bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What is the SJT?
Authors: Metcalfe David , Dev Harveer
Published: November 2020

SJTs are commonly used by organizations for personnel selection. They aim to provide realistic, but hypothetical, scenarios and possible answers which are either selected or ranked by the candidate. One such test will contribute half, or significantly more than half, the score used by applicants to the UK Foundation Programme. The test will involve a single paper over two hours and twenty minutes in which candidates will answer 70 questions. This equates to approximately two minutes per question. Your response to 60 questions will be included in your final score, while ten questions embedded throughout the test will be pilot questions which are designed to be validated but not counted in your final score. You will not be able to differentiate pilot from genuine test questions and should answer every question as if it ‘counts’. In one SJT pilot, 96% of candidates finished the test within two hours, which provides some indication about the time pressure. It is important to answer all questions and not simply ‘guess’ those left at the end. Although the SJT is not negatively marked, random guesses are not allocated points. The scoring software will identify guesses by looking for unusual or sporadic answer patterns. The SJT will be held locally by individual medical schools under invigilated conditions. Therefore, your medical school should be in touch about specific local arrangements. Each SJT paper will include a selection of questions, each mapped to a specific professional attribute. Questions should be evenly distributed between attributes and between scenario type, i.e. ‘patient’, ‘colleague’, or ‘personal’. The SJT will include two types of question: ● multiple choice questions (approximately one- third) ● ranking questions (approximately two- thirds). These begin with a scenario and provide eight possible answers. Three of these are correct and should be selected. The remaining five are incorrect. The example in Box 2.1 provides an illustrative medical school scenario. For questions based around Foundation Programme scenarios, over 100 examples are provided for practice from onwards.
Working Effectively as Part of a Team
Authors: Metcalfe David , Dev Harveer
Published: November 2020

Teamworking is an inevitable part of working within a complex multidisciplinary environment. Thankfully, most interactions with other members of the healthcare team will be positive and constructive. Unfortunately, such happy circumstances do not make for particularly interesting SJT scenarios. The following section is therefore full of colleagues that are angry, rude, dishonest, unprofessional, and even intoxicated. In Raising and Acting on Concerns About Patient Safety (2012), the General Medical Council (GMC) states that ‘all doctors have a duty to raise concerns where they believe that patient safety or care is being compromised by the practice of colleagues or the systems, policies and procedures in the organizations in which they work’. The GMC proposes taking the following steps in sequence when you develop serious concerns about a colleague: ● Raise the concern with ‘your manager or an appropriate officer of the organisation . . . such as the consultant in charge of the team, the clinical or medical director’. Alternatively, a foundation doctor may raise their concern with an appropriate person responsible for training such as their Foundation Programme Director. ● Raise the concern with a regulator (such as the GMC), professional body (such as the British Medical Association), or charity (such as Public Concern at Work). This step should be taken if you have exhausted options for raising the concern internally and there is an ‘immediate serious risk to patients, and a regulator or other external body has responsibility to act or intervene’. ● Raise the concern publicly. This step should be taken when you have exhausted options for raising the concern internally and have ‘good reason to believe that patients are still at risk of harm’. Your usual duty is to avoid breaching patient confidentiality. This is a highly unusual and significant step to take and is unlikely to be appropriate without first having taken advice from an appropriate organization such as the GMC, BMA, or Public Concern at Work. The questions within this section highlight your ability and willingness to work with team members. You will need to work collaboratively and respectfully within a multi- disciplinary team, as well as provide advice and support to colleagues.
Oncology and Palliative Care
Authors: Furmedge Dan
Published: November 2020

An ageing population, better prevention for ischaemic heart disease, and significant advances in treatment mean that cancer is becoming increasingly common, with patients living longer (sometimes decades) with it. This means living with the effects of cancer itself, as well as with the effects of the increasingly complex treatments used to treat it. It is important not only for doctors to be familiar with the presenting symp­toms and signs of cancer, so it can be investigated and diagnosed, but also with the emergencies associated with it and the common side ef­fects and complications related to the ever growing range of treatment options. The importance of palliative and end- of- life care cannot be underesti­mated, and all doctors will come into contact with patients approaching the end of their lives. Increasing evidence suggests that early involvement of palliative care in patients with many terminal and chronic illnesses im­proves the quality of life and paradoxically can even improve the length of life. Importantly, palliative care is no longer associated just with cancer. It can help in almost any chronic illness, from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart failure to frailty and dementia. All too often, particularly in hospitals, many patients receive active and aggressive treatments right up until their death when it has been evident they are approaching death for many days or weeks. All doctors should have a working understanding of the principles of palliative care, as well as how to recognize terminal illness and how to manage symptoms at the end of life.
Radiology
Authors: Sinharay Ricky
Published: November 2020

You have teased out the history, elicited the signs, and generated a list of differential diagnoses— now to confirm your suspicions, by selecting an appropriate radiological investigation. From the ubiquitous chest X-ray for diagnosing community- acquired pneumonia or congestive cardiac failure to an urgent computed tomography (CT) scan of the brain to confirm a suspected subarachnoid haemorrhage, radiological investiga­tions are an essential (if sometimes overused) resource for diagnosing disease. When working in the acute hospital setting, some knowledge and experience in interpreting X- rays and some types of CT imaging are important in order to ensure your patient is managed correctly and quickly. Going back to basic principles and using your hard- learnt anatomy will set you in good stead when looking at both X- rays and cross- sectional imaging. This chapter has been written to expose you to clinical situations where imaging is required to make a diagnosis or to make a decision on patient management. As well as this, I hope the questions in this chapter will help you think about what the correct modality of imaging to request would be to investigate pathology in the various body systems. For instance, an ultrasound of the liver may be more useful to assess liver cirrhosis than a CT scan (as well as preventing exposures to high- dose radiation). And again, in practice, if there is any doubt about the result of a radiological investigation, or indeed which type of investigation to request, your local radiologist would be more than happy to help.
Emergencies
Authors: Coryndon Tom , Parnell Chris
Published: November 2020

All doctors have to deal with emergencies— this can be a daunting pro­spect, particularly when first on the scene. The fear may be that one wrong decision could be crucial and that the recovery of the patient de­pends entirely on what is done at this moment. The truth is that doctors are rarely— if ever— alone for long and that senior help is, for the most part, just a few seconds away. It should also serve as some consolation that the approach to any clinical emergency should be much the same and depends heavily on the basic and advanced life support algorithms. This chapter is written in the spirit that any clinical encounter should be approached as if it is an emergency— this means resorting to the ABCDE (airway, breathing, circulation, disability, exposure) approach. Clearly, if the patient to whom we are called is sitting up in bed talking and drinking a cup of tea, then expectations can be tailored accordingly. As it is so hard to categorize what constitutes a clinical emergency, it is better that we go into every encounter expecting one. It is easier to taper down one’s level of urgency than it is to suddenly escalate treatment in the light of sudden surprising findings. In this way, the idiosyncratic situations— such as the call regarding the post- op thyroid patient— should be considered just as urgent as the seemingly clear car­diac arrest calls. Having performed the systematic ABCDE assessment of each situ­ation, the next stage is to develop the knowledge and confidence to go on and diagnose which specific emergency is unfolding and to apply appro­priate management plans. Questions in this chapter aim to reinforce the ability to perform this assessment, as well as outlining some of the spe­cific therapies that are required to manage individual emergencies.
Alternative Scenarios in the Context of Sustainable Development
Authors: Samir KC , Lutz Wolfgang
Published: November 2020

The number of people inhabiting the earth has fluctuated significantly over the course of human history, in response to both natural changes in the environment and stresses to local habitats created by the populations themselves. From the first appearance of Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago in Africa until about 35,000 years ago, the world’s human population was well under one million, a number that meant the threat of extinction was always looming (Biraben, 2002). Only after the Neolithic Revolution, which introduced agriculture, did the world population increase significantly, surpassing 100 million about 7,000 years ago. But it was in the nineteenth century that population growth began to accelerate in what are now the world’s most industrialized countries. This rapid population increase was a consequence of declining death rates owing to better nutrition and hygiene, more accessible fresh water supplies, and advances in preventive medicine. Immediately after World War II, death rates began a precipitous fall, owing primarily to the development of antibiotics and other medical advances. For several decades after the war, birth rates remained very high (and in some cases increased owing to the better health of women) because high fertility norms had been deeply imbedded in most traditional cultures and religions. Such norms tend to change only slowly, and, as a consequence, the world population experienced a dramatic increase, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to more than 7 billion today. The previous chapters have detailed what we now expect about the future of global population trends over the course of the twenty-first century. But in presenting this analysis, we have only occasionally made explicit reference to the fact that all human life depends on functioning environmental life support systems. This ‘support system’ aspect of human life was included in the expert meeting and IIASA–Oxford survey described in Chapters 2–7, with some of the predefined arguments explicitly referring to the possible effects of environmental change on future trends in health, mortality, and migration. With a time horizon of up to 2050, these possible effects of environmental change on the population outlook were seen by the experts as having only marginal impacts.
Surfing the Waves: Hyper-Fast Computers
Authors: Vedral Vlatko
Published: November 2020

Who hasn’t heard of a computer? In a society entirely dominated by these transistor infested boxes there are probably only a few remaining isolated tribes in the Amazon or around the Kalahari that have not been affected. From organizing our finances, flying a plane, warming up food, controlling our heartbeat (for some), these devices are prevalent in each and every aspect of our society. Whether we are talking about personal computers, mainframe computers, or the embedded computers that we find in our mobile phones or microwave ovens, it is very hard to even imagine a world without them. The term computer, however, means more than just your average Apple Mac or PC. A computer, at its most basic level, is any object that can take instructions, and perform computations based on those instructions. In this sense computation is not limited to a machine or mechanical apparatus; atomic physical phenomena or living organisms are also perfectly valid forms of computers (and in many cases far more powerful than what we can achieve through current models). We’ll discuss alternative models of computation later in this chapter. Computers come in a variety of shapes and sizes and some are not always identifiable as computers at all (would you consider your fridge a computer?). Some are capable of doing millions of calculations in a single second, while others may take long periods of time to do even the most simple calculations. But theoretically, anything one computer is capable of doing, another computer is also capable of doing. Given the right instructions, and sufficient memory, the computer found in your fridge could, for example, simulate Microsoft Windows. The fact that it might be ridiculous to waste time using the embedded computer in your fridge to do anything other than what it was designed for is irrelevant – the point is that it obeys the same model of computation as every other computer and can therefore – by hook or by crook – eventually achieve the same result. This notion is based on what is now called the Church–Turing thesis (dating back to 1936), a hypothesis about the nature of mechanical calculation devices, such as electronic computers.
Into the Woods Early Homo sapiens and Tropical Forest Colonization
Authors: Roberts Patrick
Published: November 2020

Popular philosophical associations of tropical forests, and forests in general, with an inherent ancestral state, away from the stresses, pollution, and technosphere of modern life, are nicely summarized by Murakami’s quote above (2002). Given the probable origins of the hominin clade in tropical forests, this quote is also apt from an evolutionary standpoint. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, tropical forests have frequently been considered impenetrable barriers to the global migration of Homo sapiens (Gamble, 1993; Finlayson, 2014). As was the case with the focus on ‘savannastan’ in facilitating the Early Pleistocene expansion of Homo erectus discussed in Chapter 3 (Dennell and Roebroeks, 2005), the movement of H. sapiens into tropical regions such as South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia has tended to be linked to Late Pleistocene periods when forests contracted and grasslands expanded (Bird et al., 2005; Boivin et al., 2013). Alternative narratives have focused on the importance of coastal adaptations as providing a rich source of protein and driving cultural and technological complexity, as well as mobility, in human populations during the Middle and Late Pleistocene (Mellars, 2006; Marean, 2016). The evidence of early art and symbolism at coastal cave sites such as Blombos in South Africa (Henshilwood et al., 2002, 2011; Vanhaeren et al., 2013) and Taforalt in North Africa (Bouzouggar et al., 2007) is often used to emphasize the role of marine habitats in the earliest cultural emergence of our species. Indeed, for the last decade, the pursuit of rich marine resources (Mellars, 2005, 2006) has been a popular explanation for the supposed rapidity of the ‘southern dispersal route’, whereby humans left Africa 60 ka, based on genetic information (e.g., Macaulay et al., 2005), to reach the Pleistocene landmass that connected Australia and New Guinea (Sahul) by c. 65 ka (Clarkson et al., 2017). In both of these cases, the coast or expanses of grassland have been seen as homogeneous corridors, facilitating rapid expansion without novel adaptation.
The Last in a Long Line Historical and Ethnographic Tropical Forest Encounters
Authors: Roberts Patrick
Published: November 2020

On the basis of the plethora of evidence for tropical forest agricultural practices and urban networks in Chapters 5 and 6 it seems somewhat surprising that these environments, and their human occupants, could ever come to be seen as static, primordial, or ‘elusive’ (Biesbrouck et al., 1999). Yet, today, Indigenous peoples living in tropical forests are often depicted as being isolated from the outside world, and as equally, passively threatened by external agricultural, economic, and political forces as the habitats in which they reside. As I showed in Chapter 2, the hunting and foraging practices of these groups can provide useful insights into how our prehistoric ancestors may have made a diverse living in environments that have frequently been considered too poor in crucial resources for long-term human occupation. Somehow, however, these parallels and comparisons have also seen these groups framed as relics of some of the earliest members of our species. This has been encouraged by claims that some of these groups genetically represent ‘archaic’ lineages of Homo sapiens that survived in dense forest habitats in different regions (Endicott et al., 2003; Ranaweera et al., 2014; Ranasinghe et al., 2015).Whether this is the case or not, it is now clear from historical and ethnographic information that tropical forest foragers, the world over, have been involved in complex economic and political networks to varying extents at different points in time. Moreover, the present cultural and subsistence systems of many of these groups have been significantly affected by the infiltration of colonial and imperial regimes from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as the more recent, disruptive effects of global capitalism. This chapter is an attempt to document how Eurocentric concerns with ‘exploration’, developments in literature, modern conservation movements, and the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherer debate have contributed to the removal of tropical forest societies from history and their placement into isolated, primeval conceptions of tropical forest environments. In response to this, I review evidence for historical and ethnographic connections of tropical forest hunter-gatherers, and agriculturalists, with societies in neighbouring territories.
Forests of Plenty? Comparisons and Conclusions
Authors: Roberts Patrick
Published: November 2020

The writings of John Muir were a key part of the early advocacy for the preservation of ‘wilderness’ areas in the United States. I hope to have demonstrated throughout this book that tropical forests are no longer a ‘monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape’ (Chapter 1), and hold an important place in our biological and cultural history. Yet, while this certainly makes tropical forests key priorities for conservation, I also hope to have shown that they should not be seen as static or ‘wild’. The development of new methodologies, theoretical realization that these environments are not ‘primeval’ or ‘impenetrable’, and a growth of research interest and funding are beginning to reimagine these environments as variable, dynamic, and important stages for human action. In this concluding chapter I argue that it is now time to move beyond dichotomies of whether tropical forests are ‘pristine’ or whether they have been constantly occupied and modified by humans through ongoing ‘niche construction’ (Roberts et al., 2017a). Instead, we are now able to begin to study, in detail, the sheer diversity of tropical forest ‘prehistories’, ‘histories’, and ‘modernities’ accessible to archaeologists, historians, palaeoecologists, and anthropologists. However, I want to go even further than the simple acknowledgement that a recent growth of data from, and interest in, tropical forests has given them greater visibility in discussions of human adaptations, past and present. Instead, I wish to evaluate to what extent the information from these habitats can play a theoretical and methodological role in narratives of the human ‘Universe’ more broadly. To do this I return to a series of themes developed in Chapter 1 that pitch discussions of Miocene and Pleistocene tropical forest occupation, indigenous agricultural developments and external introductions, tropical forest urbanism, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic tropical forest foraging and farming against patterns of behaviour in other environments.
4000 BCE: a cultural threshold
Authors: Ray Keith , Thomas Julian
Published: November 2020

The archaeological evidence that has accumulated over the past five decades demonstrates that two very different situations existed successively in Britain in the centuries on either side of 4000 BCE. While this is in some ways an arbitrary date, it is nonetheless a convenient one, since there are very few indications that ‘Neolithic’ artefacts and structures existed in Britain for long before the turn of the fourth millennium. Up until 4000 BCE (or perhaps a century or two earlier), the mainland and islands were populated by people who were heavily dependent upon hunting and gathering; afterwards the population lived a way of life that to a greater or lesser extent relied on herding and cultivating. Further, whereas the technology of the hunting societies had been skilfully made but was highly portable, more durable artefacts and architecture now proliferated, creating a much denser world of crafted things. However, the available evidence can be cast in a number of different ways, with the material before and after the critical date being capable of sustaining either maximal or minimal interpretations. As a consequence, the ways in which the character and degree of change across the threshold can be understood are also multiple and varied. As we saw in Chapter 1, the archaeologists of the 1920s to 1960s emphasized the contrast between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. Before the ‘transition’ between the two, Britain was home to a sparse population of hunter-foragers who followed game (including deer, wild pig, and wild cattle) and collected plants, nuts, and berries, and, for those near the sea, exploited marine resources. They had few, often simple artefacts, although it was acknowledged that significant skill was invested in some of them. They lived in informal campsites composed of rudimentary shelters while pursuing a transient way of life. Afterwards, in contrast, there were settled agriculturalists living in stable communities, in well-built houses, enjoying a mixed farming subsistence base. They were capable of building barrows and tombs for their dead, which may have demonstrated their incorporation into a widespread megalithic cult. The dichotomy between these two ways of life demanded that some fundamental change must have separated them, of whatever kind.
Doing Without Thinking
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: November 2020

Nigel Richards is a New Zealand–Malaysian professional Scrabble player (yes, there are professional Scrabble players). His mother recalled that, “When he was learning to talk, he was not interested in words, just numbers. He related everything to numbers.” When he was 28, she challenged him to play Scrabble: “I know a game you’re not going to be very good at, because you can’t spell very well and you weren’t very good at English at school.” Four years later, Richards won the Thailand International (King’s Cup), the world’s largest Scrabble tournament. He went on to win the U.S., U.K., Singapore, and Thailand championships multiple times. He won the Scrabble World Championship in 2007, 2011, and 2013. (The tournament is held every two years and he was runner-up in 2009). In May 2015, Richards decided to memorize the 386,000 words that are allowed in French Scrabble. (There are 187,000 allowable words in North American Scrabble.) He doesn’t speak French beyond bonjour and the numbers he uses to record his score each turn. Beyond that, Richards paid no attention to what the French words mean. He simply memorized them. Nine weeks later, he won the French-language Scrabble World Championship with a resounding score of 565–434 in the championship match. If he had studied 16 hours a day for 9 weeks, he would have an average of 9 seconds per word to memorize all 386,000 words in the French Scrabble book. However, Richards reportedly doesn’t memorize words one by one; instead, he goes page by page, with the letters absorbed into his memory, ready to be recalled as needed when he plays Scrabble. Richards played as quickly and incisively in the French tournament as he does in English-language tournaments, giving no clue that he cannot actually communicate in French. For experts like Richards, Scrabble is essentially a mathematical game of combining tiles to accumulate points while limiting the opponent’s opportunities to do the same and holding on to letters that may be useful in the future. The important skills are an ability to recognize patterns and calculate probabilities. There is no need to know what any of the words mean.
General medicine
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

The oral cavity is the largest and most used orifice in the human body. It is the opening of the aerodigestive tract, as well as a region of the body that is heavily involved in both sensing the outside world and communi­cating with it. Simply put, our mouths are complex and deeply intimate structures that can act as windows into the health of the rest of the body. Many disease processes that are systemically invisible may display quite overt oral manifestations. There are deep associations between bodily diseases and oral dis­ease counterparts, with considerable and mounting evidence to show that oral health may have an impact on systemic wellness. It is there­fore important to have an understanding of the wider human anatomy, physiology, and pathology. Understand and treat the patient as a whole, and think about all aspects of their health, whether it be routine pre­ventative treatment for periodontally compromised diabetic patients or polypharmacy patients requiring secondary dental care. Often at times, patients can be unclear about their own health condi­tion; having a fundamental understanding of general medicine will help to make those difficult choices regarding your patients a little easier and clarify when and whom to refer. Key topics are not included for this chapter, as it is a vast topic, and not the main focus of the dental undergraduate curriculum. It is, however, important to have a good basic knowledge of general human diseases, how they might interact with dental treatment, and the role that dentists can play in both diagnosis and management
Dental materials
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

Dental material science can be a daunting subject for most dentists, given its origins in the pure sciences of physics and chemistry. Combining this with human biology, and trying to see through the fog of material manu­facturers’ commercial claims, can make it seem like a truly mystifying subject. It is important that any student of material sciences maintains a critical eye and an evidence- based approach when it comes to material selection and use. Today we are lucky enough to work with the most advanced dental materials we have ever had. But simply having such materials at your dis­posal does not ensure success. Clinical procedural techniques are often the prime focus in restorative dentistry; however, to achieve optimal aesthetics, function, and longevity from restorations, a clear under­standing of material sciences is required. Ancient Roman engineers clearly understood this concept when con­structing Rome. They had to work within the limitations imposed by the materials they had at their disposal. However, the longevity and solidity of the impressive infrastructure we see today can be attributed to their expertise in exploiting the unique properties of the material resources they had available. The Romans perfected concrete production (based on volcanic ash and lime reacting with seawater to form tobermorite crystals) to yield a water- hardening material, so durable and resistant to cracks that modern- day concrete (based on Portland cement) is still considered weaker. It can be argued whether operator skill or advancements in dental ma­terials have resulted in improvements in restorative dentistry. However, few would disagree that it is the combination of good operator skill and appropriate use of dental materials that is the key for successful long-term dentistry. Key topics include: ● Adhesive dentistry concepts ● Understanding material physical properties ● Elemental make- up of materials ● Manufacturing processing of materials ● Biocompatibility ● Appreciation of setting reactions and working time ● Appreciation of material aesthetic and optical properties.
Statistics, epidemiology, and dental public health
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

The content of this subject is frequently overlooked, as it is often ‘not seen as pertinent’ to practitioners’ day- to- day work. However, the impact of dental public health (DPH) as a discipline can be far reaching. DPH is concerned with improving the oral health of the population, rather than the individual. It has been described as the science and art of preventing oral disease, promoting oral health, and improving quality of life through the organized efforts of society. DPH teams have numerous responsibilities, including oral health sur­veillance, developing and monitoring quality dental services, oral health improvement, policy and strategy development and implementation, and strategic leadership and collaborative working for health. As such, the impact of DPH can frequently been seen at a local level, e.g. through health promotion campaigns or provision of new/ redistribution of ser­vices (in conjunction with commissioners) to meet local needs. DPH is predominantly a postgraduate subject, and although the undergraduate curriculum does not cover the whole topic, some core knowledge is valuable. In particular, understanding research method­ology and basic statistics is a useful skill to help interpret the dental lit­erature appropriately. This is ever more necessary in the modern era of evidence- based dentistry. The questions in this chapter will predominantly cover the fundamen­tals of statistics relevant to medical research, along with the basics of study design. Additional questions will touch on the concepts of health promotion and epidemiology, with further reading suggested to supple­ment the content. Key topics include: ● Study design ● Data analysis ● Critical appraisal ● Epidemiology ● Health promotion ● Strategic working and collaboration ● Assessing evidence on oral health and dental interventions, pro­grammes, and services ● Developing and monitoring quality dental services.
Introduction
Authors: Neer Richard
Published: November 2020

What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for an artifact or a work of art to be visible as such? At some level the answer is simple: the lights must be on. Quickly, however, the issues become more complex and turn out to vary from discipline to discipline. Not everything is visible at every time, which means that not every research program can see the same things. Material conditions are certainly important, but so are perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. Archaeology is, among other things, the science of making things visible. It does so by digging them out of the ground; what time has hidden, the archaeologist reveals. The discipline is, as a result, keenly attuned to the material conditions under which such visibility becomes possible. Those conditions can be institutional, practical, and technological—funding, permits, and tools, be they picks and shovels or ground penetrating radar. But the conditions that archaeology investigates can also be historical, in the sense that, even in the distant past, visibility was neither uniform nor given. Historical agents, no less than time, may do the work of concealment: burying things, hiding them, rendering them variously obscure. It follows that archaeologists excavate more than artifacts. Equally, they excavate the conditions of each artifact’s potential visibility: the material conditions under which entities in a past world could be conspicuous and obtrusive, or recede into an unremarkable background. In short, they excavate relations no less than things—hence, by extension, a potential stratification in who saw what and at what time. Art history, on the other hand, tends to take visibility for granted. Integral to the discipline is a vast infrastructure of imaging and autopsy, from ArtSTOR to high-quality printing to travel grants—all committed to what Michael Fried has called “the primordial convention” that pictures and sculptures are meant to be beheld. This commitment exceeds the requirements of empirical research: even the most thorough technical documentation and the most meticulous description will, by broad consensus, be no substitute for seeing the object with one’s own eyes.
Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens
Authors: Neer Richard
Published: November 2020

Classical Greek monuments were meant to be seen. The poet Pindar often refers to the conspicuousness of architecture: “When a work is begun,” he declares, “it is necessary to make its façade far-beaming” (Olympian 6.3–4), and a sacred precinct can be tēlephantos, “shining from afar” (fr. 5 SM). According to Plato, the works of Pheidias were made “conspicuously” (periphanōs), literally, “so as to seen round about,” a term that can also be used to distinguish freestanding sculpture from relief (Meno 91d). The philosopher may have been thinking of Pheidias’ great bronze Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, the spear and helmet of which, we are told, were visible to ships at sea. The conspicuousness of Greek architecture was integral to its function. The Acropolis itself, for instance, was the supreme monument of the most powerful and long-lived democracy of Classical antiquity. Soaring over Athens, its great buildings—the temple of Athena Nike, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum—were statements of the official ideology of the Athenian empire and testaments to its glory. Clustered around them were numerous private and public dedications: statues, objets d’art, and inscriptions on stone. Today these monuments are landmarks of art history and magnets for tourism. Curiously, however, many of the Acropolis monuments were more or less invisible in the 400s BCE. Visibility was circumstantial and contingent, in ways that I shall elaborate below. From this starting point flow two questions: what does it mean for a democracy that its most glorious public monuments should be, to a greater or lesser degree, unseen? And what are the consequences for art history? The Acropolis monuments were subject to at least three distinct types of invisibility. First, literal invisibility, in the sense of occlusion or concealment. In this case, any light that strikes the object does not bounce back and hit an observer’s eye. Were one to bury a statue in a hole, it would be occluded in this sense; the statue would be, literally, invisible.
The Archaeology of Passage: Reading Invisibility in Chinese Tombs
Authors: Hung Wu
Published: November 2020

The eleventh section of Daode jing (Tao Te Ching), the foundational text of Taoism, reads: . . . Thirty spokes share a hub; Because [the wheel] is empty, it can be used in a cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Because it is empty, it can function as a vessel. Carve out doors and windows to make a room. Because they are empty, they make a room usable. Thus we possess things and benefit from them, But it is their emptiness that makes them useful. . . This section has always been appreciated as a supreme piece of rhetoric on the powers of nothingness, a philosophical concept fiercely articulated in the Daode jing. Whereas that may indeed be the author’s intention, the empirical evidence evoked to demonstrate this concept reveals an alternative way of seeing manufactured objects by focusing on their immaterial aspects. This way of looking at things has important implications for archaeological and art historical scholarship on ancient artifacts and architecture precisely because these two disciplines identify themselves with the study of physical remains of the past so firmly that tangibility has become an undisputed condition of academic research in these fields. Archaeologists routinely classify objects from an excavation into categories based on material and then inventory their sizes, shapes, and decoration. Art historians typically start their interpretation of images, objects, and monuments by identifying their formal attributes. Whereas such trained attention to material and formal evidence will surely persist for good reasons, the Daode jing section cautions us of the danger of ignoring the immaterial aspects of man-made forms, which, though eluding conventional typological classification and visual analysis, are nevertheless indispensible to their existence as objects and buildings. The current chapter incorporates this approach into a study of ancient Chinese art and visual culture by arguing that constructed empty spaces on artifacts and structures—holes, vacuums, doors, and windows—possess vital significance to understanding the minds and hands that created them and thus deserve a serious look into their meaning.
Current views on taxonomy and zoogeography of the genus Sus
Authors: Groves Colin
Published: November 2020

There has never been any dispute that the family Suidae, being even-toed ungulates, belong to the Artiodactyla but their position within this order has undergone some revision over the past 10 years. The standard taxonomic arrangement is that of Simpson (1945). Though Simpson’s taxonomic philosophy was explicitly not based on phylogeny, his classification of the Artiodactyla has nonetheless been interpreted as reflecting the general outlines of artiodactyl evolution. This general schema is shown in Fig. 1.1, which is based largely on Thenius (1979), except that Thenius went against the general view by aligning the Tragulidae with the Cervidae. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing consensus that taxonomy should reflect phylogeny as far as possible, and in this context the revolution in the understanding of artiodactyl evolution that took place during the 1990s (summarized by Waddell et al. 1999) has left the taxonomy of the Artiodactyla in some disarray, particularly because it is now clear that the Cetacea (whales and dolphins) are nested deep within it, as a sister group to the hippos. The new phylogenetic understanding is shown in Fig. 1.2, and a new classification is proposed in Table 1.2. Some comments on this new classification follow: • Waddell et al. (1999), in combining the Cetacea with the Artiodactyla, call the combined order Cetartiodactyla. Helgen (2003), however, has argued that, since the Cetacea are actually nested within the artiodactyls, rather than being their sister-group, it is appropriate to continue to use the name Artiodactyla for the order. The pigs therefore continue to be artiodactyls, not cetartiodactyls. • The new names introduced by Waddell et al. (1999) are given no taxonomic rank, and I have given them ranks here. But under the Whippomorpha I have left the two subdivisions, Ancodonta and Cetacea, unranked rather than introduce parvorders and the like. • In Fig. 1.2 I have followed the phylogeny of Hassanin & Douzery (2003), but I have not given names and ranks to all their clades. Even given the turmoil into which the taxonomy of the Artiodactyla has been thrown, still no one disputes that the closest living relatives of the pigs are the peccaries (family Tayassuidae).
The transition from wild boar to domestic pig in Eurasia, illustrated by a tooth developmental defect and biometrical data
Authors: Dobney Keith , Ervynck Anton
Published: November 2020

A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that the evolution from wild boar (Sus scrofa) to domestic pig (Sus scrofa f. domestica) was a gradual phenomenon, spanning many generations and centuries, or even millennia (Albarella et al. 2006). Certainly for Çayönü Tepesi, one of the important sites where early pig domestication has been claimed, this picture is corroborated by a recent review of the zooarchaeological material (Ervynck et al. 2001). Within the context of this recent study, it has been demonstrated that, in addition to the commonly used criteria for recognizing change in peoples’ relationship with certain animals in the archaeological record (see Davis 1987: 133), the analysis of pathological conditions, in this case linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH), also has much potential. As a result of a currently ongoing research project on pig domestication and evolution throughout Eurasia, a vast data set on LEH has been collected, covering both modern wild boar populations and archaeological assemblages (from palaeolithic to medieval times). On the basis of the subset for central and northern Europe, it has been demonstrated that the analysis of LEH provides insight into changes in the relationship between Sus and humans, during Mesolithic and Neolithic times (Dobney et al. 2004, see further). The aim of the present paper is to establish whether the patterns established for central and northern Europe can be extrapolated to other areas of the world. In order to evaluate this, teeth from recent wild boar populations and early archaeological sites, collected from south-west Asia, China, and Japan, have been included in the analysis. This material was selected because these are regions where claims for the early domestication of pigs have been made (e.g. Stampfli 1966 in manuscript, cited by Lawrence 1980 and published as Stampfli 1983; Bellwood 1996; Nelson 1998a; Yuan & Flad 2002; Nishimoto T. 2003). Before the analysis of the material will be presented, some background information on LEH is provided. Mammal teeth can provide many clues to an individual’s living conditions, and certain developmental defects of teeth have been used as a retrospective way of studying physiological stress in mammal populations.
A statistical method for dealing with isolated teeth: ageing pig teeth from Hagoshrim, Israel
Authors: Haber Annat
Published: November 2020

Reconstructing kill-off patterns from faunal remains is an essential step in deciphering the association between humans and animals in ancient societies. Specifically, demographic patterns and trends are considered key parameters in studying the process of domestication as revealed in the archaeozoological record (Davis 1987; Clutton-Brock 1999; Reitz & Wing 1999). This is especially true in the case of pig domestication, where both archaeozoological and ethnoarchaeological evidence point to a prolonged process that has included, and still includes today, a wide diversity of associations between pigs and humans (Grigson 1982; Griffin 1998; Hongo & Meadow 1998; Lobban 1998; Redding & Rosenberg 1998; Rosman & Rubel 1989). Although several methods exist for the recording of tooth eruption and wear for the purpose of ageing teeth, these methods rarely include statistical means by which to compare the resulting kill-off patterns. A further complication, seldom addressed in the literature, is the use of isolated teeth. In this chapter I suggest a simple procedure to overcome these problems. This procedure is illustrated using data recorded for pig remains from Hagoshrim, a Neolithic site from Israel, and discuss its implications for the study of pig domestication in the southern Levant. However, this method is applicable to any mammalian assemblages where similar ageing methods are used. Analysing kill-off patterns based on tooth eruption and wear usually involves the following stages (e.g. Hesse 1986, 2002; Rolett & Chiu 1994; Hongo & Meadow 1998; Ervynck et al. 2001; Horwitz 2001; Davis in press): (1) collecting the raw data by recording eruption and wear stages, most commonly (for pigs) based on the scheme provided by Grant (1982); (2) correlating the archaeozoological data with absolute ages from recent populations, based (for pigs) primarily on the works of Matschke (1967), Silver (1969), and Bull & Payne (1982); and (3) generating histograms or survivorship curves that summarize the raw data. However, Grant’s method and other common methods for generating survivorship curves produce information that does not lend itself easily to statistical testing. Furthermore, the method outlined by Grant (1982) is designed specifically for the analysis of half-mandibles, which are scarce in most archaeozoological assemblages.
The histopathology of fluorotic dental enamel in wild boar and domestic pigs
Authors: Kierdorf Horst , Kierdorf Uwe
Published: November 2020

Studies into the behavioral ecology of wild boar and domestic pigs are promising, yet largely neglected, areas of archaeozoological research. Changes in both the diet and health of animals may reflect specific details about the possible scale and extent of human impact on hunted wild boar populations and domesticated pigs in the past. Histological and chemical ‘signatures’ of (for example) physiological stress, brought about by possible human influence, can often be recovered in the dental and skeletal tissues of Sus. However, a fuller interpretation of what the significance of these signatures might be can only be achieved if their aetiology is known, and that can only be done by studying these phenomena in modern extant populations. One of the many aspects of the human–Sus relationship is the exposure of wild boar to contaminants from anthropogenic sources. An example of this is the pollution of wild boar habitats by fluoride from power plants and other emission sources, leading to the occurrence of characteristic dental changes, known as dental fluorosis, in the affected individuals of Sus scrofa (Kierdorf et al. 2000). However, dental fluorosis also occurs in wild and domestic mammals (and in humans) living in areas with increased environmental levels of fluoride from natural sources (Shupe et al. 1983; Cronin et al. 2000, 2003; Garrott et al. 2002; WHO 2002). The macroscopic changes of dental fluorosis reflect a disturbance of the processes involved in enamel formation. Once the permanent dentition of an individual is fully formed, exposure to excess levels of fluoride will not lead to fluorotic enamel changes. Dental fluorosis can therefore be used as a highly sensitive indicator of excess fluoride exposure during the period of tooth formation in humans and other mammals (Fejerskov et al. 1988; DenBesten 1994; Boulton et al. 1999; Kierdorf & Kierdorf 1999; Kierdorf et al. 1999). Higher levels of fluoride also exert negative effects on the skeleton throughout the life of an individual, the pathological changes being known as skeletal fluorosis (WHO 2002). This crippling disability is a major human health problem in various regions of Africa, China, and the Indian subcontinent, where millions of people are affected (Finkelman et al. 1999; WHO 2002).