The excavation of Non Ban Jak, Northeast Thailand - A report on the first three seasons

Non Ban Jak is a large, moated site located in the upper Mun Valley, Northeast Thailand. Excavations over three seasons in 2011-4 have revealed a sequence of occupation that covers the final stage of the local Iron Age. The site is enclosed by two broad moats and banks, and comprises an eastern and a western mound separated by a lower intervening area. The first season opened an 8 by 8 m square on the eastern mound, while the second and third seasons uncovered part of the low terrain rising into the western mound, encompassing an area of 25 by 10 m. The former revealed a sequence of industrial, residential and mortuary activity that involved the construction of houses, kiln firing of ceramic vessels and the interment of the dead within residences. The latter involved four phases of a late Iron Age cemetery, which again incorporated house floors and wall foundations, as well as further evidence for ceramic manufacture. The excavation sheds light on a late Iron Age town occupied at the threshold of state formation

A preliminary investigation of image indexing: the influence of domain knowledge, indexer experience and image characteristics

This study investigates the application of conceptual terms to images by individuals with various educational and occupational backgrounds. While the inherent complexities of applying terms to images are broadly acknowledged, few studies have addressed the issue of how subject expertise or practical image indexing experience may impact the work. This study begins work in this direction by examining the terms applied to a series of images by individuals with different levels of domain knowledge and practical indexing experience. In addition to the indexers’ varying backgrounds, the study examined how the images’ modes of representation and interpretation influenced the application of terms

The Current State of Linguistic Research on the Relatedness of the Language Families of East and Southeast Asia

The current state of knowledge on the relatedness of the major language families of East and Southeast Asia is summarized following a major conference on this topic in Hawai‘i in 1993. It is concluded that the Austric hypothesis linking the Austronesian and Austroasiatic language families is based on good evidence and the “homeland” of Austric was perhaps in the middle Yangzi Valley. On the other hand, the hypotheses suggesting common roots between Austro–Thai and Austronesian, and between Japanese and Austronesian, did not find much support and the numerous similarities can best be explained as the result of language contact. The relationship between Chinese and Austronesian was not resolved and merits more study

Exploring Characteristics of Social Classification

Three empirical studies on characteristics of social classification are reported in this paper. The first study compared social tags with controlled vocabularies and title-based automatic indexing and found little overlaps among the three indexing methods. The second study investigated how well tags could be categorized to improve effectiveness of searching and browsing. The third study explored factors and radios that had the most significant impact on tag convergence. Finding of the three studies will help to identify characteristics of those tagging terms that are content-rich and that can be used to increase effectiveness of tagging, searching and browsing

The Acheulian Industry of rock shelter IIIF-23 at Bhimbetka, Central India - a preliminary study.

In the last three and a half decades systematic exploration of many regions in India for palaeolithic remains has been carried out by workers from several institutions, the majority of them from the Deccan College, Poona, working under the inspiration and guidance of Professor H.D. Sankalia. Acheulian industries have been found over almost all of the country except the Indo-Gangetic plains and the western coast. As a result of these studies the geographic distribution of Acheulian industries is now fairly satisfactorily known

Biological anthropology in the Indo-Pacific Region: New approaches to age-old questions

Biological anthropological research, the study of both modern and past humans, is a burgeoning field in the Indo-Pacific region. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the unique environments of the Indo-Pacific have resulted in an archaeological record that does not necessarily align with those in the northern hemisphere. New, regionally-specific archaeological models are being developed, and biological anthropological research has an important role to play in establishing past human experience within these models. In the Indo-Pacific, research using ancient and modern human tissues is adding insight into global processes of prehistoric settlement and migrations, subsistence change and human biosocial adaptation. This review synthesises current themes in biological anthropology in this region. It highlights the diverse methods and approaches used by biological anthropologists to address globally-relevant archaeological questions. In recent decades a collaborative approach between archaeologists, biological anthropologists and local communities has become the norm in the region. The many positive outcomes of this multi-disciplinary approach are highlighted here through the use of regionally-specific case studies. This review ultimately aims to stimulate further collaborations between archaeologists, biological anthropologists and the communities in the region, and demonstrate how the evidence from Indo-Pacific research may be relevant to global archaeological models

Boolean Query Reformulation with the Query Tree Classifier

One of the difficulties in using the current Boolean-based information retrieval systems is that it is hard for a user, especially a novice, to formulate an effective Boolean query. Query reformulation can be even more difficult and complex than formulation since the user can have difficulty in incorporating the new information gained from the previous search into his/her next query. In this research, query reformulation is viewed as a classification problem (i.e., classifying documents as either relevant or nonrelevant), and a new reformulation algorithm is proposed which builds a treestructured classifier (named the query tree) at each reformulation from a set of feedback documents retrieved from the previous search. The query tree can be easily transformed into a Boolean query. The query tree and two of the most important current query reformulation algorithms were compared on benchmark test sets (CACM. CISI, and MedJars). The query tree showed significant improvements over the current algorithms in most experiments. We attribute this improved performance to the ability of the query tree algorithm to select good search terms and to represent the relationships among search terms into a tree structure