Ricerc@Sapienza

The preface of the volume includes a short discussion of each paper and of each theme. Three geographical areas are discussed: Central Mediterranean; Crete and the Aegean; Cyprus and Levant. A further theme is the role of warriors and merchants in connectivity.

This volume has its origin in a similarly entitled session organised at the 24th Annual Meeting of the European
Association of Archaeologists in Barcelona in 2018. The specific aim of both the session and this volume was
to measure acceptance of, and resistance to, outside influences within Mediterranean coastal settlements
and their immediate hinterlands, with an open time range, but with a particular focus on the processes not
reflecting simple commercial routes, but taking place at an intercultural level, in situations of developed

A re-examination of the photographic documentation of the EB IV pottery collected from the excavations at Ebla has allowed us to identify a group of sherds dating from late Early Bronze IVB that belong to the tradition of “grey wares” produced between Tell Mishrifeh/Qaṭna, Tell Shayrat and Tell Nebi Mend, and distributed primarily to Central and Southern Syria, and to the Painted Simple Ware of the central Syrian steppe. This is the first time that pottery produced in these areas is identified within an EB IVB assemblage of the Ebla region.

The southern Levantine tradition of cult buildings from Early Bronze I to Early Bronze III is represented
mainly by simple broad-room temples with a central row of pillar bases, a layout derived directly from the
local Chalcolithic traditions. However, at Tell el-Mutesellim/Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley, and Khirbet
ez-Zeraqon in the northern Transjordanian plateau, two different types of temples were discovered, which
are often conflated in the category of broad-room temples in antis. In contrast, we argue that they belong to

A large number of green infrastructure (GI) projects have recently been proposed, planned and implemented in European cities following the adoption of the GI strategy by the EU Commission in 2013. Although this policy tool is closely related to biodiversity conservation targets, some doubts have arisen as regards the ability of current urban GI to provide beneficial effects not only for human societies but also for the ecological systems that host them.

This paper aims at re-examining two intertwined problems: the possible regional coexistence of human groups that developed distinctive cultural traits as a mean to identify themselves on one hand, and, on the other hand, that related to
the chronological shift among specific regional sequences in central and southern eastern Italy during the Late Bronze
Age. Moreover, the authors discuss the intrinsic risk of using chronological terms homogeneously encompassing the

The corpus of grey and red vessels with or without whitish painted lines has considerably expanded to date and it has become clear that Early Bronze IV (EB IV) – now considered broadly contemporary in the two regions in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC – was the period when such vessels spread over several areas across the entire Levant.

In brain-computer interfaces (BCI), the detection of different mental states is a key element. In Motor Imagery (MI)-based BCIs, the considered features typically rely on the power spectral density (PSD) of brain signals, but alternative features can be explored looking for better performance. One possibility is the integration of functional connectivity (FC). These features quantify the interactions between different brain areas and they could represent a valuable tool to detect differences between two mental conditions.

Several non-invasive imaging methods have contributed to shed light on the brain mechanisms underlying working memory (WM). The aim of the present study was to depict the topology of the relevant EEG-derived brain networks associated to distinct operations of WM function elicited by the Sternberg Item Recognition Task (SIRT) such as encoding, storage, and retrieval in healthy, middle age (46 ± 5 years) adults. High density EEG recordings were performed in 17 participants whilst attending a visual SIRT.

Two-person neuroscience (2 ​PN) is a recently introduced conceptual and methodological framework used to investigate the neural basis of human social interaction from simultaneous neuroimaging of two or more subjects (hyperscanning). In this study, we adopted a 2 ​PN approach and a multiple-brain connectivity model to investigate the neural basis of a form of cooperation called joint action.