Fiona Brock

TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the material study (radiocarbon dating, wood identification and strontium isotope analyses) of four large "India occidentali" clubs, part of the founding collections of the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, and originally part of John Tradescant's "Ark" in Lambeth (1656).

Abstract: Coloured enamels from the materials used in Modernist workshops from Barcelona were produced and compared to those found in the buildings to explore the reason for the reduced stability of the blue and green enamels. They were made of a lead-zinc borosilicate glass with a low softening point, reasonable stability to corrosion and matching thermal expansion coefficient with the blown base glass, mixed with colourants and pigment particles. The historical enamels show a lead, boron and zinc depleted silica rich amorphous glass, with precipitated lead and calcium sulphates or carbonates, characteristic of extensive atmospheric corrosion. The blue and green enamels show a heterogeneous layered microstructure more prone to degradation which is augmented by a greater heating and thermal stress affectation produced by the enhanced Infrared absorbance of blue tetrahedral cobalt colour centres and copper ions dissolved in the glass and, in particular, of the cobalt spinel particles.

Abstract: Department of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Site, Headington Campus, Oxford OX30BP, United KingdomL.S.Basell@soton.ac.ukZilhăo et al emphasise the primacy of stratigraphy intheir reply. Our Bayesian modelling incorporates thesame stratigraphic information in the form of ‘priors’,but the approach also allows us crucially to test theagreement between the radiometric data and the se-quence. Bayesian modelling is the only robust way todo this (see the extensive references in our initial re-sponse for the basis of the method). Viewinguncalibrated or calibrated data by eye is not sufficientlygood to produce reliable conclusions. Zilhăo et alsuggest that our priors are the problem, despite thefact that they are based on the same stratigraphicsequence that they have argued is not prone to wide-spread mixing (eg, D’Errico et al 1998; 2003). Theythink that substantial modifications are required toour prior modelling, including treating all of theChâtelperronian levels as a single phase within athree phase model: Aurignacian, Châtelperronian andMousterian. This approach does not reflect the ar-chaeological reality at the site, the sequence ofstratigraphic units that they themselves have pub-lished on widely and accept as being intact, and wetherefore reject this suggestion.They ask whether assigning different prior outlierprobabilities to some samples, such as OxA-X-2222-21 (which is an obvious outlier due its extremely youngage) would be a good idea. In fact assigning a higheroutlier probability to this result would have no effectsince the model already shows it be to be 100% likelyto be an outlier, even with a 5% outlier prior. Zilhăo etal also state that if we assign outlier priors of 40%instead of 5%, ‘outlier-ness’ disappears. We testedthis and found the exact same numbers of significantoutliers were detected as in our original publicationdata (Higham et al 2010) (we show these data intable 1). We recommend that prior outlier probabili-ties be assigned prior to, rather than after modelling,if we have case-specific information that a determi-nation is likely to be more problematic than normal. Inthe case of the OxA-X-2222-21 determination we didnot, but as stated, the point is entirely moot anyway;the result is 100% likely to be an outlier.Zilhăo et al suggest that modern and ancient car-bon could equally easily be taken up in the sampleswe dated, but provide no evidence for it. They repeattheir claim that the samples we dated were, in fact

TL;DR: This study used a cadaveric 65 kg, female pig barrel and 9 mm Luger ammunition to fire into HG1/A + KR1 soft armour panels over the spine to examine the injuries from spinal behind armour blunt trauma (BABT) impacts.

TL;DR: In this paper, the reliability of the Naqada relative chronology as a dating tool against all the relevant radiocarbon information is evaluated and the results show that the main blocks of the relative sequence do form a true chronology, but also indicate that the system is much less reliable at the level of individual phases.