Monumental tombs reflect various social, cultural, architectural, religious, economic, and engineering features of a community. However, environmental weathering, natural disasters, poor maintenance, vandalism, and misuse unfortunately pose serious threats to these cultural assets. Historic monuments are often exposed to the highest risk due to their vulnerability. The Ottoman-style Nişancı Ham...

The study of prehistoric demography draws inevitably on evidence both imperfect and incomplete, yet is essential for a satisfactory understanding of past communities. It is particularly valuable in addressing controversial questions such as the nature of early farming communities in western Europe, in the period between the adoption of domestic plants and animals and the establishment, centurie...

Tonga was unique in the prehistoric Pacific for developing a maritime state that integrated the archipelago under a centralized authority and for undertaking long-distance economic and political exchanges in the second millennium A.D. To establish the extent of Tonga's maritime polity, we geochemically analyzed stone tools excavated from the central places of the ruling paramounts, particularly...

Abstract The Petit-Chasseur megalithic necropolis is a key archaeological context for analyzing the social and ideological changes at end of Neolithic in Alpine region Central Europe. link between funerary monuments settlement sites was established by means ceramic archaeometric analysis. Domestic pottery from were thoroughly characterized using multiple spectroscopic microscopic techniques. Tw...

The Etruscan civilisation originated in the Villanovan Iron Age in the ninth century BC and was absorbed by Rome in the first century BC. Etruscan tombs, many of which are subterranean, are one of the best representations of this culture. The principal importance of these tombs, however, lies in the wall paintings and in the tradition of rich burial, which was unique in the Mediterranean Basin,...

Since 2002 the Kenchreai Cemetery Project has explored subterranean chamber tombs of Roman date in the main cemetery of the ancient port of Kenchreai, on the eastern coast of the Isthmus of Corinth, Greece. Analysis of the human remains recovered from three tombs has furnished evidence for cremation as well as inhumation. The cremated remains represent both adults and immature individuals. Fore...

The prehistoric stone funerary monuments of the Sahara desert, distributed in a huge geographical area, had been created in several different shapes. Some of them have a design that looks like a keyhole, and therefore are known as keyhole tombs. Since they are facing the sunrise, these tombs were also considered as places for the worship of the sun. In this paper, we show that one of them, in A...

It is demonstrated that palynomorphs can occur in fired ancient potsherds when the firing temperature was under 350°C. Pollen and phytoliths recovered from incompletely fired and fully fired potsherds (ca. 2700 yrs BP) from the Yanghai Tombs, Turpan, Xinjiang, NW China can be used as potential indicators for reconstructing past vegetation and corresponding climate in the area. The results show ...