Internet Archaeology 52

This is a report on two excavations at the Carmelite friary in an area of Aberdeen called the Green. The 1980-1 excavation revealed the south-west corner of the church and the south end of what was probably the west range of the friary. The 1994 excavations uncovered the north-west corner of the church, most of what is probably the west range, a probable east wall of the church, part of the graveyard and traces of the south and/or east range. Finds included 201 burials (one of which had a copper alloy bracelet on the left wrist), window glass and leading, floor and roof tiles as well as a selection of personal items including book fittings, pins and a bone die. The friary was supplied with running water through a lead pipe and copper alloy taps from at least the late 13th century.The excavations in this area have allowed a fuller interpretation of the Carmelite friary and its setting. As a result it has now been possible to 'reconstruct' the friary and put it into its medieval setting in the Green. Aberdeen has one of the best collections of historical documents in Scotland and there are over 300 surviving documents or book entries about the Carmelite friars of Aberdeen which have been used to aid interpretation alongside the archaeological evidence. The Aberdeen Carmelite church remains buried under the car park. A plaque was erected by the developers near the site and the outline of the church has been marked out on the car park which now covers the building.

This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to address the ethical and moral dilemmas that can confound the use of new technology to classify and sort thousands of images. The categories used to 'train' the machine are self-determined by the researchers, but to what extent can current image classifying methods be broken to create false positives or false negatives when attempting to classify images taken from social media sales records as either old authentic items or recent forgeries made using remains sourced from unknown locations? What potential do they have to be exploited by dealers or forgers as a way to 'authenticate the market'? Analysing the data obtained when 'scraping' image or text relevant to cultural property trafficking of any kind involves the use of machine learning and neural network analysis, the ethics of which are themselves complicated. Here, we discuss these issues around two case studies; the ongoing repatriation case of Abraham Ulrikab, and an example of what it looks like when the classifier is deliberately broken.

A recent compositional study of Egyptian cobalt-blue glass from museum collections in Japan (18th Dynasty) and from the site of Dahshur (18th and 19th-20th Dynasties) concluded that a new source of cobalt was exploited for the later Dahshur glass, thereby suggesting that glass production continued into the Ramesside period (Abe et al. 2012). It is shown in the current article that some of this 18th Dynasty glass and the majority of the 19th-20th Dynasty glass had been recycled, not only supporting the general consensus that glass production virtually disappeared by 1250 BC, but that the cobalt source did not necessarily change. It is further proposed, however, that the generally accepted cobalt source for Egyptian glass was not the alum deposits of Egypt's Western Desert, but derived from cobaltiferous siliceous ores, possibly from central Iran.Re-analysis of the compositions of cobalt-blue glass frit found at Amarna, as well as Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass, suggests that the cobalt colourant was a by-product of silver extraction from these ores and can therefore be considered as a concentrated cobalt glass slag, which travelled in the form of a frit to glass producers who added it to locally derived base glasses and/or their precursors. Experiments conducted on ore containing cobalt-nickel arsenides with native silver demonstrate that not only can silver be extracted and that concentrated cobalt glass can be produced simply by adding a flux, but that some components of the ore partition preferentially into the silver or the glass slag, thereby weakening their associations with the other components in archaeological glass. Treating the cobalt-blue colourant as a slag composed of the gangue of a smelting system provides an explanation for the unique elevated levels of alumina and lower levels of potash found in cobalt-blue glasses, as well as providing an explanation for the cessation of cobalt exploitation at the end of the Late Bronze Age. It is suggested that the exhaustion of native silver and siliceous silver ore deposits during the Bronze Age, with argentiferous lead ores becoming the main source of silver, depleted the amount of cobalt available, thereby reducing the amount of glass produced which, in turn, led to increases in recycling during the New Kingdom period.

This dataset consists of Australian Aboriginal archaeological locations of interest in the greater Nepean River area in New South Wales, Australia.

In Ecuador, bottles as containers for liquids appeared in the Late Formative period at the end of the Machalilla culture (1600 BC to 800 BC). Whistle bottles were created and perfected during the Chorrera culture (900 BC to 100 BC), and finally evolved into polyphonic bottles during the Bahía culture (500 BC to 650 AD). During the Chorrera phase, moulded aesthetic elements were developed and incorporated:, such as zoomorphs and anthropomorphs, phytomorphs, architectural forms, whose animated references were related to the acoustics they produced, giving 'onomatopoeic' sounds of nature (e.g. birds, monkeys, frogs). The current research focused on the structural and systematic study of a double ellipsoid ornithomorph bottle with a whistle from the Chorrera-Bahía culture (900 BC to 100 BC), an object that is currently in the National Archaeological Reserve of the Ministry of Culture in the city of Quito, Republic of Ecuador (Ch-B-1-38-69) (Figure 1). Two replicas and the original were investigated in situ by the Universidad Central del Ecuador and it was possible to determine that both blowing into and moving the objects when filled with water produced the sound. We interpret this as a need to 'automate' the sound production, and the acoustics derived from the movement of water is what possibly motivated Crespo (1966) to call them 'magical objects'.