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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.

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.

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims at making explicit the semantics of a word in context by identifying the most suitable meaning from a predefined sense inventory. Recent breakthroughs in representation learning have fueled intensive WSD research, resulting in considerable performance improvements, breaching the 80% glass ceiling set by the inter-annotator agreement. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of current advances in WSD, describing the state of the art in terms of i) resources for the task, i.e., sense inventories and reference datasets for training and testing, as well as ii) automatic disambiguation approaches, detailing their peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we highlight the current limitations of the task itself, but also point out recent trends that could help expand the scope and applicability of WSD, setting up new promising directions for the future.

SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation (MCL-WiC) Task Description Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation (MCL-WiC) is the first SemEval task for Word-in-Context disambiguation which tackles the challenge of capturing the polysemous nature of words without relying on a fixed sense inventory in a multilingual and cross-lingual setting. MCL-WiC provides a single high-quality framework for the performance evaluation of a wide range of approaches aimed at evaluating the capability of a system to deeply understand word meaning. Compared to other datasets, MCL-WiC brings the following novelties: it addresses multilinguality and cross-linguality, it provides coverage of all parts of speech, and it covers a high number of domains and genres. Participating systems will be asked to perform a binary classification task in which they indicate whether the target word is used in the same meaning (tagged as T for true) or in a different meaning (F for false) in the same language (multilingual sub-task) or across different languages (cross-lingual sub-task). Below you can find two examples of sentence pairs, the first one from the multilingual part and the second one from the cross-lingual part: la souris mange le fromage -- le chat court après la souris click the right mouse button -- le chat court après la souris In the first sentence pair, the target word souris will be tagged with T (True) since it is used in the same meaning in both sentences. Instead, in the second sentence pair, the target word mouse and its corresponding translation into French are used in two distinct meanings, therefore, in this case, the expected output will be F (False). MCL-WiC covers the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Russian. Files included SemEval-2021_MCL-WiC_trial.zip: trial data SemEval-2021_MCL-WiC_all-datasets.zip: training, development and test data SemEval-2021_MCL-WiC_test-gold-data.zip: gold answers Key links Github data repository: https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/mcl-wic Codalab website: https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/27054 Link to the paper: https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.3.pdf Reference Martelli, F., Kalach, N., Tola, G and Navigli, R. SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation (MCL-WiC). Proc. of the 15th Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, 2021. BibTex: @inproceedings{martelli-etal-2021-mclwic, title = "{S}em{E}val-2021 {T}ask 2: {M}ultilingual and {C}ross-lingual {W}ord-in-{C}ontext {D}isambiguation ({MCL}-{W}i{C})", author= "Martelli, Federico and Kalach, Najla and Tola, Gabriele and Navigli, Roberto", booktitle="Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)", year={2021} }

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.