West Asia (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (292 Records)
Over the past century, prehistorians studying Acheulian assemblages have focused their energies largely on the handaxe arguing that its iconic symmetrical, tear drop shape can be a window onto the origins and evolution of modern cognition, sociality, language, teaching, skill acquisition, and even symbolic behavior. This focus on the handaxe, and by extension big game hunting, has largely been at the expense of Acheulian small tool and microlithic assemblages and their associated tasks. These...
Grain, storage, and state making in Mesopotamia (3200–2000 BC) (2017)
The states that emerged in Mesopotamia during the fourth and third millennia BC were fundamentally agrarian states. They were built on the production, stockpiling, and redistribution of grain, and they invested an enormous amount of energy in managing and monitoring the grain supply. In this paper, I draw particular attention to grain storage and its pivotal role in the rhetoric and the logistics of state making in Mesopotamia. Grain storage facilities were positioned, both physically and...
Grazing Herds on a modern Jordanian Landscape: δ13C and δ15N analysis of plants and caprine hair keratin along an altitudinal cline (2015)
The topography of Jordan is uniquely characterized by dramatic shifts in altitude from -300 b.s.l. to +1300 a.s.l. over extremely short distances, which results in sharp differences in precipitation levels and the composition of vegetation communities along altitudinal gradients. Graze species favored by sheep and goats collected along an altitudinal gradient indicate predictable shifts in floral δ13C values, influenced by altitudinal differences in water availability, while nitrogen isotope...
Grounded: A Late Bronze Age fortress on the Şerur Valley floor, Naxçivan (2016)
The Middle to Late Bronze Age transition in the South Caucasus is generally characterized by a shift from small settlements and elaborate kurgan burials to hilltop fortresses and smaller burials grouped in cemeteries. It has been argued that the hilltop fortresses with their broad view over the landscape served as anchors to the mobile populations that surrounded them, and ultimately to the development of increased social hierarchies at these fortresses. This pattern has been identified...
A Growing Investment in "Place": Exploring Late Pleistocene Perceptions of "Nature" in the Southern Levant (2017)
The concept of ‘place’ is given structure and meaning by human experience and can be viewed in several forms, including art, monuments and architecture. However, the by-products and material remains associated with the impacts of daily hunter-gatherer place-making, including food and material production as well as processing waste, are also important expressions of human experience and the construction of ‘place’. These material remains provide critical archaeological insight into how people in...
Halaf Seasonality and Mobility: An Archaeobotanical View from Fistikli Höyük, Turkey (2017)
Settlement patterns and mobility during the Halaf period (ca. 6000-5400 B.C.) are known primarily from Late Halaf sites. On the basis of the Late Halaf pattern, Halaf economies have been characterized as having segmentary organization with some degree of pastoral specialization reflecting a broad pattern of long-term mobility. However, the paucity of floral and faunal studies, particularly for the Early Halaf, limits the visibility of economic variability over the course of the Halaf. In this...
Handaxe Function at Shishan Marsh-1: Preliminary Results of an Experimental Use-Wear Analysis (2017)
Although handaxes are one of the longest lasting and most iconic stone tools in the Paleolithic, little experimental work has been done to inform archaeologists about handaxe function. The research presented here explores handaxe function using low powered microscopy and an image-based GIS approach. 32 handaxes were created with chert collected from outcrops in the region surrounding Shishan Marsh-1. For the purpose of this study, the researchers focused on experiments involving subsistence...
Harnessing Mountain Power in Ancient Anatolia (2015)
For the inhabitants of Bronze and Iron Age Anatolia, nearly every feature in the landscape was a god: rivers and springs, trees and rocks, lakes and mountains—mountains above all. Kings in Hattusas swore oaths by them. Luwian rulers claimed mountains as their own with conspicuous rock-cut reliefs and inscriptions. According to ancient sources, a mountain was among the earliest Lydian kings; that very mountain once acted as judge in a musical duel between Apollo and Pan! But how did people in...
Heritage preservation efforts in northwest Syria (2016)
As the security situation in northern Syria deteriorated following the beginning of the Syrian Revolution/civil war, members of civil society, heritage activists, and museum workers have placed themselves at risk to safeguard the country’s cultural heritage. This paper discusses two heritage protection projects in the Idlib region in northwest Syria, a region that has fallen out of the control of the Assad regime to opposition groups. The projects are self-initiative efforts by local activists...
High-resolution satellite imagery for comprehensive monitoring of cultural heritage in conflict: Syria and Iraq methodology (2015)
The growing availability of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery provides unprecedented capabilities for monitoring events in conflict zones- areas that are often inaccessible through traditional methods. This capability is particularly needed when conflict creates long-term inaccessibility and multiple actors overlap in space and time, leading to conflicting accounts, and incomplete or inaccurate information. Proactive monitoring of cultural heritage sites, coupled with time-series...
Hittite and Achaemenid imperialisms in west central Turkey (2016)
The Yalburt Yaylası Project studies a series of depressions bounded by scarps forming a corridor frequented by merchants and armies traveling between the Anatolian plateau and western Aegean valleys of Turkey. With a settlement structure dominated by fortresses controlling access along this corridor, the landscape could be interpreted as an imperial possession, but then archaeology would become an apology for imperial power. To contrast, we focus on how imperialism is built from the ground up...
Hominin cognition across the Acheulean to Middle Palaeolithic transition (2015)
In 2013 I suggested that changes in behaviour at a transitional Acheulean to Middle Palaeolithic site in India were characterized by increases in generativity, hierarchical organization and recursion, and that the transition was perhaps underpinned by improved working memory. Here I present the results of a knapping experiment that compares the recursive and hierarchical complexity of Acheulean and Middle Palaeolithic knapping sequences in order to test this claim. I then look at how...
How Do Households Work? Examining plant use during the Late Chalcolithic at Çadır Höyük, Turkey (2016)
This paper presents archaeobotanical data from the Late Chalcolithic (LC) archaeobotanical assemblage at Çadır Höyük, a mounded site on the north central Anatolian plateau with almost continuous occupation from the Middle Chalcolithic through the Byzantine period. Architectural and metallurgical evidence indicate that during the LC, Çadır was developing as a regional rural center, which makes it an ideal site to study the role that households occupied during in emerging systems of social...
Humanizing wave of advance dispersal models (2015)
Since Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza (1971) introduced Fisher’s (1937) wave of advance equation to archaeology, it has been the most commonly used method to model the complex dynamics behind human dispersals in a variety of regional and global case studies. The standard form of the model involves an initial population growing and spreading randomly outwards from an origin. Studies use the model to calculate expected arrival dates and expansion velocities based on population growth rate,...
The Hyena ecology during the Late Pleistocene of the Levant: Manot Cave (Israel), a case study (2017)
Manot Cave is situated in the western Galilee hills of Israel. Excavations have been conducted since 2010 in 12 different areas, yielding a rich archaeological record attributed mainly to the Early Upper Paleolithic period (46-33ka). Area D is located in the main hall of the cave on top of the western talus less than 15 meters from the assumed cave entrance. The upper sedimentological layer is about 80 cm thick and contains flint items, bones, coprolites and stones. The Area D ungulate-dominated...
The ice-age landscape around Manot Cave (Israel) during the Upper and Middle Palaeolithic: new insights from the anthracological record and carbon isotopes analyses (2017)
Since 2012, a series of investigations in Manot Cave recovered charcoal samples from archaeological layers in order to study the landscape around the site between the Upper and the Middle Palaeolithic (UP/MP). Samples of soils and loose charcoal were collected in different areas of the cave, while particular attention was paid to the sampling of the hearths found in Area E and I. Anatomical features of the charcoals were analyzed using a metallographic microscope in order to indentify tree...
Identity and Specialization in the Urartian Settlement at Ayanis (2015)
From its beginning in the 9th century BC the infrastructure of kingdom of Urartu was built around fortresses. In the early 7th century, the fortress network was enhanced by the construction of new group of massive fortified administrative centers, associated with extramural settlements. Of the latter, Ayanis is the most extensively investigated. Survey and excavations conducted from 1997 to 2009 investigated the relationship between the inhabitants of this settlement and the contoling...
The Impacts of Urbanization on Archaeological Site Preservation in Afghanistan (2017)
Urbanization is a significant force affecting the preservation of archaeological sites across the globe. Even in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, urbanization dramatically outpaces looting and other forms of site destruction that have been highly visible in the media. We present data on how urbanization has affected archaeological site preservation across Afghanistan. Using the city of Herat as an example, we present a method for predicting how urban growth will affect archaeological...
Imperial Context and Agricultural Content: Dimensions of Space and Practice in Agricultural Lifeways in Dhiban, Jordan, 500 CE – 1400 CE (2017)
In this paper the results of an archaeological case-study are presented to argue that considerations of space, taken here to be a physical location in Cartesian terms, are essential to identifying changes in agricultural practice in premodern imperial contexts. The recording of the location of samples intended for paleoethnobotanical analysis, whether through digital or other means, allows for more nuanced reconstructions of the depositional routes of archaeological plant remains. In turn, these...
The Importance of Being Ad Hoc: Patterns and Implications of Expedient Lithic Production in the Bronze Age in Israel (2015)
Analysis of the ad hoc component of lithic assemblages from three Bronze Age sites in Israel shows common technological patterns without significant chronological and geographical differences. Like more formal components of lithic industries, expedient and opportunistic production of tools can be characterized using technological criteria and parameters which discern recurrent patterns in lithic manufacture. Irregular flakes, variable in shape, size, and raw material, and with only minimal...
Impressions of an Early Urban Landscape: Interpreting a Bronze Age Ceramic Motif from ‘Amlah, Oman (2016)
This paper explores one prominent material correlate of an interconnected ancient Near Eastern world: a category of ceramic vessels termed incised greywares. Archaeological excavations have revealed a significant corpus of incised greyware vessels from across the mid-third millennium BC Near East; they are found in contexts as diverse as the ancient city of Susa to small, communal tombs across the Omani peninsula. The primary focus of this paper lies in investigating an assemblage of this...
In Smaller Things Forgotten: Using microdebris to enhance our understanding of Middle Islamic Dhiban (Jordan) (2015)
This paper presents heavy fraction data from the archaeological site of Dhiban, Jordan, dating to the Middle Islamic period of occupation (late 12th to late 15th centuries CE). Based on a comparative study between larger heavy fraction materials and microartifacts I argue for the importance of smaller material residues in interpreting specific use-space as well as understanding Dhiban in relation to larger regional trends. Using a systematic flotation sampling strategy that recorded volume and...
Inclusions and Innovations in Late Neolithic Pottery from the Southern Levant (2015)
Discussions of variation over time in early Near Eastern pottery production often focus on linking changes in form or surface treatment to shifts in how pots were being used, either as a functional cooking or storage container or, in some cases, as a symbolic object. More rarely, compositional characteristics (clay, temper) are examined and these too have been considered in terms of vessel use. Some tempers, for example, are thought to be beneficial for the production of cooking pots because of...
Ingenuity from the Periphery: Contributions to Old World Transformations from the Aral Sea deltas (2015)
The deltas of the Aral Sea lie within an internal drainage basin where critical water resources are prone to unpredictable change. The nature of this resource landscape discourages the emergence of enduring centralized states and was a key factor that led to the peripheral status of the deltas in world history. Nevertheless, complex social institutions did develop there in the early 1st millennium B.C. – late 1st millennium A.D., and these were based on especially diverse and flexible economic...
Intentional destruction of cultural heritage: Evidence in Syria and Iraq (2015)
The current conflict in Syria and Iraq serves as a dramatic case study of intentional damage to cultural heritage during conflict. This paper details examples of damage that can be detected using high-resolution satellite imagery in coordination with local ground documentation and verified media reports. These examples are part of the analysis done by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Geospatial Technologies Project "Developing a Research Community and Capacity for...