The voice of a child: Archaeological limitations in interpretive stories

In the archaeological record, it seems children are rarely seen. If they are, children are referred to, to explain symbolism, rituals, past lifeways, and behavior of a society or culture rather than the past lifeways of children and their relationship to family and society. This lack of investigation suffers in all forms of archaeological research. However, this bias appears to be unconscious rather than intentionally applied. Archaeology, generally, involves the nameless and faceless rather than the individual. The archaeological signature of children appears minimal. It is adults, or more succinctly, society that generates material remains. This paper discusses interpretation of sites within the context of different archaeologies, thereby providing researchers with information that may not usually be considered when approaching interpretation of sites to visitors.

Tempus: Barriers, Borders, Boundaries: Proceedings of the 2001 Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference

The conference aimed to provide a forum for the exploration of barriers, borders and boundaries in Australian archaeological methods and practice, frameworks of interpretation and epistemological structures. Sessions were designed to have broad appeal to a range of archaeological stakeholders including academics, consultants, Indigenous peoples, students, cultural heritage managers and policy formulators.

"It could be one thing or another" - on the construction of an archaeological category

This article explores the history of the archaeological category Sámi circular offering sites, which refers to certain dry wall structures in Finnmark and Troms in northern Norway. In recent years the term has been used more frequently outside this geographical area too, at times to refer to structures vastly different from those originally labelled as circular offering sites. Such interpretations may be questioned, but perhaps it is the category itself that needs to be re-evaluated; a study ofthe research history suggests that the term is a result of a mid-19th century hypothesis that was established due to a lack of other plausible explanations rather than based on indicative finds or on local traditions. This interpretation has later been adopted by key researchers and has never really been challenged by any alternative hypothesis. This article proposes that the stone structures in question could represent other cultural phenomena, and that this needs further investigation.

A peak-clustering method for MEG group analysis to minimise artefacts due to smoothness

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive technique for characterizing brain electrical activity, is gaining popularity as a tool for assessing group-level differences between experimental conditions. One method for assessing task-condition effects involves beamforming, where a weighted sum of field measurements is used to tune activity on a voxel-by-voxel basis. However, this method has been shown to produce inhomogeneous smoothness differences as a function of signal-to-noise across a volumetric image, which can then produce false positives at the group level. Here we describe a novel method for group-level analysis with MEG beamformer images that utilizes the peak locations within each participant's volumetric image to assess group-level effects. We compared our peak-clustering algorithm with SnPM using simulated data. We found that our method was immune to artefactual group effects that can arise as a result of inhomogeneous smoothness differences across a volumetric image. We also used our peak-clustering algorithm on experimental data and found that regions were identified that corresponded with task-related regions identified in the literature. These findings suggest that our technique is a robust method for group-level analysis with MEG beamformer images.