Neural network analysis for predicting metrics of fragmented laminar artifacts: a case study from MPPNB sites in the Southern Levant.

This study was aimed at introducing a new method for predicting the original metrics of fragmented standardized artifacts, specifically of flint blades from the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (10,200/100-9,500/400 cal B.P.) in the Southern Levant.

Exploring the lack of articular ends at the Middle Pleistocene site of Qesem Cave, Israel.

Biased skeletal part representation is a key element for making inferences about transport decisions, carcass procurement, and use patterns in anthropogenic accumulations. In the absence of destructive taphonomic processes, it is often assumed that the abundance of different anatomical portions represents selective transport and discard patterns of human groups. Because body parts may be transported for specific products such as meat, marrow or grease, a pattern that usually attracts attention in many archaeological sites is the low proportions of appendicular epiphyses.

When half is more than the whole: Wheat domestication syndrome reconsidered.

Two opposing models currently dominate Near Eastern plant domestication research. The model depicts a knowledge-based, conscious, geographically centered, rapid single-event domestication, while the model emphasizes a noncentered, millennia-long process based on unconscious dynamics. The latter model relies, in part, on quantitative depictions of diachronic changes (in archaeological remains) in proportions of spikelet shattering to nonshattering, towards full dominance of the nonshattering (domesticated) phenotypes in cultivated cereal populations.

Estimating temperatures of heated Lower Palaeolithic flint artefacts.

Production of stone artefacts using pyro-technology is known from the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and the Levant, and the Middle Stone Age in Africa. However, determination of temperatures to which flint artefacts were exposed is impeded by the chemical and structural variability of flint. Here we combine Raman spectroscopy and machine learning to build temperature-estimation models to infer the degree of pyro-technological control effected by inhabitants of the late Lower Palaeolithic (Acheulo-Yabrudian) site of Qesem Cave, Israel.