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AbstractThe bronze cup found in Dohnsen (Lower Saxony, Northern Germany) in the 1950s is an enigmatic artefact that bears striking similarities with the metalwork of the Late Aegean Bronze Age. We provide an accurate review of the primary sources of information on the cup's find history and context, and present the results of previously unpublished chemical and Pb isotope analyses. The latter suggest that the vessel might have been produced from Central European ores, but it represents the metalworking skills of a travelling smith with knowledge of foreign shapes and styles.

AbstractPalenquero is a Spanish-lexified creole spoken in Columbia. We argue that existing hypotheses regarding its birth are problematic in several regards. This article addresses the inconsistencies in these hypotheses and provides an alternative, more coherent account. More precisely, we take issue with the following three claims: (a) Palenquero is the result of a two-language encounter; (b) it has its roots in a West African Afro-Portuguese proto-variety; (c) an ancestral form of the creole emerged in the port city of Cartagena. We then set out to present our own, more economical, formation scenario, according to which Palenquero was formed in the early 1600s in the linguistically heterogenous maroon communities of the Cartagenan hinterlands.

In this study, we assess how representative a single charcoal record from a peat profile in small bogs (1.5–2 ha in area) is for the reconstruction of Holocene fire history. We use high-resolution macrocharcoal (>250 μm) analysis of continuous series of 2 cm3 samples from two small bogs in southern Sweden. We compare (1) duplicate charcoal records from the same core, (2) duplicate charcoal records from profiles in the same site (10 m apart), and (3) charcoal records from two sites within the same region (15 km apart). Comparisons are made for charcoal counts and area expressed as accumulation rates. The results suggest that (a) charcoal counts and area are highly correlated in all records; (b) duplicate charcoal records within the same core are very similar, although some charcoal peaks are found in only one of the two records; (c) although long-term trends in fire regimes are similar between duplicate charcoal records from nearby profiles within the same site and between charcoal records from sites within the same region, some individual charcoal peaks/fire events are asynchronous between records. The known historical fires of the town of Växjö (1570 and 1612 CE) are recorded at the two study sites, which indicates a macrocharcoal source area of minimum 15 km in diameter. The 2 cm3 peat samples contained relatively low amounts of macrocharcoal; we therefore recommend to analyse larger samples from small peat bogs with comparable peat accumulation rates. This will improve the reliability of the macrocharcoal record and its interpretation. This research was financially supported by the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences of the Linnaeus University (Sweden) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41401228).

Abstract This article explores institutional responses to and societal understandings of the 1882 Adige flood in northern Italy, which particularly affected the city of Verona. The article investigates the transformative power of that disaster on a national scale in terms of forest policy and at a city level in terms of water management and urban planning. After the flood, an extensive programme of works aiming to contain and discipline both the river and its adjacent city dwellers coexisted with the launch of forest conservation and reforestation plans. This flood and its recovery phase incorporated and materialized the early Italian state's relationship to the natural world. We interpret the flood as providing an opportunity for redirecting Italy's local and national flood management strategies, triggering an explicit awareness of the interrelation between lowlands and highlands and enhancing modernization processes in many respects. Despite its historical and symbolic relevance, this flood has not yet been fully researched and poses crucial questions about ways of organising and selectively obliterating collective memories of disasters.

A complementary multi-analytical in-situ approach has been adopted for the investigation of a corpus of ten paintings dating from 1889 and 1940 by the Venetian painter Alessandro Milesi (1856-1945), from the collection of the International Gallery of Modern Art Ca' Pesaro in Venice. Analyses were performed in situ with digital imaging, elemental and spectroscopic analysis. The analysis of pigments and binding media and their possible deterioration patterns were studied with a combination of X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) Spectroscopy, External Reflection- Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ER-FTIR) and Raman Spectroscopy. These analytical methods provide information regarding the evolution of the artist's palette and the painting techniques adopted in painting. Data suggest the widespread detection of zinc carboxylates, with implications for conservation and display. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Chalk Group forms important hydrocarbon reservoirs offshore and water aquifers onshore Denmark. Within a day of fieldwork, a 450 m long reflection seismic profile was acquired onshore in an area in southeast Denmark, where the Chalk Group extends almost to the surface and is approximately 900 m thick. The main objective of the study was to image the complete Chalk Group in high resolution and to study the origin of reflectivity within the different chalk units. A 45 kg accelerated weight-drop source, in combination with dense receiver spacing using microelectromechanical sensors mounted on a streamer and 48 planted geophones, was used for data acquisition. The profile runs subparallel to the cliffs of Stevns, and the recorded signal reaches the base of the Chalk Group at approximately 600 ms. The fully cored 443 m-deep Stevns-1 borehole, which is located at the recorded seismic line, provides excellent control on lithologic and facies changes. Comparison with the borehole data demonstrates that our seismic data set provides a high-resolution image of the internal layering of the Chalk Group. We find that the internal reflection coefficients of the Chalk Group are, in general, small based on wireline-log data. However, the reflected amplitudes are just big enough to be recorded with the receiver setup used, even from the pure chalk beds of the Chalk Group. The reflectivity seen on the high-resolution seismic profile is influenced by occurrences of clay-enriched chalk layers. Flint bands consisting of numerous flint nodules are a characteristic of the uppermost part of the Chalk Group at Stevns. The flint nodules appear to produce significant scattering of the seismic signals, and flint-rich layers appear with diffuse internal reflectivity characteristics. Outcrop-scale mound structures in Danian and Upper Cretaceous outcrops are for the first time seismically resolved.

Augmented Reality (AR) offers the possibility to enrich the real world with digital mediated content, increasing in this way the quality of many everyday experiences. While in some research areas such as cultural heritage, tourism, or medicine there is a strong technological investment, AR for game purposes struggles to become a widespread commercial application. In this article, a novel framework for AR kid games is proposed, already developed by the authors for other AR applications such as Cultural Heritage and Arts. In particular, the framework includes different layers such as the development of a series of AR kid puzzle games in an intermediate structure which can be used as a standard for different applications development, the development of a smart configuration tool, together with general guidelines and long-life usage tests and metrics. The proposed application is designed for augmenting the puzzle experience, but can be easily extended to other AR gaming applications. Once the user has assembled the real puzzle, AR functionality within the mobile application can be unlocked, bringing to life puzzle characters, creating a seamless game that merges AR interactions with the puzzle reality. The main goals and benefits of this framework can be seen in the development of a novel set of AR tests and metrics in the pre-release phase (in order to help the commercial launch and developers), and in the release phase by introducing the measures for long-life app optimization, usage tests and hint on final users together with a measure to design policy, providing a method for automatic testing of quality and popularity improvements. Moreover, smart configuration tools, as part of the general framework, enabling multi-app and eventually also multi-user development, have been proposed, facilitating the serialization of the applications. Results were obtained from a large-scale user test with about 4 million users on a set of eight gaming applications, providing the scientific community a workflow for implicit quantitative analysis in AR gaming. Different data analytics developed on the data collected by the framework prove that the proposed approach is affordable and reliable for long-life testing and optimization.

Abstract Previous research has questioned the use of mosques as points of entry for research about Muslims in Europe. Part of the background has been a new emphasis on lived religion and a critique of a one-sided focus on religious institutions. We argue that some of this criticism is theoretically ill-founded and we also point out that some trends may make mosques more important in research about Muslims. In section 1, we go through the most important literature addressing the methodological problems posed by using mosques in research about Muslims in the West. In section 2, we look at some of the fundamental problems of definitions in some of this critical methodological literature. In section 3, we discuss how the choice of methods, not least sampling modes, will be of significance for meaningful discussion about the appropriateness of using mosques in research, and in section 4, we present what we see as important advantages of using mosques as a point of entry to study Muslims. In section 5, we conclude with a brief summary and discussion.