Search

The South Caucasus occupies the divide between ancient Mesopotamia and prehistoric Europe, and was thus crucial in the development of Old World societies. Chronologies for the region, however, have lacked the definition achieved in surrounding areas. Concentrating on the Tsaghkahovit Plain of north-western Armenia, Project ArAGATS s multi-site radiocarbon dataset has now produced Bayesian modelling, which provides tight chronometric support for tracing the transmission of technology, population movement and social developments that shaped the Eurasian Bronze and Iron Ages.Keywords: South Caucasus, Armenia, Bronze Age, Iron Age, chronology, radiocarbon, IntroductionThe Caucasus is one of Eurasia's major archaeological 'fault lines' (Kavtaradze 2004: 539). It is a region where the dynamics of prehistoric Europe and the ancient Near East pressed gainst [...]

Scott C. Smith. Landscape and politics in the ancient Andes: biographies of place at Khonko Wankane. 2016. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. One of the more consequential intellectual transformations [...]

The Kura-Araxes (KA) cultural phenomenon (dated to the Early Bronze Age, c. 3500/3350-2500 BCE) is primarily characterised by the emergence of a homogeneous pottery style and a uniform 'material culture package' in settlements across the South Caucasus, as well as territories extending to the Ancient Near East and the Levant. It has been argued that KA societies practised pastoralism, despite a lack of direct examination of dietary and culinary practices in this region. Here, we report the first analyses of absorbed lipid residues from KA pottery to both determine the organic products produced and consumed and to reconstruct subsistence practices. Our results provide compelling evidence for a diversified diet across KA settlements in Armenia, comprising a mixed economy of meat and plant processing, aquatic fats and dairying. The preservation of diagnostic plant lipid biomarkers, notably long-chain fatty acids (C20 to C28) and n-alkanes (C23 to C33) has enabled the identification of the earliest processing of plants in pottery of the region. These findings suggest that KA settlements were agropastoral exploiting local resources. Results demonstrate the significance of applying biomolecular methods for examining dietary inferences in the South Caucasus region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeology has recently been described as a means of "bearing witness" through the recuperation of pasts forgotten and dismissed. But archaeology is also a tool for unseeing, creating voids in the historical record easily filled by state-sponsored polemics. In few places is this as clear as the Armenian Highland of eastern Turkey. The year 2020 marked the 105th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, a program of mass murder enacted by the collapsing Ottoman Empire that resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million people and the dislocation of almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. The genocide continues to define regional politics as a century of denial by the Turkish government strains international relations. Even as an increasingly vocal cadre of historians has grappled with the legacies of collective violence in the region, foreign archaeologists working in Turkey have increasingly avoided the material remains of the Armenian past and the evidence of its erasure, etching genocide denial into the authoritative discourse of the discipline. The disappearance of Armenians from international archaeological accounts of the region effectively co-opts the discipline as a functionary of the Turkish government's historical revisionism. This study combines close readings of works from international archaeology's archive with interviews with foreign archaeologists to better understand the discipline's understudied practices of unseeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E.E. KUZMINA, edited by VICTOR H. MAIR. The prehistory of the Silk Road. xii+248 pages, 72 figures, tables. 2008. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Press; 978-0-8122-4041-2 $65 & 42.50 £. [...]

This article provides a summary of the Dalrymple Lectures delivered November 18–21, 2019. It examines the troubled, and troubling, idea of 'civilization', charting a path toward rehabilitation not as a descriptive category but as an analytic concept. Returning to the term's 18th century origins, civilization here describes neither a state of being nor a set of personal qualities but an apparatus, a machine that generates recognition by setting the material terms for who is like and who is Other. It does so through the generation of at least three forms of value – metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical. By retheorizing civilization as a means instead of an ends, as an apparatus that generates the values at the heart of large-scale publics instead of an exclusionary monumental aesthetic, new analytic terrain is opened for a discredited term. The operation of civilization machines is interrogated through studies situated in the South Caucasus and Armenian Highland that extend from the Early Bronze Age to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.01.012 Byline: William D. Brown, Adam T. Smith, Brian Moskalik, Josh Gabriel Abstract: The function of aggressive signals, including both their information content and the circumstances under which they cause resolution or escalation of conflict, continues to be controversial. We studied the information content of aggressive songs in the house cricket, Acheta domesticus, to test their ability to inform opponents about fighting ability and motivation. We show that songs produced by individual males are highly repeatable and contain information about male resource holding potential, the ability of a male to win an aggressive contest. Temporal components of aggressive song were correlated with male body size, and size affected both the intensity and outcome of fights. In contrast, we found no components of song that signal motivation to fight. Although males with restricted access to mates were significantly more aggressive and won fights more often, their songs did not reflect the asymmetry in motivation to fight. We discuss possible reasons for the absence of signals of motivation during animal contests. Author Affiliation: Department of Biology, State University of New York at Fredonia, U.S.A. Article History: Received 4 May 2005; Revised 15 July 2005; Accepted 19 January 2006 Article Note: (miscellaneous) MS. number: A10149R

Urartian representations of the built environment are discussed in relation to the aesthetic of political legitimacy. Topics include the Urartian Empire, aesthetics and legitimacy, epigraphic representations, pictorial representations, and transcendent aesthetics of blessing and conquest.

Michael Foucault's genealogies, which depend on the Nietzschean account of the violent origin of human culture, present a debatable description of the innate struggle in the emergence of human domination. Dawkin's parallel fiction gives priority to cultural transmission rather than domination. This new fiction removes the possibility of conflict, struggle and agonism, which were considered important in defining history.

Purpose: Develop an objective tool to align the needs of inpatient services at a Comprehensive Cancer Center with the available resources of hematology/oncology clinical specialist pharmacists. Summary: The shift of the pharmacy profession from product-centered to patient-centered care has expanded the scope of practice of the clinical pharmacist and their ability to specialize in a therapeutic area. However, these specialized resources are limited. The pharmacy department at The James Comprehensive Cancer Center at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center developed a tool to objectively determine which inpatient services would receive the most benefit from having a hematology/oncology clinical specialist pharmacist on their healthcare team. A Steering Committee was created to determine the necessary metrics needed across the 29 inpatient services at The James, and data was collected from the electronic medical record. The metrics evaluated were: patient acuity, inpatient intravenous anticancer administrations, inpatient oral anticancer administrations, presence of an outpatient anticancer treatment plan for patients admitted for an inpatient stay, and the use of high-risk hematology/oncology therapies. Conclusion: A novel and data-driven tool was created to allocate hematology/oncology clinical specialist pharmacists across a Comprehensive Cancer Center. Annual use of this objective tool can aid institutions in appropriate distribution of limited hematology/oncology specialized pharmacy resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems almost preordained that James Scott, a scholar who moves with profound agility between the worlds of anthropology and political science, should eventually work his way onto the intellectual terrain of the barbarian. Barbarians play a foundational role in the formation of both disciplines, populating both anthropology's 'savage slot' (Trouillot 2003) and political science's prelapsarian 'state of nature' (Palmeri 2016). In Scott's most recent book, Against the Grain , the barbarians who helped to shape the world's earliest states play a variety of consequential roles. They are at once the forces of resistance to centralizing power, the refugees seeking respite from sovereignty's infringements and the brigands of the borderlands who provide the slave labour and mercenaries that prop up the fragile state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1250 B.C.E.) on the Tsaghkahovit Plain in central Armenia witnessed the establishment of a series of hilltop fortresses following a 900-year hiatus in regional occupation. These new settlements testify to the emergence of a South Caucasian political tradition founded on the regularization of radical inequality, centralizing practices of economic redistribution, and new institutions of rule. However, the discovery of three shrines and associated assemblages at Gegharot, one of the primary fortress sites, also suggests that divinatory practices were critical to the emergent principles of regional sovereignty. In this article, we present the evidence for esoteric rituals-particularly osteomancy, lithomancy, and aleuromancy-within the shrines at Gegharot, situating them within the available comparanda from the Caucasus and adjacent Near East. We further examine how divination-a technique for mitigating risks posed by unsettled presents and uncertain futures- provided a key source of power vital to sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Descriptions of defensive behaviors used by Neotropical harvestmen are rarely based upon direct observations of encounters between individuals and syntopic predators. In this study, we investigated the defensive responses exhibited by five harvestman species from Costa Rica in interactions with ctenid spiders ( Cupiennius spp.), whip spiders ( Phrynus pseudoparvulus), onychophorans ( Epiperipatus sp.), and centipedes ( Scolopendra sp.). We also observed interactions between harvestmen and a non-predatory invertebrate, the millipede Nyssodesmus python. In 64 encounters, ctenid spiders consumed 11 harvestmen, including eight Prionostemma sp., two Cynorta marginalis, and one Eupoecilaema magnum. The most frequent defensive behavior exhibited by harvestmen was fleeing. Other behaviors included aggression (striking with leg II), bobbing, leg autotomy, lying flat, and thanatosis. Prionostemma exhibited the most variable responses, especially in the presence of ctenid spiders. In addition to the lab-based experiment, we report some field observations of arthropod predation upon harvestmen in Costa Rica. Predators include two species of ctenid spiders ( Cupiennius spp.), scorpion ( Centruroides limbatus), solifuge ( Ammotrecha stolli), mantid ( Liturgusa annulipes) and ants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects’, posits Kathleen Stewart in her challenging experimental ethnography Ordinary affects (2007). Affects – public feelings that put intimate sentiments in broad circulation – are, for Stewart, the sinews of social life, an opaque circuit that simultaneously grounds experience in places and things and publicizes the personal. As such, affects are quintessentially archaeological in that they are both artefactual, embedded in what Bill Brown (2003) calls the ‘object matter’ of human relationships, and rooted in deep histories of material production and transformation. It is not surprising, then, that the intertwined problems of emotion and affect have re-emerged as potentially productive loci of research within archaeology itself. Indeed, as the discipline continues to extend its understanding of the social instrumentality of objects, landscapes and representations, it must, of necessity, come to terms with the affective efficacy of things, with the causes and consequences of our captivation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The uncertain volatility approach to financial derivatives is extended to American options (which allow early exercise before expiry). The requirement to model at the portfolio level made necessary by the non-linearity of the approach is found to lead to a recursive structure to the exercise possibilities across options. Other novel features include: the optimality sometimes of partial exercise; an interesting resolution to the issues surrounding short options whose exercise is controlled by a buyer counterparty; and the occurrence of a simple game structure for portfolios containing both long and short options. It is demonstrated that the exercise strategies resulting can significantly alter measured uncertain volatility risk. Contrary to the set of attributes for sensible risk measures put forward by Artzner, Delbaen, Eber and Heath, this risk need not be homogenous in portfolio sizeÐ forming a convincing argument for weakening this particular requirement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents Michel Foucault's genealogies and the creation of a parallel fiction of emergence to replace the Nietzschean accounts of violence with Richard Dawkin's account of the centrality of cultural transmission. Three technologies of Foucault's genealogies; How Foucault's genealogies are incomplete in light of an emergence based in cultural transmission; How Nietzsche describes the drama of entstehung or emergence in the book, `On the Genealogy of Morals.'

During four field seasons spanning 2014 through 2017, Project ArAGATS (Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies) expanded our long-term research on the origins and development of complex political systems in the South Caucasus with a comprehensive study of the upper Kasakh River valley in north-central Armenia. The Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey employed both systematic transect survey of 43 km2 and extensive satellite- and drone-based reconnaissance to accommodate the complex topography of the Lesser Caucasus and the impacts of Soviet-era land amelioration. Though our survey was animated by questions related to the chronology and distribution of Bronze and Iron Age fortifications and cemeteries, we also recorded Paleolithic sites stretching back to the earliest human settlement of the Caucasus, Early Bronze Age surface finds, and historic landscape modifications. Concurrent to the survey, members of the ArAGATS team carried out test excavations at select settlement sites and associated burials, and a series of wetland core extractions, with the goals of affirming site occupation sequences and setting them within their environmental context. This report provides an overview of the results of these multidisciplinary activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]