spp. The paper highlights the close relationship between wooden objects and diachronic historical processes and stresses the complexity of their study in colonial contexts, with implications toward the prehistoric period.Initial funding for this research under direction of MCB and ChT came from the Formosa Program 2010 between the National Science Council of Taiwan and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). MCB obtained further funding from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in its program Excavaciones Arqueol´ogicas en el Exterior in 2011, 2012, 2019; the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Acciones Complementarias program (HAR2011-16017-E); ; the University of Konstanz through its Anschubsfinanzierung-EU call, and the EU FP7 Marie Curie Zukunftskolleg Incoming Fellowship Programme, University of Konstanz (grant no. 291784); the Fundaci´on Palarq 2019; the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation 2013–2016. She is currently funded by the program STAR2-Santander Universidades and Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, in the frame of the Program Campus de Excelencia Internacional, call CEI 2015 of the project Cantabria Campus Internacional. ChT was funded by the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica. MMS was funded by a Post-Doc Grant Plan I2C mod. B with the project “MATERIAL-Materiality and Material Culture: Wood and Other Plant-based Materials in Archaeological Contexts” (2017–2019) and by the JIN project “Born to be wild. Crafting wild plants resources during Iron Age in the North of Iberia (B-WILD)” (PID2019-105302RJ-I00). She is currently funded by a Beatriz Galindo program as Junior Distinguished Researcher (BG20/00076) leading the project “WILD-Crafting wild plants resources during Bronze and Iron Age in the North of Iberia”. We thank Prof. Dr Chen Huei Fen (National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan) for her support in the dating of sample LAB-002. Dr Hung Kuang-chi (NTU, Taipei) provided his research on Japanese wood exploitation and references on cypress. Dr Fang Chenchen provided further information and analysis on xiaolang and Yu Yonghe. The authors are grateful to Clíodhna Ní Lion´ain for reviewing the English version of the text and to C´eline Kerfant for providing information about plant uses in Taiwan

Ancient Plasmodium genomes shed light on the history of human malaria

Malaria-causing protozoa of the genus Plasmodium have exerted one of the strongest selective pressures on the human genome, and resistance alleles provide biomolecular footprints that outline the historical reach of these species1. Nevertheless, debate persists over when and how malaria parasites emerged as human pathogens and spread around the globe1,2. To address these questions, we generated high-coverage ancient mitochondrial and nuclear genome-wide data from P. falciparum, P. vivax and P. malariae from 16 countries spanning around 5,500 years of human history. We identified P. vivax and P. falciparum across geographically disparate regions of Eurasia from as early as the fourth and first millennia bce, respectively; for P. vivax, this evidence pre-dates textual references by several millennia3. Genomic analysis supports distinct disease histories for P. falciparum and P. vivax in the Americas: similarities between now-eliminated European and peri-contact South American strains indicate that European colonizers were the source of American P. vivax, whereas the trans-Atlantic slave trade probably introduced P. falciparum into the Americas. Our data underscore the role of cross-cultural contacts in the dissemination of malaria, laying the biomolecular foundation for future palaeo-epidemiological research into the impact of Plasmodium parasites on human history. Finally, our unexpected discovery of P. falciparum in the high-altitude Himalayas provides a rare case study in which individual mobility can be inferred from infection status, adding to our knowledge of cross-cultural connectivity in the region nearly three millennia ago.This project was funded by the National Science Foundation, grants BCS-2141896 and BCS-1528698; the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, grants 851511-MICROSCOPE (to S. Schiffels), 771234-PALEoRIDER (to W.H.) and starting grant 805268-CoDisEASe (to K.I.B.); and the ERC starting grant Waves ERC758967 (supporting K. Nägele and S.C.). We thank the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean for supporting M. Michel, E. Skourtanioti, A.M., R.A.B., L.C.B., G.U.N., N.S., V.V.-M., M. McCormick, P.W.S., C.W. and J.K.; the Kone Foundation for supporting E.K.G. and A.S.; and the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Helsinki for grants to E.K.G. A.S. thanks the Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Academy of Finland, the Life and Health Medical Foundation and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. M.C.B. acknowledges funding from: research project PID2020-116196GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; the Spanish Ministry of Culture; the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation; Fundación Palarq; the EU FP7 Marie Curie Zukunftskolleg Incoming Fellowship Programme, University of Konstanz (grant 291784); STAR2-Santander Universidades and Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports; and CEI 2015 project Cantabria Campus Internacional. M.E. received support from the Czech Academy of Sciences award Praemium Academiae and project RVO 67985912 of the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. This work has been funded within project PID2020-115956GB-I00 ‘Origen y conformación del Bronce Valenciano’, granted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain, and grants from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (MZI187236), Research Nova Scotia (RNS 2023-2565) and The Center for Health Research in Developing Countries. D.K. is the Canada research chair in translational vaccinology and inflammation. R.L.K. acknowledges support from a 2019 University of Otago research grant (Human health and adaptation along Silk Roads, a bioarchaeological investigation of a medieval Uzbek cemetery). P.O. thanks the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Academy of Finland. S. Peltola received support from the Emil Aaltonen Foundation and the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation. D.C.S.-G. thanks the Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2019/061). E.W.K. acknowledges support from the DEEPDEAD project, HERA-UP, CRP (15.055) and the Horizon 2020 programme (grant 649307). M. Spyrou thanks the Elite program for postdocs of the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung. Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society

Dinámicas internas e implicaciones para los estudios austronesios. Aproximación preliminar a la secuencia arqueológica taiwanesa a través del análisis geoespacial de los yacimientos prehistóricos

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Spatial patterning of colonial burials at Heping Dao (Taiwan) viewed through archaeology archaeothanatology, and archaeogenetics

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