Methodology and Archaeometry

Stable isotope analyses have become more common in recent years to address diverse issues such as human and animal diets, movement and mobility, climate and ecology. However, like any method, the ability to interpret the results of stable isotope analyses is tightly linked with the specific research questions, sample quality, and sample size. In this presentation I describe stable isotope work we have conducted as part of an international project on Neolithic domestic animal management practices in Dalmatia. The ultimate goal of the project was to create multiple lines of evidence that would link with one another to create a mosaic of information of Neolithic subsistence and land use practices through time. We worked on several different isotopic systems in bone, teeth, and seeds, including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, strontium, and sulpher. Here I discuss results that are changing the ways we understand human-animal interactions during this period, along with those that remain inconclusive or where our original project design was flawed.

The application of techniques and methods from the Natural Sciences (e.g. Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Biology, etc.) to the characterization of the material culture and raw materials related to current societies has given birth to a new field of study known as "ethnoarchaeometry". The combination of both disciplines, i.e. archaeometry and ethnoarchaeology, has promoted a deeper understanding of the ways in which the technological choices made by artisans throughout the diverse stages involved in the production are embedded in the multiple dimensions of materiality. On the one side, archaeometry provides effective analytical routines that allow us to obtain a large amount of data related to the technology associated with archaeological materials. On the other side, ethnography provides us with interpretative frames that are useful to approach the social and cultural dynamics underlying this rich corpus of data. In this lecture, we are going to address the synergies between archaeometry and ethnoarchaeology. Through various case studies related to different types of analysis, we will see how this discipline has been used, on the one hand, to test and improve the archaeological methodologies applied in the study of the materiality associated with past societies. On the other hand, we will show how it has been also used to improve the theoretical frameworks and our interpretations of such materiality in order to address its social and cultural dimensions. The main objective of this talk is, therefore, to provide a general overview of the role that ethnoarchaeometry has been playing since it was first implemented in archaeological studies fifty years ago.

The process of direct (bloomery) iron production, which was used from prehistory till the Middle Ages, often produces a large amount of waste. Dependent on the production process and the procedures used, several categories of waste are likely to be present on the archaeological sites. The general categories of waste can be iron slag from different procedures of the production process, such as iron ore smelting or primary/secondary smithing, and the remains of technical ceramics from smelting furnaces and/or smithing installations. The methodological approach to primary documentation of these finds must be organized concerning the character of standard, mainly destructive procedures used for further analysis and interpretation, as well as a cost-effective way of meaningfully documenting large amounts of metallurgical waste that often occurs on sites with the iron production remains. The authors will present the primary documentation methods used in the treatment of in situ smelting furnaces and other metallurgical waste from several sites that can be regarded as iron production and processing workshops. All of the sites are situated in the Podravina region and are dated to late antiquity and early middle ages (4 – 8/9th century AD). The main objective for the selection of documenting procedures was to gain an optimal level of output information while securing a low level of data loss. The chosen approach allows the further application of various analytical methods, reconstructive modelling and visualizations. Authors will elaborate on the methods used, analysis employed and information gained, with an emphasis on photographic documentation and further digital processing such as image-based 3d modelling.

Earth Resistance Tomography (ERT) has the capacity to model sediment depths to bedrock. However, its use at archaeology cave site investigations has been limited though it has the potential to inform the archaeological excavation planning process by producing sediment depth estimates. A GeoScan RM85 earth resistance meter was utilized for all surveys in this study which is significant given it is an instrument common to near-surface archaeological investigations as opposed to the dedicated ERT systems typical of geology remote sensing surveys or groundwater testing. A pole-pole array was used in each of these surveys after early testing at the Bukovac Cave site near Lokve proved the data collection for this array worked well in caves as compared to the more common Wenner and Schlumberger arrays with a GeoScan instrument. Development of the pole-pole ERT survey methodology at cave sites in Croatia continued in 2014 and 2015 at the Velika Pećina near Kličevica and Romuald's Cave sites. Though these surveys proved unsuccessful concerning the reliability of the sediment depth estimates as compared to the ground-truthing from traditional excavations, much information was gained in about field methodology. In 2017, the Romuald’s Cave site in Istria was again surveyed though field methodology was modified to a very high density survey design (using 0.1 m probe spacing instead of the 0.5 m probe spacing from earlier surveys). The high data density survey produced reliable results as compared to observed sediment depth from excavations within the cave. The authors present the development of their field methodology with the ERT technique using common archaeological geophysics equipment which has produced reliable results in recent years. Primarily, the method employed with the ERT technique involves very high-density surveys within the (often) limited space available inside Paleolithic cave sites.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are information technologies which started their life in the 1980s and have since then been applied for the digitalization of printed texts, as well as their editing, analysis, storage, and prediction. Today they are applied, along with the Computer Vision (CV) algorithms, for real-time text detection and translation. These technological breakthroughs were only recently introduced in the field of archaeology, and consequentially, epigraphy, thus replacing the text-bearing medium from paper to stone and clay. The vast improvement in technology (i.e., smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, etc.) provided researchers, as well as everybody else in the archaeological ecosystem, with the tools to access information at any given time in a matter of seconds. For example, OCR, AI, and CV enable the utilization of the photosensors of a smartphone as an input to the algorithm, whose goal is to match the photograph of an object made by the user, with the previously stored photographs and the information of the same object in the database. This alleviates the need for setting up physical info-points about epigraphs and inscriptions, which can sometimes be seen as an invasion of the archaeological site itself. Along with that, these technologies have also been used to analyze the text from epigraphs, as well as to reconstruct the inscriptions in the case of missing or damaged characters of whole parts of the inscription. This presentation will show current possibilities and features of OCR and AI methods, their application in various scenarios, such as visiting a museum or an archaeological site, but also in the inscription research and non-destructive reconstruction scenarios. As these technologies are being developed with a rapid pace, their future possibilities and usage in digital epigraphy will also be presented.

Internationality and Interdisciplinary research have become focal points in archaeology. As positive as these trends are in general, they also present new problems for projects and the (regional) management of research. Since the standards of documentation differ in different countries and even regions, internationality can cause problems, for example if researchers with different backgrounds shall document according to the standards of a national or regional authority. One solution can be the use of IT-Systems which provide the correct guidelines by default. With an interface adapted to the respective guidelines and an export-function for the completed documentation all the needed documentation can be created in one system. The benefits are obvious: the standard and quality of the documentation will rise, because archaeology, not the documentation itself, is the focus. Also the time needed for creating the documentation is reduced, which leaves the archaeologists to spend more time with the interpretation and research work. In this context, the paper shows how modern information systems can be used for quality assurance and raising standards and how they can help with simplifying international projects. It shows how an AIS (Archaeological Information System) enables different people to use their experience and working methods as effectively as possible. The example in this study is the AIS-System developed by Inari Software, which covers precisely these requirements and can be flexibly adapted to new standards and guidelines.

This presentation will be refection on 5-year work on Neolithic site Gorjani Kremenjača and changes in the perception and interpretation that the site underwent during this period. The research questions at the beginning were significantly different than those right now. The major change in research trajectory was not the results of an elaborate research plan but more a matter of circumstances. Most of the research activities, especially on a single site, is deeply embedded in the standard archaeological practices and rely heavily on poorly formulated, yet rarely challenged theoretical background. In archaeological practice, theoretical background frequently transforms into dominant, yet unconscious assumptions on scale and type of prehistoric societies and settlements. The underlying and conjoining “common ground” is simplicity. When it comes to defining habitational spaces, scales shrink significantly, and features are rarely observed through space needed for everyday life through analogy with modern villages, but instead forming some imaginary “concentrated” spaces, more resembling videogames scenery like Age of Empires. One of the reason is that archaeological trenches are usually small in size. Adding to that is another embedded assumption, that of the simple primordial society that started to evolve right around the Neolithic period. Emerging evidence of complexity vs usual evidence of simplicity urge archaeology to move from those traditional explanatory models where we created prehistoric man and his life based on the image of our simple cousin and create new ones. In this presentation, I will build my arguments around work of D. Clarke, D. Graeber and D. Wengrow on the restrictions of the archaeological/anthropological method and theory and discuss alternative approaches and ideas for better interpretation of prehistoric sites using site Gorjani Kremenjača as a case study.

The classical 19th century hermeneutic argued that one could not understand history without the intentions of the people making it. Traditionally, there are two intertwined channels how to reach the intentions to understand historical events, by a detailed study of historical conditions which acted upon the particular event, and by empathically immersing into the people's mind to 'rethink' or 'relive' the situations as closely as possible. The intentions in this sense transcend the action by connecting the past people with the present historian. Through time, the emphatic immersion was increasingly understood not as a technique only, but as ontological characteristic of the human existence. Immersing into other minds was the way how to make sense (for us) of the world in which we live or think about it. For Heidegger, understanding is not a form of cognition but the ontological existential which always creates necessary relationships between the There being (Dasein) and other people and objects in-the-world. In the 20th century historiography, the major proponent of 'history of the mind' was Robin Collingwood. Crucial is his distinction between an event and an action. The event can be explained by causal chains (e.g. X produces Y), while action can be intelligible only through the reconstruction of motives, intentions, etc. He argues that historical thinking is projecting ourselves into the past to understand past actions. In contrast, archaeologists very rarely explicitly defined empathy or 'reliving' as a way how they came to interpretations. Processual archaeology completely abolished empathy and considered it as pseudo-scientific. For processualists, it is possible to think of human reasoning only based on material evidence provided by patterns of human behaviour. The revival of empathy came with postprocessulist archaeology which in its critique of the processualist scientism turned back to some older ideas (of Collingwood and others) and revived them in new contexts. One of the best examples of such older ideas with significant impact on archaeology is William Hoskin's research of past landscapes.

In the last two decades, Slovenian archaeology benefited financially from the potential derived from large-scale infrastructure projects and increased dramatically the number of analyses performed using methods derived from natural sciences – especially increased the number of radiocarbon dates. In the same period, several research projects were conducted with the intention to supplement and interpret the opportunistically collected data. In several instances the results missed the explanatory potential of absolute dating – the results exposed the conceptual problems behind the forceful conjunction of research methods coming from natural sciences and humanities. This became dramatically evident on the epistemological level of archaeological interpretation – the use of radiocarbon dating, instead of solving several archaeological questions, created new problems. This paper will expose several examples where deeply rooted archaeological assumptions, combined with a superficial reading of data, caused manipulation with data and influenced interpretations. Presented will be cases where a planned strategy of radiocarbon dating enabled the authors to formulate a new interpretation of archaeological data, but also cases where the authors, despite the results of dating, arranged the data to support the previous (traditional) knowledge.

Ancient humans, especially the Neanderthals, were too often not so fastidious to relinquish with the remains of their activities also the manuals on how to read the mess they have left behind. Structuring, and explaining, the Middle Palaeolithic archaeological date became the obsession of numerous field archaeologist and masters of academic rhetoric. We could actually claim that a capital part of the archaeological theory was formed in the 20th century on the academic battlefields besprent with side-scrapers. Parallel to the airing of modern archaeological minds, experimental archaeology, this is the production and reproduction of (almost) convincing stone tools, was developed as a desperate attempt to enable through the material action to obtain a glimpse into the ancient mind. Doing and using primitive technology boosted researchers’ confidences, but the development of academic bushcrafts aided mostly to the understanding of ancient human adaptability to chaotic environmental variability. Only rarely, it triggered a retroactive re-assessment of standard methodologies of field research or helped the researchers to address the things they did not find. More than two decades ago, we attempted to manufacture (as accurately as possible) many Middle Palaeolithic looking like stone tools. However, instead of focusing on the process, we will bring forward in this presentation, the interpretation of the debris, of the waste, produced during this process. It will not only help us to assume what we are missing with methodologically modern excavations, but it will also create a framework for the re-assessment of archaeological data from older excavations. Behaving (almost) like a Neanderthal will help us to assume what we are missing when looking at archaeological finds produced by Neanderthals, discovered, and published by generations of Homo sapiens.

On the territory of Ukraine, several dozen log-boats were found, which can be dated to the medieval period. Most of these findings are not well researched and were found by accident. Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of finds and interest in their studying. However, the data of the discovered finds is not complete and poorly introduced into the scientific environment. The medieval written sources are fragmentary, and therefore don't give a complete picture of the features of log-boats construction in mentioned lands. The most effective method for studying the traditions of making log-boats is to carry out experiments by comparing the archaeological and ethnographic evidence. During the 2019 and 2020, three experiments on the manufacture of log-boats based on archaeological materials were carried out in Ivano-Frankivsk. This paper will present the theoretical basis, the implementation of experiments, and obtained results. The experiments included the hollowing out of the boats and their further processing, which included a steaming of the sides and "sewing" of several rows of the borts. Different ways of turning (rotating) the logs, using human power and primitive levers were tested as well. Two methods of steaming borts, so-called "Finnish" and ethnographic will also be shown.

Although the Neolithic of the eastern part of Croatia has been extensively researched since the latter part of the 19th century, relatively little is known about the subsistence strategies of the contemporary populations inhabiting the area. While the eastern Adriatic coast has yielded large quantities of data on the exploitation of animals throughout prehistory, archaeofaunal studies from Slavonian sites are rare. The analysis of animal bone assemblages from the Late Neolithic Sopot culture site Gorjani-Kremenjača may therefore begin to shed some light on the matter. The site lies in the vicinity of Đakovo and its excavation in the recent years uncovered remnants of burned rectangular structures, while geomagnetic survey indicated a complex settlement with a layout of residential features, ditches and palisades. According to pottery assemblage and 14C dates, the site belongs to Sopot culture period (5016-4486 cal BP). Preliminary archaeozoological analysis reveals animal-based subsistence economy with cattle being the most abundant taxa, followed by pigs and sporadic remains of caprines, canids and wild ungulates. Additionally, this presentation will also give a basic overview of scarce faunal remains from Gorjani-Topole, a site attributed to Starčevo and Sopot culture, based on ceramic finds and the obtained 14C dates. The excavation of this site began this year but was paused due to COVID-19 outbreak. The overall aim of this study is to provide more information on the animal husbandry in Sopot culture in Croatia, raising some interesting topics, including the complexity of animal husbandry and the degree of impact of wild taxa in the Neolithic diet, while also comparing the subsistence strategies of both sites as part of the larger network in the northern Balkan Peninsula and the Pannonian Basin.

Textile was rarely dated before the introduction of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) introduction since the radiocarbon method is destructive and AMS requires a much smaller amount of material than conventional radiometric methods. For the same reason, however, AMS is more susceptible to sample inhomogeneity and foreign contamination. Linen or wool textiles contain thin closely intertwined fibers, so the pretreatment should be done with extra care. The pretreatment method that effectively removes contaminants and isolates only the original carbon representative for dating, is often dictated by the condition of the artifact. For the most famous radiocarbon-dated textile, the Shroud of Turin, many different techniques had been applied: from mechanical scraping, removing organic coatings with organic solvents, using detergents and standard acid, base and acid wash. The usual pretreatment method in the Laboratory consists of: identifying the fiber origin (by burning a thread), mechanical scraping and removal of applied coatings (like paint) by solvents, if needed, then acid, base, bleach and again acid washing. The best known artifact of linen dated in the Zagreb Radiocarbon Laboratory is the wrapping of the Zagreb mummy, called Liber linteus Zagrabiensis. Since the AMS has been introduced to the Laboratory, we have also dated canvases and textiles (wool and linen) from archeological, historical and mostly art historical context. Here we present types of textiles dated in the Laboratory and the methods for their pretreatment and compare the obtained radiocarbon ages with the expected ages, when data are available.