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Altres ajuts: NWO/360-61-060 In 2017, an excavation led by the Groningen Institute of Archaeology and in collaboration with the Tor Vergata University of Rome, took place on two small islands in the Caprolace lagoon (Sabaudia, Italy), where Middle Bronze Age layers had previously been reported. Combining the results of an environmental reconstruction of the surroundings and a detailed study of the pottery assemblages, we were able to trace a specialised area on the southern island, in all probability devoted to salt production by means of the briquetage technique. The latter basically consists of boiling a brine through which a salt cake is obtained. The technique was widespread all over Europe, from Neolithic to Roman Times. Since the evidence points to an elite-driven workshop, this result has deep implications for the development of the Bronze Age socio-economic framework of Central Italy. Pottery evidence also suggests that in the Bronze Age sites along the Tyrrhenian coast of Central Italy where briquetage has already been hypothesised, more complex processes may have taken place. On the northern island, we collected a large number of so-called pedestals, which are characteristic features of briquetage, while chemical analyses point to salt or fish sauce production, like the roman liquamen, in a Middle Bronze Age domestic context.

AbstractStudies have shown that long-lived individuals seem to pass their survival advantage on to their offspring. Offspring of long-lived parents had a lifelong survival advantage over individuals without long-lived parents, making them more likely to become long-lived themselves. We test whether the survival advantage enjoyed by offspring of long-lived individuals is explained by environmental factors. 101,577 individuals from 16,905 families in the 1812-1886 Zeeland cohort were followed over time. To prevent that certain families were overrepresented in our data, disjoint family trees were selected. Offspring was included if the age at death of both parents was known. Our analyses show that multiple familial resources are associated with survival within the first 5 years of life, with stronger maternal than paternal effects. However, between ages 5 and 100 both parents contribute equally to offspring’s survival chances. After age 5, offspring of long-lived fathers and long-lived mothers had a 16-19% lower chance of dying at any given point in time than individuals without long-lived parents. This survival advantage is most likely genetic in nature, as it could not be explained by other, tested familial resources and is transmitted equally by fathers and mothers.

International audience; Archaeological evidence indicates that pig domestication had begun by ∼10,500 y before the present (BP) in the Near East, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) suggests that pigs arrived in Europe alongside farmers ∼8,500 y BP. A few thousand years after the introduction of Near Eastern pigs into Europe, however, their characteristic mtDNA signature disappeared and was replaced by haplotypes associated with European wild boars. This turnover could be accounted for by substantial gene flow from local Euro-pean wild boars, although it is also possible that European wild boars were domesticated independently without any genetic contribution from the Near East. To test these hypotheses, we obtained mtDNA sequences from 2,099 modern and ancient pig samples and 63 nuclear ancient genomes from Near Eastern and European pigs. Our analyses revealed that European domestic pigs dating from 7,100 to 6,000 y BP possessed both Near Eastern and European nuclear ancestry, while later pigs possessed no more than 4% Near Eastern ancestry, indicating that gene flow from European wild boars resulted in a near-complete disappearance of Near East ancestry. In addition, we demonstrate that a variant at a locus encoding black coat color likely originated in the Near East and persisted in European pigs. Altogether, our results indicate that while pigs were not independently domesticated in Europe, the vast majority of human-mediated selection over the past 5,000 y focused on the genomic fraction derived from the European wild boars, and not on the fraction that was selected by early Neolithic farmers over the first 2,500 y of the domestication process. domestication | evolution | gene flow | Neolithic

In the eighteenth century, the use of mineral or fossil substances was relatively common in European medicine and pharmacy. However, this period also saw profound changes in ideas about the nomenclature, chemistry, and curative properties of minerals. Jonathan Simon has recently argued that an increasing orientation towards the mineral kingdom and the chemical transformation of minerals, and a rise in the number of mineral preparations demanded of the pharmacist, were characteristic for eighteenth-century chemistry within pharmacy. Yet in the Netherlands, and to a certain extent in England, another pattern is visible: although there certainly was an interest in the mineral kingdom and the chemical transformation of nonorganic materials, nothing suggests that this resulted in a strong increase in the demand for mineral-based pharmaceutical preparations – rather the contrary. Unlike English and French eighteenth-century pharmacy, Dutch pharmacy and its relation to academic medicine and chemistry have hardly received attention from historians of science thus far. This paper aims to fill that gap and argues that Herman Boerhaave’s (1668–1738) view on mineral medicine was crucial in the development of a certain wariness of “mineral medicine” in the eighteenth-century Netherlands and England, especially among apothecaries.

Archeological excavations of Amerindian sites on Dos Mosquises Island, Los Roques Archipelago, Venezuela, uncovered a wide range of evidence reflecting seasonal exploitation of local resources and multiple ritual depositions of large quantities of ceramic figurines, lithics, and faunal remains. Zooarchaeological analysis revealed the presence of modified and unmodified bones and teeth from numerous imported mammal species. Local geographic and environmental conditions preclude permanent establishment of terrestrial mammal populations and as such, there are no native mammalian taxa on the island itself or the surrounding oceanic archipelago. The presence of these faunal remains on Dos Mosquises can be attributed to the intentional movement of animal resources from the mainland to Los Roques by indigenous groups in the Late Ceramic Age (~AD 1200–1500). Despite attributions to a mainland source region, little else is known about the origins of these unique specimens. Here, we apply strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (δ18O), and carbon (δ13C) isotope analyses of tooth enamel from various archeologically recovered taxa including deer, peccary, tapir, ocelot, margay, opossum, fox, and weasel to investigate their geographic origins via comparisons with macro-regional models of precipitation δ18O and bioavailable 87Sr/86Sr. The 87Sr/86Sr results are highly variable both for the overall assemblage and between specimens within the same taxa, indicating origins from different geochemical environments of mainland South America. The combined archeological and isotopic evidence are consistent with origins within the late pre-colonial Valencioid Sphere of Interaction which encompassed the Lake Valencia Basin, surrounding regions, and several offshore island groups including Los Roques archipelago.

Research on route-network stability is rare. In time, due to cultural and/or natural causes, settlement locations and route orientation shift. The nature of these spatial changes sheds light on the complex interaction between settlements and surrounding natural landscape conditions. This study investigates the stability of route networks in the Netherlands during the past two millennia by determining their persistence through time. Environmental, archaeological and historical data are used to reconstruct and compare route networks. By using network friction, archaeological data on settlement patterns and route networks in combination with historical data (e.g. old maps), we were able to model route-network persistence (not necessarily continuity) from the Roman to early medieval periods (AD 100–800) and from the Early Middle Ages to the Early Modern Times (AD 800–1600). Results show that around 67.6% of the modelled early-mediëval routes in the Netherlands are persistent with routes in the Roman period. Covering a much larger surface area of the Netherlands, 24.5% of the early-modern routes show a clear persistence with their early-medieval counterparts. Besides the differences in surface area, this downfall can largely be explained by cultural dynamics, with 71.4% of the earlymodern route network following modelled movement corridors. already in existence during the Early Middle Ages.

This essay argues that we should consider perceptions of and associations with alchemical language and practices in academic and artisanal as well as popular culture in the Netherlands in order to gain a better understanding of the supposed transformation of alchemy into chemistry in this region. A fresh view on the sites of Dutch chemistry around 1700 is provided, demonstrating that the unique sociopolitical and geological characteristics of the Low Countries meant that the process of the “disappearance” of alchemy was distinctly different from that in the neighboring German lands. Finally, the essay shows that, as Lawrence M. Principe has previously suggested, the rhetoric with which Herman Boerhaave and other Dutch academics rejected the “excesses of chemistry” was less empirically than morally and socially motivated.

Route networks are influenced by cultural and environmental dynamics. Consequently, route networks themselves often are dynamic as well. This is especially true in lowland areas, such as the Netherlands, where environmental processes (e.g. geomorphological changes, floods) probably reshaped these networks numerous times. Many of the existing route networks in the Netherlands were established relatively recently, and little is known of their historical predecessors. Recent developments in spatial modelling may improve locating and analysing these old, vanished routes. In this study we have applied two recently-developed applications for historical-route network modelling to the Veluwe (the Netherlands) in order to reconstruct the route network in the region around AD 1500. This region is not densely cultivated and is known to have a long history of routes and paths running through the landscape. The first method, network friction, uses high-resolution geoscientific and cultural data to calculate potential movement corridors and probable route zones. The second method uses a more traditional least-cost path (LCP) model based on surface, groundwater level and slope. The usefulness of these approaches for reconstructing past route networks and the general added value of these approaches was assessed by comparing the reconstructions to the few existing spatial overviews of historical-route networks in this region and hollow ways extracted from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data. Our findings show that the results of the first method, network-friction modelling, correspond best with the comparison data regarding known routes in the study area. However, the general results point towards the necessity of integrating the two applied methods, since a combination of these models best reflects the multiscale variability within regional route networks.

The detrimental effects traditionally assigned to warfare in the development of pre-industrial economies have obscured the prominent role that military entrepreneurs played in economic development in this period. Historiography minimises the extent to which war and the concomitant strengthening of the central state provided a whole new range of opportunities for capital investment, a tendency that has been strengthened by the paradigm of Redlich’s ‘decline of the soldier-entrepreneur’ and the technological determinism of the debate on the Military Revolution among others. The aim of this introduction is to look into the background of this relative lack of interest and to reaffirm the mutual dependence of eighteenth-century state-formation and the business of war.

This paper explores the importance of elements of the natural world, and particularly plants, among people of different religious affiliations in western Africa. Plants play an overriding role in African folk religions, which in turn are closely associated with health practices and influence management decisions concerning natural resources. In spite of the extensive literature documenting ritual plant use, the cultural importance of plants in this context has not been systematically assessed. Our objective was to see whether the importance of plants was reflected in people’s conceptions of global (i.e., Christianity, Islam) and folk religions (i.e., Vodoun and Bwiti) in Benin (West Africa) and Gabon (Central Africa). By performing a cultural domain analysis (CDA) with 96 individuals, we found that, regardless of the religious affiliation of informants, plants and other elements of the natural world were more present in people’s notions of folk religions than in global religions. We conclude by reflecting on the potentials and limitations of the data presented here as a starting point to explore the topic of cultural keystone species. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s12231-018-9410-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.