Europe (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (1,158 Records)
The Balearic Islands were the last large islands in the Mediterranean to be settled, as late as the 3rd millennium cal BC. Currently, there is a good zooarchaeological record for the late 3rd and 2nd millennia cal BC, which allows the reconstruction of animal exploitation and management strategies in Mallorca, Menorca and Formentera. The results show that the obtainment of animal resources relied mainly on sheep, goat, cattle and pig husbandry. When this record is compared to the surrounding...
Animated ships (2017)
The rock art of southern Scandinavia includes a variety of images and among these are ships, humans and animal images. The ship is the most common motif and appears in various constellations. The ship may appear without associated images, it can be seen with a row of lines indicating a crew, and it can be associated to rather detail human and animal images. The process of adding humans and animals to the ships changed the significance of these images. In this paper I will go through some of the...
Answers in the Dirt: Taphonomy, Preservation Bias, and Pastoralism at Iron Age Nichoria, Greece (2017)
The assumed increase of cattle in Dark Age Nichoria has been a key piece of evidence for the "cattle-ranching" model of Dark Age Greek economy. New zooarchaeological analysis, however, demonstrates a distribution of more robust skeletal specimens which are likely the result of preservation bias, rather than economic reliance on cattle. Geoarchaeological analysis of "archival" soils retrieved from uncleaned bones provides some confirmation and additional detail: the abundance of cattle bones at...
The Antiquity of Hunter-Gatherers Revisited (2015)
One of the challenges of Paleoanthropology is developing coherent models for ancient social and economic systems that have no close analogues in the recent archaeological and historical records. Systematic observations of variability among recent foragers produced by Binford, Kelly and others, are vital tools for understanding early humans. They provide necessary frames of reference for predicting variation, and for understanding why observations may not fit predictions. In a 2001 paper we...
Applied Archaeological Visualization: Technical advances and research insights from the effort to visualize Neanderthal/AMH interactions at deep time depth. (2015)
Geospatial and temporal mapping technologies continue to rapidly evolve, making possible archaeological visualizations capable of revealing patterns in the past from new and potentially dramatic perspectives. The TemporalMapping.org project, now in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s PalaeoChron.org, will share techniques and research results from data visualization efforts including a global 30-arc second resolution model of sea level change from 475,000 BP to Present and a high...
Approaches for Producing Precise Archaeological Chronologies (2015)
For the fortunate few, dendrochronology allows an annual window into the archaeological record. Over the past 20 years, however, Bayesian chronological modelling has brought chronologies precise to within the scale of past lifetimes and generations within the reach of all archaeologists. Explicit statistical modelling allows radiocarbon dates to be interpreted within the framework of existing knowledge provided by associated archaeological evidence, providing more precise dating and thus...
Approaches to Scandinavian rock-art (2015)
The aim of this paper is to discuss and evaluate some general trends in Scandinavian rock-art research. For a larger part of the 20th century scholars from the history of religion had a strong impact on the interpretation of south Scandinavian rock-art. Images were contextualized by a comparative approach where scenes and details from rock-art were compared to similar phenomenon in other media. Today, this perspective is complemented by a variety of approaches; but a dominating perspective...
Approaches to Understanding Skeletal Part Frequencies in Roman Assemblages (2016)
Since the 1950s, zooarchaeologists have noticed that the expected number of each skeletal element varied from the recovered frequencies. Determining the reason for such variation is an important aspect of zooarchaeological research. Several approaches to understanding skeletal part frequencies are current, including density mediated attrition and differential transport. One method of interpreting skeletal part frequencies that is underused in studies of complex societies involves food utility...
The Appropriation of Native American Cultural Property: Comparing the U.S. and French Contexts (2015)
When Native American sacred objects were recently auctioned off as art in Paris, many Americans were shocked by the headlines. American institutions and archaeologists continue to face their own histories of appropriation of Native American culture and objects, but many in the U.S. still seem surprised by the extent to which European institutions resist calls for more sensitive handling of cultural property. Others see a disparity between a widespread acknowledgement of the need to repatriate...
Archaeo-anthropological analysis of the early to late Middle Age (7-14th century) parish church and graveyard from Sursee, Switzerland. (2016)
In 1985/86 the parish church of St. Georg, Sursee was excavated. The archaeological findings showed that the ecclesiastical beginnings of the church date back to the early Middle Ages. In the early 7th century CE a wooden church was built near burials dating back to late antiquity. In total, five occupational phases for the cemetery can be associated with five construction phases (one wooden and four stone phases) of the church. Of the 223 recovered burials, only 119 individuals were...
Archaeobotany and Early Farming in Europe (1978)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
The Archaeological Consequences of Human Fire Use: Analyses, Interpretations, and Implications for Understanding the Evolution of Pyrotechnic Behaviors. (2017)
The importance of controlled fire use in human evolutionary history is widely acknowledged, but the timing of initial anthropogenic fire use and control remains contentious. This debate has recently extended to question whether fire-making behavior was maintained and employed by early hominins moving into northern latitudes based on inconsistencies in archaeological fire signatures in the European record. A series of recent publications interpret these inconsistencies as indicating that...
Archaeological Field schools: Teaching Heritage Management. An Example from Menorca (2015)
The archaeological field school is a traditional means of training students in the practical skills of survey, excavation, recording, and artifact processing. Recent discussions about field schools have emphasized the need to approach fieldwork from a holistic perspective and incorporate the theory and practice of archaeological stewardship: preservation, interpretation, management, and public outreach of archaeological resources. In this paper we describe our experience in the development of a...
Archaeological Open-Air Museums in Europe (2015)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
Archaeological Visibility at Stélida, Naxos: Identifying Activity Hubs at a Palaeolithic Chert Quarry in the Cyclades (2015)
This paper details the methodology used by the Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project (SNAP) to distinguish primary activity areas within a Palaeolithic chert quarry. This work is undertaken in a challenging artifact-rich landscape that has undergone significant post-depositional modification through various environmental factors and anthropogenic disturbance. The two-year non-invasive survey involved walking numerous transect lines to produce a broad-stroke impression of artifact density, which...
Archaeologies of the Norman Conquest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the long-standing truism in archaeology that the Norman Conquest of England is largely invisible in ‘the stuff of everyday life’, an abundance of material remains dating to the 11th and 12th centuries has been recovered through excavation and still survives above ground. It is now becoming clear that...
Archaeology and Tourism in the Early 20th Century: Pompeii through a Photographic Archive (2018)
Since its rediscovery in 1748, Pompeii has remained a destination for travelers and tourists from around the globe. Originally, a tourist destination during the Grand Tour, mainly in the 17th-18th centuries, Pompeii attracted the educated elite. In the course of the 19th century, the site was transformed into an open-air museum and became accessible to a broader group of visitors seeking an authentic experience. This presentation offers a glimpse at a tourist’s experience in the early 1900s...
The Archaeology of Gossip: Delineating the Space of Interpersonal Performance (2018)
Much of the literature on performance in cultural and political spheres in archaeology over the last 4 decades has focused on social memory. This paper shifts that discussion from the arena of public commemoration and cultural rites to the de facto performances of the domestic sphere. Private, interpersonal interactions are important in the transmission and creation of social memory as well- they place an individual’s social world in the context of shared social memory, and vice versa. Gossip is...
Archaeology of Materials: An Overview of Amber Use in Prehistory (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Amber is still today a material which is highly appreciated in modern societies. To use amber means to be part of the tradition of thousands of years. The topic "amber in prehistory" became very popular in the last decades in European archaeology. It shows a huge potential for understanding the use practices of special materials in prehistoric societies....
The archaeology of medieval nomadism in Eastern Europe (10th-13th centuries): the current state of research (2016)
The vast steppe corridor that begins in north-central China and ends on the Middle and Lower Danube has been the habitat of many communities of nomads, and the object of intensive archaeological research. Ever since Svetlana Pletneva, research on the late nomads in the steppe lands now within Russia and Ukraine has focused on burial assemblages, especially on burial mounds. However, new lines of research have opened in the last few decades, which highlight new categories of evidence: stone...
ARCHAEOMUSICA – eine internationale Wanderausstellung zur Klang- und Musikgeschichte Europas (2018)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
Archäologische Freilichtmuseen: Geschichte, Qualität und Praxis (2016)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
"Are You There Gods?" Offerings and Communication Between Worlds in Protohistoric France (2017)
Ritual offerings are inherently communicative; they are created or selected for the meanings they convey to the giver, other viewers, and the intended recipient(s). With this concept in mind, objects deposited in the Source of the Douix, a freshwater spring in eastern France, were recently examined to understand how people use offerings for communication in ritual practices. During exploration of the spring’s subterranean karst system, cave divers observed human-made objects in the water....
ARIADNE: Building a European data infrastructure for archaeology (2016)
This is a pdf copy of the PowerPoint slides used for this presentation in the SAA symposium. ARIADNE is a four-year EU FP7 Infrastructures funded project, made up of 24 partners across 16 European countries, which hold archaeological data in at least 13 languages. These are the accumulated outcome of the research of individuals, teams and institutions, but form a vast and fragmented corpus, and their potential has been constrained by difficult access and non-homogeneous perspectives. ARIADNE...
Artifact Geographies of the Viking Age (2017)
The hair comb is one of the most commonly recovered bone artifacts from early medieval sites in Northern Europe, particularly in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Beyond the bone hair comb’s association with technological innovation, it acts as a powerful proxy for urbanism, human migration, and long-range trade in Viking-Age towns. Yet despite this prevalence, the bone hair comb remains understudied in recent years and few multi-site syntheses have been undertaken. Existing studies have focused on the...