Europe (Geographic Keyword)
1,101-1,125 (1,158 Records)
Archaeological excavations are increasingly using digital surveying techniques for better documentation and visualization. Using high resolution imaging systems and UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems), photographic surveys were completed of the interior and exterior of the Arma Veirana Cave in Liguria, Italy. The aim is to contextualize the excavation within its environment for accurately geo-referencing the excavation trenches and to better understand how Neanderthals lived with respect to their...
Using pXRF to Unravel Raw Material Choices in Early Holocene Lithic Assemblages from the Island of Cyprus, Eastern Mediterranean (2017)
This poster presents the preliminary results of an extensive geo-chemical fingerprinting program using pXRF that was undertaken on a large and diverse lithic collection that included three different raw materials, namely obsidian, carnelian and picrolite. Specifically, the project investigated the use of these three raw materials in Early Holocene lithic assemblages - stone tools and ornaments - from the island of Cyprus, eastern Mediterranean. Obsidian, carnelian and picrolite have been defined...
Using spiked, fired clay samples for developing robust quantification algorithms for pXRF of pottery (2015)
Meanwhile absolute concentrations rather than relative, instrument and setting specific values are requested as scientific standard in publishing provenancing results. Recent publications suggest that there is no reliable vendor software for elemental quantification of pottery with pXRF. It is unclear whether this is due to a lack of precision in the given trace element values of reference standards, or uncorrected matrix effects, or both. We faced similar problems when using >30 reference...
Using Zooarchaeology to Explore the Origins of Medieval Urbanism: Evidence from Badia Pozzeveri near Lucca, Antwerp, and Ipswich (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origin of urbanism is one of the most significant transitions in human history. Archaeologists and historians have been interested in the origins and development of early medieval urbanism since the days of V. Gordon Childe and Henri Pirenne in the early twentieth century. While most of the early studies of medieval towns were based on historical...
Validating niche-construction theory through path analysis (2015)
Under the conventional view of evolution, species over time come to exhibit those characteristics that best enable them to survive and reproduce in their preexisting environments. Niche construction provides a second evolutionary route to establishing the adaptive fit, or match, between organism and environment, viewing such matches as dynamical products of a two-way process involving organisms both responding to problems posed by environments as well as setting themselves new problems by...
The Value of all that Glitters: Beads in the Tombs around Pylos, Greece (2016)
This paper aims to explore the value of faience and glass in Bronze Age Pylos with a view to reconstructing the wealth and status of the people with whom they were buried. These beads must have been imported to Pylos as finished objects since none of the raw materials are found locally and we have no evidence for their manufacture or production at Pylos. Indeed our analysis of a sample of the vitreous beads shows that some of these beads, or at least their substance, originated in Egypt and...
Variability and Change in the Middle Paleolithic of Western Europe and the Near East. In: the Mousterian Legacy (1983)
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.
Variability in Neolithic Cattle Populations: a Case Study from the Orkney Islands (2015)
The Orkney archipelago, at the northern end of Scotland, has a rich and well preserved record of Neolithic settlement. Radiocarbon dates from northern Scotland indicate the establishment of farming communities quite soon after those in southern England. However, the process by which agriculturalists reached these far northern territories is still not well understood. Faunal analysts (Watson 1931, Noddle 1983) have drawn attention to an apparent distinction in morphology between the cattle...
'Various Styles of Urn'---Cemeteries and Settlement in Southern England Circa 1400-1000 BC. In: the Archaeology of Death (1981)
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 variscite of Gavà, Spain: characterization and system of exploitation and diffusion in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula (2017)
This paper presents a synthesis regarding the exploitation of the variscite mineral in the prehistoric mines of Gava, Spain, as well as the manufacturing of ornaments and their dissemination during the Neolithic period. Special emphasis will be given to the results of the latest research in both the mineralogical characterization and archaeological interpretations derived.
Vestigial Religion: The Legacy of Byzantine Christianity in Ottoman and Venetian Greece (2017)
This paper offers a glimpse into the roles played by religion during the decline of one empire and the emergence of another, from the perspective of a historical case study: the Mani Peninsula. Mani is a peripheral region in the Peloponnese, Greece, that converted to Orthodox Christianity under the Byzantine Empire, and its occupants maintained this religious identification throughout the subsequent periods of Ottoman and Venetian rule. This unbroken religious continuity, which can be traced in...
View of the site (2015)
View of the excavation from the entrance. We use two total stations, one for each half of the cave.
Viking Age Grave Reentry within the Context of Mortuary Drama (2017)
The present study traces the history of grave manipulation and reentry in Scandinavia from the Stone Age through medieval times, but with a special emphasis on the context and implications of funerary activity during the Viking Age and the early medieval period. During this time span, the people of Scandinavia became a major force that reshaped the economic, political, and social structure of Europe. I examine the phenomenon of grave reentry and alteration within the framework of Neil Price’s...
Viking Age tar production and the exploitation of the Outlands (2017)
In Sweden, recent excavations have revealed how the production of tar evolved from a small scale, household operation situated within the settlements of the Roman Iron Age, to a large-scale activity in the forests during the Vendel and Viking periods. The resulting quantities of tar far exceeded ordinary household requirements. This change in production coincides with the introduction of the sail, characteristic for the Viking Age, with extensive need for large amounts of tar. The change in...
The Viking Phenomenon (2017)
In December 2015, the Swedish Research Council made an unprecedented investment in archaeology with a ten-year, multi-million dollar grant to establish a center of excellence in Viking Studies at Uppsala University. Much of the recent research into the Vikings and their time (c. 750-1050 CE) has focused on the complex processes of state formation and Christian conversion that eventually gave rise to the modern Scandinavian nations. Far less attention has been devoted to the very beginnings of...
Viking skeletal remains in northern Europe: a survey (2015)
This paper presents the preliminary findings of a systematic survey of Viking skeletal remains in northern Europe. The survey covers Viking Age skeletons from the homeland countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as well as putative Viking skeletons from several countries subject to Scandinavian colonization, including England, Scotland, Ireland, and Iceland. Among the attributes we are recording are the degree of skeletal completeness, chronological age of the specimens, and the evidence that...
Vikings on the Move: Combined Methods to Reassess Mobility and Migration in Early Medieval Europe (WGF - Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship) (2021)
This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Over the past decade, new bioarchaeological methods such as isotope analysis and ancient DNA have become standard tools for studying migration and mobility. Yet with an increasing amount of data now available, it is apparent that these methods come with significant limitations: each, on its own, rarely able to confidently characterise migration. It is, therefore, crucial to develop new ways...
Violence, Politics and Power: Iron Age and Pictish Reinventions of a Prehistoric Mortuary Landscape at the Sculptor’s Cave, NE Scotland (2017)
The Sculptor’s Cave in NE Scotland saw a long history of use, from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Medieval (Pictish) period. Late Bronze Age activity is characterised, as in other caves along this stretch of coast, by complex communal funerary practices involving the exposure and processing of human bodies. Veneration continued for many centuries, yet by the Roman Iron Age (c. 3rd century AD) perceptions of the cave had markedly changed. During this period, several adults were decapitated...
A virtual documentation of excavation through 3D modeling; is it worth the effort? (2016)
Illustration of various means has always helped in visualising complex information, and archaeologists have used means such as photographs, drawings and even three-dimensional illustration to present complex archaeological data. Archaeologists began using three-dimensional models of various archaeological monuments only in 1990s. However, in recent years, and with high-end computer applications, archaeologists are able to document different stages of excavations using 3D illustration, which has...
Virtualization as a Method for Heritage Preservation: A Case Study from Seyitömer Höyük, Turkey (2017)
In Turkey, rapid industrialization is one of the most prescient concerns facing the country’s natural and cultural heritage. Increasingly, archaeologists are expanding their traditional toolkit to incorporate methods of virtualization, to create 3D models of sites, structures, and artifacts. This paper offers a case study of digital heritage preservation at Seyitömer Höyük, an Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000-2000 BCE) urban center that is located within an active coal mine, and is under direct threat...
The "Visible" Dead: Mortuary Patterns and Ceremonial Activities in the Dawn of the Bronze Age in Southern Greece (2017)
Following anthropological theory regarding the dynamic relationship between the living and the dead, this paper will explore the role of mortuary and ceremonial places as important venues for human activities related to broader social phenomena and cultural changes. By the mid. 3d mil. BCE southern Greece had witnessed the emergence of social stratification evident both in the settlement and mortuary archaeological record. Little is known, however, regarding the preceding period and the...
Visualizing the Invisible: How Can We Model Roman Religious Processions? (2017)
Religious processions colored the ancient world, filling a city’s streets with a multi-sensorial display of sounds and images. Although the presence of processional activity is acknowledged as a regular occurrence in the Roman world, our understanding of their movement patterns and their effect on the cityscape remains understudied. The record of processions was held primarily in the memories of those who experienced or took part in the festival, only manifesting within the archaeological record...
The Vital Force of Underground Places and Ritual Production in Caves and Rockshelters (2018)
Caves are regularly portrayed as a blank stage upon which the social – including ritual activity – is enacted. This paper, however, takes the opposite approach: in discussing a number of selected Antique and Medieval ritual cave sites in Slovenia that are associated with Roman, Christian and Slavic religious systems, it demonstrates the vibrant, hybrid, participant and continuously-changing nature of underground places in which multiple symmetric and fluid connections exist between people,...
Volcanic winter and population replacements? Forager adaptations in Liguria during OIS 3 across the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition (2016)
There has been a lot of focus on the disruptive effects of dramatic climatic shifts on Paloelithic population dynamics, but the topic of cultural continuity across such events has been less intensely investigated. This paper presents data from some of our recent research projects in Liguria, especially from the site of Riparo Bombrini, to investigate the nature of the apparent resilience of the proto-Aurignacian in the face of events like the Phlegrean Fields eruption and the reasons why the...
Walking before running. Late Palaeolithic regional dynamics in the Spanish Mediterranean region previous to the "last big transition" (17 - 10 ky cal BP) (2017)
The lapse of time between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the Holocene 8.2 cold event, can be considered as a Long Transition, in which global diachronic changes and regional processes are combined. Between 17 - 10 ky cal BP important ecological changes (increased temperatures, forestry and presence of some species of herbivores, variations in sea-level and coastline , etc), techno-economic transformations (abandonment of osseous weapons, active and passive grinding stones related...