Allgemein

The first Conference on Methodological Innovations in P-XRF-Studies will be held on 24th of September 2024 at the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science with an Ice-breaker Event at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien on the 23rd of September. It will give space to discuss portable X-ray fluorescence (p-XRF), a method widely used in a variety of research fields including archaeometry, conservation, geology, heritage studies, and many more. However, despite its widespread use, there still remains a lack of understanding of the specific requirements and best practices for handling the instrument across different research applications and materials: The simplicity of the instrument, as easy as pulling a trigger, gives the impression that, compared to laboratory methods, it does not require a specialist to operate it. As a result, there is a lack of training opportunities for practitioners, a deficit of groundwork and innovative studies and a tendency to apply p-XRF in a repetitive manner to the ever-same research questions. This sidelines p-XRF and neglects its innovative potential. Therefore, this conference will provide a platform to present cutting-edge methods and strategies for p-XRF data acquisition, processing and interpretation. It aims to highlight practical and software innovations, handling techniques and the new ways of the application of p-XRF to a variety of materials. Presentations from a variety of fields utilizing p-XRF will be presented…

HEAS Team Leader Sylvia Kirchengast (Department of Evolutionary Anthropology) has recently received new funding from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)’s 1000 Ideas Program. Her research project, „Gender-associated infant mortality in archaeological samples“, will examine the still unexplained female deficit in prehistoric and historic cemeteries.   The demographic interpretation of prehistoric and historic cemeteries is challenged by a frequent female deficit, with male skeletons often outnumbering female skeletons by a factor of two or more, contrary to expected natural sex ratios. Methodological issues such as inaccurate morphological sex diagnosis and possibly faster decomposition of female skeletons have been suggested but remain unproven. Additionally, gender stereotypes may influence the sex classification of human remains.   Sylvia's interdisciplinary project posits a new explanation: the female deficit is not a methodological artifact but a result of the subordinate role of women in patriarchal societies. This deficit may stem from lower societal investment in female offspring or from deliberate neglect. The project explores this question through interdisciplinary collaboration between Roman Archaeology and Biological Anthropology.   The team, consisting of HEAS members Sylvia Kirchengast, Dominik Hagmann, and other experts from HEAS and beyond, will analyze a Roman-era cemetery from today’s Wels, Austria, known for its female deficit. The research will include aDNA analysis of subadult individuals to detect excess female mortality, 14C dating, and material culture…

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Elmira Mohandesan has been awarded an FWF stand-alone research grant (PAT 3594624). She and her international team will explore the genetic diversity and cultural interactions of Late Bronze to Middle Iron Age human communities in the Carpathian Basin. Their multidisciplinary study will investigate how eastern population influxes and horses influenced these societies, providing a comprehensive understanding of their socio-cultural transformations." More information

The HEAS Keynote with Eszter Bánffy took place on Friday the 28th June in the beautiful Theatersaal in the HEAS Partner Institution The Austrian Academy of Sciences. We welcomed almost 100 people online and in-person for her talk on 'New strategies and coping practices of early farmers taking the Danubian route (6000-5350 cal BC)'.   The recording from this event will be available on our YouTube channel later this week.

The prestigious excavations of the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Ephesos/Türkiye will be led by Martin Steskal from this year. For many years, Steskal has been committed to interdisciplinary research approaches and the establishment of archaeology as an interface between the humanities and sciences. His planned research includes questions on circular economy, resource management, human-environment relationships, production and consumption. He deals with the key question of how the living conditions of an ancient populations can be reconstructed.

On the 6th February 2024 HEAS hosted a group of children from children from around Vienna for a workshop on 'Archaeology for Kids' at the HEAS partner the Natural History Museum. The children learnt about the main prehistoric and historical eras with interactive examples of representative sites, monuments, and objects. We hope this hands on experience sparked an interest for the children in ancient cultures and the modern scientific methods used to study them. To learn more about the workshop and other work by Dr. Alexandra Dolea please see her blog post below: https://www.ilovearchaeology.com/post/archaeology-for-kids-workshop

HEAS Member Martin Fieder has published a new US textbook on social status, number of children in modern societies, confirming evolutionary assumptions on social status and reproduction. This is the first book to fully examine, from an evolutionary perspective, the relationship between social status and fertility in human societies before, during, and after the demographic transition. In most non-human social species, social status or relative rank in a social group is positively associated with the number of offspring, with high-status individuals typically having more offspring than low-status individuals. Humans, however, appear to be different. As societies have become richer, fertility has fallen to unprecedented lows, with some developed societies now at or below replacement fertility. Within rich societies, women in higher-income families often have fewer children than women in lower-income families. Evolutionary theory suggests that the relationship between social status and fertility is likely to be somewhat different for men and women, so it is important to examine this relationship for men and women separately. When this is done, the positive association between individual SES and fertility is often clear in less developed, pre-transition societies, especially for men. Once the demographic transition begins, it is elite families, and especially the women of elite families, who lead the way in fertility decline. Post-transition, the evidence from a wide range of developed…

HEAS member, Günther Karl Kunst, had his publication on 'The 10,000-year biocultural history of fallow deer and its implications for conservation policy' featured on Science ORF, the national public broadcaster for Austria. https://science.orf.at/stories/3223579/   Link to publication  

The oldest known genome of a bacterium from a family that causes diseases such as syphilis has been identified in prehistoric human remains from Brazil, a Nature paper reveals. The finding helps to shed light on the origins of this disease group. Closely related but distinct subspecies of Treponema pallidum bacteria cause different types of treponemal disease, such as venereal syphilis and a non-sexually transmitted disease known as bejel. The origins of these diseases are debated: some argue that the syphilis epidemic in late 15th century Europe arose after Columbus’ expeditions introduced the bacteria from the Americas. Previous theories of the emergence of these diseases have been based on studies of ancient bone pathology but definitive evidence to identify the causative subspecies has eluded researchers. Verena Schuenemann and colleagues extracted DNA from four individuals from a nearly 2,000-year-old Brazilian burial site and were able to reconstruct the genomes of T. pallidum bacteria that had infected them. Their analysis revealed that the pathogen responsible was most closely related to the modern species that causes bejel. The finding adds strength to previous suggestions that civilizations in the Americas experienced treponemal infections in pre-Columbian times, and that treponemal disease was already present in the New World at least 500 years before Columbus set sail. The study does not shed light on the emergence…

Congratulations to HEAS member Laura van der Sluis and HEAS Team Leader Pere Gelabert on being awarded the Young Investigator Award 2023. The Young Investigator Award is an initiative of the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Vienna designed to honour young postdoctoral scientists publishing in the top journals of their field. Award recipients are selected based on their publication output.

New publication of Philip R. Nigst and colleagues in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology on the results of the new excavations at Korolevo II in Ukraine. The site of Korolevo II in western Ukraine - located in the border area between central and eastern Europe - is mainly known for its Early Upper Palaeolithic assemblage, argued in the past to represent an assemblage at the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic. Hence, the site holds a potential for a better understanding of the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic transition and the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans. In this paper we report on our new fieldwork between 2015 and 2017, which provided a new view on the stratigraphy, chronology and archaeological sequence of the site. Read more here   Link to article      

Sound instruments over 12,000 years old identified as used by the last hunter-gatherers of the Near East to imitate the call of birds of prey An international team of archaeologists and ethnomusicologists led by José-Miguel Tejero (Researcher at the Pinhasi Laboratory of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology of the University of Vienna and HEAS Member) and Laurent Davin (CNRS. France) has discovered a unique set of prehistoric sound instruments in the Near East. These objects come from the Eynan-Mallaha archaeological site (Natufian archaeological culture, c. 13,000-9,700 BC) in northern Israel, excavated since 1955 by a Franco-Israeli team. The results of the study of these materials have just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. Link to article   [gallery ids="2519,2522"] [playlist type="video" ids="2517"]