Abstracts by Wiebke Mainusch
D. Mischka, K. Mischka, C. Preoteasa (eds.). 2016. Beyond excavation. Geophysics, aerial photography and the use of drones in Eastern and South-East European archaeology. Piatra-Neamț, 35-39
Papers by Wiebke Mainusch
Ethnographisch-Archaeologische Zeitschrift, 2024
This paper sheds light on two crucial phases of Franz Boas’s life linked to Kiel: his early acade... more This paper sheds light on two crucial phases of Franz Boas’s life linked to Kiel: his early academic pursuits leading to his PhD in 1881 and his return fifty years later to deliver a lecture that would become a seminal text in the fight against racism. Boas initially arrived in Kiel in 1879 and completed his PhD on the optical properties of water in 1881. During that time, he had to deal with anti-Semitism, sometimes even with the rapier. In 1931, Boas returned to Kiel University to receive an honorary doctorate for his achievements. At this occasion, he gave a lecture entitled ‘Race and Culture,’ which directly opposed the racist ideologies gaining traction in Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Boas wrote an open letter to Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg, bemoaning the restrictions on freedom and the anti- Semitic actions in Germany. As a result, Boas was blacklisted, and his books were removed from the Kiel University Li- brary, even allegedly burnt. Irrespective of his global significance as a founding father of four-field anthropology, Boas’s connection with Kiel remains little known, perhaps long overshadowed by Kiel University’s reluctance to address its problematic past.
PLoS ONE 15, 2020
Müller-Scheeßel N, Müller J, Cheben I, Mainusch W, Rassmann K, Rabbel W, et al. (2020) A new appr... more Müller-Scheeßel N, Müller J, Cheben I, Mainusch W, Rassmann K, Rabbel W, et al. (2020) A new approach to the temporal significance of house orientations in European Early Neolithic settlements. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0226082. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226082
This paper shows that local differences in house orientation in settlements from the Early Neolithic in Central Europe reflect a regular chronological trajectory based on Bayesian calibration of 14 C-series. This can be used to extrapolate the dating of large-scale settlement plans derived from, among other methods, geophysical surveys. In the southwest Slovakian settlement of Vrá ble, we observed a progressive counterclockwise rotation in house orientation from roughly 32˚to32˚to 4˚over4˚over a 300 year period. A survey of published and dated village plans from other LBK regions confirms that this counterclockwise rotation per settlement is a wider Central European trend. We explain this observation as an unintentional, unconscious but systematic leftward deviation in the house builders' cardinal orientation, which has been termed "pseudoneglect" in studies of human perception. This means that whenever houses were intended to be oriented towards a specific direction and be parallel to each other, there was an error in perception causing slight counterclockwise rotation. This observation is used as a basis to reconstruct dynamics of Early Neolithic settlement in the Slovakian Z ˇ itava valley, showing a rapid colonization, followed by increased agglomeration into large villages consisting of strongly autonomous farmsteads.
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Abstracts by Wiebke Mainusch
Papers by Wiebke Mainusch
This paper shows that local differences in house orientation in settlements from the Early Neolithic in Central Europe reflect a regular chronological trajectory based on Bayesian calibration of 14 C-series. This can be used to extrapolate the dating of large-scale settlement plans derived from, among other methods, geophysical surveys. In the southwest Slovakian settlement of Vrá ble, we observed a progressive counterclockwise rotation in house orientation from roughly 32˚to32˚to 4˚over4˚over a 300 year period. A survey of published and dated village plans from other LBK regions confirms that this counterclockwise rotation per settlement is a wider Central European trend. We explain this observation as an unintentional, unconscious but systematic leftward deviation in the house builders' cardinal orientation, which has been termed "pseudoneglect" in studies of human perception. This means that whenever houses were intended to be oriented towards a specific direction and be parallel to each other, there was an error in perception causing slight counterclockwise rotation. This observation is used as a basis to reconstruct dynamics of Early Neolithic settlement in the Slovakian Z ˇ itava valley, showing a rapid colonization, followed by increased agglomeration into large villages consisting of strongly autonomous farmsteads.
This paper shows that local differences in house orientation in settlements from the Early Neolithic in Central Europe reflect a regular chronological trajectory based on Bayesian calibration of 14 C-series. This can be used to extrapolate the dating of large-scale settlement plans derived from, among other methods, geophysical surveys. In the southwest Slovakian settlement of Vrá ble, we observed a progressive counterclockwise rotation in house orientation from roughly 32˚to32˚to 4˚over4˚over a 300 year period. A survey of published and dated village plans from other LBK regions confirms that this counterclockwise rotation per settlement is a wider Central European trend. We explain this observation as an unintentional, unconscious but systematic leftward deviation in the house builders' cardinal orientation, which has been termed "pseudoneglect" in studies of human perception. This means that whenever houses were intended to be oriented towards a specific direction and be parallel to each other, there was an error in perception causing slight counterclockwise rotation. This observation is used as a basis to reconstruct dynamics of Early Neolithic settlement in the Slovakian Z ˇ itava valley, showing a rapid colonization, followed by increased agglomeration into large villages consisting of strongly autonomous farmsteads.