Europe (Geographic Keyword)
1,151-1,158 (1,158 Records)
Egyptologist and Folklorist Margaret Murray was a major figure in the creation of professional archaeology in the United Kingdom, President of the Folklore Society, and advocate for women’s rights in higher education. However, another major part of her legacy was the mainstream acceptance of the concept of the "witch-cult," a hidden ancient religion dating back to the Pleistocene but continuing until at least the seventeenth century when it was persecuted by witch-hunters. Historians have...
Wizards, Dragons and Giants: Creating Motte Castles in an English Landscape (2017)
Medieval motte castles are large flat-topped earth and stone mounds, often coupled with an enclosure or bailey, and represent a characteristic component of the British landscape. Mottes often dominate their immediate surroundings, with many remaining visually impressive monuments to this day. Although their creation often involved substantial landscape change, it is becoming increasingly clear that continuity could also be maintained. Many mottes were placed at points in the landscape with...
Women in small-scale societies: how demographic archaeology can contribute to gender archaeology (2017)
Demography has re-emerged as a growing research area within archaeology. Recent studies have refined archaeological demographic methods and developed models which cite demographic change as a key variable in explaining social and artefactual change. However, one aspect which has not been explicitly acknowledged is how archaeological demography is intrinsically concerned with women. In this paper I explain the importance of women to the demographic regimes of small-scale societies and discuss...
Words for domestic animals used as metaphors in coastal naming (2017)
Place-names are important sources to understand and reimagine past conceptions of the landscape. Toponyms map animal lives on to the landscape. In some cases, however, words for animals – wild as well as domestic – are used as metaphors. In some names denoting sunken rocks along the Norwegian coast, e.g. Sugga (’sow’), Oksa (‘bull’), Hesten (’horse’), Porthunden (‘watchdog’), the words either refer to the shape or sound of the locations, or to some special circumstances, e.g. dangerous rocks in...
Working on the Margins of the Modern World and Within Archaeology: The Historical Archaeology of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentith-Century Ireland (2017)
In Ireland, historical, post-medieval, or modern world archaeology as a discipline is located on the margins. The time period and material comprising our research is argued by many to be relevant only to the pursuits of historians and folk studies. In this paper I discuss the importance and relevance of a discipline on the margins and the study of Ireland’s impoverished class during the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This marks one of the most dynamic periods in Ireland’s...
World prehistories and the development of a global archaeological narrative (2017)
The origins of prehistoric archaeology as a discipline lie in the New Learning of the 16th and 17th centuries and derive from a number of sources: antiquarian researches in northwest Europe; European exploration and the encounter with non-European peoples; and speculative accounts of human origins and development. It was only in the 19th century that these strands first began to be woven together to create a global narrative of human prehistory. Such a narrative raises a number of problematic...
Worn Down: Dental Attrition and Dietary Differences at an Early Medieval Settlement in Central Europe (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval diets may have differed in preparation rather than composition, with certain classes, genders, or age groups eating more abrasive and/or more cariogenic preparations of the same foods (Beranová 2007; Esclassan et al. 2015). This study is a bioarchaeological examination of dental attrition at the 9-11th century site complex of Libice nad Cidlinou in...
Your Horse Is a Donkey! Identifying Domesticated Equids Using ZooMS (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) play essential roles in human culture and economy. Unlike most other domesticates, horses and donkeys can produce hybrids. Mules, offspring of female horses and male donkeys, have been found in archaeological contexts across the Old World. Written sources describe the choice of horse, donkey, or mule as...