bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Infectious Diseases
Authors: Fink Doug
Published: November 2020

Infectious diseases are global and local. They impact health and dis­ease in every country, but protean factors— cultural, geographical, and political— determine their particular local distribution. Every single patient is globally colonized by microorganisms, but singular behaviours, genetics and co- morbidities significantly determine what organisms cause disease in any individual. The practice of infectious diseases medi­cine necessarily demands an understanding of the person and the world in which they live. This chapter will emphasize the importance of context in assessing patients for infectious diseases. In terms of global mortality, communicable diseases remain the leading causes of mortality. Despite the evocative epithet of ‘infectious diseases’, these are not all caused by creatures that creep and crawl. Cosmopolitan diseases (i.e. universally distributed infections such as influenza or bac­terial pneumonia) represent a huge burden wherever medicine is prac­tised. However, it is important to note that in high- resource settings, infection imported by travel and migration is increasing. In particular, the international traffic of emerging infections, such as Zika virus, and anti-microbial resistance (AMR) are already major healthcare problems. As the world shrinks and the climate changes, the distribution of infectious diseases will continue to change. The threat of AMR no longer looms— it is a present and real danger. In the time it will take for disciples of this text to reach the end of their specialty training, AMR will account annually for more deaths than cancer. The delivery of almost all interventional, surgical, and immunomodulatory therapies depends on our ability to provide effective anti- microbial prophylaxis and rescue. The ability of organisms to adapt rapidly to novel iatrogenic selection pressures means that the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and manifold other pathogens will be compromised, not simply anti- bacterial agents. The future of modern medicine depends on the global healthcare community sharing both concern and responsibility. This chapter will include cases pertaining to the management of AMR.
Clinical Chemistry
Authors: Furmedge Dan
Published: November 2020

With so many tests available and increasingly fast laboratory processors, there is a growing temptation to request large numbers of blood tests on each and every patient. What we should remember is that they should be used as an adjunct to the history and clinical examination. Test results should reinforce the likely diagnosis and rule out our differentials, rather than be used to try and make the diagnosis per se. What makes things easier is to know how serum biochemistry and homeostasis are regulated and then to consider a number of questions: ● Which hormones are involved in the control of this electrolyte? ● What happens when these are increased or decreased? ● Does the patient have any renal or hepatic impairment? ● Are they taking any drugs that might be affecting serum electrolyte levels? ● Have they taken an overdose? ● Is the patient dehydrated/ hypovolaemic/ hypoxic? It can seem daunting at first when results come back unexpectedly out of range. They must be considered in combination with the patient’s clinical status; if the numbers just do not fit, then repeat the test— they may not be right. However, there are a few ‘unmissable’ electrolyte derangements that need to be dealt with immediately. Once detected, they should trigger the thoughts shown in Table 12.1. Interpreting serum values is important, but to prevent iatrogenic derangement, careful use and prescription of intravenous fluids are also needed. Does a patient who looks hypovolaemic, has a low blood pres­sure, and is tachycardic need crystalloids or blood? Colloids, such as ‘Gelofusine®’ or ‘Volplex®’, are now largely out of date, with evidence not supporting their use. Are they frail or do they have cardiac failure and therefore require cautious replacement? Do they have liver failure? Is their fluid balance so critical that close fluid monitoring in a level 2 crit­ical care setting required? Gone are the days when central venous lines are used on the wards for fluid balance. This chapter will help consider­ation of the whole picture before putting pen to paper and (potentially) wrongly prescribing 4 L of fluids a day for a frail older man with left ventricular failure.
Future Education Trends
Authors: Barakat Bilal F. , Durham Rachel E.
Published: November 2020

Education is an inherently long-term endeavour. Not only in the sense that formal schooling alone may last a significant part of a lifetime, but also because part of the reason for spending this time in school is the promise of benefits for decades to come. This is true at both the individual and societal levels. For the underlying educational systems, the long-term nature of education is felt more keenly than at the individual level. Schools are built to serve multiple generations of students, and teachers are often hired for life as civil servants. A newly trained teacher of today will, towards the end of her/his career, teach students who, in turn, may well still be in the active labour force 100 years from now. Educators themselves also hold expectations about the long-term future. Part of why we care whether a Dalit boy gets some form of early childhood education is because we expect that, as a consequence, his increased chances to complete school will benefit him not only for the next 10 or 15 years, to the end of our programme intervention or planning horizon, but for the rest of his life. His own education may even make it more likely that he will send his own children to school. If he sends a daughter to school, her education will possibly lead her to wait until she is in her late 20s to bear her first child, when she is better able to provide care. That ‘delayed benefit’ of the Dalit boy going to school now might not occur until sometime in the 2050s. To insist that we ‘learn for life, not for school’ is a cliché, yet there are strikingly few attempts to look ahead—much less project quantitatively—how today’s students will contribute to the educational composition of tomorrow’s population, and the implications for their personal life course and the challenges of their generation. Some of the key contemporary policy debates concern very long-term issues. Among these are the sustainability of pensions, the provision of health care, and response to environmental degradation. For all of these, the education of the concerned populations matters.
Children of the Aimless Chance: Randomness versus Determinism
Authors: Vedral Vlatko
Published: November 2020

In our search for the ultimate law, P, that allows us to encode the whole of reality we have come across a very fundamental obstacle. As Deutsch argued, P cannot be all-encompassing, simply because it cannot explain its own origins. We need a law more fundamental than P, from which P can be derived. But then this more fundamental law also needs to come from somewhere. This is like the metaphor of the painter in the lunatic asylum, who is trying to paint a picture of the garden he is sitting in. He can never find a way to completely include himself in the picture and gets caught in an infinite regression. Does this mean we can never understand the whole of reality? Maybe so, given that any postulate that we start from needs its own explanation. Any law that underlies reality ultimately needs an a priori law. This puts us in a bit of a ‘Catch 22’ situation. So, are we resigned to failure or is there a way out? Is there some fundamental level at which events have no a priori causes and we can break the infinite regression? What does it mean for an event to have no a priori cause? This means that, even with all prior knowledge, we cannot infer that this event will take place. Furthermore, if there were genuinely acausal events in this Universe, this would imply a fundamentally random element of reality that cannot be reduced to anything deterministic. This is a hugely controversial area, with various proponents of religion, science, and philosophy all having a quite contrasting set of views on this. Often people get very emotional over this question, as it has profound implications for us as human beings. Could it be that some events just don’t have first causes? The British philosopher Bertrand Russell thought so. In Russell’s famous debate with Reverend Copleston on the origin of the world, Copleston thought everything must have a cause, and therefore the world has a cause – and this cause is ultimately God himself.
Destruction ab Toto: Nothing from Something
Authors: Vedral Vlatko
Published: November 2020

The main view promoted by this book is that underlying many different aspects of reality is some form of information processing. The theory of information started rather innocently, as the result of a very specific question that Shannon considered, which was how to maximize the capacity of communication between two users. Shannon showed that all we need is to associate a probability to an event, and defined a metric that allowed you to quantify the information content of that event. Interestingly, because of its simplicity and intuitiveness, Shannon’s views have been successfully applied to many other problems. We can view biological information through Shannon’s theory as a communication in time (where the objective of natural selection is to propagate the gene pool into the future). But it is not only that communications and biology are trying to optimize information. In physics, systems arrange themselves so that entropy is maximized, and this entropy is quantified in the same way as Shannon’s information. We encounter the same form of information in other phenomena. Financial speculation is also governed by the same concept of entropy, and optimizing your profit is the same problem as optimizing your channel capacity. In social theory, society is governed by its interconnectedness or correlation and this correlation itself is quantified by Shannon’s entropy. Underlying all these phenomena was the classical Boolean logic where events had clear outcomes, either yes or no, on or off, and so on. In our most accurate description of reality, given by quantum theory, we know that bits of information are an approximation to a much more precise concept of qubits. Qubits, unlike bits, can exist in a multitude of states, any combination of yes and no, on and off. Shannon’s information theory has been extended to account for quantum theory and the resulting framework, quantum information theory, has already shown a number of advantages. The greater power of quantum information theory is manifested in more secure cryptographic protocols, a completely new order of computing, quantum teleportation, and a number of other applications that were simply not possible according to Shannon’s view.
Tropical Forests Natural History, Diversity, and Potentiality as Theatres of Human Adaptation and Negotiation
Authors: Roberts Patrick
Published: November 2020

The above quote by the German poet, novelist, and painter Herman Hesse highlights the cultural significance of forests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western culture as the ‘natural’ contrast to growing urban populations and industrial expansion. Hesse’s focus on the ‘ancient’ element of these environments is certainly valid in a tropical context, given that tropical forests are some of the oldest land-based environments on the planet, existing for over one thousand times longer than Homo sapiens (Upchurch and Wolf, 1987; Davis et al., 2005; Ghazoul and Shiel, 2010; Couvreur et al., 2011). This antiquity also makes them one of the richest and most diverse terrestrial ecosystems on the planet (Whitmore, 1998; Ghazoul and Shiel, 2010). Tropical rainforests, for example, contain over half of the world’s existing plant, animal, and insect species (Wilson, 1988). A significant portion of the developed world’s diet today originated in tropical forests—including staples such as squash and yams, spices such as black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and sugar cane, and fruits including bananas, coconuts, avocados, mangoes, and tomatoes (Iriarte et al., 2007; Roberts et al., 2017a). Tropical forests also often provide ample freshwater for their inhabitants. However, despite popular perceptions of forests, and specifically tropical forests, as uniform, they are, in fact, highly variable across space and time. In tropical evergreen rainforests productivity is often primarily allocated to wood products, meaning that edible plants and animals for human subsistence have been considered lacking, or at least more difficult to extract, relative to more open tropical forest formations (Whitmore, 1998; Ghazoul and Shiel, 2010). Similarly, while evergreen tropical rainforests generally receive significant precipitation and freshwater, seasonally dry tropical forests are subject to sub-annual periods of aridity. Therefore, while archaeologists and anthropologists have tended to see ‘tropical forest’ as a uniform environmental block, it is important to explore the diversity within this category.
Tropical Bounties The Emergence of Tropical Forest Agricultures
Authors: Roberts Patrick
Published: November 2020

The transition from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Holocene (c. 12–8 ka) witnessed increasingly intensive human manipulation of plant and animal resources that resulted in genetic and phenotypic changes in various species as part of what has been termed the ‘origins of agriculture’. This process has been cited as one of the most significant ecological occurrences in human evolutionary history (Bocquet-Appel, 2011; Larson et al., 2014), representing a shift in human interactions with the natural world with global environmental ramifications (Fuller et al., 2011a; Boivin et al., 2016). Martin Jones (2007) has also discussed the cultural and social changes resulting from the new spatial and practical proximity of domesticated plants and animals that made them effectively ‘family’ or ‘kin’. The tropics have, for a long time, been left out of discussions of this process, with poor preservation conditions considered unlikely to produce incipient crop or animal domesticate remains and some even arguing that the wet and acidic soils of tropical forests were too poor to support agriculture (Meggers, 1971, 1977, 1987; Grollemund et al., 2015). Nevertheless, emerging datasets from Melanesia, North and Central America, South America, and Africa are demonstrating that cultivation and, to a lesser extent, herding practices also emerged indigenously in these regions and, in some cases, perhaps as early as the traditional focus point of the ‘Fertile Crescent’ in the Near East. Moreover, these examples are having significant impacts on the way we conceptualize the emergence of ‘agriculture’ and the adaptive and social changes required (Denham et al., 2004, 2009; Barton and Denham, 2011). Here, I explore the distinctive nature of early agricultures in tropical forest environments. I also evaluate their predecessors in the form of human management including forest burning to stimulate faunal and floral growth and diversity, the deliberate movement of faunal species into tropical forest environments, and the emergence of arboriculture cultivation. In doing so, I document how the species and strategies involved in these processes differ globally with varying tropical forest formations, ranging from a focus on long-term forest interaction, drainage system construction, and tree-cropping in Melanesia (Denham et al., 2003; Denham, 2011) to diverse hunting, fishing, and cultivation strategies in theAmazon (Roosevelt, 2000; Meggers and Miller, 2002).
Kinship, history, and descent
Authors: Ray Keith , Thomas Julian
Published: November 2020

For traditional societies, by which we mean those peoples whose worlds are permeated by kin relations and obligations, and among whom past societies such as those of Neolithic Britain are mostly to be counted, the most precious inheritance is knowledge. Inherited knowledge is of many kinds, the most overt of which is instrumental knowledge—how to make a rope from fibre, where to look for and how to utilize medicinal plants, and so on. Alongside this, however, is a plurality of less obvious but equally fundamental knowledges that include kinds of behavioural knowledge (in the sense of customs and prohibitions, for example), forms of discursive awareness (how to negotiate the social world; what to recall and recount as story and history), and understandings of esoteric beliefs and their concomitant ‘necessary’ actions. Collective cultural and customary knowledge, then, is a resource that makes possible the sustaining and renewal of human social relationships through time. There is a modern tendency to see history as a progression of tableaux, or a montage of scenes, a cavalcade; or, as we noted in Chapter 1, an ascent through measurable social evolutionary stages from relative cultural simplicity towards a present of multilayered complexity. In the modern world, history is expressed in the form of narratives that have been standardized and systematically ordered, and published in a diversity of media, as well as being contested by alternative perspectives in print and online. This contrasts with the way that knowledge and tradition are conveyed in societies that lack written literature, which generally takes the form of oral transmission. However, they are also expressed and fixed (however fleetingly) and transformed through the use of material items and material culture, including the built environment. For such societies, history may take the form of a shared memory of significant events, but these are always experienced and mediated through the filters of social relationships of dominance and subordination, and of kinship. This latter is composed of the shifting elements of genealogy, lineage, and descent, although any or all of these may be fictional in character, and open to a degree of manipulation.
If You Torture the Data Long Enough
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: November 2020

I recently received an e-mail that offered me a way to automate my research: Dear Professor Smith, We would like to introduce you to [our] brand new research tool . . . , ready to automate your empirical research basing on official statistical time series databases. [Our software] has been designed to explore and discover new exciting economic correlations directly from your desktop. No extra software required, no need to crawl thousands of databases manually. You’ll be up and running in no time your first big data project. The e-mail went on to boast that their software will calculate “correlation coefficients with millions of statistical time series,” “identify unexpected interdependences,” and “find new insights.” The creative grammar was one thing. More disheartening was their assumption that I wanted to sift through literally trillions of correlations looking for unexpected patterns. An unexpected pattern has no logical basis—and I am skeptical of patterns that defy logic. Statistical tests assume that researchers have well-defined theories in mind and gather appropriate data to test their theories. This company assumed that I was eager and willing to pay a substantial amount of money to work the other way around. Look at every possible correlation—not caring whether they made sense or not—and report the correlations that turn out to be the most statistically persuasive. It is a sign of the times, but not an inspiring sign. Many important scientific theories started out as efforts to explain observed patterns. For example, during the 1800s,most biologists believed that parental characteristics were averaged together to determine the characteristics of their offspring. For example, a child’s height is an average of the father’s and mother’s heights, modified by environmental influences. However, Gregor Mendel discovered something quite different in his experiments with pea plants. Mendel was born in Austria in 1822 and grew up on his family’s farm. His parents expected him to take over the farm, but Mendel was an excellent student and became an Augustinian monk at a monastery known for its scientific library and research. Perhaps because of his farming roots, Mendel conducted meticulous studies of tens of thousands of pea plants grown in the monastery’s gardens over an eight-year period.
Preventative and paediatric dentistry
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

The child patient can be a challenging and daunting proposition for the junior dentist and dental student. Whilst children can be anxious, unco­operative, and unpredictable, they also present an extremely rewarding opportunity, which, if managed correctly, may go on to influence their healthcare experiences for the rest of their lives. Excellent behavioural management of the child patient (and their parents!) is fundamental to a successful clinical and patient- reported outcome. Aside from possible behavioural issues, paediatric patients may pre­sent with a series of unique clinical presentations that require additional skills and knowledge above and beyond those required for adult pa­tients. Differences in the micro- and macro- structures of primary and permanent teeth, coupled with variations in eruption dates, lead to an evolving mixed dentition that can lead to some difficult diagnostic and treatment planning scenarios. Furthermore, dental anxiety and the pre­ponderance for dento- alveolar trauma in children and young adults may exacerbate the patient management of an already complex situation. Prevention is central to paediatric dentistry. However, whilst signifi­cant progression has occurred in some areas, poor dietary habits and suboptimal oral hygiene regimes remain significant concerns for the pro­fession, with large numbers of dental extractions still performed under general anaesthesia each year. Key topics include: ● Tooth anatomy and eruption patterns ● Abnormalities of structure and form ● Prevention and management of dental caries, including pulp therapy ● Dental trauma ● Dental extractions and space management ● Behavioural management ● Safeguarding ● Pharmacological management.
Head and neck syndromes
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

A comparatively small chapter, syndromes of the head and neck are gen­erally rare. It is unlikely that the majority of clinicians will diagnose or treat patients affected by many of the syndromes discussed. However, it is highly likely that clinical findings or presenting features may find their way into undergraduate academic examinations. Most syndromes are presented in the literature as a specific list of associated clinical findings, and many are still referred to eponymously. Some of the syndromes with oral manifestations can also be associated with more sinister conditions and, as such, a broad knowledge of the common syndromes with orofacial manifestations is important. It is highly advised to read the chapter on syndromes of the head and neck in the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Dentistry. Key topics include: ● Syndromes associated with hypodontia ● Syndromes affecting orofacial development ● Syndromes linked with gastrointestinal conditions ● Syndromes subsequent to infections.
Digital inclusion
Authors: Baecker Ronald M.
Published: November 2020

J. C. R. Licklider, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay optimistically and exuberantly imagined how computers could better the lives of people. Much of this has come to pass. The Internet supports learning by ‘students’ at all levels. Information on laws, procedures, diseases, and medical care may be found on the web. The Internet now provides the easiest, or in some cases the only, way to pay bills or order items such as books, groceries, and even clothing. It is a means of communication with family, friends, individuals one would like to meet, individuals with whom one could share insights, and potential employers. Music, films, and other means of entertainment stream to our digital devices. This implies that those for whom digital technology is not available are at a disadvantage. The gap between the technology-haves and the technology-have-nots became known in the 1990s as a digital divide. The concept is nuanced; we can speak of availability or scarcity of hardware, such as personal computers (PCs) and mobile phones; of infrastructure such as cellular networks; of communications bandwidth that enables a smooth media viewing experience; of expertise in using the technology; of commitment to its use; and of engagement in the process. Some only consume information; others contribute their ideas via methods such as blogging and tweeting. Yet a better way to describe digital technology widely accessible is the goal of social inclusion, to allow all individuals, regardless of socioeconomic status, location, race, gender, or ability or disability, to take advantage of the benefits of modern computing and telecommunications. To have terminology that is even more evocative, we shall use the more modern and descriptive term of digital inclusion. This has been defined by the International Telecommunications Union as ‘empowering people through information and communication technologies (ICTs)’. The term ‘people’ is meant here to imply all people throughout the world. This chapter will first examine the digital divide between the haves and the have-nots (often the rich and the poor) within several nations. Examples of the benefits of digital inclusion will be cited.
What Lies Beneath: Carving on the Underside of Aztec Sculpture
Authors: Brittenham Claudia
Published: November 2020

Not all ancient art was made to be seen. Consider, for example, a sculpture of a rattlesnake, today in the British Museum. Its visible body is smooth and simple, coiled into three highly polished circuits. The mouth is daubed with red paint, open to reveal fierce fangs and an elongated forked tongue; the body terminates in thirteen rounded rattles. In between, the only decoration is the varied coloration of the gleaming stone. On the underside, the carving is far more elaborate. The rattles and then the ventral scales of the serpent are lavishly detailed as they spiral upwards. At regular intervals, dots of red pigment have been added to these hidden coils, ornamenting the rattlesnake’s belly. The three-dimensionality of this sculpture challenges display; photographs, casts, or ingeniously rigged mirrors can simultaneously make both the top and bottom of the sculpture visible for modern audiences, but it is likely that in Aztec times the serpent’s coils were invisible, only hinted at by the rounded forms at the base of the sculpture. One of over one hundred Aztec sculptures with documented carving on its underside, this coiled serpent was not an isolated caprice but part of a coherent and meaningful practice. Much ancient art was difficult to see in its original context. From the dedicatory inscription on the back of a Neo-Assyrian sculpture such as the Lamassu in Chicago’s Oriental Institute to the surface of the Column of Trajan spiraling out of sight or the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, ancient art frequently thwarted the gaze. Many objects alternated between moments of visibility and concealment: displayed briefly, but crucially, at a funeral ceremony before being sealed within a tomb, for example; or stored in darkness between moments of exposure in procession or performance. Other images ended up hidden after complex histories of reuse and recycling. Still other examples hovered at the edge of a gradient of diminishing visibility—possible to see, perhaps, if only one’s gaze were powerful enough.
The Practice of Short-Term Climate Prediction
Authors: van den Dool Huug
Published: November 2020

While previous chapters were about methods and their formal backgrounds, we here present a description of the process of making a forecast and the protocol surrounding it. A look in the kitchen. It is difficult to find literature on the subject, presumably because a real-time forecast is not a research project and potential authors (the forecasters) work in an ever-changing environment and may never feel the time is right to write an overview of what they are doing. Moreover, it may be very difficult to describe real-time forecasts and present a complete picture. Nearly all of the material presented here specifically applies to the seasonal prediction made at the NWS in the USA, but should be relevant elsewhere. A real-time operational forecast setting lacks the logic and methodical approach one should strive for in science. This is for many reasons. There is pressure, time schedules are to be met, input data sets could be missing or incorrect, and one can feel the suspense, excitement and disappointment associated with a forecast in real time. There are habits that are carried over from years past—forecasters are partly set in their ways or find it difficult to make major changes in mid-stream. The interaction with the user influences the forecast, and/or the way the information is conveyed. Psychology enters the forecast. Assumptions about what users want or understand do play a role. Generally speaking a forecast is thus a mix of what is scientifically possible on the one hand and what is presumably useful to the customer on the other. The CPC/NWS forecasts are moreover for the general user, not one user specifically. Users for short-term climate forecasts range from the highly sophisticated (energy traders, selling of weather derivatives, hydrologists) via the (wo)man in the street to entertainment. The seasonal forecast has been around a long time in the USA. Jerome Namias started in-house seasonal forecasts at the NWS in 1958. After 15 years of testing, his successor Donald Gilman made the step to public release in 1973.
Recuperating Ruins
Authors: Hauser Kitty
Published: November 2020

As has been well documented, images of the British landscape performed an important propagandist role in the Second World War, particularly after the fall of France in June 1940, when Britain faced the prospect of both aerial attack and all-out invasion by air or sea. In what Angus Calder has called ‘the myth of the Blitz’ the nation’s landscape, framed by war, played the role of backdrop, target, refuge, dream, and prize. An advertisement for F. J. Harvey Darton’s books English Fabric, Alibi Pilgrimage, and The Marches of Wessex, which appeared in Country Life in August 1940, made a familiar association when it asserted that at ‘no other time in our long island history has the spirit of the English Countryside made such an appeal to us as now’. In illustrated publications like Country Life and Picture Post, the landscape was repeatedly presented in its most idyllic form of ‘Beautiful Britain’ as—explicitly or implicitly—‘what we are fighting for’. An article entitled ‘The Beauty of Britain’ which appeared in Picture Post on 22 June 1940, for example, included picturesque shots of hay-harvesting in the Lake District, captioned ‘The Dream Men Carry With Them’, and a lake in Caernarvonshire, captioned ‘The Peace That Will Come Again’. ‘This is Britain’, ran the accompanying text. ‘This is the soil we are fighting for.’ Pre-war anxieties that the distinctive characteristics of the British landscape were disappearing beneath a tide of modernization were largely eclipsed under the immediate impact of the threat of enemy bomb attacks. For the sake of the rhetorical power of these morale-boosting images, it was imperative to stress the continuing presence of that which was in fact feared by many to be disappearing. This development did not mark a great U-turn so much as a change of emphasis. There was a continuity of rhetoric, as we shall see, for Britain under threat of modernization could easily be rewritten as a country under threat of aerial bombardment or invasion. And by relocating the threat in the war machine of a nation—Nazi Germany—that seemed to embody the forces of an aggressive mechanization, this was not hard to do.
Culture, ecology, and pigs from the 5th to the 3rd millennium BC around the Fertile Crescent
Authors: Grigson Caroline
Published: November 2020

By the 5th millennium BC people in the Middle East were dependent for their meat on four domestic ungulates: sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, all considerably smaller than their wild ancestors (Bökönyi 1977; Uerpmann 1979; Flannery, K.V. 1983; Laffer 1983; Meadow 1983; Stampfli 1983; Grigson 1989; Ducos 1993; Horwitz & Tchernov 1998; Vigne & Buitenhuis 1999; Peters et al. 2000; Ervynck et al. 2001; and many others). It is uncertain whether equids had been domesticated at this date, but their remains are so few in most sites of the 5th, 4th, and 3rd millennia that they can be discounted in any discussion relating to the domestic economy. On the small number of sites where their remains are plentiful they are thought to be derived from wild onagers or wild asses (Uerpmann 1986). In these three millennia the numerical proportion of pig remains compared with those of other domestic artiodactyls varies from site to site. In view of the later pig prohibitions of Islam and Judaism it is of particular interest to know, for the prehistory of the area, when and where pigs were present or absent, and if absent whether this can already be accounted for by any developing social or cultural attitude, in the millennia before the establishment of these religions, or whether it must be explained by simpler economic or environmental factors. All dates in the present work are based on uncalibrated radiocarbon years BC, simply because even when radiocarbon dates for the sites are available (which is by no means always the case), many have not been published in calibrated form. The period studied in the present work starts with the later pottery cultures of the 5th millennium BC which are usually designated as Early Chalcolithic (Late Halaf, Amuq E, and Ubaid 2 and 3) although in the southern Levant most authorities refer to the contemporary Wadi Rabah culture as the Late Neolithic. The 4th millennium is the period of the Chalcolithic (or Late Chalcolithic), typically the Ghassoul-Beersheva culture of the southern Levant and the Uruk and Late Ubaid periods in Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and south-eastern Turkey.
Age estimation of wild boar based on molariform mandibular tooth development and its application to seasonality at the Mesolithic site of Ringkloster, Denmark
Authors: Carter Richard , Magnell Ola
Published: November 2020

Age estimation based on the dentition of animal remains is one of the most important methods used for analysis of the demography of past as well as contemporary animal populations by zooarchaeologists and wild game biologists (Wagenknecht 1967; Silver 1969; Morris 1972; Wilson et al. 1982). By constructing age profiles from faunal remains it is possible to study hunting of wild boar and pig husbandry in past societies (Higham 1967a; Rolett & Chiu 1994; Vigne et al. 2000a; Magnell 2005a). Age estimation can also be used for assessing seasonal occupation of settlements and slaughtering of pigs (Legge & Rowley-Conwy 1988; Rowley-Conwy 1993, 1998; Ervynck 1997). Several contributions to this volume provide good examples of how different aspects of the past relationship between humans and pigs can be understood from estimations of age. Age estimations based on tooth development have several advantages over ageing methods based on tooth eruption and wear. Experiments with undernourished pigs have shown that the tooth development is less affected by environmental factors than tooth eruption (McCance et al. 1961). A problem with age estimation of domestic animals based on tooth eruption is that the ages at eruption are known to vary between different breeds (Habermehl 1961; Silver 1969; Reiland 1978; Bull & Payne 1982). The rate of tooth wear is also variable between, and within, different populations as a result of several factors such as variation in tooth morphology, eruption, coarseness, and abrasives in the diet (Healy & Ludwig 1965; Grant 1978, 1982; Deniz & Payne 1982; Magnell 2005b). However, tooth development seems to vary less between different populations. In cattle, roe deer, and red deer no consistent differences between various breeds/populations or between males and females have been noted in tooth development (Brown et al. 1960: 27; Carter 2001a). An advantage with age estimation based on tooth development is that the method considers several definable stages in the formation of all molariform teeth. Because the method is based on several characteristics in the dentition it is possible to give a very accurate assessment of dental maturity and the age of a specimen.
Geothermal energy
Authors: Batchelor Tony , Curtis Robin
Published: November 2020

The term ‘geothermal energy’ describes all forms of heat stored within the Earth. The energy is emitted from the core, mantle, and crust, with a large proportion coming from nuclear reactions in the mantle and crust. It is estimated that the total heat content of the Earth, above an assumed average surface temperature of 15◦C, is of the order of 12.6×1024 MJ, with the crust storing 5.4×1021 MJ (Armstead, 1983). Based on the simple principle that the ‘deeper you go the hotter it gets’, geothermal energy is continuously available anywhere on the planet. The average geothermal gradient is about 2.5–3◦C per 100 metres but this figure varies considerably; it is greatest at the edges of the tectonic plates and over hot spots–where much higher temperature gradients are present and where electricity generation from geothermal energy has been developed since 1904. Geothermal energy is traditionally divided into high, medium, and low temperature resources. Typically, temperatures in excess of 150◦C can be used for electricity generation and process applications. Medium temperature resources in the range 40◦C to 150◦ C form the basis for ‘direct use’ i.e. heating only, applications such as space heating, absorption cooling, bathing (balneology), process industry, horticulture, and aquaculture. The low-temperature resources obtainable at shallow depth, up to 100–300 metres below ground surface, are tapped with heat pumps to deliver heating, cooling, and hot water to buildings. The principles of extracting geothermal energy, in applications ranging from large scale electrical power plants to smallscale domestic heating, are illustrated in Fig. 3.1. Geothermal energy can be utilized over a temperature range from a few degrees to several hundred degrees, even at super critical temperatures. The high temperature resources, at depth, are typically ‘mined’ and are depleted over a localized area by extracting the in situ groundwaters and, possibly, re-injecting more water to replenish the fluids and extract more heat. Although natural thermal recovery occurs, this does not happen on an economically useful timescale.
Biological solar energy
Authors: Barber James
Published: November 2020

Oil, gas, and coal provide us with most of the energy needed to power our technologies, heat our homes, and produce the wide range of chemicals and materials that support everyday life. Ultimately the quantities of fossil fuels available to us today will dwindle, and then what? Even before that we are faced with the problem of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the consequences of global warming (Climate Change, 2001). To address these issues it is appropriate to remind ourselves that fossil fuel reserves are derived from the process of photosynthesis. Plants, algae, and certain types of bacteria have learnt how to capture sunlight efficiently and convert it into organic molecules, the building blocks of all living organisms. It is estimated that photosynthesis produces more than 100 billion tons of dry biomass annually, which would be equivalent to a hundred times the weight of the total human population on our planet at the present time, and equal to about 100 TJ of stored energy. In this chapter we emphasize the enormity of the energy/carbon dioxide problem that we face within the coming decades and discuss the contributions that could be made by biofuels and developing new technologies based on the successful principles of photosynthesis. We will particularly emphasize the possibility of exploiting the vast amounts of solar energy available to extract hydrogen directly from water. The success of this energy generating and storage system stems from the fact that the raw materials and power needed to synthesise biomass are available in almost unlimited amounts: sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. At the heart of the reaction is the splitting of water by sunlight into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen (a ‘waste product’ of the synthesis) is released into the atmosphere where it is available for us to breathe and to use for burning our fuels. The ‘hydrogen’ is not normally released into the atmosphere as H2, but instead is combined with carbon dioxide to make organic molecules of various types.
River-Drift Men and Cave Men
Authors: O'Connor Anne
Published: November 2020

British researchers often compared their river-drift tools to French finds. The gravel pits of St Acheul, rich in hand-axes, were a popular choice. Another was the cave of Le Moustier, known for its scrapers. By the end of the nineteenth century, British tools might be called ‘Mousterian’, ‘Acheulian’, or ‘Chellean’. These labels are associated with the French prehistorian Gabriel de Mortillet, and it is often assumed that de Mortillet’s classification clarified a hazy image of the British Palaeolithic sequence. There are two problems with this assumption. First, the picture of river-drift tools gained from Chapter 3 suggests that British researchers cannot be compared to a sponge, waiting to soak up Continental classifications. They did use these French labels, but they did not necessarily adopt all de Mortillet’s beliefs as well. Second, researchers other than de Mortillet were building sequences on the Continent in the nineteenth century, and de Mortillet was aware of their research when he developed his Chellean, Acheulian, and Mousterian epochs. So were British researchers, but they were also encouraged by these Continental findings to make another, more fundamental, division of the British implements. One question that had puzzled British researchers was the connection between tools from their caves and those from their river-drifts; it was dificult to link the isolated pockets of cave sediments to the drifts lying in river valleys. Another question, closely related, concerned the term ‘Palaeolithic’: what tools and what time-period did it encompass? The geologists from Chapter 2 used their sequences of bones, river drifts, and glaciers to answer the first question; but answers to both were also found in the bones and tools of France and Belgium (Map 1 gives the location of the major sites mentioned in the text).
Conclusion
Authors: O'Connor Anne
Published: November 2020

Ideas about the British Palaeolithic and its connections to geological time changed enormously between the days of the early eighteenth century, when Bagford wondered whether the implement found by Conyers at Gray’s Inn Lane had been left by an Ancient Briton near the bones of a Roman elephant, and the century covered in this book. In the hundred years that followed the acceptance of human antiquity—between c.1860 and c.1960— similar tools were scrutinized by many other interested eyes; they were labelled and classified, and their age and meaning were vigorously debated. In the present study, I have provided a picture of changing ideas about British Palaeolithic tools and their place in geological time, and have also tried to recover the excitement of the arguments that swept through this century of geological research and its little-known relations with archaeology. Views of the past were not built up by dispassionate authorities, coolly observing the range of available and expanding data; the gaze of each individual was restricted by different questions and expectations that encouraged them to describe, interpret, and defend different patterns in the ancient stone tools of Britain. It is now time, before closing this chapter on the history of British Palaeolithic research, to stand back and take a broader look at some of the reasons for these differing beliefs and for their varying success. But first, a recapitulation is offered of the major developments. In this summary, presented below, the Gray’s Inn Lane implement is followed through time to highlight the changes in perception of the Palaeolithic. During the latter part of the tale, this pear-shaped ‘hand-axe’ found by Conyers is accompanied by the Clactonian industry, which has supplied a more familiar anchor point for the shifting interpretations described in previous chapters. Human antiquity was widely accepted in learned circles after they heard the famous papers of 1859. But it was a few years more before the hand-axe from Gray’s Inn Lane became described as the contemporary of many extinct prehistoric animals and assigned to post-submergence, post-glacial times. The work of geologists was central to the task of placing such implements more precisely in Britain’s distant past. Chapters 1 and 2 described how geologists had been attracted in increasing numbers to the once-unpopular drifts and the bones and tools that they preserved.
Biblical Archaeology
Authors: Diaz-Andreu Margarita
Published: November 2020

The increase of interest that the study of ancient monuments had raised, mainly from the eighteenth century, attracted many individuals to the classical lands. There, as explained in the last chapter, a search for the roots of Western civilization and of the flourishing nineteenth-century empires took place. In addition, however, in some of those countries—mainly in Egypt and Mesopotamia—this concern would not be the only one which boosted scholars’ interests. These lands had witnessed some of the accounts related in the Christian Holy Book, the Bible, and therefore the search for classical antiquity came together with—and was sometimes overshadowed by—research on the biblical past. Work focused first on Egypt, then on Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and parts of Iran), and then moved to other areas: Palestine, and to a certain degree Lebanon and Turkey. After the first travellers who managed to overcome the difficulties of access imposed by the Ottoman Empire, there followed diplomats in the area working for the various imperial countries as well as more specialized explorers, including geographers and antiquarians. Later on, especially in Palestine, many of those who looked for ancient remains were in one way or another connected with religious institutions. Therefore, imperialism will not be the only factor to consider in the development of archaeology in the area described in this chapter, for religion also had an essential role. As explained in the following pages, these were overlapping, complementary forces. The influence of religion on the archaeology of the biblical lands can be seen both in the religious beliefs of those who undertook it, as well as, more importantly, in how it had an effect on research. The aim of most of the archaeologists working in the biblical land—especially in the core area of Palestine and Lebanon—was to illustrate, confirm, or challenge the biblical account, and they were not interested in any period dated either before or after the events related in the Holy Book. Thus, an interest in the Islamic archaeology of the area would only appear at the end of the period dealt with in this book (Ettinghausen 1951; Vernoit 1997: 4–5), and pre-biblical archaeology would develop later.