West Asia (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (292 Records)
In the province of Rough Cilicia, monumental public architecture was built in the initial phase of the social and political incorporation of southern Asia Minor into the Roman Empire during the early Imperial Period. This analysis focuses on two monumental baths at the site of Antiochia ad Cragum, located in modern day southern Turkey, and also implicates the monumental bath phenomena throughout southern Asia Minor. Multi-level signaling theory is utilized in this study to understand the...
The Rowanduz Archaeological Program - Results from the 2015 field season (2016)
This talk presents the results from the third seasons of archaeological investigations conducted by the Rowanduz Archaeological Program (RAP) in Erbil Province in northeastern Iraqi Kurdistan. During the Late Bronze and early Iron Age, the project area, the modern Soran District, served as an important buffer zone between the Assyrian and Urartian Empires, and scholarly consensus locates the Hurro-Urartian buffer state of Ardini/Musasir in this rugged mountainous region, best known for its...
A Satellite Remote Sensing Model for the Ancient Traffic in Upper Mesopotamia (2017)
Roads reflect motivations and needs behind many relations of past societies; they imposed spatial order on agricultural production, enabled transportation of bulk-goods, and mediated hegemonic power. Considered not only as the container of action, but also the action itself, the road has much more to say on the ancient movement praxis. This study focuses on Bronze Age roads (hollow ways) in Upper Mesopotamia. At this space-time, the movement embedded within production economies contributed to...
Scales of Analysis and Modes of Interpretation in Osteobiography: An Example from the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project (2017)
Bioarchaeologists have traditionally prioritized statistically significant patterns in large skeletal assemblages to document major biocultural trends in human populations. But in the last 15-20 years, the osteobiography approach has returned to favor, encouraging bioarchaeologists to focus on the specifics of the human scale, reconstruct an experiential prehistory, and restore an identity to those "genderless, faceless blobs" (Tringham 1991: 97) who people so many traditional interpretations of...
Searching for Complexity: Initial statistical analysis of mortuary material in shaft tombs from the Early Bronze Age I (c. 3500-3000 BC) Bab adh-Dhra`, Jordan (2016)
The southern Leventine Early Bronze Age (EB) I-III is characterized by the development of fortification systems, intensification of agricultural and pastoral production, innovative water management, irrigation technology, population aggregation, and increasing regionalized expression of EB material culture. Due to these characteristics, various researchers have interpreted this society as the region's earliest urban culture, a chiefdom, a city state, or a secondary state. Recent scholars have...
Settlement Systems and Land Use Strategies in the Upper Diyala/Sirwan River Valley, Kurdistan Region of Iraq (2016)
This paper presents results of a regional archaeological survey in the Upper Diyala/Sirwan River valley, a study area that straddles the highland landscapes of the Zagros Mountains and lowland plains of southern Mesopotamia. Historically constituting a key communication route between these regions, the Upper Diyala offers a unique laboratory for analysis of changing subsistence strategies and interactions among and ancient communities who inhabited very different upland and lowland environments....
Shared Ritual Ideologies: Long Spouted Vessels on the Iranian Plateau in the Third and Second Millennium BCE (2015)
Interactions between Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia during the third and second millennium BCE are well documented with much written on this topic. I will expand on this scholarship by tracing long spouted Iranian vessels across these regions to investigate possible shared ideologies. These vessels are often associated with Iron Age context in northern Iran, but this characteristic trough spout has been present on vessels on the plateau since at least the 4th millennium BCE. This unique...
Shifting Human-Environmental Interactions in the Late Prehistoric Periods of Southern Caucasia (2015)
The Caucasus Mountain range is an exceptionally dynamic landscape whose diverse topographic, tectonic, hydrological, climatic, and pedological dimensions provided the backdrop to equally vibrant social transitions from the Neolithic through the Iron Age. The past two decades of intensive excavations and radiocarbon dates in the South Caucasus (particularly Armenia and Georgia) have resulted in important refinements to material culture sequences from the first farmers to the earliest political...
Silence and Noise in the Archaeological Record: are archaeological understandings always underdetermined? (2015)
Silence and Noise in the Archaeological Record: are archaeological understandings always underdetermined? In his seminal critique on the practice of history: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot persuasively argues that historians often cannot understand or even recognize major historical events, such as the slave organized and directed rebellion in Haiti (1791-1804) that led to the end of slavery and the establishment of the Republic of Haiti. It was...
Site Formation Processes and Stratigraphy of Akrotiri Aetokremnos, Cyprus: The Devil is in the Details (2015)
Akrotiri Aetokremnos is a small collapsed rockshelter that has provided evidence of the earliest well-documented human presence on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. It is, in fact, amongst the earliest numerically dated site on any of the Mediterranean islands. A large suite of radiocarbon ages indicates that Akrotiri Aetokremnos was occupied around 12,000 cal. B.P., during the Late Epipaleolithic. More controversial than the ages is the association of extinct endemic pygmy hippopotami with...
Site Formation Processes at Manot Cave, Israel (2017)
Manot Cave, represents today one of the richest Upper Palaeolithic assemblages in the Levant. The site has produced a 55,000 year old anatomically modern human skull, as well as Middle Paleolithic to Post-Aurignacian lithic and bone artifacts. The rich assemblage is found in an "unusual" situation, with an in situ occupation area at the top of a talus and close to a currently blocked entrance. The occupation area defined by in situ combustion features is replete with artifacts, and so is the...
Sites and Sight Lines: An Investigation of Intervisibility Among Hilltop Sites in Azerbaijan (2015)
Most archaeology takes as its primary unit of focus the archaeological site. Yet sites did not exist in isolation: interactions between sites, and between people and the surrounding landscape, were also an important component of ancient societies. These interactions were social, political, military, and/or ritual, and investigating the use of landscape provides archaeologists with a means to understand larger-scale processes such as growth and expansion of urban centers. One way of looking at...
Sites, landscapes, and survey intensity in the South Caucasus: the evolution of landscape archaeology approaches in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (2017)
In the last decade, the number of landscape archaeology projects in South Caucasia has dramatically increased. South Caucasia geographically and disciplinarily sits between two early centers of survey archaeology (Near East and Mediterranean), each with its own methodologies and primary questions. The mountainous landscapes of South Caucasia, the high degree of population mobility in many periods, and the extent of Soviet land engineering challenge archaeologists to develop hybrid survey...
The skeletal findings from excavations in the Batinah, Oman (2015)
Background. The presence of limited settlements has limited the understanding of prehistoric occupation in the Arabian Peninsula (Potts 1990). Interest and research of Arabia during the Bronze (3200-1200 BC) and Iron Age (1200-400 BC) has increased producing a greater understanding of the people from the region and their culture. Methods. A total of sixty-four tombs were excavated with twenty-seven yielding human remains. These twenty-seven tombs originated from various periods of the Bronze...
Skull Removal and Mediation of Personhood over the Forager-Farmer Transition (2016)
The transition from forager-collectors to small-scale agricultural communities, in the case of southern Levant the Natufian to Pre-Pottery Neolithic periods, is widely viewed by researchers as a critical evolutionary threshold, one that both sees the development of new economic realities, and at the same time, long-term continuity in select ritual practices. Numerous studies have put forth functional and symbolic interpretations for the existence of skull removal in specific ethnographic,...
Social and Spiritual Landscapes in Ancient Mesopotamia (2017)
Ethnobiologists have demonstrated that shared human cognitive processes generate cross-cultural regularities in how people categorize the natural world. The human ability to recognize taxa means that plant and animal classification is not totally arbitrary. In addition, ancient people would have had place-specific knowledge of the particular plants and animals living in the territories they frequented. Representations of plants and animals in relation to each other in a landscape therefore...
Social Interaction at Distance Over the Long Term: Obsidian Sourcing from the Southern Levant (9th – 4th millennia cal BC) (2017)
The McMaster Archaeological XRF Lab is dedicated to undertaking major regional obsidian sourcing studies, not least in the Eastern Mediterranean where we have the North American geological source sample collection. We take a holistic, integrated approach, melding chemical composition with the artefacts’ techno-typological characteristics, contextual information and other pertinent data to produce ‘thick description’ narratives. In this case we consider obsidian circulation and consumption...
Soil Micromorphology Analysis of Area D at Manot Cave, Israel:insights into site formation processes. (2017)
Manot Cave, discovered in 2008 in Western Galilee (Israel), represents one of the richest Upper Palaeolithic assemblages in the Levant. The site has produced a ca. 55,000 year old anatomically modern human calvarium, as well as Middle Paleolithic to Post-Aurignacian lithic and bone artefacts. The deepest stratigraphic sequence is found in Area D, located halfway down the steep talus. This area shows continuous stratification from dolomite bedrock to an early sterile colluvium, an archaeological...
Space and Scale in Reconstructions of the Social Organization of Craft Production (2017)
Archaeologists often speak of production in spatial terms, contrasting nucleated and dispersed forms of crafting. However, the importance of the scale of spatial patterning in production activities (as opposed to "scale" in reference to quantitative output) has yet to be fully explored. It is impossible to relate the spatial distribution of crafting activities to a particular social organization of production without considering spatial scale. An examination of spatial distributions at multiple...
Spatial patterning and site formation at Dmanisi, Georgia (2016)
The early Homo site of Dmanisi, Georgia, offers some of the clearest insights into the first dispersals from Africa by early members of our genus. On a more local level, the site contains very well preserved bones with excellent provenience data, which allows for an in depth look at spatial associations of archaeological material. In this paper, we look specifically at one excavation area at Dmanisi, Block 2, where majority of the hominin fossils have been uncovered. Using spatial analyses...
Storage, Surplus and Wealth at a Chalcolithic Site in Israel (2015)
Excavations at Tel Tsaf, Israel have provided evidence of large mudbrick silos, animal pens and potential feasting activities. Tel Tsaf dates to the earlier part of the Chalcolithic period which spans from c. 5200-3600 BC and marks a transition from egalitarian villages to the eventual cities of the Early Bronze Age in the region. Towards the end of the Chalcolithic period social stratification becomes more visible within the archaeological record as evidenced by hoards of copper items in...
The Stratigraphy of Area E, Manot Cave (2017)
Area E is located close to the upper end of the main talus, at the NW side of the cave. It is built of sediments which originated outside the cave, mainly the local Terra-Rossa soil that was washed into the cave with rainwater, mixed with limestone rocks, some of them originating in the cave itself from decaying and falling roof and wall parts. Two main sedimentary units were observed so far: Unit 1 – Colluvium made of soil with limestone rocks in varying sizes. This colluvium contains very...
Sweep Widths in the Evaluation of Coverage by Archaeological Surveys in Jordan and Cyprus (2015)
The Wadi Quseiba Survey in northern Jordan and Tremethos Valley Survey in Cyprus recently employed "calibration runs" by survey crews to calculate sweep widths in a variety of visibility contexts. The resulting sweep widths were a critical element in evaluating the coverage of spaces previously surveyed, and these coverages were integral to the planning of additional survey according to a Bayesian allocation algorithm. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...
Synchronizing highland and lowland rhythms of material exchange (2015)
From an archaeological point of view, interconnectivity between highlands and lowlands of the ancient Near East is undeniable. The differential distribution of natural resources (particularly metals and precious stones which are sourced predominantly in highland regions), and the evidence for circulation of these resources from at least the Neolithic, is the most obvious sign of this interdependence. Too often, however, our models of this interdependence have tended to create abstract zones –...
Syria: Cultural Property Protection Policy Failure? (2015)
International ‘cultural property protection’ policy is structured around two UNESCO Conventions: the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Together, these conventions encourage a policy which aims at cultural site protection at source and the recovery and restitution of stolen or otherwise illicitly-traded...