bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Digging the Dead in a Digital Media Age
Authors: Sayer Duncan , Walter Tony
Published: November 2020

A number of recent events inside and outside of the heritage sector have triggered a lively and largely constructive debate about the excavation, display, and conservation of human remains in the UK (see Jenkins 2008, 2010; Moshenska 2009; Sayer 2009, 2010a; Parker Pearson et al. 2011; Giesen 2013). Two events have been of particular significance: the reburial of human remains prompted by requests to museums from the Pagan community, and independently of these requests the Ministry of Justice decided to revisit its conditions for the excavation of human remains (Parker Pearson et al. 2013). In the short term, these issues seem to have been resolved through open consultation and campaigning by archaeologists. British archaeologists consider that they have public support; public-facing archaeology develops strong links within local communities, the Portable Antiquities Scheme engages members of the public in the discovery of metal objects on a national scale, and TV and Radio programmes regularly include archaeology or excavation as their central theme. There are various ways to engage with archaeology outside of a traditional museum environment: people can shift soil or sit back and read about it in numerous academic and popular books, in magazines, and digitally on the internet. This chapter discusses this new digital environment by describing and analysing three events in British burial archaeology which deliberately sought coverage online and within global media. These are: 1) the burial campaign which was instrumental in raising the profile of the reburial problem in England; 2) the discovery of a cow and woman buried in the same grave in a fifth- and sixth-century cemetery at Oakington, Cambridgeshire; 3) the investigation of King Richard III’s final resting place in the city of Leicester. One of us was instrumental in publicizing the first two events; neither of us was involved in the third. We will refer also to a recent case in East Anglia where negative media publicity came unsought by the archaeologists concerned. In the mid-twentieth century, archaeology found a place in mass broadcasting and early shows like Animal, Vegetable and Mineral or Chronicle captured the public imagination (Bailey 2010).
Reconstructing Death: The Chariot Burials of Iron Age East Yorkshire
Authors: Giles Melanie
Published: November 2020

Visitors to the Hull and East Riding Museum used to reach the climax of the Iron Age exhibition, Celtic World, by coming face-to-face with the extraordinary funerary offerings from three chariot burials at Wetwang Slack (Dent 1985). Now removed for urgent conservation, the iron swords from two male burials, their scabbards decorated with intricate, incised Celtic art, and the corroded iron mirror and sealed bronze container from the female burial, were displayed in Perspex cases. Beads of red glass ‘enamel’ adorned both swords and box, and a slender iron pin shone with a thin strip of glowing gold, entwined around a coral bead. These artefacts are marvellous testimonies to Iron Age craft skill, speaking of the repertoire of decorated objects through which power amongst these communities was underpinned and reproduced (Giles 2008). Behind these cases, setting the scene for these personal possessions or funerary gifts, is an oversized image—now the focus of that section of the museum: a reproduction of Peter Connolly’s impressive and moving reconstruction of a chariot burial (Fig. 19.1), loosely modelled on the Kirkburn K5 inhumation (see Stead 1991) and painted in the late 1980s. The image shows a tableau of mourners surrounding a grave, in which has been interred the body of an adult male (Fig. 19.1). He is lying over the wheels of a dismantled chariot, with a shield placed over his chest, and forequarters of pig lain on top. The box of the chariot (still attached to the pole shaft) is being lowered over the body like a coffin, before the grave is back-filled. The participants in this ceremony are predominantly male, with one woman at the edge in an apparent state of grief: two others are in the background, one keeping a pair of children at a distance from the proceedings. Two ponies are being led away from the scene, tossing their heads as if perturbed by the event. Such images have a powerful, instantaneous impact: ‘act[ing] at a distance, across the gallery, in a way a block of text cannot’ (James 1999a: 121).
Introduction
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

You, dear reader, are special. Most humans were born before 1700. And of those born after, you are probably richer and better educated than most. Thus you and most everyone you know is special, elite members of the industrial era. Like most of your kind, you probably feel superior to your ancestors. Oh, you don’t blame them for learning what they were taught. But you’d shudder to hear of many of your distant farmer ancestors’ habits and attitudes on sanitation, sex, marriage, gender, religion, slavery, war, bosses, inequality, nature, conformity, and family obligations. And you’d also shudder to hear of many habits and attitudes of your even more ancient forager ancestors. Yes, you admit that lacking your wealth your ancestors couldn’t copy some of your habits. Even so, you tend to think that humanity has learned that your ways are better. That is, you believe in social and moral progress. The problem is, the future will probably hold new kinds of people. Your descendants’ habits and attitudes are likely to differ from yours by as much as yours differ from your ancestors. If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you’d realize that you should expect your descendants to seem quite strange. Historical fiction misleads you, showing your ancestors as more modern than they were. Science fiction similarly misleads you about your descendants. New habits and attitudes result less than you think from moral progress, and more from people adapting to new situations. So many of your descendants’ strange habits and attitudes are likely to violate your concepts of moral progress; what they do may often seem wrong. Also, you likely won’t be able to easily categorize many future ways as either good or evil; they will instead just seem weird. After all, your world hardly fits the morality tales your distant ancestors told; to them you’d just seem weird. Complex realities frustrate simple summaries, and don’t fit simple morality tales. This book presents a concrete and plausible yet troubling view of a future full of strange behaviors and attitudes. You may have seen concrete troubling future scenarios before in science fiction. But few of those scenarios are in fact plausible; their details usually make little sense to those with expert understanding. They were designed for entertainment, not realism.
Modes
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

How much could the world plausibly change if a new era appeared within a century or so? A review of the biggest past changes offers a weak basis for expectations about the magnitudes and types of future changes. If we go way back, the universe began, and then life arose. But those events happened billions of years ago and are poorly understood. Within the last few million years, however, the biggest changes were concentrated in three key transitions: the introduction of humans, farming, and industry. Humans foraged, that is, searched, for food from a few million to about 10 000 years ago. From then until a few hundred years ago, we farmed and herded. Since then we have developed and relied on industry. Social group sizes have steadily increased over this history. While most mammals live in groups of two to 15 individuals ( Kamilar et al. 2010 ), most human foragers lived in bands of roughly 20 to 50. Most farmers lived in village-based communities of roughly 500 to 2000 ( Kantner and Mahoney 2000 ). While larger empires often existed, they made little direct difference to most people’s lives. Today, most people live in metropolitan regions of roughly 100 000 to 10 million ( Giesen et al. 2010 ), and also in nations of roughly 1 million to 100 million. These sizes fit a simple if mysterious pattern: each era’s community sizes have been roughly the square of the previous era’s sizes; a band is roughly a group of groups, a village is roughly a band of bands, and a city is roughly a village of villages. These three human eras of foraging, farming, and industry have encompassed similar numbers of people. About 20 billion humans have been born since 1750, roughly 50 to a 100 billion were born between 10 000 years ago and 1750, and a similar number of near-humans were born in the million or so years before 10 000 years ago (Haub 2011). So of all the humans who have ever lived, only about 3–8% are alive today. These three eras also saw similar amounts of change, in the sense that they encompassed similar factors of total economic growth. During each era the human economy (i.e., the total economic capacity to produce valued things) doubled relatively steadily (i.e., via exponential growth) from seven to 10 times.
Scales
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

Can we say anything about the specific speeds at which ems can run? Because of brain parallelism, the cost of running an em should be nearly proportional to speed over a wide range of speeds. The upper limit of this proportional-cost em speed range is the “top cheap” speed, that is, the highest speed at which the cost is still nearly proportional to speed. To estimate this speed, we must consider how simulated neurons in em brains might both send faster signals, and more quickly compute what signals to send. Human brain neuron fibers send signals at speeds ranging from 0.5 to 120 meters per second. In contrast, signal speeds in electronic circuit boards today are typically about half the speed of light. If signals in em brains move at electronics speeds, that would be between one million and 300 million times faster than neuron signals. If signal delays are the limiting factor in em brain speed, then this ratio gives an estimate of the maximum speedup possible, at least if em brains have the same spatial size as human brains. proportionally larger speedups are possible if em brains can be made proportionally smaller. Regarding the computation of when to fire a simulated neuron, note that real neurons usually seem to take at least 20 milliseconds to react ( Tovee 1994 ), while even today electronic circuits can switch 10 billion times faster, in one-and-a-half trillionths of a second ( deal et al. 2010 ). A key question is thus: how many electronic circuit cycles does it take to execute a parallel computer program that emulates the firing of a single neuron? For example, if there were an algorithm that could compute a neuron firing in 10 000 of these fastest-known circuit cycles, then an emulation based on this algorithm would run a million times faster than the human brain. As quite complex parallel computer programs can be run in 10 000 cycles, em speedups of at least one million times seem feasible, provided that energy and cooling are cheap enough to profitably allow the use of these fastest electronic circuits. When energy and cooling are more strongly limiting factors, however, the top cheap speed could be slower.
Efficiency
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

The em economy could draw from a large pool of ordinary humans willing to be scanned. That pool could, in effect, be greatly expanded via many possible tweaks of each scan. In addition, a single em can dominate a large labor market by making many copies of itself. These factors can together produce strong competition. Such competition may drive profit-seeking firms to try hard to select the most profitable combinations of scanning, tweaking, and training. The best such combinations would then dominate the em economy. A thousand diverse able scanned humans seems sufficient to induce competition in most labor markets, as the best few ems can dominate each labor market. Thus it seems likely that most ems are copies of fewer than a thousand or so, and perhaps only dozens, of the original humans. These few highly copied em “clans” of copies might be known by a single name, as are celebrities today such as Madonna or Beyoncé. (Of course ems also need identifiers to distinguish particular clan members.) Familiar one-name em clans might be typically favored in most social interactions over billions of unfamiliar two- or three-name clans. The usual human preference for interacting with familiar personalities rather than strangers might discourage ems from interacting with ems from less wellknown clans, increasing inequality between clans. Ems may even justify this unequal treatment by saying that it is less moral to end an em copy from a small clan, because not as many similar other ems continue on. However, an aversion to having multiple copies from the same clan in each small social circle may limit this clan inequality. Em sociality might thus become more like that of our forager ancestors, who only ever met a few hundred people at most in their entire lives, and were quite familiar with the history, personality, and abilities of everyone they met (Dunbar 1992; McCarty et al. 2000). When they stick to associating with one-names, ems might know well who they liked or didn’t like, and how best to flatter or insult each one. There might be clan jokes analogous to our ethnic jokes, such as “How many Freds does it take to screw in a light bulb?” One-name ems cannot “start over fresh” by moving to a new city or job; strong reputations follow them everywhere.
Mating
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

How is sex different for ems? As the em world is a very competitive world where sex is not needed for reproduction, and as sex can be time and attention consuming, ems may try to suppress sexuality, via mind tweaks that produce eff ects analogous to castration. Such effects might be temporary, perhaps with a consciously controllable on-off switch. Historically, castrated males have tended to have lower libido, to be less aggressive and obsessive, to be better able to multi-task, and to be more sensitive, sympathetic, and social. However, historically eunuchs have often wanted to marry, and have often had active sex lives ( Aucoin and Wassersug 2006 ; Brett et al. 2007 ; Wassersug 2009 ; Treleaven et al. 2013 ). Thus even for eunuch-like ems there might still be a substantial demand for sex and related pair bonding. It is possible that em brain tweaks could be found to greatly reduce natural human desires for sex and related romantic and intimate pair bonding, without reducing em productivity. It is also possible that many of the most productive ems would accept such tweaks. Alternatively, it is possible that cheap vivid romantic and sexual simulations will sufficiently satisfy pairbonding urges, so that little demand remains for pair-bonding with real ems ( Levy 2008 ; Brain 2012 ). However, given how deeply pair bonding and sexual behaviors are embedded in human nature, such scenarios do not seem likely, at least for the early em era. Scenarios of sex suppression also seem to be less simple, as it is harder to calculate their implications. In this book I thus assume that ems retain modestly strong desires for sex and related pair bonding, even if such desires are substantially reduced. I also assume that familiar conventional sexual and gender habits and preferences continue in the em world. That is, most ems divide clearly into male versus female, ems mostly prefer male-female pair bonds, and these bonds have a distribution of time-scales near those we have seen in humans across cultures so far.
A Material Culture: Introduction
Authors: Wynne-Jones Stephanie
Published: November 2020

Africa’s eastern littoral borders the Indian Ocean, providing the setting for the settlements, people, and language known collectively as Swahili, which have been a key part of that ocean’s trading networks for at least two millennia. Graeco-Roman sailors visited the now-forgotten metropolis of Rhapta, and their voyages were recorded in the narratives that later became the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Casson 1989). Traces of that early contact survive in the form of beads and coins, yet are limited in number and diffuse in nature (Chami and Msemwa 1997a; Horton 1990). From the seventh century onwards, a series of more permanent settlements began to monopolize this trade; by the eleventh century some of these had grown into towns that were able to control and provide a focus for the mercantile opportunities of the Indian Ocean. The trading economy of Swahili towns was based on the wealth of the African continent—gold and ivory were particularly valuable exports—and underlain by a mixed economy and diverse population of fishers and farmers, traders and craft-workers (Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 2008). By the ‘golden age’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Swahili were an African society of considerable cosmopolitanism and fame, with towns like Kilwa Kisiwani known throughout the medieval world (Sutton 1993, 1997). Swahili archaeology is focused, conceptually and methodologically, on the series of stone towns that grew up along Africa’s eastern coast from the end of the first millennium AD. These towns developed as key nodes in both local and international networks of interaction, and became the conduits through which the African continent traded and communicated with the wider Indian Ocean world. The material settings of the towns, and particularly the distinctive tradition of coral architecture they contain, embody their cosmopolitanism, with this locally derived building tradition creating unique urban spaces that nevertheless reference the Islamic architecture of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Garlake 1966). Archaeology on this coast is still relatively new, dating back only to the 1950s and 1960s, and to the pioneering work of researchers convinced they had discovered evidence for Arab trading stations on the coast of eastern Africa (Kirkman 1964).
Vumba Kuu: Negotiating Similarity and Difference
Authors: Wynne-Jones Stephanie
Published: November 2020

Identity and society in Swahili towns have tended to be considered on the scale of a settlement or region; as discussed in the previous chapter, it is possible to understand urban Swahili identity relative to surrounding populations. At Kilwa Kisiwani, one way that this can be recognized is in the relationship between the town and its wider hinterland, as this creates a sense of the urbanism of Kilwa through the practices that went on there. Display and the material setting have been emphasized as a means by which objects and architecture were bound up into social dynamics, and served as active components of the formation of urban identities. This sense of creating social worlds through the material setting is particularly apposite along the East African coast in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries. As discussed, this was a time when many new towns were founded, or elaborated with coral buildings. Even sites containing a majority of wattle-and-daub architecture were often augmented with a coral mosque during this period. This incorporation of new architectural technologies was a part of adopting the emergent material forms of Swahili towns, as well as providing a space for the practice of Islam and a new way of dwelling within stone houses. As suggested by the example of Kilwa Kisiwani, though, the towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were also shaped by more mundane practices of consumption relating to food and to everyday objects. This created a distinction between town and countryside through new ways of living that defined the urban milieu. The process of distinction and identification will also have been an active one within the town and among the urban population; more recent archaeologies have thought through the ways that Swahili urban society was internally differentiated. Here, too, a biographical approach to practice recovers a sense of the ways that coastal inhabitants have lived those identities, which were intimately bound up with changing forms of materiality. For these considerations, the town and polity of Vumba Kuu is an important case study.
Moving Inland from the Coast
Authors: Wynne-Jones Stephanie
Published: November 2020

It is immediately clear that the towns of the Swahili coast could not have existed without a web of connections linking them to a deeper African hinterland. This is a complex network to recover: a lack of historical documents and an extremely patchy archaeological record have meant that interaction has been understood only in very general terms. This is often cited as a major lacuna in our understandings of the coast (Horton 1987a; Sinclair 1995), with calls for sustained archaeological attention to interior societies. There can be no doubt that this is necessary. Yet here a cautiously optimistic approach is taken, as I suggest that part of the problem we have in understanding interior networks is in the ways that we expect them to be manifest, according to a model developed for the coast: connections have been sought through the movement of imported trade goods, which may not everywhere be a useful proxy for interaction. In fact, there is now a significant body of evidence for the ways that these connections worked, even though they do not always take the form of foreign artefacts in new locations. In this chapter I extend the notion of networks of practice to think through the ways that activities and consumption would have determined the nature of coast/interior entanglements; I suggest that the absence of trade goods in sites of the interior may not be (just) a function of lack of knowledge, but also the result of choices and the active role of taste among hinterland groups. Historical sources hint at long-distance movements across eastern Africa from at least the first century AD; Ptolemy’s Geography refers to the ‘Lake of the Nile’ (Freeman-Grenville 1962b: 4), suggesting knowledge of areas and connectivity as far inland as Lake Victoria. Direct material evidence of these two millennia of interaction tends to be sought in the remains of imports found at interior sites. These are comparatively few, but do at least offer a map of connectivity that sets a framework for thinking about interaction. The earliest imports at interior sites are not, in fact, objects.
The Indian Ocean before the Arrival of Europeans
Authors: Wynne-Jones Stephanie
Published: November 2020

The precolonial Swahili coast was thus a region united through particular material practices. In this volume, consumption and display have been emphasized as aspects that are very clearly evident in the archaeological record. More ephemeral practices, such as ritual, dance, or public acts of memorialization, are only now being incorporated into our understandings, bringing the picture of the precolonial coast into line with what is known of more recent periods (see Chapter 8). Yet tangible acts of display and the use of material objects in certain contexts served to delineate a particular cultural area, as well as to link them to a broader Indian Ocean sphere; the objects bound up into prominent acts were often derived from that world. As has been discussed, this served a purpose on the Swahili coast, where cosmopolitanism and the ability to claim connections with distant regions have long been important in the negotiation of identities. This might be seen as an unequal relationship: a region in which external symbols had special power, whether due to their intrinsic qualities or to the cultural hegemony of the societies from which they came (per Gosden 2004). This has often been the assumption on the eastern African coast, where commodities such as gold or ivory were traded for exotic objects such as glazed ceramics or beads. Yet this inequality is a difficult notion to test. First, as discussed in earlier chapters, the ocean was only one of the spheres of interaction in which the Swahili were active, albeit one that they chose to highlight. Second, it is probable that the imported goods we see on the coast, often in tiny quantities, were just a very small part of a much larger commodity trade. Ships would not have travelled empty to this region, and so the bulk of their cargo must have been made up of items we now do not see: cloth, foodstuffs, or raw materials long since consumed or formed into manufactured objects.
Kingdoms and regiones: The documentary evidence
Authors: Rippon Stephen
Published: November 2020

During the early medieval period eastern England was occupied by two major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms—the East Saxons and East Angles—alongside a region that Bede referred to as ‘Middle Anglia’. There has been a widespread assumption that Essex (‘the East Saxons’) and Suffolk and Norfolk (the ‘South Folk’ and ‘North Folk’ of East Anglia) were direct successors to these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (e.g. Carver 1989, fig. 10.1; 2005, 498; Yorke 1990, 46, 61; Warner 1996, 4, plate 1; Pestell 2004, 12; Chester-Kadwell 2009, 46; Kemble 2012, 8; Gascoyne and Radford 2013, 176; Reynolds 2013, fig. 4), which would imply a strong degree of territorial continuity from at least the early medieval period through to the present day. There is, however, a recognition in the Regional Research Framework that regional differences within early medieval society across eastern England have seen little investigation (Medlycott 2011b, 58), something that the following chapters hope to address. This chapter will explore the documentary evidence for these early medieval kingdoms and their relationship to later counties, before turning to the archaeological evidence for Anglo- Saxon immigrants and their relationship to the native British population in Chapters 8–10. The clear differences between the Northern Thames Basin, East Anglia, and the South East Midlands that are still evident during the seventh to ninth centuries are outlined in Chapter 11. Finally, Chapter 12 explores the boundaries of the early medieval kingdoms, and in particular the series of dykes constructed in south-eastern Cambridgeshire.Table 7.1 provides a timeline of key historical dates for early medieval England, and key developments within the archaeological record. The earliest list of territorial entities is the Tribal Hidage. The original document has been lost—it only survives in a variety of later forms—but it is thought to have been written between the mid seventh and the ninth centuries (Hart 1970; 1977; Davies and Vierck 1974, 224–7; Yorke 1990, 10; Blair 1991, 8; 1999; Harrington and Welch 2014, 1). The Tribal Hidage lists at least thirteen peoples in and around eastern England, some of whom clearly occupied quite extensive areas, such as the East Angles (assessed as 30,000 hides), East Saxons (7,000 hides), and the Cilternsætna (4,000 hides).
Conclusions
Authors: Rippon Stephen
Published: November 2020

Territorial structures feature in many studies of the past, but are the focus of very few. While books on Iron Age Britain are full of references to ‘tribes’ and ‘kingdoms’, their boundaries remain poorly defined. Although regional variation within Iron Age material culture was marked, it has traditionally been thought that Romanization led to a homogenization of society, its artefacts, and its architecture. Our understanding of Romano-British territorial identities remains poor and most studies have simply provided the seemingly obligatory map showing the names of civitates with or without schematic dotted lines between them. Within early medieval scholarship there has been a greater focus on territoriality and in particular the origins and development of kingdoms, but few attempts have been made to map their boundaries or the socioeconomic zones that may have underpinned them. Overall, our understanding of territorial structures in Britain during the late prehistoric and early historic periods is very poor. Until the 1960s—when the ‘culture-historical’ paradigm prevailed—the Iron Age, Roman, and early medieval periods were seen as having been characterized by frequent disruptions to society brought about by invasions and migrations. From the 1970s the idea that there may have been far greater continuity in the landscape gained favour, just as the idea that cultural change had to be brought about by mass migration went out of fashion. Most of the narratives on what happened in the post-Roman landscape were, however, based upon anecdotal evidence from a small number of well-known sites—Barnsley Park, Frocester, Latimer, Rivenhall, and the like—and so The Fields of Britannia (Rippon et al. 2015) attempted to explore the extent to which there may have been continuity within the countryside through an analysis of pollen sequences and excavated field systems. This suggested a considerable degree of potential continuity in most lowland regions, making a prima facie case that many Romano-British farmers continued to work the land, albeit with a shift in emphasis from arable to pasture. Following on from this, Kingdom, Civitas, and County has considered whether there may also have been continuity in the socio-economic and territorial structures within which communities lived their lives.
The Rise of the University
Authors: Willetts David
Published: November 2020

The university is one of Europe’s great gifts to the world. There had been sophisticated centres of learning in Classical Athens and Alexandria, in China, and then in North Africa and Spain during the Islamic world’s scientific flowering. But it is Europe’s universities which gave birth to the humanism of the Renaissance, drove the Reformation, led the rise of empirical science, and promoted the emergence of critical history. They are still extending the boundaries of knowledge today, as part of a global enterprise which is heavily influenced by the European model. They emerged in the twelfth century. The first wave of a dozen or so, including Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, already comprised different types of university, reflecting their different origins depending on which came first, the chicken or the egg, the teacher or the student. In Bologna, reputed to have been founded in 1088 and hence Europe’s oldest university, the student is thought to have come first. Groups of students were looking for training to get qualifications that would help them practise medicine or law and employed teachers to help them. There ‘the lecturing staff had to submit to a competitive trial to win the custom of their fee paying consumers . . . teaching was viewed as a commodity like any other and it was logical that new students should sample lecture courses before making their academic purchase’. They were mature students who had probably already started work and knew what extra training they needed to advance in their profession. By contrast in Northern Europe the university began with teachers setting up universities: they had much younger students who were more dependent on them. (They were called masters, reflecting the origins of the model in apprenticeships.) These universities tended to be less vocational as the routes into professions such as the law or medicine were instead via apprenticeships. Towns gave these new institutions a mixed welcome—and sometimes still do. Tensions between town and gown boiled over into violence. Universities looked to the Church, the major countervailing power of the time, for protection from hostile locals.
Fragmenting the body
Authors: Brück Joanna
Published: November 2020

In 2002, the extraordinarily wealthy inhumation burial of a single adult male was discovered less than 5 kilometres from Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The Amesbury Archer, as he soon came to be known, was buried sometime between 2380 and 2290 BC (Fitzpatrick 2011), and he was accompanied by an array of grave goods including three copper knives, a pair of gold ornaments, five Beaker pots, seventeen barbed and tanged arrowheads, two stone bracers, a shale belt ring, and a possible cushion stone for the working of metal objects. The appearance of single burials with grave goods at the beginning of the Chalcolithic has long been interpreted as indicating the emergence of an ideology of the individual (e.g. Renfrew 1974; Shennan 1982). The objects buried with the Archer have been viewed as a direct reflection of his wealth and status, and the discovery seems to support established views of Bronze Age society as increasingly hierarchical—dominated by individuals who drew political power from success in long-distance exchange, control over specialist technologies such as metalworking, and prowess in hunting and warfare (Needham 2000a; Needham et al. 2010; Sheridan 2012). It has frequently been recognized, however, that such evolutionist narratives in fact present a reductionist reading of the evidence (e.g. Petersen 1972; Petersen et al. 1975, 49; Brück 2004a; Gibson, A. 2004), and detailed evaluation of human remains from both mortuary contexts and elsewhere indicates considerable variability in the treatment and perception of the human body (Sofaer Derevenski 2002; Gibson, A. 2004; Brück 2006a; Fitzpatrick 2011, 201–2; Appleby 2013; Fowler 2013, ch. 4). We will return to consider the significance of grave goods in Chapter 3; here we will focus on the treatment of the body both in Bronze Age mortuary rites and in other forms of social and ritual practice. As we shall see, the bodies of the dead were manipulated in complex ways that indicate the existence of concepts of the self that differ profoundly from those familiar from our own cultural context.
Production and Users
Authors: Swift Ellen
Published: November 2020

There have been many previous studies of Roman production, most notably with regard to pottery vessels such as Samian, but also examinations of the production methods of other industries such as glass manufacture or bone-working. Most of these studies have entailed the consideration of detailed evidence from production sites such as kilns or furnaces, and the study of part-made objects and the debris that results from the production process. Finished objects have also been studied with a view to reconstructing some aspects of production, particularly the relationship between artefact features such as stamps and particular workshops or production areas. The production process has, therefore, normally been studied either as an end in itself, or as a means to understand provenance and patterns of trade. In this chapter, I take a different approach, focusing instead on the relationship between production processes and user experience. This has of course already been considered in an indirect way in the previous chapters, in which particular artefact features produced by various production methods have been analysed from the point of view of users. Yet as outlined in the introductory chapter, there is also scope for a more explicit consideration of the relationship between users and production processes, particularly in relation to scales of production and issues such as standardization. We can also examine how constraints on production (for instance those that result from the use of specific materials) in turn impact on the finished product, and so on user experience. Firstly, we will examine the production process of dice, and secondly, production methods for some types of glass vessels. The production process of bone dice is well understood since evidence survives of manufacturing waste as well as the finished product. For bone carving in general, the metapodial bones were favoured, as they were relatively straight. Although they were hollow in the centre, they offered a reasonable volume of solid material. Large dice were made from the complete bone, with a hollow core that had to be plugged at either end.
Conclusion
Authors: Swift Ellen
Published: November 2020

Over the course of this book, we have investigated a diverse range of Roman material, which has provided a wonderful opportunity to examine relationships between people and things. Not only is the Roman period well recorded in textual sources in comparison to other periods in antiquity, allowing a good understanding of the wider historical context, it also has a relatively long timespan, and very large, well-dated and well-documented assemblages of artefacts, with much potential for further interrogation. All this has made possible a nuanced investigation of the evidence in which we have been able to dissect various different trajectories of artefact development and use, and investigate wider issues of behaviour and experience. What have the case studies in this book contributed to our understanding of how affordances may be studied? In theoretical discussions, it has been suggested that affordances need to be evaluated alongside other sources of evidence such as wear marks, experimental reconstruction, and archaeological context (see Chapter 1). This has been undertaken through the case studies in Chapter 2, which show that comparative approaches of this kind yield a much richer understanding of artefact function and possible variability in use, and of the end products made by particular tools and how these too change through time. In addition, the case studies have demonstrated several aspects of object affordance that need to be carefully considered in any study of functional objects. Firstly, we have learned especial caution is needed in studying artefacts that appear to have similar functions to modern objects. Although the basic identification of such objects tends to be correct, there may be a tendency to project onto these objects exactly the same range of functions that they have in the present, without paying sufficient attention to how the objects themselves, and the conditions in which they existed and were used, are different to those of modern material culture. Here we need an especially close focus on the affordances of particular artefacts, and what they might facilitate that is different from modern uses.
Operative treatment of dental caries in the young permanent dentition
Authors: Smallridge J A , Albadri S
Published: November 2020

Caries is a chronic disease. If it starts to affect the permanent teeth the child patient is drawn into a cycle requiring ongoing care for the rest of his/her life. Therefore when treating the young permanent dentition we have to adopt an approach that considers and addresses the whole disease process and not just treat the outcome of the disease. Caries is still a considerable problem in children and adolescents. The 2013 Child Dental Health Survey for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland found that, on average, nearly half (46%) of 15-year-olds and a third (34%) of 12-year-olds had obvious decay experience. Although the proportion of children with untreated dentinal caries has improved from 2003, it remained high at 21% and 19% for 15-year-olds and 12-year-olds, respectively. These children are at high risk of pain and discomfort relating to their teeth. The 2013 survey also looked at the impact on daily life. On average, a fifth of 12- and 15-year-old children reported experiencing difficulty eating, and about half reported that their life had been affected by problems with their teeth or mouth within the previous 3 months (Steele et al. 2015). Caries prevalence declined in the later decades of the twentieth century. As it dropped, a concentration of the disease occurred, with a small percentage of the population experiencing most of the disease. Caries prevalence is greatest in the occlusal surfaces of the first permanent molars and buccal grooves of the lower first molars, and the prevalence in these sites has dropped by the smallest proportion. The least susceptible sites are the approximal surfaces of the incisors, so caries seen in these permanent teeth indicates more extensive disease (Sheiham and Sabbah 2010). The first permanent teeth erupt in the mouth at approximately 6 years of age, but may appear as early as 4 years of age. The eruption of the anterior teeth usually causes great excitement, as it is associated with ‘the fluttering of tooth fairy wings’. However, the eruption of the first permanent molars goes largely unnoticed until there is a problem.
Computational Approaches to Minoan Settlement Interaction and Growth
Authors: Paliou Eleftheria , Bevan Andrew
Published: November 2020

Several recent approaches to Minoan urbanism have revisited the kinds of formal models and analyses first developed in fields such as urban studies or statistical physics. The goal of such applications is usually to better capture and understand the relationship between people, paths, places, and cultural interaction in terms of nodes, networks, and flows. This emphasis first appeared in Aegean Bronze Age archaeology at least thirty years ago, for example via isolated attempts to interpret built spaces using graph-based methods (Yannouli 1992). More recently, however, the idea that networks of human interaction are a key generator of urban development and social change has been progressively gaining ground in Minoan studies for several different spatial scales of analysis (see also Hacıgüzeller and Thaler 2014; Letesson 2009, 2014). At the macro-scale (many settlements in a landscape or multiple Aegean islands for instance), various forms of ‘spatial interaction model’ have been used to explore settlement evolution, population movement, the transmission of cultural traits, socio-political organization, and interregional trade (Bevan and Crema 2014; Bevan and Wilson 2013; Knappett, Evans, and Rivers 2008; Knappett, Rivers, and Evans 2011; Paliou and Bevan 2016). Central to these works have also been concerns about how best to identify and model environmental and spatial factors influencing past human interactions and settlement attractiveness and how to make effective use of material culture evidence in the model-building process. In this chapter, we reflect on this trend and draw upon previous experience in applying simulations of settlement interaction in the Cretan landscape to revisit some of these issues. In particular, we describe briefly computational models that aim to explore the emergence of place and path hierarchies at the island level, examine the links between cultural transmission and geographic distance, and look into the benefits of combining settlement and artefact data to approach aspects of socio-political organization. The growth, decline, and interaction of Bronze Age Cretan settlements have long been part of wider discussions about socio-political organization in the second millennium BC, not least with regard to different notions of Minoan palatial territoriality and political geography.
Fungal Diagnostics
Authors: Seaton Shila , Manuel Rohini J.
Published: November 2020

The field of fungal diagnostics encompasses tests that are performed to help diagnose fungal disease, guide its management, and or monitor the effectiveness of its treatment. For some superficial skin and yeast infections, a clinical examination of the patient combined with microscopic examination of the sample may be sufficient to determine that fungal disease is present, even if the specific fungal pathogen is not identified. For deep- seated and systemic infections, a combination of diagnostic tests may be required in order to obtain a definitive diagnosis. These include microscopy to detect fungal elements, culture, detection of circulating antigens and antibodies, and molecular tests. More recently, molecular and proteomic approaches have increasingly dominated the conventional identification of pathogenic yeasts and, to some extent, filamentous fungi, since traditional methods are time consuming. More importantly, conventional methodologies have failed to identify common organisms that display uncharacteristic profiles, or fungal pathogens that are rarely encountered. The ‘gold standard’ for the definitive diagnosis of fungal disease is histology or culture of the fungal pathogen from a clinical specimen. A specimen will routinely be inoculated onto several different types of media, and then incubated at specific conditions and temperatures for up to twenty-one days. Media plates will be examined periodically for growth, and staff will try to identify the fungus using both macroscopic and microscopic morphologies. The few biochemical tests available, e.g. the urease test, can be helpful in identification, most often for yeast species. Microscopy of fungal isolates, histopathological examination of tissue, and fungal specific stains play fundamental roles in the diagnosis of infection for the variety of fungi that cause disease. The most common stain for identifying fungal elements from a cultured isolate is lactophenol fuschin/aniline blue stain. Figure 10.1 depicts the fruiting body (conidiophore) of Aspergillus fumigatus species complex, the most prevalent fungal species responsible for invasive aspergillosis (IA) in severely immunocompromised individuals. Figure 10.2 illustrates the phenotype of a three-day old colony. Serological tests are beneficial when non-culture based diagnosis of fungal disease is required. Complement fixation is predominantly used to diagnose endemic mycoses, e.g. coccidioidomycosis, blastomycosis, and histoplasmosis.
Laboratory Quality Control and Accreditation
Authors: Oliver Anthony R.
Published: November 2020

According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the ‘Medical laboratories—Requirements for quality and competence (ISO 15189:2012) BS EN ISO 15189:2012’ accreditation is defined as ‘a procedure by which an authoritative body gives formal recognition that an organization is competent to carry out specific tasks’. Accreditation is delivered by the ‘competent authority’ based on a set of defined standards and the continual internal audit of the laboratory processes and infrastructure against these standards to achieve conformance. Additionally, the ‘competent authority’ periodically undertakes assessments to ensure compliance with the standards. These assessments vary in frequency and nature depending upon the assessment body. In some instances (e.g. UK Accreditation Service, UKAS), the assessments are annual and based on a four- year cycle covering the whole laboratory repertoire and infrastructure. The HSE is responsible for the inspection and licencing of microbiological containment level 3 and 4 facilities. The HTA is responsible for legal registration of laboratories that process and store human tissue, and is mainly histology related. The MHRA provides guidelines on good laboratory practice, good clinical practice, good clinical laboratory practice, and good manufacturing practice, largely around clinical trial work. It is also responsible for accreditation of blood transfusion laboratories. Finally, it provides guidance on the In Vitro Diagnostic Medical Device Directive (IVDMDD, 98/ 79/ EC) and the regulation of medical ‘devices’ including diagnostic devices, where a ‘device’ is defined as including reagent kits and analytical platforms. EFI provides guidance and standards for transplantation and tissue typing laboratories across Europe. Until 2009, CPA provided accreditation for the majority of UK pathology services. CPA was acquired by the UK Accreditation Service in 2009. UKAS is a government- appointed national accreditation body for the UK that is responsible for certification, testing, inspection, and calibration services, and is the competent authority for all ISO standards, not just pathology. It covers various sectors, including healthcare, food production, energy supply, climate change, and personal safety. The majority of UK pathology services will be UKAS ISO15189 accredited by 2018, including transitional ‘dual’ CPA standards/ ISO15189 accreditation between 2015 and 2018. It also provides ISO22870:2006 accreditation that is point of care specific, as well as ISO17025:2005, which applies to calibration standards.