Cave

Cave diving is one of the most technical and potential dangerous forms of diving done today. It may involve use of multiple tanks, regulators and gas mixtures or rebreathers, in combination with powerful long-range diver propulsion vehicles, to penetrate thousands of meters into submerged cave systems where direct ascent to the surface in the case of emergencies is impossible. In order to carry out scientific studies under such difficult conditions, individuals must be highly competent and experienced cave divers. In spite of these problems, numerous scientific investigations in the fields of biology, ecology, microbiology, geology, hydrology and archaeology have carried out by cave diving scientists. Exploratory cave divers have provided the initial impetus for this research by exploring and mapping underwater caves.

Abstract. A new rhynchonellid brachiopod genus Tethyrhynchia, with type species Tethyrhynchia mediterranea n. sp., is described from specimens discovered in dark zones of submarine caves along the Mediterranean coast of France between Marseille and La Ciotat, and also at ...

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Abstract
El pensamiento griego estuvo atravesado desde los orígenes por enfoques optimistas en el terreno del conocimiento que propusieron vías para alcanzarlo y a la vez por otros que se instalaron en la sospecha y enfatizaron los aspectos de precariedad y limitación del saber humano. Platón encarna un paradigma de los programas filosóficos que, contra las vertientes escépticas, conciben el conocimiento como un logro que los hombres pueden lograr. En su perspectiva esta empresa implica avanzar por zonas escarpadas y conflictivas cuya complejidad teórica determina que no puedan estar sujetas a una descripción llana, sino que se deba recurrir a símiles alegóricos que sugieran, antes que mostrar, la meta a la que se dirige el filósofo. El sol, la línea y la caverna son claves, con buena cuota de suspenso y enigma, para esta búsqueda. La importancia de este recorrido radica en que sólo el saber que espera al final de las andanzas justifica el sistema político integral que Platón propone para edificar un Estado sobre principios de justicia cuyo gobierno está en manos de filósofos, hombres que sabrán arbitrar las cuestiones del ámbito circundante porque han accedido al conocimiento de sus modelos inteligibles.


Contratapa

Ahora bien, después de esto –dije–, compara nuestra naturaleza en lo tocante a la educación y la ignorancia con esta situación. Imagina unos hombres que habitan en una especie de caverna subterránea con una gran entrada abierta a la luz todo a lo largo de la cueva. En esta caverna están desde niños atados por las piernas y el cuello, de modo que permanecen quietos allí y sólo ven lo que está delante, y además les es imposible girar las cabezas a los lados a causa de las ataduras. Arriba, a cierta distancia detrás de ellos, brilla la luz de una hoguera, y entre el fuego y los encadenados hay un camino ascendente, junto al cual imagina que hay construido un muro al estilo del biombo que los prestidigitadores colocan delante de los espectadores y sobre el cual muestran sus trucos.
–Lo imagino –dijo.
–Imagina ahora a lo largo del muro a unos hombres que llevan objetos de todo tipo, que sobresalen del muro, figuras de hombres y otros animales hechos de piedra, madera o cualquier otra forma. Como es natural, algunos de los que pasan hablan y otros permanecen callados.
–Hablas de una rara imagen y de raros prisioneros –dijo.
–Parecidos a nosotros –dije yo–. (República, VII.514a-515a)"

This is the first comparative study of a highly unlikely group of authors: eighteenth-century women peasants in England, Scotland, and Germany, women who, as a rule, received little or no formal education and lived by manual labor, many of them in dire poverty. Among them are the ...

Gold remains a rare material during the whole Bronze Age. It is a metal that circulates amongst the elites exclusively. The exchange of gold artefacts over very long distances is fundamental in the build-up of socio-political relations. Fifty artefacts found during subaquatic excavations in the river Lesse in the cave of Han-sur-Lesse have been submitted to quantitative elemental analysis using PIXE, a method never used before on archaeological material found in Belgium. The results show that there are clearly three groups of artefacts. The first one (discs, “baskets”, pearls) proves of local manufacture, as also suggested by the discovery of two ingots. The second one (gilded rings) could have been locally made too, but is a lot less homogeneous. The third one (filigreed and granulated beads or pin's heads) must be imported and most probably originates in the Mediterranean.

In Palaeolithic archaeology, the notions of tool and site are practically inseparable: it is very difficult to identify a place of human activity without any remain of tool production or tool use. There is nevertheless a category of sites where the tools are superfluous: the decorated caves from the Upper Palaeolithic, where art is the highest and the most obvious expression of the human presence. The amount of artefacts generally found in the decorated caves is low and the remains of activities are scarce and disparate, because the discovery of most of the underground sites is ancient and the ones recently discovered are parsimoniously excavated. For diametrically opposite reasons, the harvests of artefacts in the Palaeolithic decorated caves are not more exhaustive today than yesterday and their scientific value is unequal. However, the functional analysis of some underground lithic assemblages shows a broader range of activities than expected in such contexts. Aside from the engraving and scraping tools found in the caves with carvings, and frequent projectile points or inserts probably related to ceremonial purposes, different tools have been used to work various organic materials. The main question about the underground sites, which have been visited during centuries or millennia, concerns the degree of synchronicity between their various archaeological remains.

Caving is a type of sports activity done by those who are especially interested in adventure sports in order to investigate and map the caves. The increasing demand for this sport in recent years in Turkey having an abundant source of caves requires these kinds of researches to be conducted. The purpose of this study is to reveal the opinions of the people doing the caving activities professionally in order develop it, do it systematically and utilize it in tourism in a controlled manner. To this end, 19 people who are administrative staff of the federations, associations, groups, clubs, and unions operating in caving field and professionally doing this sport were contacted. In line with the purpose of this study, an interview protocol consisting of three questions, to which the participants were asked to give open ended responses, was prepared. The responses obtained from the study which had been conducted between October and December in 2015 were subjected to content analysis. In analysis, the obtained codes, which are in the topics of what needs to be used during cave sport, determining the problems related to cave sport, and evaluating the ways to utilize caves in tourism, were seized under specific themes. The study was concluded with a number of conclusions and recommendations in the light of obtained findings.

In the paper, the Crimean routes of professor of Kazan University K.S. Merezhkovsky are systematized, together with the discoveries he made, the locations of the objects of archaeological heritage found by him are specified, and the results of the researcher’s two field seasons are summed up. Konstantin Sergeevich Merezhkovsky is traditionally considered to be a discoverer of Stone Age sites in Crimea. However, his activities during two field seasons also involved a number of other monuments related to the Early Iron Age and Middle Ages. After discovering the primeval sites on the territory of France and Germany, K.S. Merezhkovsky, inspired by the discoveries of European scholars, tried to find the Russian counterparts of European antiquities. His choice quite rightly fell on the foothills of the Crimean Mountains and the Mountain Crimea proper which abound in natural cavities quite suitable to serve as abodes for the Stone Age people. K.S. Merezhkovsky’s field studies permitted to not only reveal new archaeological monuments, collect a large number of finds and remains of extinct animals, but also ascertain the fact of human populations in epochs more distant than as was presented in biblical history. Also, it is this researcher who has the right to be called the first archaeologist of such important Crimean Middle Age monuments as the Aluston fortress, the “cave towns” of Bakla, Eski-Kermen, the caves of Tysiachegolovaya and Kholodnaya. Eventually, K.S. Merezhkovsky managed to find or for the first time to conduct archaeological studies on 14 significant objects of archaeological heritage, a number of which now are the objects of federal significance.

Sediments deposited within caves and rockshelters have yielded much material evidence pertaining to the nature and extent of human activity in the area of the Mediterranean basin. Importantly, these sedimentary records also serve as unique and rich repositories of evidence for Quaternary environmental change and landscape dynamics which can elucidate the nature and extent of climatic oscillations and/or human impact upon the local and regional environment.
This research examines two rockshelter sediment records located in the central Mediterranean region (Sicily and Montenegro), to evaluate the utility of these sequences as archives of environmental change – driven by both anthropogenic and natural processes. The multi-proxy approach used for this research includes detailed fieldwork logging and description, together with laboratory analyses including sedimentological, mineral magnetic and micromorphological techniques.

An overview of the Mediterranean region, including the physiography, climate, tectonics and history of human activity is given, which provides vital contextual information on the region in which the study areas are situated. Caves and rockshelters are considered in an extensive review of the processes of sedimentation and nature of the sediments deposited in these environments.

At Riparo 1 rockshelter, a mid to late Holocene sequence, analyses show that the sediments relate primarily to the keeping of animal livestock within the cave. These sediments have a very strong anthropogenic signal, and it is thought that this signal has overprinted any ‘natural’ or anthropogenic off-site signal which may have been stored in the sediments. The results of the work at Riparo 1 are significant to our ability to recognise sediments relating to early animal husbandry practices, and the extensive database compiled of the key characteristics of such sediments will allow for these sequences to be more easily recognised in settings where they are less well preserved.

Crvena Stijena is a large limestone rockshelter situated in Montenegro, western Balkan Peninsula. The deep sedimentary sequence preserved at the site has already yielded a wealth of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data. A high-resolution sampling strategy developed for the present study has resulted in a very detailed picture of the on- and off-site environment being generated, which has a very close relationship to evidence of intermittent Neandertal occupation of the site during the Middle Palaeolithic.

The results from both the field study areas has revealed evidence for environmental change at a number of scales, driven by both human and natural mechanisms. The research has also highlighted the benefits of using a multi-proxy approach to the study of cave and rockshelter sediments.

Tjoarvekrájgge (Tjorve), with a surveyed length of 21,814 meters, the longest cave of Scandinavia, isfound in one of four marble bands of stripe karst in Bonå, some miles north of the Polar circle in Norway.Te cave is a two-dimensional labyrinth system situated close to a shoulder of a “U” shaped valley.Morphometric and fractal analysis can be made with over 99 % of the passage dimensions.

Morphometric parameters of Tjorve yield a passage density of 47.5 km/km2 and a cave porosity of 0.8 %, intermediate between the values of confined and unconfined settings, and an areal coverage of 21.8 %, close to the values for confined settings. Values for the uppermost part of the cave (cave porosity:
3.6 %, areal coverage: 32.6 %) are closer to or within the values for confined settings. The values might reflect a cyclic development of the cave over several glacial-interglacial cycles. Four levels in the cave can be discerned in vertical profile, possibly corresponding to ancient water tables that have been step-wise
lowered in successive glacial periods. Tjorve may have developed over a long time-period, from perhaps the Tertiary.

The Linked Modular Element (LME) method (Curl 1986: http://tinyurl.com/6o53kd) is applied to Tjorve to determine the distribution of cave passage sizes. The distribution of LME sizes fit a power-law function from 1.8 to 5.9 m and exhibits a fractal dimension of 2.929 (s.d. 0.068), similar to Little Brush Creek Cave (LBC), Utah (fractal dimension 2.79). The proper modulus is near 1.1 m, compared to 0.6 m for LBC, indicating perhaps less complete exploration.

The Lespugue Goddess from Haute Gargonne, France is a 5-inch mammoth ivory nude statue. (LOG: 162-3.) In 1922, René de Saint-Périer discovered this steatopygous deity in the Rideaux cave of Lespugue cave (Haute Gargonne) located in the Pyrenees foothills.

Here is the very pregnant Goddess of Lespugue, 22,000 BC, found buried in the foothills of the Pyrenees. She has ten vertical lines incised from waist to buttocks, suggestive of the ten Moons from conception to birth. But this is not simply linear numerical time; it is time as quality and substance, cyclical time, continually reborn. For the Moon appeared to give birth to itself, and so was regarded as the primary source of fertility on Earth: the increase and decrease of animals and plants, and all the milk, semen, sap and moisture of growth. As with humans and animals, so with plants: the Moon was the origin of the rhythmic rising and falling of the sap, the seasons of sowing and reaping, the power of growing that came and went in a lunar rhythm (MMT).

The CAVE, a walk-in virtual reality environment typically consisting of 4–6 3 m-by-3 m sides of a room made of rear-projected screens, was first conceived and built in 1991. In the nearly two decades since its conception, the supporting technology has improved so that current CAVEs are much brighter, at much higher resolution, and have dramatically improved graphics performance. However, rear-projection-based CAVEs typically must be housed in a 10 m-by-10 m-by-10 m room (allowing space behind the screen walls for the projectors), which limits their deployment to large spaces. The CAVE of the future will be made of tessellated panel displays, eliminating the projection distance, but the implementation of such displays is challenging. Early multi-tile, panel-based, virtual-reality displays have been designed, prototyped, and built for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the Univer...

Lascaux Cave (Montignac, France) contains paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period. Shortly after its discovery in 1940, the cave was seriously disturbed by major destructive interventions. In 1963, the cave was closed due to algal growth on the walls. In 2001, the ceiling, walls and sediments were colonized by the fungus Fusarium solani. Later, black stains, probably of fungal origin, appeared on the walls. Biocide treatments, including quaternary ammonium derivatives, were extensively applied for a few years, and have been in use again since January 2008. The microbial communities in Lascaux Cave were shown to be composed of human-pathogenic bacteria and entomopathogenic fungi, the former as a result of the biocide selection. The data show that fungi play an important role in the cave, and arthropods contribute to the dispersion of conidia. A careful study on the fungal ecology is needed in order to complete the cave food web and to control the black stains threatening the Pale...

Geoarchaeological investigations of limestone caves along the Rove Peninsula, where several Lapita-era (1150-750 BC) sites dating from the earliest period of Fiji’s human history have been found, was undertaken by a team from the University of the South Pacific and the Fiji Museum. Surface collection and excavation in the largest cave – Qaranibourewa – was hindered by large amounts of ceiling collapse and no trace of human occupation earlier than about AD 1000 was found. The second-largest cave – Qaramatatolu – had a cave fill 190 cm thick but this was determined to be all of recent origin, having accumulated as a result of being washed down through a hole in the cave roof from a settlement above that probably existed AD 750-1250. The shell faunal remains from the Qaramatatolu excavation all suggest an open-coast location, quite different from the mangrove forest that fronts the area today. This mangrove forest probably formed only within the last few hundred years.