Em sua história, o município de São Sebastião, localizado no Litoral Norte do Estado de São Paulo, foi palco de inúmeras transformações ambientais, principalmente a partir do final do século XVI, quando chegaram à região as primeiras levas de colonizadores europeus, introduzindo novos hábitos e imprimindo na paisagem as marcas de sua ocupação. Apesar das constantes alterações e apropriações do espaço urbano e rural, ainda existem remanescentes culturais que, norteados pela pesquisa arqueológica, propiciam significativas informações sobre as paisagens culturais do passado. Nesse caso, destaca-se o Sítio Arqueológico São Francisco, um complexo construtivo e arquitetônico cujas instalações estão relacionadas a uma propriedade agrícola da primeira metade do século XIX e que constituiu o objeto de estudo apresentado nesta tese de doutorado. De maneira geral, as pesquisas foram realizadas no âmbito da Arqueologia da Paisagem com o objetivo de compreender o cenário de implantação do sítio arqueológico. Privilegiou-se a utilização de tecnologias para realizar a leitura do processo histórico a partir de uma visão de espectro amplo baseada no entendimento das relações homem/meio ambiente, analisando os processos de artificialização do meio e as principais características da paisagem na época de ocupação do sítio. / In its history, the municipality of São Sebastião, located at the north costal zone of the State of São Paulo, was the stage of uncountable environmental transformations, mainly after the end of the XVIth century, when the first waves of European settlers disembarked in the region, introducing new customs as well as printing their signals of occupation in the landscape. Despite the constant alteration and re-appropriation of the urban space and rural zones, there are cultural reminiscences that, based on archaeological research, have revealed significative information about past cultural landscapes. In this case, the archaeological site known as São Francisco is an impressive instance of that, and constituted by an architectonic and constructive complex in which the units are associated with a XIXth century agricultural property, the very object of study in this PhD dissertation. In general terms, this research is focused on landscape archaeology with the priority to understand the implantation scenario of this archaeological site. At this point, it was selected the use of technologies to read the historical process of man-envrionment interaction based on a wide spectrum vision, and also analyzing the environment artificial-transformative processes that took place. Additionally, the main characteristics of the landscape during the time of site occupation are revealed.

Em sua história, o município de São Sebastião, localizado no Litoral Norte do Estado de São Paulo, foi palco de inúmeras transformações ambientais, principalmente a partir do final do século XVI, quando chegaram à região as primeiras levas de colonizadores europeus, introduzindo novos hábitos e imprimindo na paisagem as marcas de sua ocupação. Apesar das constantes alterações e apropriações do espaço urbano e rural, ainda existem remanescentes culturais que, norteados pela pesquisa arqueológica, propiciam significativas informações sobre as paisagens culturais do passado. Nesse caso, destaca-se o Sítio Arqueológico São Francisco, um complexo construtivo e arquitetônico cujas instalações estão relacionadas a uma propriedade agrícola da primeira metade do século XIX e que constituiu o objeto de estudo apresentado nesta tese de doutorado. De maneira geral, as pesquisas foram realizadas no âmbito da Arqueologia da Paisagem com o objetivo de compreender o cenário de implantação do sítio arqueológico. Privilegiou-se a utilização de tecnologias para realizar a leitura do processo histórico a partir de uma visão de espectro amplo baseada no entendimento das relações homem/meio ambiente, analisando os processos de artificialização do meio e as principais características da paisagem na época de ocupação do sítio. / In its history, the municipality of São Sebastião, located at the north costal zone of the State of São Paulo, was the stage of uncountable environmental transformations, mainly after the end of the XVIth century, when the first waves of European settlers disembarked in the region, introducing new customs as well as printing their signals of occupation in the landscape. Despite the constant alteration and re-appropriation of the urban space and rural zones, there are cultural reminiscences that, based on archaeological research, have revealed significative information about past cultural landscapes. In this case, the archaeological site known as São Francisco is an impressive instance of that, and constituted by an architectonic and constructive complex in which the units are associated with a XIXth century agricultural property, the very object of study in this PhD dissertation. In general terms, this research is focused on landscape archaeology with the priority to understand the implantation scenario of this archaeological site. At this point, it was selected the use of technologies to read the historical process of man-envrionment interaction based on a wide spectrum vision, and also analyzing the environment artificial-transformative processes that took place. Additionally, the main characteristics of the landscape during the time of site occupation are revealed.

This thesis considers new methods that exploit recent developments in computer technology to address three extant problems in the area of Finance and Econometrics. The problem of Asian option pricing has endured for the last two decades in spite of many attempts to find a robust solution across all parameter values. All recently proposed methods are shown to fail when computations are conducted using standard machine precision because as more and more accuracy is forced upon the problem, round-off error begins to propagate. Using recent methods from numerical analysis based on multi-precision arithmetic, we show using the Mathematica platform that all extant methods have efficacy when computations use sufficient arithmetic precision. This creates the proper framework to compare and contrast the methods based on criteria such as computational speed for a given accuracy. Numerical methods based on a deformation of the Bromwich contour in the Geman-Yor Laplace transform are found to perform best provided the normalized strike price is above a given threshold; otherwise methods based on Euler approximation are preferred. The same methods are applied in two other contexts: the simulation of stable distributions and the computation of unit root densities in Econometrics. The stable densities are all nested in a general function called a Fox H function. The same computational difficulties as above apply when using only double-precision arithmetic but are again solved using higher arithmetic precision. We also consider simulating the densities of infinitely divisible distributions associated with hyperbolic functions. Finally, our methods are applied to unit root densities. Focusing on the two fundamental densities, we show our methods perform favorably against the extant methods of Monte Carlo simulation, the Imhof algorithm and some analytical expressions derived principally by Abadir. Using Mathematica, the main two-dimensional Laplace transform in this context is reduced to a one-dimensional problem.