This paper reports on a radiocarbon-dated sequence of alluvial terraces from the Teleorman Valley in the southern Romanian Plain and represents the first Late-glacial and wellconstrained Holocene alluvial sequence from the lower Danube Valley of southeast Europe. The two earliest and most extensive terraces (T1 and T2) are dissected by large, high-amplitude palaeochannels, which are dated to ca. 12 800 yr BP and are comparable to large meandering palaeochannels identified from other Late glacial contexts across northern and central Europe. The remaining sequence of alluvial deposits show changes in river activity and accelerated sedimentation around 4900-4800 yr BP, 4000-3800 yr BP, 3300-2800 yr BP, 1000 yr BP and within the past 200 yr. A phase of tributary stream alluvial fan deposition is dated to ca. 2400 yr BP. All these periods of alluvial sedimentation correlate well with episodes of climatic cooling, higher rainfall and enhanced river activity, both in terms of incision and greater lateral mobility as well as increased flood frequency and magnitude identified elsewhere in central, western and northern Europe. Human activity appears to have had little effect on this river environment and significant fine-grained sedimentation is not noted until ca. 2400 yr BP, approximately 5000 yr after the first neolithic farmers settled the area. Whether this record of river activity truly reflects the impact of prehistoric societies on this catchment will only be elucidated through further, ongoing detailed archaeological research.
Rising sea levels have been associated with human migration and behavioral shifts throughout prehistory, often with an emphasis on landscape submergence and consequent societal collapse. However, the assumption that future sea-level rise will drive similar adaptive responses is overly simplistic. While the change from land to sea represents a dramatic and permanent shift for preexisting human populations, the process of change is driven by a complex set of physical and cultural processes with long transitional phases of landscape and socioeconomic change. Here, we use reconstructions of prehistoric sea-level rise, paleogeographies, terrestrial landscape change, and human population dynamics to show how the gradual inundation of an island archipelago resulted in decidedly nonlinear landscape and cultural responses to rising sea levels. Interpretation of past and future responses to sea-level change requires a better understanding of local physical and societal contexts to assess plausible human response patterns in the future.
This paper focuses on the 5th-millennium BC shift from short-term habitations to permanent tell settlements in southern Romania: from the Criş, Dudeşti and Boian to the Gumelniţa Cultures. Archaeological and geomorphologic data suggest that changes in river stability conditioned shifts in settlement and economies.
The idea of different folk psychologies is the idea that among the world's cultures there are those whose folk, or commonsense, psychologies differ in theoretically signi cant ways from each other and from western folk psychology. This challenges the claim that folk psychology is a 'cultural universal'. The paper looks rst of all at what are called 'opulent' accounts of folk psychology, which employ a wide-ranging and more complex set of psychological concepts, and 'core' accounts, which employ a much more restricted set of such concepts. With respect to both kinds of account it is argued that eld studies of the folk-psychological concepts of a number of ethnic groups indicate signi cant differences between the concepts used by those groups and those of western folk psychology; and hence do not support the view that folk psychology is a cultural universal.
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