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Landscapes are socially produced and reproduced spaces. This is easily recognizable for large-scale urban groups with built environments that dominate living places. But it also pertains to all types of societies and cultures, even small-scale hunter–gatherers, once the ontological beliefs structuring landscape perception and use are acknowledged. The foragers of south–central and southern California and the Great Basin illustrate this fact. They maintained a widely shared ontological perspective supported by a fundamental cognitive postulate. This is that supernatural power, the principle causative agent in the universe, was differentially distributed among individuals and places. The distribution of power, revealed by certain geomorphological features and natural events, structured their perceptions of landscape. These perceptions were expressed in ritual and symbolism, including petroglyphs and pictographs as durable manifestations of ceremonies on the landscape. The ontological relationship between power and landscape explains a longstanding question in hunter–gatherer archaeology: Why were rock writing sites created at specific locations? It also explains another equally significant but rarely considered and related problem: Why do some localities have massive quantities of rock writings that dwarf most other sites? The landscape symbolism of and the placement of sites by Native Californian and Great Basin tribes is explained by reference to their shared ontological beliefs, illustrating how they structured their ritual practices and archaeological record.

The paper examines how American artist Andrea Fraser explores the specific political, institutional and historical conditions of art in Germany through the two exhibitions she has had at Gallery Nagel in Cologne in 1990 and 2001.

Urbs in transitum vuole essere l’avvio di un percorso volto a costituire un’ampia ed inclusiva comunità di studiosi del mondo antico attorno al secolo che funge da cerniera tra l’epoca di massimo sviluppo dell’Impero romano ed i successivi esiti di epoca tardo antica, il III secolo d.C. Alla luce della costante crescita di interesse per questo periodo e dell’ampliamento delle conoscenze archeologiche relative alle città di Roma, Ostia e Portus, il libro, che raccoglie gli atti del convegno eponimo, affronta diverse questioni, come il rapporto tra la città e i suoi porti, la topografia degli spazi urbani e suburbani, l’architettura e le tecniche costruttive, i rivestimenti musivi e pittorici, gli arredi scultorei e la produzione e circolazione di oggetti e materie prime.

This article explores the application of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to structured tabular insurance data. LDA is a probabilistic topic modelling approach initially developed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to uncover the underlying structure of (unstructured) textual data. It was designed to represent textual documents as mixture of latent (hidden) topics, and topics as mixtures of words. This study introduces the LDA’s document-topic distribution as a soft clustering tool for unsupervised learningtasks in the actuarial field. By defining each topic as a risk profile, and by treating insurance policies as documents and the modalities of categorical covariates as words, we show how LDA can be extended beyond textual data and can offer a framework to uncover underlying structures within insurance portfolios. Our experimental results and analysis highlight how the modelling of policies based on topic cluster membership, and the identification of dominant modalities within each risk profile, can give insights into the prominent risk factors contributing to higher or lower claim frequencies.

L'Italia prima dell'unificazione romana ci viene presentata dalle fonti storiche romane e greche come un mosaico policromo di popoli, dai confini abbastanza definiti. Tuttavia, se scartiamo questa prospettiva e guardiamo invece alle testimonianze archeologiche ed epigrafiche, l'immagine cambia in modo significativo, specialmente per la fasi più antiche. I confini tra questi popoli sembrano perdere la loro nitidezza, formando spesso un gioco di sfumature e gradienti. Tuttavia, adottando un approccio olistico ai dati, è possibile identificare alcune linee di differenza che sembrano materializzare i confini tra vari livelli di identità collettive coesistenti e non necessariamente mutualmente esclusive. Questo tema sarà affrontato nella presentazione attraverso il caso di studio dei Sabini, uno dei principali popoli preromani dell'Italia centrale. Secondo le fonti, infatti, questi sarebbero stati all’origine di vari popoli vicini attraverso un rito di migrazione sacra (ver sacrum). Nell’intervento ci si propone quindi di leggere queste informazioni in modo diacronico, indagando le cause della genesi di nuove identità collettive, analizzandone i differenti rapporti che istituiscono e tentando di seguirne la conseguente moltiplicazione del confine (cfr. Barth 1969) attraverso il dato archeologico ed epigrafico, messo in parte in dialogo con approcci mutuati da altre discipline (ad es. la Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, vedi Leonardelli, Pickett, Brewer 2010). Contestualmente ci si propone inoltre di trattare, dalla prospettiva della disciplina archeologica, l’identità sia in quanto concetto operativo che in quanto strumento analitico (cfr. Remotti 2010, 25 e segg.), cercando di discriminarne le prospettive “etics” e quelle “emics” (cfr. Headland, Pike, Harris 1990).

This contribution aims to reflect the need for more insightful interpretations of archaeological objects as “media products” that can reveal how the dynamics of identity and landscape formation worked in the past. Through the presentation of my post-doctoral project, RELOAD (REthinking Liminality Open Access Data), funded by F.R.S.-FNRS at UCLouvain as a case study, the paper argues that alternative narratives of the past could be achieved thanks to a better understanding of the interdependency between objects, human behaviour, environment. The ongoing debate about the approaches to material culture and human agency in archaeology reveals that a shared perception of ‘resonance’, to be considered as the interaction of the human mind and objects situated in a specific space and time, has not yet been reached. It is evident that archaeology needs material culture, that individuals live in a mediating relation to their surroundings and their peers, and that communication proceeds through symbolic codes; however, there is still some scepticism in considering objects as medium of bodily actions, attitudes, and ideas to reconstruct human-environmental interactions in the past. Moreover, even when objects are considered as implicated in animacy, behaviour and identity, one of the main risks is to take into consideration only individual artefacts; however, their patterns of associations are highly significant considering that objects are never isolated, but they change within the flow of time and about the way agents experienced them. If there is agreement that we must rethink many common assumptions concerning cognition, perception, and action, a comprehensive understanding of networks of archaeological objects as vehicles of identities is still missing. Similarly, integrating data about archaeological materials and other available sources revealed fundamental to reconstructing the dynamics of ancient landscape formation. As the paper tries to demonstrate, material assemblages could hide traces to investigate past identities. At the same time, their role in detecting social interactions and understanding space organization strategies should not be underestimated. The benefit of applying agent-based model simulations in archaeology is linked to the possibility of testing the validity of theoretical approaches in a digital environment featured by actual characteristics. All this leads to reflecting on the methodological choices, their impact on data interpretation, and the importance of integrating a network of objects and their social dimension to reconstruct alternative narratives of the past.

Before the Roman unification (290 BC), the territory straddling the ridges of the central Apennines had long served as the backbone of the Osco-Umbrian speaking Italic world. The distinctive topography of the region most probably contributed to shape a peculiar society and culture, influencing its structure and historical development. This talk focuses on the Sabine communities in the Nursia territory (Perugia, south-eastern Umbria) as a case study to examine societal and cultural patterns. The data come both from archival sources and previous and ongoing scientific research. They will be used to shed new light on the domestic, economic, sacral, and funerary patterns in the case study area and make a case for the presence of communities as vibrant and active as the better studied ‘great civilisations’ of the Thyrrenian plains (e.g., the Etruscans and the Romans).

Eugenia Sokolinski, Manager Editor of the COMSt Bulletin, has written a conference report about our 7-8 December online event, hold from Basel: Perceptions of Writing in Papyri. Crossing Close and Distant Readings, co-organized by Claire Clivaz (SIB, CH & RSCS, UCLouvain) and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello(University of Basel). All videos are available online: https://d-scribes.philhist.unibas.ch/en/event/details/perceptions-of-writing-in-papyri-crossing-close-and-distant-readings/

A sacred site that draws pilgrims from distant regions is a distinctive resource for studying religion. Research into a site’s relevance to pilgrims and how it came to be founded contributes to a better understanding of religious activity. To address these issues, a thorough historical analysis of a sacred site’s records is essential. Such an analysis endeavors to distinguish the historical facts of a sacred site from its narratives and further discusses the significance of each. With such intent, this study focuses on the Rujing Stupa, a sacred site of significant importance to transnational pilgrimages that has yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. The stupa, which is located at the Jingci Monastery in Hangzhou, China, is believed to hold the relics of Tiantong Rujing 天童如浄 (1163–1228), a Song Dynasty monk. Although the modern stele inscription at this location indicates that the stupa was founded in the 13th century, shortly after the monk’s death, this paper examines the historical reinventions within the inscription and traces the influence of Japanese narratives on such a reinvention. This study demonstrates that the Rujing Stupa was established by, and for, the Japanese Sōtō Buddhists. The Chinese monk’s connection to the Sōtō pilgrims lies in Rujing’s role as the master who instructed Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), the founder of the Sōtō tradition, making his stupa a sacred site for the Sōtō community. Concerns of commemoration and reifying doctrinal authenticity motivated two generations of Japanese pilgrims to construct the Rujing stupa in the late 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. On the other hand, Rujing’s significance and the presence of the Sōtō tradition were scarcely acknowledged in China until the early modern period. Only in the late 20th century did Chinese Buddhists begin to appreciate this stupa. Examining the site’s historical reinventions and identifying the factors that shape its narrative, this case study offers insights into the investigation of sacred sites and suggests a concern for narrative in the examination of a site’s history and significance.