SpringMango7379

Prisons are places of suffering. But in theory, they aim for something beyond punishment: reform.

In the United States, the goal of prisoner rehabilitation can be traced back, in part, to the 1876 opening of the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York. Purported to be an institution of "benevolent reform," the reformatory aimed to transform prisoners, not just deprive them—though founder Zebulon Brockway, known as the "Father of American Corrections," was notoriously harsh.

Other states soon adopted the reformatory model, and the notion that prisons are places to "correct" people has become a staple of the judicial system.

But the idea that imprisonment and suffering were supposedly good for the prisoner didn't emerge in the 19th century. The earliest evidence goes back some 4,000 years: to a hymn in Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq, praising a prison goddess named Nungal.

Almost a decade ago, as a graduate student researching slavery in early Mesopotamia, I came across numerous texts dealing with imprisonment. Some were administrative documents dealing with everyday accounting information. Others were legal texts, literature or personal letters. I became fascinated with imprisonment in these cultures: Most of them detained suspects only briefly, but in literary and ritual texts, imprisonment was seen as a transformative, purifying experience.

A research team led by Prof. Yang Yuzhang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) investigated the human subsistence strategy evolution of agricultural structure during the Yangshao culture period (ca. 6400-5300 cal. BP) at Changge Shigu, a representative prehistoric site in the Central Plains region.

The study was published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Previous studies have shown that in the middle and late Yangshao culture (ca. 6000-5000 BP), all major regional civilizations in China established agricultural production as the mainstay of the ancestors' living economy.

The Central Plains region, with west-central Henan and south-central Shanxi as its core, played a leading role in the origin and early development of Chinese civilization, which is closely related to the sustained development of the agricultural economy and the formation of a diversified crop cultivation system in the region 6,000 years before present.

However, due to a lack of reliable archaeobotanical evidence and accurate chronological data, the archaeological community is still unclear about the exact time and structural evolution of the Yangshao-era agricultural economy in the region.

In this study, the researchers employed the method of analyzing the charred plant remains, combined with the high-precision accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) 14C dating of a series of samples.

The results showed that the identifiable charred plant remains found in the flotation soil samples of the Yangshao culture period at the Shigu site are dominated by three kinds of crops planted, namely broomcorn millet, foxtail millet, and rice, as well as various kinds of field weed seeds, among which the crops occupied a dominant position. the proportion of rice is lower than those of millet. Weed seeds are predominantly from the grass family.

The results also showed that agricultural production based on the cultivation of two types of millets, namely the dryland crops, has become the main way of obtaining plant food resources for the ancestors of Shigu, and the main position of the agricultural economy in the Central Plains region has been established 6,400 years ago.

Since the Yangshao culture 6,000 years ago, the proportion of rice in the site significantly declined. The millets took an absolute main position in the agricultural structure. This change is attributed to the deterioration of the climate environment at that time.

This study clarifies for the first time the exact time of the formation of the prehistoric agricultural economy in the Central Plains, the core area of the origin of Chinese civilization, as well as the evolution process of the economic structure of rice and millet farming and its possible driving factors in the Yangshao culture period (ca. 7000-5000 BP) in the study area. The results provide key research materials for the evolution of prehistoric human subsistence strategy, agricultural economy, and the origin of civilization in the Central Plains region.

According to a report in The Guardian, archaeologists working at the site of Ostia Antica about 20 miles from Rome have uncovered fragments of marble slabs called fasti recording official events that took place in A.D. 128 during the reign of the emperor Hadrian (reigned A.D. 117–138). One of the dates mentioned is January 10th, when the emperor was given the title of pater patriae, or father of the country, and his wife, Sabina, received the title Augusta. Hadrian’s April 11th trip to Africa is also noted, as is his dedication of a building in Rome which may be the Pantheon. Alessandro D’Alessio, director of the Ostia Antica Archaeological Park, calls the discovery “extraordinary” and believes that it will reveal more about the activities of the famous emperor and about ancient Ostia as well.

An international team of anthropologists, archaeologists and geneticists has learned more about the migration patterns of people living around the Mediterranean Sea during the Iron and Bronze ages. In their study, reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the group conducted genetic sequencing on the remains of 30 people who lived during the Iron or Bronze Age in Italy, Tunisia and Sardinia.

Archaeologists have long been drawing conclusions about how ancient tools were used by the people who crafted them based on written records and context clues. But with dietary practices, they have had to make assumptions about what was eaten and how it was prepared.

A new study led by archaeologist Michelle Bebber, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Kent State University's Department of Anthropology, has demonstrated that the atlatl (i.e., spear thrower) functions as an "equalizer," a finding which supports women's potential active role as prehistoric hunters.

COLOGNE, GERMANY—According to a Live Science report, M. Dores Cruz of the University of Cologne and her colleagues have found early evidence for the practice of plantation slavery at Praia Melão, the recently identified site of a sixteenth-century sugar mill on the northeastern coast of the island of São Tomé. The Portuguese inhabited the island, which is located off the coast of West Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, in the late fifteenth century. They soon found, however, that migrants to the previously uninhabited island endured high rates of malaria. Convicts, Jewish children, and enslaved Africans were soon forced to work there, harvesting and processing sugar cane, and building and maintaining the sugar mills. Praia Melão includes a large stone two-story building with a clay roof. Its lower floor served as a sugar boiling room, while domestic quarters were placed on the upper floor. Fragments of cone-shaped sugar molds similar to those found at Portuguese sugar mills in Madeira have also been recovered at the site. By 1530, plantations on São Tomé were so profitable that additional sugar mills were constructed, but the Portuguese eventually moved much of their sugar production to Brazil in the early seventeenth century. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity.

CAMPECHE, MEXICO—According to a statement released by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), a 1,200-year-old ritual deposit has been found in a platform at a monumental complex at the Maya site of El Tigre in southeastern Mexico. The deposit contained two ceramic vessels with lids, whose style suggests that they date to sometime between A.D. 600 and 800. One of the vessels contained the skeletal remains of a young person in a flexed position and a well-preserved jade ring. INAH general director Diego Prieto Hernández said that the remains will be carefully excavated from the vessel in the laboratory, noting that the soil would be searched for any other artifacts and analyzed for any traces of pollen or seeds.

LAHAINA, MAUI—Time Magazine reports that Kimberly Flook of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation and her colleagues estimate that at least four museums and thousands of artifacts have been lost in the recent wildfires. Among the objects believed to be lost is an original flag of the Hawaiian kingdom, last flown on August 12, 1898, when it was replaced with the American flag. Hawaiian feather work, furniture, photographs, and objects made of kapa, a fabric made of fibers from trees and shrubs, are also likely to be gone. The destroyed or damaged museums include the Wo Hing Museum & Cookhouse, a social hall for Chinese immigrants who built tunnels and irrigations systems; the Baldwin Home, which was the oldest standing residence on the island; and the Old Lahaina prison, which dates to the whaling era of the mid-nineteenth century. “We’ve lost physical pieces of history,” Flook said. “We have not lost our history, our culture. And we won’t."

Finding at Civita Giuliana villa throws light on lowly status of slaves in ancient world

Archaeologists have discovered a small bedroom in a Roman villa near Pompeii that was almost certainly used by slaves, throwing light on their lowly status in the ancient world, Italy’s culture ministry said on Sunday.

The room was found at the Civita Giuliana villa, some 600 metres (2,000ft) north of the walls of Pompeii, which was wiped out by a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago.

English archaeologists have announced the discovery of the remains of a teenage girl buried in the Early Middle Ages. The circumstances of her burial were very unusual, suggesting she may have led a tragic life.

In ninth-century Cambridgeshire, as a community prepared to abandon their settlement, they took down the elaborate entrance gate and replaced it with a grave. In it were the remains of a young woman, aged just 15, buried face down in a pit and perhaps with her ankles bound together. This unusual grave gives us insight into a rare Early Medieval burial practice, and perhaps even contemporary attitudes towards those within the community who were considered different.