Europe (Geographic Keyword)
426-450 (1,158 Records)
Ancient cityscapes with long occupational histories have great potential for reconstructing changes in social structure, spatial planning, political governance, identity, economy, environment, and climate. Recovering such information, however, poses many challenges, both human and financial. Archaeological deposits are often deeply buried and palimpsestic, representing a complex mixture of processes including collapse, partial abandonment, repurposing, and reoccupation. Yet, anthropological...
From Life History to Large Scale: Osteobiography as Microhistory (2017)
Osteobiography, like other types of biographies, extends beyond the individual through entanglements with objects, landscapes, and social phenomena. The approach requires a multi-scalar analysis to understand how bodies both emerge from and create historical process. Osteobiographies are developed by tacking between an individual’s remains and the wider skeletal population to establish a contextualized life history. Conceptualizing osteobiography as a microhistory of human remains is one way in...
From materiality to space: monumental enclosures, exploited mineral resources and territoriality during the Michelsberg Culture (Neolithic, 4200-3700 BC, France and Germany) (2015)
The Michelsberg Culture saw the onset of major enonomic, social, technological and cultural transformations in agricultural societies around 4200 BC Cal. The most striking feature is without doubt the appearance in the landscape of large sites enclosed by complex systems of ditches and palissades. On the other hand, different modes of production and the exploitation of flint and salt show not only networks of raw material procurement but also a new organisation of territories and the role of...
From North America to Europe: Preliminary Biomolecular results Regarding the Transatlantic History of the Turkey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While there is a growing body of studies on turkey domestication and use in North America, many questions remain unanswered regarding its introduction to Europe and its subsequent breeding. Which populations of turkeys were imported in Europe and when? How fast did they...
From Palethnography to Paleohistory: following a Magdalenian group through three successive occupations at Etiolles (2015)
Since the 1980s, spatially oriented techno-economical lithic studies of a few key open-air sites in the Paris basin have been essential to our comprehension of Upper Palaeolithic behavioral patterns. While these analyses have largely been synchronic in focus, and many others evaluate diachrony on the long-term, we hope to now bridge these two approaches through a study of the mid-term. One of the only Palaeolithic contexts that allow for such an approach is the three-level sequence that...
From Present-Day Fields to Ancient Samples…and Back Again: Strategies for Establishing Principles of Interpretation in Plant Stable Isotope Work (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant stable isotope analysis presents a series of ‘middle range’ challenges for archaeologists, but also unique opportunities for reconstructing ancient agroecologies. Here we focus on the potential and limitations of modern crop studies for informing interpretation of archaeobotanical cereal and pulse...
From Russia with Love: Ruth Tringham and the Early Days of Microwear (2015)
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE: RUTH TRINGHAM AND THE EARLY DAYS OF MICROWEAR ANALYSIS It was the early 1970’s and a time when the Cold War directed the geopolitical scene worldwide. It was also a time when a young British archaeologist brought to the USA a new approach to the study of material culture. Professor Ruth Tringham landed at Harvard in 1971 together with the technique of microscopic analysis of traces of use on chipped stone tools, a technique which she had studied in the USSR. There...
From Stone to Screen: Squeezing into the World of Digital Archaeology (2015)
As the field of Digital Archaeology becomes increasingly prevalent, large-scale projects tend to dominate both thinking about and approaches towards the digital landscape. Scholars and students with smaller budgets and resources are often at a disadvantage; we believe renewed energy should be devoted to exploring the value and integrity of small-scale projects. This poster presents From Stone to Screen, a multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and open-access digitization project launched in 2012...
From the Aegean to the Adriatic: Exploring the Neolithization of Islands (2016)
Frameworks for understanding Neolithization have increasingly recognized the complex and multifaceted nature of the spread of domesticates from Southwest Asia into Europe. But how do these factors interplay in unique island settings as compared to the continental scale? This paper takes a comparative approach using sites located on islands from the Aegean and the Adriatic to address changing subsistence and herd management between 10,000-7,000 BP. Based on zooarchaeological and biogeochemical...
From the green belt: an appraisal on the circulation of western Iberian variscite (2017)
The Western half of the Iberian Peninsula plays a significant role for understanding the production and circulation of "green stone objects" (mainly variscite adornments, but also some jadeite axe heads) during the Neolithic and Copper Age of Western Europe. This importance lies in the presence in the area of two out of the three prehistoric variscite mines in Europe. Through an extensive review of the variscite adornments found in the archaeological contexts of Western Iberia, we will try to...
From Trench to Tablet: Field Recording, Interpreting, and Publishing in the Age of Digital Archaeology (2017)
Since the arrival of robust mobile tablet devices in 2010, archaeological documentation has increasingly become born-digital. The adoption of digital tools and practices has not gone unnoticed, with reactions ranging from enthusiastic acceptance to outright skepticism. Significantly, scholars are beginning to offer more critical and reflexive views of the issues surrounding the use of mobile devices in archaeological fieldwork, interpretation, and dissemination. The ability to disseminate...
From Villanovan to Etruscan Mortuary Goods: The Ceramic Assemblages of Four Seventh-Century BCE Pit Graves from the Site of San Giuliano (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The San Giuliano necropolis, located within the Marturanum Regional Park in northern Lazio, Italy, is well-known for its hundreds of Villanovan and Etruscan graves. As part of our mission to understand the patterns of human habitation at the site from the ninth...
Frontier Concept in Prehistory: the End of the Moving Frontier. In Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe (1977)
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.
Functional and Organizational Variation Among Late Mesolithic Sites in Southwestern Germany (2017)
Because sites of the Late Mesolithic are relatively rare in southern Germany, and are mostly represented by caves, three open-air sites of this period provide unique insights into this period. Two of the sites are located on a lakeshore and the third is in a river valley. All three possess excellent preservation of organic materials that facilitate analysis. The contents and spatial organization of these sites will be examined in the context of their functional role and their implications for...
Funding Archaeology and Heritage Conservation in Postcommunist Bulgaria and Beyond (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On 10 November 1989, Todor Zhivkov, the communist leader of Bulgaria, was ousted, bringing the fall of the one-party regime and Bulgaria’s transition to democracy. With the collapse of the communist regime, funding for archaeological research and conservation was dramatically altered and significantly diminished. In...
Garnets for the Vikings: Charismatic jewellery and family memories in early Viking Age Scandinavia (2017)
The paper presents how continental-inspired elite jewellery from the Merovingian period (550-800AD) continued to play an important role in the Viking Age Scandinavia (800 -1050 AD).The so-called "disc-on-bow" brooch were covered with garnets, and is one of the most spectacular jewellery types we know from this period in Europe. They nevertheless appear in a number of female graves from the Viking Age, revealing traces of having been used a long time, most likely passed down through several...
Garum and Graves: Bioarchaeological Interpretation of Cremations and Mortuary Architecture (2015)
Mortuary contexts are archaeologically and anthropologically ambiguous. Moreover, mutilcomponent-use archaeological sites are difficult to interpret as the original purpose of these designated spaces reflects the ever changing living society. The ancient Roman site of Troia is a multicomponent-use site. Originally constructed as a Garum production and distribution center, in fact the largest known in the Western Roman Empire, Troia was also utilized as a cemetery throughout its use from the 1st...
Gender and Age in the 18th – 19th century Worcester Porcelain Industries: relating the results of archaeological research to social history. (2015)
This poster will present some of the finds analysis from the Worcester Porcelain Project, which is conducting fieldwork in the suburbs and agricultural zones around the City of Worcester, in order to better understand the processes of industrial waste management prior to World War II. The study of industrial archaeology in Britain since the 1960s has emphasized monument and landscape studies, with emphasis on preservation and conservation of iconic factories and installations. In parallel to...
Genetic Insights into Indo-European Origins (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient genomic data has provided important new clues that help to address the more than 200-year-old problem of the origin of Indo-European languages. Beginning in 2015, a series of papers have shown that Yamnaya steppe pastoralists--who spread over the steppes north of the...
Genome analysis of medieval Yersinia pestis suggests an ancient European source population for the majority of modern plague strains (2016)
Yersinia pestis is among the most notorious pathogens and is thought to be responsible for at least three major Eurasian plague pandemics since the Late Antique. Much has been speculated about the origin of the disease, and its potential migration routes to various parts of the world. Historical documents point toward an African origin for the first pandemic during the 6th century AD and an Asian source for the 14th century Black Death. Modern molecular data, however, suggest an East Asian...
Geoarchaeology of a Dunefield Shell Midden Site in County Sligo, Ireland (2016)
This paper presents the preliminary results of a geoarchaeological investigation of an expansive shell midden site in a dunefield blowout area known as the Shelley Valley in Carrowdough, Co. Sligo, Ireland. Based on the results of the various geophysical and archaeological methodologies we employed at this site during the summer of 2015, we examine changes through time in the ways people utilized the seashore and its resources. Western Ireland is an ideal location in which to study temporally...
Geoarchaeology, Paleobiology and Archaeology of rockshelters and caves from Valencia (Spain) (2015)
Caves and rock-shelters stratified sites from Mediterranean Spain are the result of the accumulation of time-averaged palimpsests, that probably don’t represent the normal range of human activities on the landscape. We focus the discussion on understanding the nature of human responses to climate changes, and we argue that different erosive and removal events in several mediterranean sites had been decisive in our vision of the end of the Palaeolithic-Epipalaeolithic and the beginning of the...
Geographical origin assignment of sheep wool textiles using light stable isotopes (2015)
Identifying which of a group of material cultural objects is non-local has long been part of artefact analysis in archaeology. Identifying the movement of objects, and the movement of ideas about how to make and use objects, is important to understanding physical and ideological links between sites. This work has relied on data from typological, technological and chemical analyses of object construction and use. Textiles made from sheep wool were a highly valuable commodity which was traded...
Geophysical investigations at the Bronze Age site of Békés 103 in Eastern Hungary (2016)
In archaeological research both non-invasive and weakly invasive methods are often employed without, or prior to, excavation. Surface collection, geophysical survey and shovel testing are the methods that have been employed at the site of Békés 103. Despite the difficulty imposed by the soil conditions and the nature of the targets themselves (cremation graves), geophysical measurements employing a variety of techniques (gradiometry, soil resistivity and electromagnetics) were applied in tandem...
Geophysical Prospection at Caisteal Mac Tuathal in Perthshire, Scotland (2016)
Geophysical prospection utilizing ground penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometry in association with a general packet radio service (GPRS) topographical survey was conducted at Caisteal Mac Tuathal – an unexcavated potential Iron Age hill fort on the northeastern terminus of Drummond Hill near Kenmore, Perthshire, Scotland. Nestled above the rich archaeology of Loch Tay and Glen Lyon, Caisteal Mac Tuathal’s prominence in the local topography, proximity to rich Iron Age landscapes, and its...