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The dissection of archaeological palimpsests has become a crucial process for achieving a diachronic understanding of the history of human groups. However, its widespread application to archaeological deposits has been hampered by both methodological and theoretical limitations, as well as by the inherent characteristics of the deposits. This paper explores whether overcoming these barriers, both methodological and theoretical, truly represents a significant shift in understanding past human behaviour, thereby motivating the pursuit of shorter timescales. To this end, we have analysed the lithic assemblages of Unit Xb from the Neanderthal site of El Salt (Alcoi, Iberian Peninsula) focusing on lithic attributes and raw material analyses, enabling the definition of raw material units and refitting sets. Considering these variables, we have applied archaeostratigraphic and spatial analyses in order to generate units of analysis whose content is compared to that of the entire unit. The defined archaeostratigraphic units display different spatial distributions and lithic composition. Some of them are attached to certain hearths and composed of refitted sets, while other units are related to areas without combustion evidence and integrated with bigger and heavier single products. Through this approach, here, we show that reducing the spatiotemporal scale of the record helps to unravel behavioural variability, reducing interpretative errors implicit in the assemblage-as-a-whole approach. This highlights the role of temporal resolution in reconstructing site formation processes and challenges research perspectives that assert the unnecessary or impossible nature of palimpsest dissection.

This paper explores how layers of history can be parsed in a neighborhood through narrative analysis, using Balat, an old quarter of Istanbul, as a case study. The study tests the relevance of several methodologies and concepts, including palimpsest, chronotope and heterotopia, to see whether local, Constantinopolitan iterations of these ways of reading can be marshalled instead. To that end, it has recourse to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s extensive writing on Istanbul to expand on concepts such as terkip, macera and buhran. These concepts are traced backwards and forwards in time to see how they apply to different writers’ work on Istanbul/Constantinople through the ages, such as Odo of Deuil, Evliya Çelebi, John Ash and Orhan Pamuk. This comparative exercise reveals an affective bond between the writers, one that favors imperial melancholia and nostalgia. The contemporary nostalgia/melancholia affect is then shown to be either savored or shunned by Istanbulites and visitors, as they make use of this poetics of the past as cultural capital, they may invest in for use on social media today.

Vat. iber. 4, a membrum disjectum of the manuscript Sin. geo. 49, contains on two of its folios the Syriac Gospel text as the lowest layer (scriptio ima) within a double palimpsest. Comparison with known Syriac versions of the extant text – Matt 11.30–12.26 – shows that the text represents the Old Syriac version, and is particularly akin to the Curetonianus (Syc). On palaeographic grounds, the original Gospel manuscript can be dated to the first half of the sixth century. The fragment is so far the only known vestige of the fourth manuscript witness to the Old Syriac version.

This article presents texts recovered by post-processing of multispectral images from the fifth- or sixth-century underwriting of the palimpsest Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Texts identified include the Anonymous II Proemium to Aratus’ Phaenomena, parts of Eratosthenes’ Catasterisms, Aratus’ Phaenomena lines 71–4 and 282–99 and previously unknown text, including some of the earliest astronomical measurements to survive in any Greek manuscript. Codex Climaci Rescriptus also contains at least three astronomical drawings. These appear to form part of an illustrated manuscript, with considerable textual value not merely on the basis of its age but also of its readings. The manuscript undertexts show significant overlap with the Φ Edition, postulated as ancestor of the various Latin Aratea.

Archaeological palimpsests are depositional units where the remains of various human occupations have been mixed for hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years. They create various sets of analytical scales that archaeologists must deal with routinely. In this paper, I argue that sociocultural processes derived from a communities of practice framework — scaffolding, guided participation, and continuity through shared activities — can be used by archaeologists to describe a palimpsest’s lithic assemblage, to differentiate its patterns, and to interpret their meaning. These processes must first be remapped onto an ecological approach to skill before they can be expanded onto new sets of scales, however. I ground my work at the site of La Martre (Quebec, Canada), a nexus of fifteen marine terraces spread over 500,000 m2. Slow depositional processes and plowing have mixed its lithic remains to create a 10,000-year-wide depositional unit with poor chronological and spatial control. Fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 1999 sampled 0.03% of its total surface. Most of its 2111 tools and 207,506 flakes were uncovered in its 40-cm-thick plowzone. I build methodological tools — dispersion surfaces, skill combinatorics, and extended skilled reduction sequences — to describe a small subset (N=93) from one of La Martre’s loci (16-west). I describe ten extended skilled reduction sequences showing various degrees of skill and knapping methods. Concepts of scaffolding, guided participation and continuity through shared activities are then used to interpret these patterns.

The aim of this study is to investigate the semiotic relationships that emerge from the interpretation of the face in relation to the sound of the voice, considering both as signifying expressions subject to layered semantic interpretation. Specifically, we will explore the relationship between the voice and the face, treating them as palimpsests in symbiotic signification. This approach draws on fundamental semiotic research into the face, examining how, being both an integral part of the phonatory apparatus and a modulator of vocal sound, it conveys culturally legible characteristics and generates meanings in connection with the voice, particularly in relation to the emotional dimension perceptible in both. Alongside this primary aim, a secondary objective emerges: to investigate, from an interdisciplinary perspective combining semiotics and cognitive science, the middle ground on which the contested boundary between nature and culture shifts. This reflection builds on analyses of the cultural interpretation of facial and vocal expression to reach the biological foundations of our semiotic system and its cultural ramifications.