Asia (Continent) (Geographic Keyword)
1,626-1,650 (1,722 Records)
One of the largest puzzles for archaeologists at Angkor is untangling the extremely complex chronological development of the site. The region was host to hundreds of years of urban occupation arising out of a long tradition of habitation through the Bronze and Iron Age. Decades of archaeological investigations have established relational frameworks through which it is now possible to do more precise dating. Recent LiDAR investigations and the associated mapping and ground truthing have...
Update on the Situation in Palmyra (2015)
Since its capture by ISIL (IS or ISIS) militants in May 2015, the region around the ancient city of Palmyra (modern Tadmor) has been in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, which has escalated dramatically in recent weeks. This report will provide a summary of the current situation in Palmyra and the effects of the conflict on its people and cultural heritage. Atrocities include attacks on civilians and mass abductions. Intentional damage to the cultural materials of the local populations is...
Updated Perspectives on Sennacherib’s Siege at Tel Lachish (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...
Upper Paleolithic Cultural Landscapes of the Selenge Tributaries, Northern Mongolia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The distribution of Upper Paleolithic sites in northern Mongolia indicate that maintaining social networks, subsistence and shelter were all significant factors in the cultural landscapes of these ancient hunter-gatherers. In 2018, 12 new Upper Paleolithic sites were documented in the Naryn Tolberiin Gol (Narrow Tolbor River, n=21) valley of the greater...
The Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of Manot Cave: the dental perspective (2017)
The study on the partial calvarium discovered at Manot Cave, Western Galilee, Israel (dated to 54.7 ± 5.5 kyr BP, Hershkovitz et al. 2015), revealed close morphological affinity with recent African skulls as well as with early Upper Paleolithic European skulls, but less so with earlier anatomically modern humans from the Levant (e.g., Skhul). The ongoing fieldwork at the Manot Cave has resulted in the discovery of several new hominin teeth. These include a lower incisor (I1), a right lower...
Urban Ideologies and Demographic Revolutions in Ancient Mesopotamia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dramatic demographic growth is a hallmark of the urban process, yet reasons for population growth in emerging urban systems are not well understood. This paper draws on archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to ideology of the house and cultural values to explore why populations increased so dramatically in third millennium Mesopotamia. Additional...
Urban Spatial Relationships during the Early Islamic Period: Reassessing Investigations into the Market and Mosque at Sīrāf, Iran (2018)
There has been much debate on what defines an Islamic city (madīna) and what made cities become "Islamic" after the Islamic conquest. These studies have often marginalized the Islamic period, associating street encroachment and overall shifts away from the "classical" model as signs of decline. Scholars have relied on western notions of what defines a city and have used strict urban typological models, which do not conform to the region or period. In addition, these studies have neglected to...
Urbanism in Western Medieval Central Asia: Dynastic Jewels and Dynamic Networks (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ninth to thirteenth centuries in the western Eurasian steppe and Central Asia were a period of intensive urban growth. Cities such as Bukhara and Marv boasted large populations in the hundreds of thousands, were home to large communities of scientific and religious scholars, and were transformed by large-scale construction, commonly...
Urbanization and Ceramic Consumption at the Late Neolithic Settlement of Liangchengzhen (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Longshan period settlement of Liangchengzhen in southeastern Shandong have uncovered large quantities and diverse forms of ceramic vessels from contexts representing each phase of occupation. This paper explores consumption patterns for ceramic vessels in one neighborhood during eight phases of occupation estimated to represent...
Use and Reuse of Burial Space during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Mongolia: A Case Study from Zaraa Uul (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the late second millennium BC, communities in the Gobi-steppe of Mongolia began to build unique burial structures made of stone. The Late Bronze Age builders of these mortuary features employed new forms of surface demarcation and for the first time in this region, individuals were interred in a prone position. At the turn of the...
The Use of Bayesian Allocation for the Optimization of Archaeological Survey Effort (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, many archaeological surveys have the goal of documenting, as completely as possible, the locations and character of sites, many of which are rare, unobtrusive, or both. Increasingly over the last three decades, archaeologists have used predictive models in a GIS to help them target spaces that are most likely to contain sites of interest, or sites under...
The use of Chenopodium plants in China (2017)
This article reviews the use of Chenopodium plants in Chinese archaeobotanical record. We will draw attention to two regions particularly, Northeast and Southwest China. We will consider the use of Chenopodium food in the context of origins of agriculture in China.
Use-Wear Analysis on Cooking Vessels of the Longshan Culture: Case Studies on the Tonglin Site (2017)
Some preliminary research on ceramic vessels of the Longshan culture had indicated li vessels as the most important type of cooking vessels. Vessel's categories might not exclusively indicate a vessel type. As was observed for the Tonglin site, an important site of Longshan culture at Linzi, li, guan, and pen vessels are the most abundant categories type. However, li vessels of Tonglin site have small rim diameter sizes on average, and it is necessary to collaborating use-wear analysis for...
Use-wear and Standardization Analysis of Pottery from Dibaping, A Banshan Period Cemetery in Southern Gansu Province, China (2017)
Excavated in 1978, the cemetery at the site of Dibaping in southern Gansu Province, China revealed hundreds of Banshan period (2600-2300BC) ceramic vessels. The elaborately painted geometric motifs on many of the vessels led to them quickly being touted as an example of the pinnacle of artistic achievement in Neolithic northwestern China. Aside from typology, however, no other analyses have been done on these objects. The result is that little is known about how these vessels were created, the...
Using Aerial Remote Sensing to Assess Error and Uncertainty in Archaeological Site Mapping (2017)
Archaeologists often find themselves excavating sites where previous investigations have been performed, and documentation relating to earlier work may be of varying quality. This discussion focuses on the use of a topographic mapping drone to assess error and uncertainty in archaeological site survey performed at Tel Lachish, Israel since the 1930’s. Systematic assessments of historical map datasets were performed within a Geographic Information System (GIS) allowing for an enhanced...
Using Archaeological and Genomic Data to Investigate the Evolutionary History of Celiac Disease (2017)
The Neolithic Transition brought with it a number of changes in the relationships that people had with animals, plants and pathogens. Increasing proximity to domesticated and commensal animals, and larger, denser communities shifted the disease ecologies of these communities and resulted in an increasing number of disease vectors. I use ancient and modern DNA to look at the effects that these new dietary and epidemiological trends had on people in the past and the genomic legacies of the...
Using Computerized X-ray Tomography to track rates of Agricultural Domestication using Seed coat Thickness (2017)
Pulses were an important crop in human prehistory. Tracking traits of domestication in pulses has been limited in the past due to poor preservation of diagnostic features of domestication. Traditionally, morphometric techniques have focused on changes in seed size. The authors measured horsegram (Macrotyloma uniflorum) from South Asia, dating from the Neolithic (2000BC) to the Early Historic Period (400-700AD), which showed an increase through time with domestication. This is in juxtaposition to...
Using Ethnoarchaeology to Identify Spatial Patterns of Behavior in Domestic Dogs (2018)
Domestic dogs (Canis familaris) are a common presence in nomadic cultures, but archaeology still struggles to identify them in the absence of their faunal remains. What we lack is a means to identify behaviors that manifest themselves in the archaeological record that are in clear association with domestic dogs. One avenue is carnivore modified bone. What experimental studies indicate is that we can isolate patterns of feeding associated with particular carnivores, but what has not been...
Using geochemistry, phytoliths and ethnographic analogy to interpret Neolithic settlements in southwest Asia (2017)
Our understanding of Neolithic sites in southwest Asia is often impeded by the lack of preservation of biological evidence. As a result, they often consist of a series of structures, the construction and function of which, remains elusive. In order to address this problem we conducted a study which used phytoliths and geochemistry from an ethnographic site in Jordan, Al Ma’tan, to determine if certain building construction techniques and anthropogenic activities leave specific phytolith and...
Uzbekistan Ceramics: Compositional and Descriptive Data (2014)
This dataset contains compositional (elemental abundance) and descriptive data for a total of 9 ceramic and clay specimens from Uzbekistan analyzed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). These data were generated by neutron activation analysis (NAA) at LBNL between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Data from the LBNL were transferred to the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri, where they were digitized for distribution through tDAR. Elemental abundance data for one...
Évaluation du degre de cuisson de céramiques de l’âge du Bronze en Arabie par camparaison avec des temoins de cuissons expérimentales (conference summary) (1988)
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 EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these 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 using the...
Variability and Change in the Near Eastern Mousterian of Levallois Faces (1968)
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.
Variation in Large Sites from the Longshan Period of Northern China (2017)
Recent research does not support the common view that the numerous large sites from the Longshan period of northern China ca. 2500-1900 BC represent a homogeneous type of settlement with respect to developmental process, scale, and organization. Most publications regard these large settlements as cities and expect they share specific features indicative of organizational homogeneity. The focus has been on large Longshan and later, early Bronze Age settlements in Henan province. We discuss...
Vereinsbericht der Europäischen Vereinigung zur Förderung der Experimentellen Archäologie (exar) für das Jahr 2005 (2006)
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 EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these 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 using the...
A Vertical Loess Cave Dwelling at Yangguanzhai? (2017)
Of all features excavated at the late Neolithic site of Yangguanzhai since 2005—including houses, hearths, postholes, kilns, child and adult burials, and ditches—pits features, known by the generic term "huikeng" or "ash pit" in Chinese archaeology, account for about 80%. Detailed studies of such features are important not only because of their sheer number, but also because their contents are often used as criteria for site dating and chronology. As our excavation of one such feature (H85)...