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Archaeology
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Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropology, archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field is distinct from the discipline of palaeontology, Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies across the world, Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time. The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about the past, in broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, Archaeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past. Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts, a lack of public interest, the science of archaeology grew out of the older multi-disciplinary study known as antiquarianism. Antiquarians studied history with attention to ancient artifacts and manuscripts. Tentative steps towards the systematization of archaeology as a science took place during the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe, philosophical interest in the remains of Greco-Roman civilization and the rediscovery of classical culture began in the late Middle Age. Antiquarians, including John Leland and William Camden, conducted surveys of the English countryside, one of the first sites to undergo archaeological excavation was Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments in England. John Aubrey was a pioneer archaeologist who recorded numerous megalithic and other monuments in southern England. He was also ahead of his time in the analysis of his findings and he attempted to chart the chronological stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield-shapes. Excavations were also carried out in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum and these excavations began in 1748 in Pompeii, while in Herculaneum they began in 1738. The discovery of entire towns, complete with utensils and even human shapes, however, prior to the development of modern techniques, excavations tended to be haphazard, the importance of concepts such as stratification and context were overlooked. The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington and he undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous recordings of neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, one of the major achievements of 19th century archaeology was the development of stratigraphy. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like William Smith, James Hutton, the application of stratigraphy to archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze Age sites
2.
Chitin
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Chitin n is a long-chain polymer of an N-acetylglucosamine, a derivative of glucose, and is found in many places throughout the natural world. The structure of chitin is comparable to the cellulose, forming crystalline nanofibrils or whiskers. In terms of function, it may be compared to the protein keratin, chitin has proved versatile for several medicinal, industrial and biotechnological purposes. The English word chitin comes from the French word chitine, which first appeared in 1821 and derived from the Greek word χιτών, a similar word, chiton, refers to a marine animal with a protective shell. The structure of chitin was solved by Albert Hofmann in 1929, chitin is a modified polysaccharide that contains nitrogen, it is synthesized from units of N-acetyl-D-glucosamine. Therefore, chitin may be described as cellulose with one group on each monomer replaced with an acetyl amine group. This allows for increased hydrogen bonding between adjacent polymers, giving the chitin-polymer matrix increased strength, in its pure, unmodified form, chitin is translucent, pliable, resilient, and quite tough. Combined with calcium carbonate, as in the shells of crustaceans and molluscs and this composite material is much harder and stiffer than pure chitin, and is tougher and less brittle than pure calcium carbonate. Another difference between pure and composite forms can be seen by comparing the body wall of a caterpillar to the stiff. The elaborate chitin gyroid construction in butterfly wings creates a model of optical devices having potential for innovations in biomimicry, scarab beetles in the genus Cyphochilus also utilize chitin to form extremely thin scales that diffusely reflect white light. These scales are networks of randomly ordered filaments of chitin with diameters on the scale of hundreds of nanometres, the multiple scattering of light is thought to play a role in the unusual whiteness of the scales. In addition, some wasps, such as Protopolybia chartergoides, orally secrete material containing predominantly chitin to reinforce the outer nest envelopes. Chitosan is produced commercially by deacetylation of chitin, chitosan is soluble in water, chitin producing organisms like protozoa, fungi, arthropods, and nematodes are often pathogens in other species. Keratinocytes in skin can also react to chitin or chitin fragments, according to in vitro studies, chitin is sensed by receptors, such as FIBCD1, KLRB1, REG3G, Toll-like receptor 2, CLEC7A, and mannose receptors. Plants also have receptors that can cause a response to chitin, namely chitin elicitor receptor kinase 1, the first chitin receptor was cloned in 2006. When the receptors are activated by chitin, genes related to plant defense are expressed, and jasmonate hormones are activated, commensal fungi that have ways to interact with the host immune response that as of 2016 were not well understood. Some pathogens produce chitin-binding proteins that mask the chitin they shed from these receptors, zymoseptoria tritici is an example of a fungal pathogen that has such blocking proteins, it is a major pest in wheat crops. Chitin was probably present in the exoskeletons of Cambrian arthropods such as trilobites, the oldest preserved chitin dates to the Oligocene, about 25 million years ago, consisting of a scorpion encased in amber
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Archaeological site
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Sites may range from those with few or no remains visible above ground, to buildings and other structures still in use. Beyond this, the definition and geographical extent of a site can vary widely, depending on the period studied and it is almost invariably difficult to delimit a site. It is sometimes taken to indicate a settlement of some sort although the archaeologist must also define the limits of human activity around the settlement, any episode of deposition such as a hoard or burial can form a site as well. Development-led archaeology undertaken as cultural resources management has the disadvantage of having its sites defined by the limits of the intended development, even in this case however, in describing and interpreting the site, the archaeologist will have to look outside the boundaries of the building site. According to Jess Beck in “How Do Archaeologists find sites. ”The areas with a number of artifacts are good targets for future excavation. The most common person to have found artifacts are farmers who are plowing their fields or just cleaning them up often find archaeological artifacts, many people who are out hiking and even pilots find artifacts they usually end up reporting them to archaeologist to do further investigation. When they find sites, they have to first record the area and if they have the money, there are many ways to find sites, one example can be through surveys. Surveys involve walking around analyzing the land looking for artifacts. ”This helps archaeologists in the future. In case there was no time, or money during the finding of the site, archaeologists can come back, archaeologist can also sample randomly within a given area of land as another form of conducting surveys. Surveys are very useful, according to Jess Beck, “it can tell you where people were living at different points in the past. ”Geophysics is a branch of survey becoming more and more popular in archaeology, because it uses different types of instruments to investigate features below the ground surface. It is not as reliable, because although they can see what is under the surface of the ground it does not produce the best picture, Archaeologists have to still dig up the area in order to uncover the truth. There are also two most common types of survey, which is, magnetometer and ground penetrating radar. Magnetometry is the technique of measuring and mapping patterns of magnetism in the soil and it uses an instrument called a magnetometer which is required to measure and map traces of soil magnetism. The ground penetrating radar is a method that uses radar pulses to image the subsurface and it uses electro magnetic radiation in the microwave band of the radio spectrum, and detects the reflected signals from subsurface structures. There are many tools that can be used to find artifacts. This tool is helpful to archaeologists who want to explore in a different area. They can use this tool to see what has already been discovered, with this information available, archaeologists can expand their research and add more to what has already been found. Traditionally, sites are distinguished by the presence of artifacts and features
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Formative stage
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It is the third of five stages defined by Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips in their 1958 book Method and Theory in American Archaeology. There are alternative classification systems, and this ranking would overlap what others classify as the Woodland period cultures, cultures of the Formative Stage are supposed to possess the technologies of pottery, weaving, and developed food production. Social organization is supposed to involve permanent towns and villages, as well as the first ceremonial centers, ideologically, an early priestly class or theocracy is often present or in development. Examples of cultures considered to be Formative include the Adena, Olmec, Old Copper, Oasisamerica, Woodland, sometimes also referred to as the Pre-Classic stage, it followed the Archaic stage and was superseded by the Classic stage
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Processual archaeology
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This idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human society. All they felt could be done was to catalogue, describe, colin Renfrew, a proponent of the new processual archaeology, observed in 1987 that it focuses attention on the underlying historical processes which are at the root of change. Archaeology, he noted has learnt to speak with authority and accuracy about the ecology of past societies, their technology, their economic basis. Now it is beginning to interest itself in the ideology of early communities, their religions, the theoretical frame at the heart of processual archaeology is cultural evolutionism. Processual archaeologists are, in almost all cases, cultural evolutionists and it is from this perspective that they believe they can understand past cultural systems through the remains they left behind. This is because processual archaeologists adhere to Leslie Whites theory that culture can be defined as the means of environmental adaptation for humans. In other words, they study cultural adaptation to environmental rather than the bodily adaptation over generations. This focus on environmental adaptation is based on the cultural ecology, as exosomatic adaptation, culture is determined by environmental constraints. The result of this is that processual archaeologists propose that cultural change happens within a predictable framework, moreover, since that framework is predictable, then science is the key to unlocking how those components interacted with the cultural whole. Thus one should be able to completely reconstruct these cultural processes. Hence came the name processual archaeology and its practitioners were also called new archaeologists. Methodologically, the advocates of the New Archaeology had to come up with ways of analyzing the remains in a more scientific fashion. The problem was no framework for this kind of analysis existed. Different researchers had different approaches to this problem, Lewis Binford felt that ethno-historical information was necessary to facilitate an understanding of archaeological context. Ethno-historical research involves living and studying the life of those who would have used the artifacts - or at least a similar culture, the new methodological approaches of the processual research paradigm include logical positivism, the use of quantitative data, and the hypothetico-deductive model. Systems theory has proved to be a bag for archaeology as a whole. It works well when trying to describe how elements of a culture interact, from some obvious reasoning he proceeded to some radically new conclusions. As a result, he argued, archaeology had suffered a loss of innocence as archaeologists became sceptical of the work of their forebears, processualisms development transformed archaeology, and is sometimes called the New Archaeology
6.
Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed
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Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed often abbreviated as Cultureel Erfgoed, is a Dutch heritage organisation working for the protection and conservation of National Heritage Sites. It is located in Amersfoort, province of Utrecht, Cultureel Erfgoed is a department of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. They also subsidize grants in the fields of both movable and immovable cultural heritage, registered city or village views considered to be important to the countrys heritage are also protected by the Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed. In 1875 the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs founded the department Kunsten en Wetenschap, in 1947 this organisation was renamed to the Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg. The archeological and cultural property departments merged in 2006 and became the Rijksdienst voor Archeologie, in 2009 this organisation was renamed to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed it moved into a new building in Amersfoort. In April/May 2011 the RCE released its image collection of 550,000 images on beeldbank. cultureelerfgoed. nl, in September 2012 the first uploads to Wikimedia Commons were made. In December 2012 a bot was started to upload images
7.
Taphonomy
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Taphonomy is the study of decaying organisms over time and how they may become fossilized. e. Taphonomists study such phenomena as biostratinomy, decomposition, diagenesis, one motivation behind taphonomy is to better understand biases present in the fossil record. During the late century, taphonomic data began to be applied to other paleontological subfields such as paleobiology, paleoceanography, ichnology. Archaeologists study taphonomic processes in order to determine how plant and animal remains accumulate and this is critical to determining whether these remains are associated with human activity. In addition, taphonomic processes may alter biological remains after they are deposited at a site, some remains survive better than others over time, and can therefore bias an excavated collection. Forensic taphonomy is concerned with the study of the decomposition of human remains, Experimental taphonomy testing usually consists of exposing the remains of organisms to various altering processes, and then examining the effects of the exposure. Taphonomy has undergone an explosion of interest since the 1980s, with focusing on certain areas. Microbial, biogeochemical, and larger-scale controls on the preservation of different tissue types, in particular, covered within this field is the dominance of biological versus physical agents in the destruction of remains from all major taxonomic groups. Processes that concentrate biological remains, especially the degree to which different types of assemblages reflect the species composition, the spatio-temporal resolution and ecological fidelity of species assemblages, particularly the relatively minor role of out-of-habitat transport contrasted with the major effects of time-averaging. The Mars Science Laboratory mission objectives evolved from assessment on ancient Mars habitability to developing predictive models on taphonomy. It has been suggested that biominerals could be important indicators of extraterrestrial life, furthermore, organic components that are often associated with biominerals are believed to play crucial roles in both pre-biotic and biotic reactions. The search for evidence of habitability, taphonomy, and organic carbon on the planet Mars is now a primary NASA objective, because of the very select processes that cause preservation, not all organisms have the same chance of being preserved. Any factor that affects the likelihood that an organism is preserved as a fossil is a source of bias. Some of the most common sources of bias are listed below and this perhaps represents the biggest source of bias in the fossil record. First and foremost, organisms that contain hard parts have a far greater chance of being represented in the record than organisms consisting of soft tissue only. As a result, animals with bones or shells are overrepresented in the fossil record, many animals that moult, on the other hand, are overrepresented, as one animal may leave multiple fossils due to its discarded body parts. Among plants, wind-pollinated species produce so much more pollen than animal-pollinated species, most fossils form in conditions where material is deposited to the bottom of water bodies. In continental environments, fossilization is especially likely in small lakes that fill in with organic and inorganic material
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Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation
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Anthrozoology
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Anthrozoology is the subset of ethnobiology that deals with interactions between humans and other animals. It is a field that overlaps with other disciplines including anthropology, ethnology, medicine, psychology, veterinary medicine. A major focus of research is the quantifying of the positive effects of human-animal relationships on either party. It includes scholars from fields such as anthropology, sociology, biology, history, the interaction and enhancement within captive animal interactions. In the UK, the University of Exeter runs an MA in Anthrozoology which explores human-animal interactions from anthropological perspectives, there are now three primary lists for HAS scholars and students—H-Animal, the Human-Animal Studies listserv, and NILAS, as well as the Critical Animal Studies list. There are now over a dozen journals covering HAS issues, many of them founded in the last decade, and hundreds of HAS books, most of them published in the last decade. Brill, Berg, Johns Hopkins, Purdue, Columbia, Reaktion, Palgrave-McMillan, University of Minnesota, University of Illinois, beginning in 2011, ASI has partnered with Wesleyan Animal Studies, who will be hosting the fellowship in conjunction with ASI. There are also a handful of HAS conferences per year, including organized by ISAZ and NILAS. Finally, there are more HAS courses being taught now than ever before, the ASI website lists over 300 courses in twenty-nine disciplines at over 200 colleges and universities, not including over 100 law school courses. Animals and Society Institute Anthrozoology Research Group H-Animal Human-Animal Studies listserve Humanimalia, a journal of human-animal interface studies NILAS
