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Two metallurgical traditions coexisted in the Chalcolithic Southern Levant: the lost wax casting of polymetallic alloys and the pure copper technology. Details of their operational sequences are still unknown. To date, no production sites of lost wax casting technology have been found. Only the main steps of the pure copper technology can be reconstructed from the archaeological record. Therefore, an archaeological experiment was carried out to shed new light on both technologies. Concerning the pure copper technology, the experiment focussed on the draught technique and high-temperature behaviour of the crucible and furnace clays. Based on archaeological evidence, a furnace and crucibles were reconstructed with local clays used by ancient metallurgists. Instead of the commonly hypothesised blowpipes, bellows were used to produce the draught. The furnace was successfully operated with bellows and reached temperatures high enough to melt copper. Furthermore, the clays’ behaviour varied considerably due to high heat exposure, but they are suitable if used appropriately. Our experiment establishes this draught technique as a viable alternative to the commonly assumed blowpipes as well as the suitability of local clays.

Abstract In this paper we investigated the calculation of the anodic limit of two anions of ionic liquids, largely used as electrolyte of lithium batteries. Starting from a model based on calculations performed on single ions at the MP2 level of theory, we showed that the matching between calculation and experiments decreases while using more expanded basis set with respect to 6-31G**, possibly because of the destabilization of the neutral species when larger basis sets are considered. Additionally, in order to decrease the computational time, the performances for the calculation of the anodic limit obtained by means of a series of DFT functionals with increasing level of complexity (from the Generalized Gradient Approximation to the Range Separated Hybrid meta-Generalized Gradient Approximation) were compared. Overall, the best performing functionals are BMK, ωB97M-V and MN12-SX, while acceptable results can be obtained by M06-2X, M11, M08-HX and M11-L. Some less computationally expensive functionals, like CAM-B3LYP and ωB97X-D, also provide reasonable values of the anodic limit.

In the American West, wildfires and earthquakes are increasingly threatening the archaeological, historical, and tribal resources that define the collective identity and connection with the past for millions of Americans. The loss of said resources diminishes societal understanding of the role cultural heritage plays in shaping our present and future. This paper examines the viability of employing stationary and SLAM-based terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, automated surface change detection, GIS, and WebGL visualization techniques to enhance the preservation of cultural resources in California. Our datafication approach combines multi-temporal remote sensing monitoring of historic features with legacy data and collaborative visualization to document and evaluate how environmental threats affect built heritage. We tested our methodology in response to recent environmental threats from wildfire and earthquakes at Bodie, an iconic Gold Rush-era boom town located on the California and Nevada border. Our multi-scale results show that the proposed approach effectively integrates highly accurate 3D snapshots of Bodie’s historic buildings before/after disturbance, or post-restoration, with surface change detection and online collaborative visualization of 3D geospatial data to monitor and preserve important cultural resources at the site. This study concludes that the proposed workflow enhances the monitoring of at-risk California’s cultural heritage and makes a call to action to employ remote sensing as a pathway to advanced planning.

Abstract The Rongorongo is a system of writing, still undeciphered, from Easter Island in the Pacific. It consists of a corpus of twenty-six inscriptions, scattered around the world. This article presents the state-of-the art in the study of one of these inscriptions, Text D or the ‘Échancrée’ tablet housed in a museum in Rome, Italy. Through an integrated methodology based on photogrammetry and high-precision structured light scanning, a 3D model of the inscriptions is made available through a public 3D Viewer for the first time. The technique made use of the benefits of both methods of image acquisition: a very accurate, precise, high resolution, and metric reconstruction of the tablet geometry gained through the scanning process, and a high-quality texture achieved through photogrammetry. In addition, we present a new analysis of the text, through a close palaeographic examination of its signs, and corrections of previous hand drawings and transcriptions. The ultimate aim is to reach unbiased ‘readings’ of the signs through an integrated synergy of traditional palaeographic analysis and an advanced 3D model. These, applied to all the inscriptions, constitute the necessary stepping-stones for any decipherment attempt.

Despite the recent great success of the sequence-to-sequence paradigm in Natural Language Processing, the majority of current studies in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) still frame the problem as a sequence labeling task. In this paper we go against the flow and propose GSRL (Generating Senses and RoLes), the first sequence-to-sequence model for end-to-end SRL. Our approach benefits from recently-proposed decoder-side pretraining techniques to generate both sense and role labels for all the predicates in an input sentence at once, in an end-to-end fashion. Evaluated on standard gold benchmarks, GSRL achieves state-of-the-art results in both dependency- and span-based English SRL, proving empirically that our simple generation-based model can learn to produce complex predicate-argument structures. Finally, we propose a framework for evaluating the robustness of an SRL model in a variety of synthetic low-resource scenarios which can aid human annotators in the creation of better, more diverse, and more challenging gold datasets. We release GSRL at github.com/SapienzaNLP/gsrl.

The high artistic and cultural relevance of particular objects, in this case from the Nuragic civilization, have stimulated the growth of a forgery industry, replicating small bronze boats (navicelle), statues (bronzetti), and other objects. It is often the case where the forgeries are of such quality that it becomes difficult to distinguish them from authentic artifacts without a proper chemical analysis. In this research, a Monte Carlo simulation algorithm for X-ray interactions with matter is used to obtain the chemical composition from the bulk of each object from a set of five. The method employed has the advantage of being completely nondestructive and relatively fast. The objects’ chemical composition and morphology were compared with the data available from authentic artifacts so their authenticity could be inferred. Four of the five objects are likely to be authentic, where two of them could be associated with a Sardinian origin.

Miniaturized bronze flasks represent a small portion of a wide metallurgical production that flourished in Sardinia (Italy) between the Final Bronze Age (FBA) and the Early Iron Age (EIA). They replicate a well-known and symbolic type of object, the pilgrims’ flask, common in all Europe and Mediterranean basin, and have but few archaeological parallels. For these reasons, their characterization can be considered important from an archaeological perspective. Three flasks, preserved at the Antiquarium Arborense museum (Oristano), were analyzed by X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (XRF) and Raman spectroscopy, integrated by multispectral images. The samples, coming from illegal excavations, posed two problems: establishing their authenticity and investigating the alloy composition of such particular objects. All specimens presented a widespread degradation in the outer surface: XRF and Raman spectroscopy indicated the presence of copper oxides, calcium and copper carbonates deposits. The abscence of Zn, a clear marker of forgeries, was not detected by XRF. In two of the flasks, an unusual Sn content above 20%, was detected. For FBA and EIA, especially regarding southern Europe, Sn was extremely rare, and was possibly used with caution. Further results are presented herein.

Abstract: The article presents evidence about the Middle Palaeolithic and Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition interval in the karst area of the Danube Gorges in the Lower Danube Basin. We review the extant data and present new evidence from two recently investigated sites found on the Serbian side of the Danube River – Tabula Traiana and Dubočka‐Kozja caves. The two sites have yielded layers dating to both the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and have been investigated by the application of modern standards of excavation and recovery along with a suite of state‐of‐the‐art analytical procedures. The presentation focuses on micromorphological analyses of the caves’ sediments, characterisation of cryptotephra, a suite of new radiometric dates (accelerator mass spectrometry and optically stimulated luminescence) as well as proteomics (zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) and stable isotope data in discerning patterns of human occupation of these locales over the long term. Funder: NOMIS Stiftung; Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100008483

Biocodicological analysis of parchments from manuscript books and archives offers unprecedented insight into the materiality of medieval literacy. Using ZooMS for animal species identification, we explored almost the entire library and all the preserved single leaf charters of a single medieval Cistercian monastery (Orval Abbey, Belgium). Systematic non-invasive sampling of parchment collagen was performed on every charter and on the first bifolium from every quire of the 118 codicological units composing the books (1490 samples in total). Within the genuine production of the Orval scriptorium (26 units), a balanced use of calfskin (47.1%) and sheepskin (48.5%) was observed, whereas calfskin was less frequent (24.3%) in externally produced units acquired by the monastery (92 units). Calfskin was preferably used for higher quality manuscripts while sheepskin tends to be the standard choice for ‘ordinary’ manuscript book production. This finding is consistent with thirteenth-century parchment accounts from Beaulieu Abbey (England) where calfskin supply was more limited and its price higher. Our study reveals that the making of archival documents does not follow the same pattern as the production of library books. Although the five earliest preserved charters are made of calfskin, from the 1230s onwards, all charters from Orval are written on sheepskin.

In Text-to-AMR parsing, current state-of-the-art semantic parsers use cumbersome pipelines integrating several different modules or components, and exploit graph recategorization, i.e., a set of content-specific heuristics that are developed on the basis of the training set. However, the generalizability of graph recategorization in an out-of-distribution setting is unclear. In contrast, state-of-the-art AMR-to-Text generation, which can be seen as the inverse to parsing, is based on simpler seq2seq. In this paper, we cast Text-to-AMR and AMR-to-Text as a symmetric transduction task and show that by devising a careful graph linearization and extending a pretrained encoder-decoder model, it is possible to obtain state-of-the-art performances in both tasks using the very same seq2seq approach, i.e., SPRING (Symmetric PaRsIng aNd Generation). Our model does not require complex pipelines, nor heuristics built on heavy assumptions. In fact, we drop the need for graph recategorization, showing that this technique is actually harmful outside of the standard benchmark. Finally, we outperform the previous state of the art on the English AMR 2.0 dataset by a large margin: on Text-to-AMR we obtain an improvement of 3.6 Smatch points, while on AMR-to-Text we outperform the state of the art by 11.2 BLEU points. We release the software at github.com/SapienzaNLP/spring.