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The article offers information on a seminar on the archaeology and ethnohistory of Baja California, Mexico, that was presented at the Society for California Archaeology's annual 2008 meeting in Burbank, California. The seminar was chaired by Julia Bendimez Patterson, Director of Baja California's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). It highlights the symposium papers, other related papers, and relevant topics in peninsular archaeological research.

Archaeological investigations in the rural settlements of the Po Valley in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy, particularly in the Monferrato area, have revealed a wide range of structures dating from the Roman to the Early Medieval periods. This rural architecture is of great heritage value, as it provides insights into the historical development of Piedmont. This paper focuses on the analysis of lime, one of the oldest and most important building materials, used as binder of bedding mortars of three archaeological rural buildings sites dating from the Early Roman imperial Period to the Late Antique phases of medieval fortified centers of Piedmont region. A low-cost and efficient diagnostic geochemical-based method based on the characterization of two oxides present in the lime of mortars and in carbonate rocks of the area (MgO and CaO) is presented. Exploited limestone quarries exploited often have a fairly constant chemical composition and therefore a typical geological Mg/Ca ratio. The variation in this ratio is useful for the relative dating of building walls and for identifying of geological formations and quarries possibly used during the different architectural phases. This paper focuses on this second objective: the study of potential supply areas across the ages related to the ancient communication routes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper aims to provide a theoretical guide for preserving ancient books in China. Design/methodology/approach - The paper reviews the history of the damage and preservation of ancient books in China, and analyzes the value attributes of ancient books: archaeological value, historical value and artistic value. Findings - The paper proposes a preservation framework for Chinese ancient books. This framework is composed of three layers. The foundation layer is to preserve the physical entity of ancient books so that the archaeological values are preserved. The middle layer is to preserve the intellectual content of ancient books so that the values for historical research are preserved. The top layer is mainly about preserving the productions process of the artistic format of ancient books, so that not only the static artistic formats are preserved, the techniques and procedures to produce the artistic format are preserved as well. Originality/value - The paper presents a framework that connects the value attributes of ancient books and the strategies to preserve those values, systematizes them and presents them as a whole. The framework can be used to justify government policies and help identify pitfalls in the preservation strategies for ancient books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a waste landscape in the Marston Vale, Bedfordshire, UK, consisting of a range of landfill hills. The hills originated as vast holes in the ground created by clay extraction, which presented suitable receptacles for the dumping of landfill waste. Although of much larger scale than evidence normally dealt with by archaeologists, these are treated here as archaeological features within an archaeological landscape. While other papers deal with important aspects of political ecology of waste landscapes, the present focus is on the upscaling of methods that is necessary to cope with such mega-scale contemporary waste landscapes, in order to make them more susceptible to archaeological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Excavations in Tepe Barveh were conducted with the aim to shed further light on the period of painted Bronze Age wares and to refine the existing chronology for the Lesser Zab Basin in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. Thanks to its location in the upper valley of the Lesser Zab, the Barveh region served as a natural pathway for interaction between the Zagros foothills zones with the Rania and Peshdar Plain in Sulaimaniyah province in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the southern basin of Lake Urmia. By its overlapping Bronze Age sequence, the site offers a strong potential to fill the existing gap of information for the Early Bronze Age occupation in northwestern Iran. A foremost purpose of this paper is to situate Barveh within northwestern Iran, and to explore intra- and inter-regional interactions. The stratified occurrence of Painted Orange Ware (POW) is helpful to establish a sequence for the region and to fill the existing lacuna. EBA sites in northwestern Iran beyond the Kura Araxes zone remain understudied, and few sites offer deposits of considerable depth. The Early Bronze Age is generally associated with the burnished black pottery, while the orange pottery, a coeval and equally important cultural hallmark, has attracted less attention and remains a little known tradition. Hence, in light of the material culture excavated at Barveh, this paper seeks to gain an insight into the ways in which Tepe Barveh interacted with other regions dominated by the orange pottery culture. The ca. 8-meter deep EBA deposit at Barveh built up over c. 300 years and represents this period of POW in an uninterrupted sequence, attesting to cultural continuity over an extended period of time. The culture shows parallels with EBA sites in the southern Urmia Lake Basin and in the Rania and Peshdar plains in Iraqi Kurdistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of a collection of articles on glass in African archaeology. Topics include the proposal of a symposium on the subject, the shift from an Egypt-centered discussion to a broader examination of glass in Africa, and the use of elemental analysis in studying glass. The collection aims to provide new insights and diverse perspectives on archaeological glass in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Abstract: In the Comment by Dr. I. Rabin from Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung in Berlin are stated many conjectures and apparent guesses contradicting several of our interpretations. Most of Rabin's ‘guesses’ and interpretations are unwarranted. Below we rebut some of the misinterpretations under separate headings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]