Archaeology of Natural Places

Cannabis sativa is known among many cultures for its medicinal potential. Its complexity contributes to the historical application of various parts of the plant in ethno-medicines and pharmacotherapy. C. sativa has been used for the treatment of rheumatism, epilepsy, asthma, skin burns, pain, the management of sexually transmitted diseases, difficulties during child labor, postpartum hemorrhage, and gastrointestinal activity. However, the use of C. sativa is still limited, and it is illegal in most countries. Thus, this review aims to highlight the biological potential of the plant parts, as well as the techniques for the extraction, isolation, and characterization of C. sativa compounds. The plant produces a unique class of terpenophenolic compounds, called cannabinoids, as well as non-cannabinoid compounds. The exhaustive profiling of bioactive compounds and the chemical characterization and analysis of C. sativa compounds, which modern research has not yet fully achieved, is need...

Seima-Turbino transcultural phenomenon is defined by certain bronze and stone artefact types whose distribution covers a huge area from western Mongolia to northern Scandinavia. The phenomenon is currently dated at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE. The westernmost outreach of Seima-Turbino technology is indicated by sporadic bronze artefact and mould finds in Finland, Sweden and Norway. Curiously, north-western Russia is totally devoid of Seima-Turbino artefact finds within 1000 km of the Fennoscandian find cluster. Most of the Fennoscandian finds are “stray finds” from contexts indicating ritual activities connected with water. No Seima-Turbino artefacts have been found from burial contexts in Fennoscandia. It seems that the ritual meanings of artefacts produced by Seima-Turbino technology were created in Bronze Age Fennoscandia through a process rooted in local Stone Age ritual practises. This paper examines possible reasons for the distinctively “Stone Age” way Seima-Turbino artefacts were treated in Fennoscandia.

Islands provide an ideal setting for writing about the ‘archaeology of water’. At a broad level, this paper asks how archaeologists can understand how past communities encultured islandscapes. At a detailed level, it explores a few lesser-known aspects of prehistoric Mediterranean island cultures and how they provide insights into the essence and meaning of water, in terms of both its natural and cultural connotations. While a thriving scholarship on the role of water exists for prehistoric northern Europe, the application of these ideas to the Mediterranean islands has seldom been tried out before. The Mediterranean islands seem to provide just the right opportunity to put all this into practice, through an exploration of an ‘archaeology of natural places’ (Bradley 2000, Harmanşah 2014) and an ‘archaeology of meaningful places’ (Zedeňo and Bowser 2009).

International Conference at Central European University, Budapest Central European University – Palacký University Olomouc – Grotiana Foundation 10-12 November 2016 Október 6. u. 7, Room 102 The organizers (Hans Blom, Erasmus University, Rotterdam; Jana Engelbrechtová, Palacký University, Olomouc; László Kontler, Central European University) are grateful for the generous support of Central European University and Brill Publishers.

This study identifies and assesses the diversity of ecosystem services, and in turn the benefits that World Heritage sites can deliver to society and the economy through direct and indirect use or through inherent ‘non-use’ values. It also aims to increase awareness and understanding of the multiple services and benefits that ecosystems can provide as well as their contribution to the well-being of local, national and global communities.

Since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), historians and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the implications of disciplinarity. For Kuhn, rigid disciplinary training was essential for progress within periods of “normal” science. “A commitment to a discipline,” as Andrew Barry and colleagues put it, “is a way of ensuring that certain disciplinary methods and concepts are used rigorously and that undisciplined and undisciplinary objects, methods and concepts are ruled out” (Barry et al. 2008). This “ruling out” is valuable as it discourages intellectual wandering or false-starts, but it is also, and necessarily, normatively restrictive: the ideal of disciplinary purity—that each discipline is defined by a commitment to an appropriate, unique set of objects, methods, theories, and aims—has powerful implications for the structure and practices of many sciences, including life sciences, such as ecology, and social scienc...

Conditions that exist in Palembang as a result of population growth, which is projected to reach 1,662,893 people in 2020 at a density of 248.78 people per km2, putting increasing pressure on the environment, as evidenced by the increased area of critical land in South Sumatra, which exceeds 870,211 hectares. It encompasses 432,941 hectares of forest and 437,270 hectares of non-forest land. There was an increase of 291,565 hectares from 578,646 hectares in 2019. Natural resources are environmental components that include biological and non-biological resources that work together to produce an ecosystem. Rivers are an integral aspect of the environment and natural resources that must be protected to ensure human survival. Natural resources have the potential to be a source of local wisdom development. The purpose of this study is to define and analyze the opportunities, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses associated with natural resource management and the development of indigenous...

The declaration of a new Protected Area is a decision made by political authorities which does not always gain the consensus of the people who live in the area concerned. In this article, we will look at the barriers in establishing a fruitful dialogue between both parties, taking as an example the Natural Park of Puebla de San Miguel in the province of Valencia (Spain). We will also explain the reasons for the opposition among the local residents to this new Protected Area.

Agency, the capacity to act for a goal or purpose guided by norms, is central to our understanding of the capacities and activities of organisms including human beings. However, its distinctive purposive and normative character has proven difficult to integrate with the scientific understanding of organisms as natural physical entities. The challenge is to show both that agency has a place in the natural causal order of the world as described by natural science (naturalism), and that its distinctive purposive and normative character plays an indispensable role in our understanding of natural phenomena (teleology). The standard approaches, however, either locate agency in the natural causal order of the world but fail to vindicate its distinctive purposive and normative character, or vice versa. My goal is to avoid this dichotomy and instead offer a complete unifying account of natural agency. In the first part of the thesis I address the methodology of naturalism. First, I argue tha...

Prominent voices in archeology have expressed deep skepticism about the role of theory in archeology, while with new, exciting methods at its disposal, archeological science is occasionally perceived as not needing theory at all. This article reflects upon the debate about theory in archeology to arrive at a robust but critical middle-range concept of the role and character of theory in socio-environmental archeology. It is argued that archeology is a data-based science and, consequently, in order for theory to be meaningful in socio-environmental archeology, theory ought explicitly aim to make its qualitative concepts quantitative to establish a clear relation to data and its interpretation. On the turn side, theory plays an important role critically reflecting upon the use of concepts in archeological understanding and explanation, as well as their origins in particular paradigms, as examples of which certain debates in scientific archeology are discussed (aDNA and migration, evol...

The market of natural and organic cosmetics has been growing in last decades. The increase in interest in this type of product is a consequence of the concern that consumers have been presenting in relation to the environment and health. In addition to the appreciation the use of sustainable ingredients in cosmetic formulations, the consumers are also concerned about pollution caused by the use of plastics, which leads industries to reinvent themselves and rethink about the composition of packaging. The factor that most drives the purchase of natural and organic cosmetics is the fact that the consumer, in addition to contributing to the preservation of the environment, is also using a sustainable product. The growing demand for natural and organic cosmetics results in a concern of the brands with the organic issue, with the decreased use of animal derived ingredients and with the updating the parameters required for certification of a cosmetic as natural or organic.

Eminent designers and engineers have historically been cited as inspirational polymaths with the ability to utilize a wide range of information to form a rational idea and create a concept. If educators are ever to encourage students of Design to emulate such skills then nurturing the growth of philomathic attitudes is essential. Part of that process is developing the ability to draw together observations from a far broader range of disciplines than those currently and commonly drawn upon in most design curricula, and integrating these into common practice. Biomimetics offers many opportunities in design to broaden scientific inquiry. Such approaches currently lack formality as a design methodology and are consequently relatively scarce in application, but successful outcomes tend to capture student imagination. As such, biomimetics can provide an inspirational and highly educational direction for students to take and therefore has the scope to be a powerful learning mechanism. This...

In the Tolkien classic and recent motion picture epic The Lord of the Rings there is a compelling portrayal of the struggle between good and evil as it is manifested between empires, cultures, peoples, and in the hearts of individuals. It is a portrayal that resonates deeply in the human heart. It reveals something of what we know at a deep level. One could say it speaks indirectly of the Natural Law. Why do we call Natural Law "Natural"? If Natural Law is natural because it comes from the nature of human beings, as Finnis, and many other contemporary Natural Law advocates appear to say, then why are there not different rules for different natures? No one partaking of the mythic struggle for Middle Earth would say that murder, torture and oppression of others are right for Sauron and the orcs because theyflowfrom their nature. Indeed, if as Francis Fukuyama fears human nature can be changed, just as the dark powers turned captive elves into orcs in Tolkien 'spast of le...

Prominent natural formations, such as rocks of extraordinary shape, were among the most important sacred places of the last fisher-hunter-gatherers in the area of Finland, the historical Sami of northernmost Finland. However, the possible prehistoric significance of sacred natural places in other areas of Finland has traditionally been bypassed, due to the methodological problem of detecting prehistoric ritual activities in locations containing no human-made features. The ritual archaeology of Iron Age and Bronze Age Finland is currently limited almost exclusively to human-made structures, especially stone cairns. Bronze Age and Iron Age cairns are typically interpreted in terms of land ownership and domestication of landscape, and thus assumed to be unrelated to sacred natural sites.  However, a closer look at the exact locations of the prehistoric stone cairns of Finland reveals that natural bedrock features and other natural stone formations were an important concern for the builders of the cairns. Furthermore, excavations have revealed that some of the cairns containing traces of prehistoric ritual activities are in fact slightly modified geological formations.  This paper examines possible methods of detecting and evaluating the role of natural formations in the cairn-building rituals of Bronze Age and Iron Age Finland.