Traces on Tropical Tools
Traces on Tropical Tools

Author: Channah José Nieuwenhuis

Publisher: Archaeological Studies Leiden

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13:

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This volume presents the results of an analysis of microscopic wear traces on chert artefacts from a variety of pre-ceramic period sites in Colombia. Nieuwenhuis uses wear trace analysis to explore the relationship between Abrian and Tequendamian artefacts, and the different systems of tool production and use. Focusing on material from sites in the high plain of Bogota and the middle Magdalena Valley, Nieuwenhuis extends the study to consider the complex relationships between tool use and changes in climate and environment. The distinction between Tequendamian and Abrian artefact classes has long been related to the climatic, vegetational and faunal changes of the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. Tequendamian tools were thought to belong to late Pleistocene hunters of large game in open landscapes, but were gradually replaced by Abrian tools at the onset of the Holocene; Abrian tools were considered a specialised adaptation to the changing environment, and were used by Holocene foragers exploiting the resources of the tropical rainforest. In the past decade, however, the strict chronological division between the two classes has become blurred. Nieuwenhuis argues that the Abrian tools represent a simple, multifunctional, versatile toolkit, while Tequendamian tools did not have an explicit specialised function, but served various domestic tasks, and were used for some sort of status-related exchange."

Imaging Spectrometry -- a Tool for Environmental Observations
Imaging Spectrometry -- a Tool for Environmental Observations

Author: Joachim Hill

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-08-19

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0585331731

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The technique of imaging spectrometry has now passed its infancy and entered into a new phase of application oriented research. Advanced sensor systems (such as Nasa/JPL's AVIRIS) have become available for international research programmes (MAC Europe 1991), new imaging spectrometers are under development in several European countries or have already passed their acceptance tests, and first high spectral resolution imaging systems are already operated by private industry. On European level, the EARSEC programme of the Joint Research Centre has provided considerable financial investments for the development of an imaging spectrometer which covers the reflective and important parts of the emissive spectrum (DAIS-7915), and the European Space Agency has initiated an important airborne remote sensing campaign (EMAC 1994/95) in which imaging spectrometry will constitute one of the most important components. The increasing sensor capabilities also reflect the fact that imaging spectrometry has advanced in many application fields of earth remote sensing. Progress has been made in the development of data pre-proeessing methods, spectral signature modeling and semi-empirical approaches for retrieving surface parameters. It therefore appeared important to further disseminate information about new approaches in the application-oriented analysis of imaging spectrometry data. This volume presents the lectures of the second EUROCOURSE on imaging spectrometry which was held in November 1992 at the Joint Research Centre (a first course on "Fundamentals and Prospective Applications" of imaging spectrometry had been organised in October 1989, the lectures being published as EUROCOURSES in Remote Sensing, vol. 2).

Trace Metals in a Tropical Mangrove Wetland
Trace Metals in a Tropical Mangrove Wetland

Author: Santosh Kumar Sarkar

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-08-09

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 9811027935

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This book offers a comprehensive and accessible guide covering various aspects of trace metal contamination in abiotic and biotic matrices of an iconic Indian tropical mangrove wetland – Sundarban. Divided into nine chapters, the book begins by discussing the fundamental concepts of sources, accumulation rate and significance of trace metal speciation, along with the impact of multiple stressors on trace metal accumulation, taking into account both tourist activities and the exacerbating role of climate change. The second chapter presents a detailed account of the sampling strategy and preservation of research samples, followed by exhaustive information on sediment quality assessment and ecological risk, instrumental techniques in environmental chemical analyses, quality assurance and quality control, along with the Sediment Quality Guidelines (SQGs). Using raw data, the sediment quality assessment indices (e.g., pollution load index, index of geoaccumulation, Nemerow Pollution Load Index etc.) and conventional statistical analyses are worked out and interpreted precisely, allowing students to readily evaluate and interpret them. This is followed by chapters devoted to trace metal accumulation in sediments and benthic organisms, as well as acid-leachable and geochemical fractionation of trace metals in sediments. The book then focuses on chemical speciation of butylin and arsenic in sediments as well as macrozoobenthos (polychaetous annelids). Finally, potential positive role of the dominant mangrove Avicennia in sequestering trace metals from rhizosediments of Sundarban Wetland is elaborately discussed. This timely reference book provides a versatile and in-depth account for understanding the emerging problems of trace metal contamination – issues that are relevant for many countries around the globe.

Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture
Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture

Author: Linda Hurcombe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-12

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1136802002

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This book is an introduction to the study of artefacts, setting them in a social context rather than using a purely scientific approach. Drawing on a range of different cultures and extensively illustrated, Archaeological Artefacts and Material Culture covers everything from recovery strategies and recording procedures to interpretation through typology, ethnography and experiment, and every type of material including wood, fibers, bones, hides and adhesives, stone, clay, and metals. With over seventy illustrations with almost fifty in full colour, this book not only provides the tools an archaeologist will need to interpret past societies from their artefacts, but also a keen appreciation of the beauty and tactility involved in working with these fascinating objects. This is a book no archaeologist should be without, but it will also appeal to anybody interested in the interaction between people and objects.

Hunter-Gatherers’ Tool-Kit
Hunter-Gatherers’ Tool-Kit

Author: Juan F. Gibaja

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-01-06

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1527544923

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This volume provides the reader with a multifaceted overview of the study of stone tools used by humans in the past. Including case studies from various geographic regions and different continents, and covering a wide range of chronologies, the contributions here are centred on the study of human communities based on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. A number of essays in this volume focus on tool production and use, and address major paleoanthropological questions related to past human economic and social behaviour. The book also includes detailed and careful studies of human technology during Prehistory.

Tracing Early Agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea
Tracing Early Agriculture in the Highlands of New Guinea

Author: Tim Denham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-28

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1351115286

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In this book, historical narratives chart how people created forms of agriculture in the highlands of New Guinea and how these practices were transformed through time. The intention is twofold: to clearly establish New Guinea as a region of early agricultural development and plant domestication; and, to develop a contingent, practice-based interpretation of early agriculture that has broader application to other regions of the world. The multi-disciplinary record from the highlands has the potential to challenge and change long held assumptions regarding early agriculture globally, which are usually based on domestication. Early agriculture in the highlands is charted by an exposition of the practices of plant exploitation and cultivation. Practices are ontologically prior because they ultimately produce the phenotypic and genotypic changes in plant species characterised as domestication, as well as the social and environmental transformations associated with agriculture. They are also methodologically prior because they emplace plants in specific historico-geographic contexts.

Traces of the Unseen
Traces of the Unseen

Author: Carolina Sá Carvalho

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2023-02-15

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 081014543X

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A richly illustrated examination of photography as a technology for documenting, creating, and understanding the processes of modernization in turn-of-the-century Brazil and the Amazon Photography at the turn of the twentieth century was not only a product of modernity but also an increasingly available medium to chronicle the processes of modernization. Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America situates photography’s role in documenting the destruction wrought by infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multimedia assemblages, Carolina Sá Carvalho explores how this visual evidence of violence was framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated. As she explains, this photographic creation and circulation generated a pedagogy of the gaze with which increasingly connected urban audiences were taught what and how to see: viewers learned to interpret the traces of violence captured in these images within the larger context of modernization. Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings. Moreover, Sá Carvalho locates historically specific practices of seeing within the geopolitical peripheries of capitalism. What emerges is a consideration of photography as a technology through which modern aspirations, moral inclinations, imagined futures, and lost pasts were represented, critiqued, and mourned.

Emissions of Atmospheric Trace Compounds
Emissions of Atmospheric Trace Compounds

Author: Claire Granier

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13: 1402021674

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This book grows out of a 2001 workshop on "Emission of Chemical Species and Aerosols into the Atmosphere." The contents deal with inventories of emissions related to anthropogenic emissions or biomass burning; emissions from vegetation and soils; emissions of mineral and sea-salt aerosols; and emissions of sulphur compounds from the oceans. Concluding chapters show how atmospheric observations have been used to improve our knowledge of emissions.

Guide to Sources for Agricultural and Biological Research
Guide to Sources for Agricultural and Biological Research

Author: J. Richard Blanchard

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 748

ISBN-13: 0520328736

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.