6th century BCE, probably as part of the expansion into the region of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Lying on one of the main branches of the ancient Silk Roads, which connected Europe and Africa to the Far East, a succession of cities flourished. By the early medieval period these encompassed over 1,000ha (Fig. 1). The great Islamic city of Sultan Kala, capital of the eastern Islamic world, wa...

There is substantial historical evidence to support the prevalence of surgical practice during ancient times in the subcontinent of India. However, in contrast to the contemporaneous Greek and Roman periods, there is a notable absence of any archaeological finds in the form of surgical instruments. Inquiries to major museums and personal contacts have not been fruitful. This lack of relevant ar...

D.C. Comer, A Primer on Space Archaeology: In Observance of the 40th Anniversary of the World Heritage Convention, SpringerBriefs in Archaeology 5, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6074-9_15, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract With its ability to penetrate dense tropical canopies, LiDAR is revolutionizing how ancient Mesoamerican landscapes are recorded. Locating ancient sites in th...

Ground-penetrating mapping radar allows fo r the three-dimensional reconstruction of ancient landscapes by interpreting geological horizons associated with archaeological sites. When the geological framework of a site can be placed in both time and space, ancient environments and people’s usage and adaptation to landscapes can be studied. In coastal Portugal late Ice Age people discarded stone ...

archaeological excavations have revealed diverse medical materials of the bronze, neolithic, hellenistic ages, the roman empire and late ancient culture period in the territory of georgia. these materials are rich repositories of national, spiritual and material culture kept in different museums of georgia. to show the origin and development of medicine in georgia, it is, primarily, crucial to ...

Disease is a major cause of natural selection affecting human evolution, whether through a sudden pandemic or persistent morbidity and mortality. Recent contributions in the field of ancient pathogen genomics have advanced our understanding of the antiquity and nature of human-pathogen interactions through time. Technical advancements have facilitated the recovery, enrichment, and high-throughp...

An intense debate concerning the nature and mode of Neolithic transition in Europe has long received much attention. Recent publications of paleogenetic analyses focusing on ancient European farmers from Central Europe or the Iberian Peninsula have greatly contributed to this debate, providing arguments in favor of major migrations accompanying European Neolithization and highlighting noticeabl...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS In spite of the abundance of archaeological, bio-archaeological, historical and genetic data, the origins, historical biogeography, identity of ancient grapevine cultivars and mechanisms of domestication are still largely unknown. Here, analysis of variation in seed morphology aims to provide accurate criteria for the discrimination between wild grapes and modern cultivars a...

said about the effect of the hostile environment on the maturation of the chemical philosophy in France. How far, for instance, did figures like de Claves deliberately play down their dogmatic attachment to Paracelsus's elemental theory for prudential reasons? There is more to be said also about the emergence of the new chemistry in eighteenth-century France. Chemistry and medicine were not so ...