Europe (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (1,158 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research into megalithic temporality, mobility, and symbolic identity suggests that the rise of long-distance maritime journeys began in Europe as early as the megalithic era. Megaliths emerged in northwest France (~4700–4200 cal BC) and then spread over the seaways along...
Bone calcination of different age groups in cremations from Bronze Age Hungary (2017)
Bronze Age Hungary saw the advancement of trade which may have been a cause of the movement from egalitarian societies to more complex societies with increasing social inequality. Social inequality between regions in Hungary may be reflected in variation among funeral customs. Excavations from Békés 103, a Bronze Age cemetery in south-eastern Hungary, have uncovered 68 burials, most of which are cremations. This study focuses on color analysis (identified by Munsell Soil Color Charts) of the...
Bone Remodeling Behavior Across the Surfaces of the Skeleton as Biographical Windows (2017)
The morphology of the whole skeleton is crafted over the life course by bone remodeling across its skeletal surfaces: the endosteal surface of its trabeculae, and on the periosteal, endocortical, and intracortical surfaces of its cortex. The behavior of each of these surfaces differs between individuals and populations resulting in some understood differences in bone morphology across human groups. But the skeletal surfaces are also differentially influenced during growth, aging, reproduction,...
The borders of space and time: Biological continuity at Campovalano (2016)
Territorial and cultural boundaries remain some of the most elusive and compelling areas of anthropological study. We examine biological continuity at Campovalano (Teramo, Abruzzo, Italy) to highlight ways that biology can be used to elucidate interpretations of frontiers and borderlands. We test the hypothesis that geographic location strongly influenced biological continuity in Italian history. Eighteen cranial (n=278) and five maxillary dental (n=377) metric traits, and dental morphological...
Boundedness in Art and Society. In: Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (1982)
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.
Branding the Mediterranean: Naturally-sourced products and their containers in Greece and Rome (2017)
The ancient trade in olive oil and wine is well understood thanks in no small part to typologies established for their transport containers. A synthetic survey of the containers used to transport other naturally-sourced products, such as pharmaceuticals, perfumes, and pigments, is lacking. Such products were subject to counterfeiting and adulteration in antiquity, thus packaging and labelling were often valuable tools for ancient consumers to help them recognize products. For example, the...
Bread, Apples, and Cereal Grains: Analyzing a Collection of Carbonized Food from Robenhausen, Switzerland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of research on a collection of food from Robenhausen, a lake-dwelling site southeast of Zurich. These specimens are part of a larger collection that was recovered in the late 19th century and is housed at the Milwaukee Public Museum. The material includes thirteen bread fragments, seventy-five apple pieces, and thousands of...
Breastfeeding, weaning and childhood diet in cave and megalithic populations of Late Neolithic north-central Spain (2017)
Stable carbon and nitrogen data of adult/adolescent human bone collagen from north-central Spanish Late Neolithic (ca. 3500-2900 cal. BC) provide evidence for the existence of significant isotopic differences among and between communities living in close proximity and burying their dead in caves and megalithic graves. This, together with previously identified distinct funerary selection patterns, suggests an unsuspected complex social or cultural differentiation. The purpose of this paper is to...
Bridging the Gap: Understanding the empty Medieval landscape of post-Roman Aquitaine (2015)
The end of the Roman Empire is marked archaeologically by an impressive shift in material culture. Changes in land organization and the use of more ephemeral building materials created a largely invisible and difficult to detect post-Roman landscape. Archaeologists initially assumed such landscapes were abandoned as a result of the political and economic chaos resulting from Rome’s fall. Work in northwest Europe in the past two decades, however has shown that new techniques can help locate these...
A Brief Review of the Work of Paul Goldberg in SW France (2015)
There are few researchers who have achieved the breadth of experience of Paul Goldberg, whose work spans almost every continent on the planet, and from the early Pleistocene to the Holocene. There are some regions, however, that have greatly benefited from his expertise, including SW France. In this paper we will review some of his work here, beginning with his dissertation work at the site of Pech de l’Azé II, and over the past 14 years at the sites of Pech de l’Azé I and IV, Roc de Marsal,...
British Iron Age settlement chronologies: a view from Danebury hillfort (2015)
Traditional approaches to the Iron Age have constructed complex chronologies based on artifact typologies, mainly pottery and metal, with radiocarbon long being neglected. Such views are now untenable, with recent Iron Age research showing that typological dating produces sequences that are regularly too late. Furthermore, regional syntheses anchored by chrono-typologies fail to provide a robust analytical methodology for better understanding the nuances of the settlement landscape and social...
British Prehistory: An Integrated View (1979)
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.
British Transferware in Portugal (1780-1900). (In)equality, identity and style. (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Studies of Material Culture (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. British transfer ware begins to be identified in the Portuguese archaeological record around 1780s. At this time it is an elite’s product and only identified in wealthy contexts. Transfer ware only started to be made in Portugal around 1850. By then lower income households were able to consume this fashionable...
Bronze Age Economy and Rituals at Krasnosamarskoe in the Russian Steppes (2017)
The final report of the Samara Valley Project (SVP), a U.S.-Russian archaeological investigation conducted between 1995 and 2002 in the Samara Oblast in central Russia, was published in June 2016. The SVP explored the changing organization and subsistence resources of pastoral steppe economies from the Eneolithic (4500BC) through the Late Bronze Age (1900-1200BC) across the steppe and river valley landscape in the middle Volga region. Particular attention focuses on the role of agriculture...
Broxmouth biographies: Roundhouses as mnemonic devices in Iron Age Scotland (2015)
Broxmouth hillfort in SE Scotland saw continued occupation for almost 800 years (c. cal. 600 BC - AD 200), during which around 30 generations of inhabitants shaped the settlement and its surroundings. Activity at Broxmouth can be broadly split into six (both enclosed and unenclosed) phases, the last of which (c. cal. 200 BC - AD 200) is characterised by re-enclosure, and well-preserved roundhouses of timber and stone. The form, fabric and development of the roundhouses over time suggest that...
Building and Debating National Identity: Three Case Studies of the Ownership of Ancient Artifacts (2015)
Artifacts are crucial to the understanding of past societies. Archaeologists are able to learn about the values and cultural practices through material remains left behind by ancient civilizations. Museums display artifacts not only to educate the general public, but to make modern nationalistic statements connecting the country in possession of material to the ancient civilization which created it. The critical point with most of these exhibitions is that many of the artifacts are not excavated...
Building Charlieu: Chronology and Asset Flow over Time at Saint Fortunatus Monastery, 872-1120 C.E. (2016)
The monastery of Saint Fortunatus in Charlieu, France, was built and rebuilt several times from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. In the twentieth century, the monastery was excavated by American archaeologist and art historian Elizabeth Sunderland, who relied heavily on its relationship to mega-monastery Cluny to reconstruct the smaller abbey’s chronology. However, re-examining Charlieu’s timing and phasing with attention to material and labor costs over time exposes an alternative chronology...
Building Community: The Heuneburg Hillfort as Monument and Metaphor (2015)
Walls are assumed to serve as systems of containment and protection in response to social divisiveness but they may also serve to reduce or mask conflict within a society. Their physical form may be entirely expedient, largely symbolic, or some combination of the two. Early Iron Age settlements in west-central Europe were often situated on promontories with wall and ditch systems encircling portions of the occupied terrain but because of the daunting task of excavating such hillfort sites, which...
"A burden of one’s own choice is not felt": observing ceramic production technology, exchange and consumption in the Late Mycenaean Saronic Gulf. (2015)
It is widely recognized that Mycenaean states varied in their structure and organisation, were linked to different types of crafting industries, a range of trade networks and a host of consumer preferences. The Saronic Gulf is a paradoxical space that physically separates Mycenaean geopolitical states/regions, while its waters facilitate the interregional movement of people, goods and ideas. The application of thin section petrography and INAA to observe the movement of pottery, the most...
Burial and social organization in Italian Iron Age necropoleis: Testing a biodistance approach (2015)
Using correlations between biodistance and tomb distance, this poster examines how mortuary practices of two central Italian Iron Age (1000 – 27 BC) ranked societies partially encoded responses to increasing sociopolitical instability. This time period witnessed reorganization of clan-based, transhumant, agropastoral societies immediately prior to long periods of conflict and Roman encroachment. Although they used similar mortuary arrangements, local groups had different attitudes towards these...
Burning questions about preservation: an investigation of cremated bone crystallinity in a Bronze Age cemetery (2017)
The elemental and isotopic analysis of human skeletal remains has greatly added to our understanding of diet, mobility, and social variability in prehistoric societies. For studies of this nature, it is critical to evaluate the preservation of the skeletal material prior to analysis to make sure that taphonomic processes have not affected the original chemical signatures. Calcined bone (usually produced from cremation burial practices) is generally avoided for chemical analysis due to heat...
The Business of 'Becoming': Community Formation and Greek Colonization in the Northwestern Mediterranean (2017)
In the early 1st millennium BCE, Greek communities sprang up around the Mediterranean, and the West was no exception. As the story goes, Ionian Greeks arrived in southern France and a legendary marriage to the local chieftan’s daughter ensured their acceptance as settlers. From their base at Massalia, they expanded their trading foothold to Emporion on the Catalonian coast, cementing a relationship that was long-attested by the presence of Greek goods on western shores. Whereas rapid...
By the seaside: The role of marine resources in northern Spain from the late Palaeolithic to the Neolithic (2015)
Cantabrian Spain is a privileged area for a diachronic study of the relationship between human societies and the marine resources. The region can boast one of the highest densities of Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites in Europe, and a long and dense tradition of archaeological research, especially in the coastal areas. Moreover, its continental shelf is very narrow, so the preserved sites are closer to the late Pleistocene shoreline than in other parts of the Continent. This paper...
Byzantine Archaeologies (2016)
Byzantine Archaeologies Michael J. Decker The past twenty years have witnessed important research in the core areas of Byzantium, especially in Asia Minor, as well as in territories governed by Constantinople prior to the Arab conquests of the seventh century. Byzantine archaeology has long remained conservative and often the preserve of those interested in art history or nationalist agendas. Nonetheless, many aspects of Byzantine archaeology remain unexplored or neglected, in part because of a...
Calculating moment of inertia of spindle whorls as a method for understanding Iron Age textile production (2016)
Excavations of Iron Age hillfort's in Northwestern Portugal, known as castros, have yielded many spindle whorls, but no extant fabrics due to the nature of preservation in the region. This leaves the question "what types of textile were produced?" In an attempt to answer this question, I calculate the moment of inertia (MI) for spindle whorls collected from three different sites in the Ave River Valley. MI represents the angular momentum of a whorl, allowing for the whorls various...