Enrico R Crema
Biographic Data
| ID | 138307 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Enrico R Crema |
| GIVEN NAMES | Enrico R |
| FAMILY NAME | Crema |
| SIGNATURE | CREMA E R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6727-5138 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 398 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
An Icar spatial model to reconstruct regional geographic variations in arrival times
Reconstructing the speed and pattern of dispersals of cultural traits from the archaeological record is typically based on spatio-temporal distributions of dated artefacts. However, archaeological sampling biases often result in uneven datasets where some regions or time periods are well represented, while others are not. This hinders our ability to offer precise and accurate reconstructions of past dispersal processes. Here we are proposing an a…
A Bayesian alternative for aoristic analyses in archaeology
Aoristic analysis is often used to handle chronological uncertainties of datasets where scientific dates (e.g., 14 C and OSL) are unavailable, and observations are described by association to archaeological periods or phases. Although several advances have been made over the last 2 decades, the basic principle of this approach remains fundamentally the same. Temporal windows of analyses are first divided into regularly sized time blocks, and prob…
Assessing quantitative methods in archaeology via simulated datasets: The Archaeoriddle challenge. Concept, project and motivations
Compared to what is found in many other scientific disciplines, archaeological data are typically scarce, biased and fragmented. This, coupled with the fact that archaeologists can rarely test their hypotheses using experimental design, makes archaeological inference and our ability to assess the robustness of quantitative methods used to make such inferences challenging. Archaeoriddle is a project that was born as an attempt to compare archaeolo…
Statistical modelling in archaeology: Some Recent Trends and Future Perspectives
A comparative analysis of stone- and earth-wall settlement locations of the Lower Xiajiadian Culture in Aohan Banner, China
Estimating intralimb proportions for commingled remains
Intralimb proportions provide insights into growth, development, populations history, and adaptation across human groups. However, the conventional approach of calculating brachial and crural indices for individual skeletons and comparing assemblages using sample means is not feasible in commingled remains. This study aims to assess the reliability of an “aggregate method” based on the ratio of sample means of limb bone lengths as an alternative …
Modelling diffusion of innovation curves using radiocarbon data
Archaeological data provide a potential to investigate the diffusion of technological and cultural traits. However, much of this research agenda currently needs more formal quantitative methods to address small sample sizes and chronological uncertainty. This paper introduces a novel Bayesian framework for inferring the shape of diffusion curves using radiocarbon data associated with the presence/absence of a particular innovation. We developed t…
Beyond baselines of performance: Beta regression models of compositional variability in craft production studies
Chemical analyses of archaeological artefacts are often used for provenance studies and for assessing whether specific performance characteristics were targeted by craftspeople in the past. Traditionally, the answers to these questions were sought by identifying compositional averages and by studying their correlations with either the geochemical signatures of candidate raw material sources or the corresponding physical or chemical properties of …
Regional variations in the demographic response to the arrival of rice farming in prehistoric Japan
Rice agriculture was brought to Japan during the first millennium BC by migrant communities of farmers from the Korean peninsula. Substantial geographic variation is observed in the uptake of this new subsistence economy, reflecting different forms of interaction between farmers and foragers. Here, the authors analyse a combination of settlement and radiocarbon data to determine the extent to which these different forms of interaction led to regi…
Evidence that cultural groups differ in their abilities to detect fake accents
Previous research in the evolutionary and psychological sciences has suggested that markers or tags of ethnic or group membership may help to solve cooperation and coordination problems. Cheating remains, however, a problem for these views, insofar as it is possible to fake the tag. While evolutionary psychologists have suggested that humans evolved the propensity to overcome this free rider problem, it is unclear how this module might manifest a…
Culinary continuity in central Japan across the transition to agriculture
Rice and millet arrived in Western Japan from Korea around 3,000 years ago and spread eastwards across the archipelago in the next 700 years. However, the extent to which agriculture transformed traditional Jōmon hunter-gatherer-fisher communities is debated. Central Japan is a key area of study as remodelling of radiocarbon dates shows a slowdown in the dispersal rate of rice agriculture in this area. Here, we examine and compare the use of pott…
The Global Dynamics of Inequality (Gini) project: Analysing Archaeological Housing Data
The GINI project investigates the dynamics of inequality among populations over the long term by synthesising global archaeological housing data. This project brings archaeologists together from around the world to assess hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of inequality that are of relevance to contemporary societies globally
An Archaeological Radiocarbon Database of Japan
We present a radiocarbon database for the Japanese archipelago compiled from over 5,500 site excavation reports covering a chronological span from 55,000 BP to the present day. The complete database in Japanese contains over 44,000 entries, providing contextual information directly obtained from descriptions provided in the site reports. Here we provide a curated English translation of the database, containing a subset of 39,284 dates from the or…
How Cultural Transmission Through Objects Impacts Inferences About Cultural Evolution
The cross-fertilisation between biological and cultural evolution has led to an extensive borrowing of key concepts, theories, and statistical methods for studying temporal variation in the frequency of cultural variants. Archaeologists have been among the front-runners of those engaging with this endeavour, and the last 2 decades have seen a number of case studies where modes of social learning were inferred from the changing frequencies of arte…
Statistical Inference of Prehistoric Demography from Frequency Distributions of Radiocarbon Dates: A Review and a Guide for the Perplexed
The last decade saw a rapid increase in the number of studies where time–frequency changes of radiocarbon dates have been used as a proxy for inferring past population dynamics. Although its universal and straightforward premise is appealing and undoubtedly offers some unique opportunities for research on long-term comparative demography, practical applications are far from trivial and riddled with issues pertaining to the very nature of the prox…
Divergent population dynamics in the middle to late Holocene lower Fraser valley and mid-Fraser canyon, British Columbia
Risk factors for the occurrence of sexual misconduct during archaeological and anthropological fieldwork
Fieldwork is crucial to advancing knowledge in archaeology and anthropology, but previous works suggests that between 64 and 68 percent of respondents experience sexual misconduct during fieldwork. Going forward, fieldwork must be made safe and inclusive. To achieve this, we must understand why sexual misconduct takes place during fieldwork. We surveyed an international sample of archaeologists and anthropologists (n=300) about their most recent …
Modelling the potential ecological niche of domesticated buckwheat in China: Archaeological evidence, environmental constraints and climate change
We present a species distribution model (SDM) of Fagopyrum esculentum (buckwheat) in China using present distribution data and estimates for the past based on palaeoclimatic reconstructions. Our model estimates the potential area suitable for buckwheat cultivation over the last 8,000 years, with northeast China consistently showing the highest suitability, providing insights on the discrepancy between the location of the earliest archaeobotanical…
Inference From Large Sets of Radiocarbon Dates: Software and Methods
The last decade has seen the development of a range of new statistical and computational techniques for analysing large collections of radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates, often but not exclusively to make inferences about human population change in the past. Here we introduce rcarbon , an open-source software package for the R statistical computing language which implements many of these techniques and looks to foster transparent future study of their str…
The MedAfriCarbon Radiocarbon Database and Web Application. Archaeological Dynamics in Mediterranean Africa, ca. 9600–700 BC
The MedAfriCarbon radiocarbon database and its accompanying web application are outcomes of the MedAfrica project — Archaeological deep history and dynamics of Mediterranean Africa, ca. 9600–700 BC. The dataset presented here in Version 1.0 of the database includes 1587 archaeological 14C dates from 368 sites in Mediterranean Africa. The database is unusual because the majority of the dates within it have been annotated with further cultural and …
A multi-proxy inference of Jōmon population dynamics using bayesian phase models, residential data, and summed probability distribution of 14C dates
Neolithic population crash in northwest Europe associated with agricultural crisis
The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population between ~5950 and ~5550 cal yr BP is followed by a decline that lasted until ~4950 cal yr BP. The timing of the increase in population density correlates with the local appearance of farming and is attributed to the advantageous effects of agriculture. However, the subsequent population decline has yet to be satisfactorily explained. One possible expl…
Māori Population Growth in Pre-contact New Zealand: Regional Population Dynamics Inferred From Summed Probability Distributions of Radiocarbon Dates
Past population dynamics play a key role in integrated models of socio-cultural change in Polynesia. A key aspect of these models is the interplay between food production and population growth. Located on the margins of Polynesia, New Zealand presented considerable challenges to traditional Polynesian food production, many crops were not successfully established and those that were produced greatly reduced yields. However, despite the hurdles to …
Spatio-temporal approaches to archaeological radiocarbon dates
Summed Probability Distribution of 14C Dates Suggests Regional Divergences in the Population Dynamics of the Jomon Period in Eastern Japan
Recent advances in the use of summed probability distribution (SPD) of calibrated 14C dates have opened new possibilities for studying prehistoric demography. The degree of correlation between climate change and population dynamics can now be accurately quantified, and divergences in the demographic history of distinct geographic areas can be statistically assessed. Here we contribute to this research agenda by reconstructing the prehistoric popu…
Reconstructing regional population fluctuations in the European Neolithic using radiocarbon dates: A new case-study using an improved method
In a previous study we presented a new method that used summed probability distributions (SPD) of radiocarbon dates as a proxy for population levels, and Monte-Carlo simulation to test the significance of the observed fluctuations in the context of uncertainty in the calibration curve and archaeological sampling. The method allowed us to identify periods of significant short-term population change, caveated with the fact that around 5% of these p…
Inference From Large Sets of Radiocarbon Dates: Software and Methods
The last decade has seen the development of a range of new statistical and computational techniques for analysing large collections of radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates, often but not exclusively to make inferences about human population change in the past. Here we introduce rcarbon , an open-source software package for the R statistical computing language which implements many of these techniques and looks to foster transparent future study of their str…
A probabilistic framework for assessing spatio-temporal point patterns in the archaeological record
Modelling Temporal Uncertainty in Archaeological Analysis
Spatio-temporal approaches to archaeological radiocarbon dates
A house with a view? Multi-model inference, visibility fields, and point process analysis of a Bronze Age settlement on Leskernick Hill (Cornwall, UK)
This paper combines point-process modelling, visibility analysis and an information criteria approach to infer the reasons behind the Bronze Age settlement pattern of Leskernick Hill in Cornwall, UK. We formalise three alternative hypotheses as point process models characterised by different combinations of covariates. In addition to using traditional topographic variables, we use a form of affordance viewsheds, which we refer to as visibility fi…
Culture, space, and metapopulation: A simulation-based study for evaluating signals of blending and branching
This paper explores the robustness of phylogenetic methods for detecting variations in branching and \nblending signals in the archaeological record. Both processes can generate a spatial structure whereby \ncultural similarity between different sites decays with increasing spatial distance. By generating a series \nof artificial records through the controlled and parameterised environment of an agent-based simulation, \nwe: a) illustrate the wea…
A multi-proxy inference of Jōmon population dynamics using bayesian phase models, residential data, and summed probability distribution of 14C dates
An Approximate Bayesian Computation approach for inferring patterns of cultural evolutionary change
A wide range of theories and methods inspired from evolutionary biology have recently been used to investigate temporal changes in the frequency of archaeological material. Here we follow this research agenda and present a novel approach based on Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), which enables the evaluation of multiple competing evolutionary models formulated as computer simulations. This approach offers the opportunity to: 1) flexibly int…
A Simulation Model of Fission–Fusion Dynamics and Long-Term Settlement Change
Cycles of change in Jomon settlement: A case study from eastern Tokyo Bay
Japanese archaeology benefits from the large number of rescue excavations conducted during recent decades that have led to an unparalleled record of archaeological sites. That record is here put to use to interrogate changing settlement patterns in the north-eastern corner of Tokyo Bay during several millennia of the Jomon period (Early, Middle and Late Jomon: 7000-3220 cal BP). Jomon hunter-gatherer occupation is characterised by large numbers o…
A matter of taste? Mode and periodicity of marine mollusc exploitation on the Mediterranean island of Favignana (Ègadi Islands, Italy) during its isolation in the early Holocene
The exploitation of marine molluscs by Mediterranean hunter-gatherers increased from the Upper Palaeolithic onwards, although their role in subsistence has rarely been investigated fully. An ideal area to address this issue is the archipelago of the Ègadi Islands, most of which were isolated by Post-Glacial sea level rise. Here we report on the results of the study of the mollusc assemblage recovered during the 1972 excavations at Grotta d’Orient…
Risk factors for the occurrence of sexual misconduct during archaeological and anthropological fieldwork
Fieldwork is crucial to advancing knowledge in archaeology and anthropology, but previous works suggests that between 64 and 68 percent of respondents experience sexual misconduct during fieldwork. Going forward, fieldwork must be made safe and inclusive. To achieve this, we must understand why sexual misconduct takes place during fieldwork. We surveyed an international sample of archaeologists and anthropologists (n=300) about their most recent …
Modeling Demic and Cultural Diffusion: An Introduction
Identifying the processes by which human cultures spread across different populations is one of the most topical objectives shared among different fields of study. Seminal works have analyzed a variety of data and attempted to determine whether empirically observed patterns are the result of demic and/or cultural diffusion. This special issue collects articles exploring several themes (from modes of cultural transmission to drivers of dispersal m…
The chronology of culture: A comparative assessment of European Neolithic dating approaches
Archaeologists have long sought appropriate ways to describe the duration and floruit of archaeological cultures in statistical terms. Thus far, chronological reasoning has been largely reliant on typological sequences. Using summed probability distributions, the authors here compare radiocarbon dates for a series of European Neolithic cultures with their generally accepted ‘standard’ date ranges and with the greater precision afforded by dendroc…
Māori Population Growth in Pre-contact New Zealand: Regional Population Dynamics Inferred From Summed Probability Distributions of Radiocarbon Dates
Past population dynamics play a key role in integrated models of socio-cultural change in Polynesia. A key aspect of these models is the interplay between food production and population growth. Located on the margins of Polynesia, New Zealand presented considerable challenges to traditional Polynesian food production, many crops were not successfully established and those that were produced greatly reduced yields. However, despite the hurdles to …
Beyond baselines of performance: Beta regression models of compositional variability in craft production studies
Chemical analyses of archaeological artefacts are often used for provenance studies and for assessing whether specific performance characteristics were targeted by craftspeople in the past. Traditionally, the answers to these questions were sought by identifying compositional averages and by studying their correlations with either the geochemical signatures of candidate raw material sources or the corresponding physical or chemical properties of …
Culinary continuity in central Japan across the transition to agriculture
Rice and millet arrived in Western Japan from Korea around 3,000 years ago and spread eastwards across the archipelago in the next 700 years. However, the extent to which agriculture transformed traditional Jōmon hunter-gatherer-fisher communities is debated. Central Japan is a key area of study as remodelling of radiocarbon dates shows a slowdown in the dispersal rate of rice agriculture in this area. Here, we examine and compare the use of pott…
Divergent population dynamics in the middle to late Holocene lower Fraser valley and mid-Fraser canyon, British Columbia
Cultural Incubators and Spread of Innovation
Several forms of social learning rely on the direct or indirect evaluation of the fitness of cultural traits. Here we argue, via a simple agent-based model, that payoff uncertainty, that is, the correlation between a trait and the signal used to evaluate its fitness, plays a pivotal role in the spread of beneficial innovation. More specifically, we examine how this correlation affects the evolutionary dynamics of different forms of social learnin…
A Bayesian alternative for aoristic analyses in archaeology
Aoristic analysis is often used to handle chronological uncertainties of datasets where scientific dates (e.g., 14 C and OSL) are unavailable, and observations are described by association to archaeological periods or phases. Although several advances have been made over the last 2 decades, the basic principle of this approach remains fundamentally the same. Temporal windows of analyses are first divided into regularly sized time blocks, and prob…
Assessing quantitative methods in archaeology via simulated datasets: The Archaeoriddle challenge. Concept, project and motivations
Compared to what is found in many other scientific disciplines, archaeological data are typically scarce, biased and fragmented. This, coupled with the fact that archaeologists can rarely test their hypotheses using experimental design, makes archaeological inference and our ability to assess the robustness of quantitative methods used to make such inferences challenging. Archaeoriddle is a project that was born as an attempt to compare archaeolo…
Regional variations in the demographic response to the arrival of rice farming in prehistoric Japan
Rice agriculture was brought to Japan during the first millennium BC by migrant communities of farmers from the Korean peninsula. Substantial geographic variation is observed in the uptake of this new subsistence economy, reflecting different forms of interaction between farmers and foragers. Here, the authors analyse a combination of settlement and radiocarbon data to determine the extent to which these different forms of interaction led to regi…
The Global Dynamics of Inequality (Gini) project: Analysing Archaeological Housing Data
The GINI project investigates the dynamics of inequality among populations over the long term by synthesising global archaeological housing data. This project brings archaeologists together from around the world to assess hypotheses concerning the causes and consequences of inequality that are of relevance to contemporary societies globally
How Cultural Transmission Through Objects Impacts Inferences About Cultural Evolution
The cross-fertilisation between biological and cultural evolution has led to an extensive borrowing of key concepts, theories, and statistical methods for studying temporal variation in the frequency of cultural variants. Archaeologists have been among the front-runners of those engaging with this endeavour, and the last 2 decades have seen a number of case studies where modes of social learning were inferred from the changing frequencies of arte…
A probabilistic framework for assessing spatio-temporal point patterns in the archaeological record
Modelling Temporal Uncertainty in Archaeological Analysis
Spatio-Temporal Distributions of Middle to Late Jomon Pithouses in Oyumino, Chiba (Japan)
Oyumino district (Chiba City, Chiba Prefecture, Japan) is a small residential area which has been intensely investigated as part of an urban development project during the 1970s~90s. The emergency excavations have yielded a vast amount of archaeological materials from different historic and prehistoric periods, including numerous hunter-gatherer settlements attributed to the Jōmon culture (ca. 16,000 – 2500 cal BP).The dataset comprises the spati…
A Simulation Model of Fission–Fusion Dynamics and Long-Term Settlement Change
Cycles of change in Jomon settlement: A case study from eastern Tokyo Bay
Japanese archaeology benefits from the large number of rescue excavations conducted during recent decades that have led to an unparalleled record of archaeological sites. That record is here put to use to interrogate changing settlement patterns in the north-eastern corner of Tokyo Bay during several millennia of the Jomon period (Early, Middle and Late Jomon: 7000-3220 cal BP). Jomon hunter-gatherer occupation is characterised by large numbers o…
Une modélisation géographiquement explicite d’interaction culturelle. Dialectes crétois modernes, archéologie de l’âge du Bronze
Cet article considère comment une distribution de traits culturels est affectée par la taille, l'emplacement et la configuration d’établissements humains à travers une région géographique, ainsi que d'autres aspects du paysageintervenant. En nous appuyant sur deux bases de données venant de Crète, nous considérons d'abord les variantes dialectales de mots utilisés dans plus d'une centaine de communautés crétoises à la fin des années soixante. Un …
A matter of taste? Mode and periodicity of marine mollusc exploitation on the Mediterranean island of Favignana (Ègadi Islands, Italy) during its isolation in the early Holocene
The exploitation of marine molluscs by Mediterranean hunter-gatherers increased from the Upper Palaeolithic onwards, although their role in subsistence has rarely been investigated fully. An ideal area to address this issue is the archipelago of the Ègadi Islands, most of which were isolated by Post-Glacial sea level rise. Here we report on the results of the study of the mollusc assemblage recovered during the 1972 excavations at Grotta d’Orient…
Reconstructing regional population fluctuations in the European Neolithic using radiocarbon dates: A new case-study using an improved method
In a previous study we presented a new method that used summed probability distributions (SPD) of radiocarbon dates as a proxy for population levels, and Monte-Carlo simulation to test the significance of the observed fluctuations in the context of uncertainty in the calibration curve and archaeological sampling. The method allowed us to identify periods of significant short-term population change, caveated with the fact that around 5% of these p…
A house with a view? Multi-model inference, visibility fields, and point process analysis of a Bronze Age settlement on Leskernick Hill (Cornwall, UK)
This paper combines point-process modelling, visibility analysis and an information criteria approach to infer the reasons behind the Bronze Age settlement pattern of Leskernick Hill in Cornwall, UK. We formalise three alternative hypotheses as point process models characterised by different combinations of covariates. In addition to using traditional topographic variables, we use a form of affordance viewsheds, which we refer to as visibility fi…
An Approximate Bayesian Computation approach for inferring patterns of cultural evolutionary change
A wide range of theories and methods inspired from evolutionary biology have recently been used to investigate temporal changes in the frequency of archaeological material. Here we follow this research agenda and present a novel approach based on Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), which enables the evaluation of multiple competing evolutionary models formulated as computer simulations. This approach offers the opportunity to: 1) flexibly int…
Culture, space, and metapopulation: A simulation-based study for evaluating signals of blending and branching
This paper explores the robustness of phylogenetic methods for detecting variations in branching and \nblending signals in the archaeological record. Both processes can generate a spatial structure whereby \ncultural similarity between different sites decays with increasing spatial distance. By generating a series \nof artificial records through the controlled and parameterised environment of an agent-based simulation, \nwe: a) illustrate the wea…
The chronology of culture: A comparative assessment of European Neolithic dating approaches
Archaeologists have long sought appropriate ways to describe the duration and floruit of archaeological cultures in statistical terms. Thus far, chronological reasoning has been largely reliant on typological sequences. Using summed probability distributions, the authors here compare radiocarbon dates for a series of European Neolithic cultures with their generally accepted ‘standard’ date ranges and with the greater precision afforded by dendroc…
Isolation-by-distance, homophily, and “core” vs. “package” cultural evolution models in Neolithic Europe
Recently there has been growing interest in characterising population structure in cultural data in the context of ongoing debates about the potential of cultural group selection as an evolutionary process. Here we use archaeological data for this purpose, which brings in a temporal as well as spatial dimension. We analyse two distinct material cultures (pottery and personal ornaments) from Neolithic Europe, in order to: a) determine whether arch…
Modeling Demic and Cultural Diffusion: An Introduction
Identifying the processes by which human cultures spread across different populations is one of the most topical objectives shared among different fields of study. Seminal works have analyzed a variety of data and attempted to determine whether empirically observed patterns are the result of demic and/or cultural diffusion. This special issue collects articles exploring several themes (from modes of cultural transmission to drivers of dispersal m…
Cultural Incubators and Spread of Innovation
Several forms of social learning rely on the direct or indirect evaluation of the fitness of cultural traits. Here we argue, via a simple agent-based model, that payoff uncertainty, that is, the correlation between a trait and the signal used to evaluate its fitness, plays a pivotal role in the spread of beneficial innovation. More specifically, we examine how this correlation affects the evolutionary dynamics of different forms of social learnin…
Summed Probability Distribution of 14C Dates Suggests Regional Divergences in the Population Dynamics of the Jomon Period in Eastern Japan
Recent advances in the use of summed probability distribution (SPD) of calibrated 14C dates have opened new possibilities for studying prehistoric demography. The degree of correlation between climate change and population dynamics can now be accurately quantified, and divergences in the demographic history of distinct geographic areas can be statistically assessed. Here we contribute to this research agenda by reconstructing the prehistoric popu…
A matter of ephemerality: The study of Kel Tadrart Tuareg (southwest Libya) campsites via quantitative spatial analysis
Biagetti, S., J. Alcaina-Mateos, and E. R. Crema. 2016. A matter of ephemerality: the study of Kel Tadrart Tuareg (southwest Libya) campsites via quantitative spatial analysis. Ecology and Society 21(1):42.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08202-210142
Spatio-temporal approaches to archaeological radiocarbon dates
Neolithic population crash in northwest Europe associated with agricultural crisis
The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population between ~5950 and ~5550 cal yr BP is followed by a decline that lasted until ~4950 cal yr BP. The timing of the increase in population density correlates with the local appearance of farming and is attributed to the advantageous effects of agriculture. However, the subsequent population decline has yet to be satisfactorily explained. One possible expl…
Māori Population Growth in Pre-contact New Zealand: Regional Population Dynamics Inferred From Summed Probability Distributions of Radiocarbon Dates
Past population dynamics play a key role in integrated models of socio-cultural change in Polynesia. A key aspect of these models is the interplay between food production and population growth. Located on the margins of Polynesia, New Zealand presented considerable challenges to traditional Polynesian food production, many crops were not successfully established and those that were produced greatly reduced yields. However, despite the hurdles to …
The MedAfriCarbon Radiocarbon Database and Web Application. Archaeological Dynamics in Mediterranean Africa, ca. 9600–700 BC
The MedAfriCarbon radiocarbon database and its accompanying web application are outcomes of the MedAfrica project — Archaeological deep history and dynamics of Mediterranean Africa, ca. 9600–700 BC. The dataset presented here in Version 1.0 of the database includes 1587 archaeological 14C dates from 368 sites in Mediterranean Africa. The database is unusual because the majority of the dates within it have been annotated with further cultural and …
A multi-proxy inference of Jōmon population dynamics using bayesian phase models, residential data, and summed probability distribution of 14C dates
Modelling the potential ecological niche of domesticated buckwheat in China: Archaeological evidence, environmental constraints and climate change
We present a species distribution model (SDM) of Fagopyrum esculentum (buckwheat) in China using present distribution data and estimates for the past based on palaeoclimatic reconstructions. Our model estimates the potential area suitable for buckwheat cultivation over the last 8,000 years, with northeast China consistently showing the highest suitability, providing insights on the discrepancy between the location of the earliest archaeobotanical…
Inference From Large Sets of Radiocarbon Dates: Software and Methods
The last decade has seen the development of a range of new statistical and computational techniques for analysing large collections of radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates, often but not exclusively to make inferences about human population change in the past. Here we introduce rcarbon , an open-source software package for the R statistical computing language which implements many of these techniques and looks to foster transparent future study of their str…
Statistical Inference of Prehistoric Demography from Frequency Distributions of Radiocarbon Dates: A Review and a Guide for the Perplexed
The last decade saw a rapid increase in the number of studies where time–frequency changes of radiocarbon dates have been used as a proxy for inferring past population dynamics. Although its universal and straightforward premise is appealing and undoubtedly offers some unique opportunities for research on long-term comparative demography, practical applications are far from trivial and riddled with issues pertaining to the very nature of the prox…
Archaeology (32 works) · Geography (31 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (24 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Population (14 works) · Biology (13 works) · Demography (13 works) · Radiocarbon dating (11 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works) · History (10 works)