The catastrophic impact of fishing pressure on species such as cod and herring is well documented. However, the antiquity of their intensive exploitation has not been established. Systematic catch statistics are only available for ca.100 years, but large-scale fishing industries existed in medieval Europe and the expansion of cod fishing from the fourteenth century (first in Iceland, then in Ne...

[1] A new tree‐ring record from living and remnant bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata) wood from the headwaters region of the Rio Grande River, Colorado is used in conjunction with other regional records to evaluate periods of unusually severe drought over the past two millennia (B.C. 268 to A.D. 2009). Our new record contains a multi‐century period of unusual dryness between 1 and 400 A.D., incl...

Archaeozoology is devoted to the identification, analysis, and interpretation of animal remains from archaeological sites. The reconstruction of everyday life in the medieval period has become unimaginable without considering archaeological phenomena, as emphasis tends to be placed on outstanding events and personalities at the expense of the simple matters of life that characterized daily prac...

The purpose of this study is to obtain demographic data regarding the medieval population buried at the Yuigahama-minami site in Kamakura, Japan, and to detect a secular trend in the life expectancy of Japanese population over the last several thousand years. The Yuigahama-minami skeletal sample consists of 260 individuals, including 98 subadults (under 20 years old) and 162 adults. A Yuigahama...

The genetic composition of the medieval populations of Central Europe has been poorly investigated to date. In particular, the region of modern-day Slovakia is a blank spot in archaeogenetic research. This paper reports the study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in ancient samples from the 9th-12th centuries originating from the cemeteries discovered in Nitra-Šindolka and Čakajovce, located in west...

In the period between 400 to 800 AD, also known as the period of the Barbarian invasions, intense migration is documented in the historical record of Europe. However, little is known about the demographic impact of these historical movements, potentially ranging from negligible to substantial. As a pilot study in a broader project on Medieval Europe, we sampled 102 specimens from 5 burial sites...

The paper considers some Medieval sources about imagined or actually studied automata, to make a contribution to the reconstruction of the cultural landscape of a period that, from the technological point of view, is commonly regarded as less interesting than others. It will be shown that the idea of an automatic device or system, capable of performing not necessarily simple tasks, of measuring...