Europe (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (1,158 Records)
There has been a very strong relationship between human societies and the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in many different places and cultures. The bear has had multiple roles in European societies, from the ancient (and modern) epitome of the wild, through religious symbol to the arenas of the Roman Empire, and their later use as entertainment. At what point does the bear’s position change in society from an animal to be feared, to one to be mocked? In terms of captive management, a fully grown bear...
Beers with Lawrence and Insights into Magdalenian Visual Display at El Mirón Cave (2016)
In 1996 Lawrence Guy Straus embarked on new adventures in fieldwork at El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, northern Spain. As a young University of New Mexico graduate student the author joined him there from 1997–2000. Excavating literally thousands of Magdalenian artifacts and features in the cave’s corral area and visiting other Magdalenian caves on weekends made Lawrence’s fact-filled and captivating classroom lectures come alive. The author’s fascination with personal ornamentation and...
Being a Woman in Roman Gaul: Gendered Votive Offerings in a Colonial Context (2017)
The annexation of Gaul into the Roman Empire in the mid-first century BCE spurred the development of new religious practices in that region, including the practice of offering votive figurines at sanctuaries. Because each votive represents a personal decision on the part of the dedicant, analysis of votive assemblages provides unique insight into the demographics of worshippers and illuminates aspects of individual identity in this colonial context. Here, I present the results of a quantitative...
Being Male in al-Andalus. A Comparative Osteobiographical Approach to Reconstructing Islamic Identities in Medieval Spain. (2017)
In 711 AD the influx of Arabs and Berbers into Iberia culminated in the formation of the only Islamic state in medieval Western Europe. The uptake of new religious ideology and cultural practices by the inhabitants, which when applied in their unique sociohistorical context, resulted in an Iberian Islamic identity. While much research has explored variation in the lives of women, including debates on their freedom of movement and activity, less is postulated about the lives of men and what it...
Benabarre: the Modernization of a Spanish Village. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology (1974)
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.
Benefits of Time Travel, the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre (2017)
Our laboratory focuses on the preservation and degradation of organic signatures in archaeological remains. We devise and use state-of-the art genetic techniques to pull DNA sequences from tooth and bone remains to address questions of ancestry, origins, extinctions and evolution. Currently the lab is focusing on the evolution of infectious disease, namely plague, using full genomic evidence garnered from victims of past pandemics. I will speak about the centre, the overarching questions we are...
Between radicalism and tolerance: Characterising the rule of a militarised Christian theocracy in the medieval Baltic (2016)
The Teutonic Order, the last of the major military orders founded in the Holy Land in the twelfth century, developed a strong, centralised hierarchy once it redirected its efforts to crusading in the Baltic. After the initial period of crusading was over, its fortified monasteries were built with consistent regularity, and the Order adopted a top-down, corporate approach to controlling the conquered territories, under the leadership of the Grand Master. However, despite this centralisation,...
Beyond bones: Non-faunal evidence for the role of dogs in Anglo-Saxon society (2015)
Zooarchaeological data have provided much new information on Anglo-Saxon dogs including information on animal sizes, ages at death, paleopathology, and evidence for the treatment/mistreatment of dogs. However, many aspects of the relationship between humans and dogs in the Anglo-Saxon period cannot be understood on the basis of animal bones alone. This paper will explore the non-archaeozoological evidence for human-dog relationships in the Anglo-Saxon period drawing on evidence from literature...
Beyond Counting Sheep: An Interdisciplinary Review of Faunal Assemblages in the British Pastoral Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the challenges in zooarchaeological research is to advance new methods of understanding animal husbandry within the past socio-ecological context. Intensification of wool production is typically evidenced in the archaeological record by the increase of sheep remains in species abundance and adult mortality; however,...
Beyond Iron Age ‘towns’: Examining oppida as examples of mega-sites and low-density urbanism (2017)
The question of whether Late Iron Age oppida in Europe were truly ‘urban’ has dominated debate over these sites since the 19th century. Oppida, however, have been surprisingly absent from comparative urban studies, despite increasingly nuanced perspectives on the nature and diversity of the urban phenomenon. In particular, Roland Fletcher’s suggestion that oppida might be examples of a range of alternative urban-like centres has been largely ignored by scholars of the European Iron Age. The...
Beyond Provenance: Using the chemical composition of copper-alloys to explore technology and metal flow (2015)
The vast chemical datasets for copper-alloy objects are a tremendous, but underused, opportunity. These data were often considered objective fixed points that represented chronological sequences and geographical provenance. Recent work has demonstrated that, though the object composition is fixed, it is only a final characterisation. Bringing together material science, archaeological, and conceptual approaches, we discuss the life histories of units of metal. Before being cast into the final...
Beyond Romanization and Colonialism: Roman Influences in Ireland (2016)
Currently, models of colonial theory are being broken down with better understandings of fluid frontiers and more complex systems of culture contact. These new frameworks offer greater insights into how groups interact and provide us with a substantial platform on which to discuss nuanced exchange networks. With recent renewed interest in exchange during the Late Iron Age in the British Isles, there has been greater advanced scholarship in our understanding of interactions between Rome and...
Beyond trauma and disease: Examining the growth and potential of bioarchaeological research in Iberian medieval archaeology. (2016)
With the advancement of inter-disciplinary research in medieval archaeology in recent decades, much progress has been made in the integration of bioarchaeological data into larger archaeological and historical questions. This growth may be seen in the increase in publications, professional associations, and programs of study focusing upon bioarchaeological research of the medieval period. Yet, particularly in Iberian medieval studies, the contribution of bioarchaeological research largely has...
Bioarchaeological Assemblages at Çatalhöyük: A Relational Examination of Porotic Hyperostosis and Cribra Orbitalia Etiologies and Transmissions (2017)
Porotic hyperostosis, manifested as pittings on the outer table of the cranial vault, and cribra orbitalia, the analogous porosities that form on orbital roofs, are two commonly observed pathologies used extensively by bioarchaeologists to understand past health and nutritional conditions. Yet the etiologies of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia are largely varied and not well understood, with proposed explanations ranging from diet and nutrition to chronic and infectious diseases. This...
The Bioarchaeological Evidence for Elder Care in Roman Britain (2015)
The elderly are the most neglected demographic in archaeology. In today’s youth-obsessed society the elderly are consistently denigrated, particularly those perceived to be physically or mentally frail. This negative construction is partly a consequence of an unprecedented ageing population, often conceptualised as problematic and burdensome to society. A related and growing concern in contemporary populations is the physical abuse of the elderly, believed to be an escalating, demographically...
Bioarchaeological versus Archaeological Data on the Beginnings of Southeast and Central European Early Neolithic (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The short paper focuses on Early Neolithic continental Europe, with presenting new archaeological results compared to similarly recent ancient DNA and stable isotope studies. I shall address various scenarios from selected regions in the Balkans, in northern Germany before zooming in the eastern and western part of the Carpathian basin. Here again,...
Bioarchaeologocal approaches to reconstructing Upper Palaeolithic environments in the Cantabrian Region, Northern Spain. (2017)
The Cantabrian Region of Northern Spain was an important refugium during the harsh conditions of the Last Glacial Maximum, when ice sheets covered much of Northern Europe and populations were pushed further south. Late Upper populations in the Cantabrian region thrived at this time, and there is an increase in the density of archaeological sites is seen, in addition to cultural changes such as the creation of rich cave art assemblages. Understanding the climatic and environmental conditions...
Bioarchaeology of a demographic crisis in the baroque phase of the cemetery St. Benedict in Prague- a multidisciplinary approach (2015)
The new evaluation of the skeletal remains and the archaeological documentation from the Saint Benedict cemetery in Prague is a unique opportunity for a bioarchaeological analysis of past mortality crises. The rescue archaeological excavation (held in 1971) and the first osteological analysis (Hanakova et al., 1988) showed in the baroque phase V (1635-1786) the presence of several multiple graves (approximately 30 with 190 individuals) and also many other simultaneous individual burials...
The Bioarchaeology of Diversity: A Case Study in the Roman Empire (2018)
This poster presents a new project to explore migration—the geographic movement of people—and diversity—the intersection of different types of people—in imperial Rome. In Bioanthropology, migration is often perceived in oversimplified terms. Researchers seek to determine if an individual or group migrated, and when in their lifetime this occurred. Furthermore, many scholars treat diversity in equally simplified terms. Traditionally, individuals are assigned to an ancestral population of "best...
Biogeography of Neandertals: The Southern Italian Middle Paleolithic (2015)
Most research on the Middle Paleolithic in southern Italy has focused on the region of Apulia. This research has been extensive and productive, and so it stands to reason that other less researched regions of southern Italy hold similar potential. This paper uses predictive niche modeling to identify Neandertal niche from site location and environmental variables in Apulia, and applies the modeled niche to under researched regions to predict locations of new Middle Paleolithic sites. The model...
Biographical approach for evaluating archaeological landscapes. A case-study from Estonia (2017)
Since the 1990s, landscape biography as a research method has diversified. The biographical approach expects a thorough study of a certain region in various fields of landscape research, which span far beyond just geography or archaeology. In contemporary approaches to landscape, the limits of the concept of landscape biography are being explored, but also tested. What exactly is a landscape biography? What does it constitute? Is landscape biography just a narration of a specific defined place...
Biographies of enclosure: an introduction (2015)
The papers in this session explore the extended biographies of prehistoric enclosures, bringing together researchers from several geographical areas and periods. Although archaeologists have been drawn by the often monumental qualities of prehistoric enclosures, the act of enclosure was frequently just one episode in long-lived and/or recurrent patterns of human activity at significant places in the landscape. The European focus on the concept of the ‘hillfort’, for example, has tended to...
The 'Bitter' Death of Children: Health, Welfare and the Funerary Treatment of Infants and Young Children in Christian Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the burials of infants and young children in the earliest Christian cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England (10th and 11th centuries CE). While in earlier pagan periods the burials of the very youngest members of communities are conspicuous by their paucity, the earliest Christian cemeteries have a much more representative...
Black Death (1964)
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.
A Bloody Mystery: Proteomic Residue Analysis of Funerary Ceramics from the Early Iron Age Heuneburg (2016)
This paper presents the results of a proteomic analysis (protein-based mass spectrometry) of the contents of six ceramic vessels excavated from a burial mound near the Heuneburg, an early Iron Age (640-400 BC) hillfort in southwest Germany. One hundred and sixty eight proteins from human, animal, and microbial sources were identified with high confidence and low false discovery rate, demonstrating the suitability of proteomics for discovery-based residue analysis in untreated prehistoric...