Neolithic (Other Keyword)
226-250 (327 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To understand the role climate played in facilitating the development and expression of human behaviors, our interdisciplinary research team cored the interdunal Nyalonzelwe lake (Inhambane coast, southern Mozambique) during the summer of 2019. Lake Nyalonzelwe sits 5 m above MSL and is sheltered from the Indian Ocean by a Pleistocene dune system. Its...
The Past inside the Present: Interpreting Archaeological Evidence of Weaving in Mainland Southeast Asia in the Light of Present-Day Textile Making Traditions (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Woven textiles have played an important role in Southeast Asia both as practical items and markers of status, a role that continues to this day. Many important traditions and techniques, ranging from simple to complex, have survived to the present day, or the recent past. In this paper I will review the archaeological...
Pathways to Plant Domestication: Categories of Cultivation Practice and Convergent Evolution (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Taking inspiration from Zeder’s notion of pathways to animal domestication (commensal, prey, directed), this presentation will outline equivalent pathways of plant domestication types, and suggest a range of species that can be grouped by these pathways. These pathways are united by issues of habit (annual, perennial),...
A Pawsitively Interesting Prehistory of Dogs: New Stable Isotope and Morphometric Analyses from Croatia (2018)
Though dogs are recognized as important points of comparison for archaeologists seeking to reconstruct prehistoric human diet and lifestyles (e.g., canine surrogacy approach), less attention has focused on understanding the cultural and ecological significance of dogs themselves in these same contexts. We report new morphometric and stable isotope results from prehistoric (Neolithic-Iron Age) sites from Croatia that represent different cultural and environmental contexts that potentially...
Phytoliths, Geochemistry and Ethnography: A Multi-method Approach for Interpreting the Neolithic Sites of WF16 and ‘Ain Ghazal (2018)
Understanding Neolithic sites in southwest Asia is often difficult because of the lack of preservation of organic remains and the effects of various taphonomic processes that alter the original record. It is, therefore, critical that we maximise the information that can be acquired from these sites. Here, we use an ethnographic approach to test the potential of using plant phytoliths and geochemistry to aid our interpretation of southwest Asian Neolithic sites. We sampled two Neolithic...
Pig Management in Neolithic North China: Foddering and Social Change in the Western Liao River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent models for pig domestication in China have suggested that initial domestication was contingent upon millet cultivation, which allowed for foddering through agricultural surplus. For this study, a combination of bulk collagen carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis and compound...
Pigs and Power Centres in Late Neolithic Britain (2015)
This paper explores the interplay between food provision, landscape and power centres in late Neolithic Britain. This period is characterised by iconic megalithic ceremonial complexes, the most famous of which is Stonehenge. These centres represent a new scale of labour mobilisation, not previously seen in Britain. Evidence for feasting, invariably focussing on pork, is rife is in the environs of these monuments, yet settlement evidence is generally sparse. It is likely that these feasting...
Pigs by Sea: The Establishment of Pig Husbandry on Wallacean Islands during the Late Holocene (2018)
Domestic pigs play a crucial role in the socioeconomic systems of Island Southeast Asian cultures today. However, the timing of their introduction into the region during the late Holocene and details of their use by prehistoric inhabitants is not entirely clear. The introduction of domestic pigs by maritime Neolithic horticulturalists to the Wallacean island region of eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste, which has never been connected to a major landmass, appears to have been an advantageous...
Pitchstone in Prehistory: New Insights into the Mesolithic and Neolithic use of Pitchstone in Scotland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pitchstone is a glassy volcanic rock similar to obsidian but in Europe, its geological occurrence and its use as a raw material for prehistoric chipped-stone assemblages are much more restricted. In northern Britain where good quality flint is scarce, pitchstone circulated widely in the Neolithic with artifacts made from this...
Population, monuments and violence in Neolithic Europe (2015)
The EUROEVOL project has recently created reconstructions of changing regional population densities based on summed radiocarbon probability distributions for a large area of western and central Europe for the period 8000-4000 BP, covering the later Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. These have revealed a pattern of population booms and busts in many regions following the arrival of farming. The project has also gathered data on the construction dates of enclosures surrounded by ditches, banks and...
Predict and Confirm: Survey and Excavation at Three Candidate Sites in Wadi Quseiba, Jordan in search of Late Neolithic Occupation (2015)
In 2012 and 2013, a team from University of Toronto surveyed the Wadi Quseiba drainage in northwest Jordan. The survey had two goals. The first was to discover evidence of Late Neolithic habitation and landscape use. Many large villages declined or were abandoned at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and we sought to augment our knowledge of Late Neolithic sites to help learn why this might be. The second was to increase the efficiency and reliability with which sites are located. To this end...
Predomestic Animal Management and the Social Context of Animal Exploitation in SW Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than a century of faunal work seeking evidence for the origins of domestic livestock in SW Asia has shed considerable light on the timing, locations and processes of animal domestication. The early stages in the shift from hunting to herding, however, remain difficult to identify and as a result both the mechanisms and...
Prehistoric Agriculture in South Tibet: Archaeobotanical Perpespective from Bangga Site (2018)
To understand the evolution of agricultural economy in south Tibet, a large number of flotation samples and phytolith samples were collected during 2015-2017 field seasons at Bangga site. Preliminary analysis on these samples shows clues to the subsistence strategy, the nature of the site （pastoral or agropastoral）and probably the seasonality of the occupation of the site. Comparison with Changguogou site which is earlier in time indicates changes in subsistence strategy over time in this...
Prehistoric Obsidian Use in Southern Italy: Primary Acquisition and Down-the-line Exchange in Calabria, Basilicata, and Campania (2018)
Obsidian was a significant component of daily life in southern Italy during the Neolithic period (ca. 6000-3000 BC). Intensive surveys by Ammerman and colleagues in the 1970s identified a widespread presence of Neolithic obsidian in Calabria, generally thought to have come from the island of Lipari, mostly on the basis of its being the closest, along with general visual characteristics. While it was also thought possible to have small amounts of obsidian from the further away tiny island of...
Preliminary investigations of Human Remains from the Neolithic Gouwan Site in Henan China: Examples of trauma and stress (2017)
Traumatic injuries and other osseous evidence of stress are important factors that reflect the health status of past populations. Human skeletal remains excavated from the Gouwan (99 human skeletal remains in total), a Yangshao culture site (ca. 5000-3000 B.C.) in Xichuan, Henan Province were examined macroscopically for the evidence of skeletal trauma and stress using a biocultural approach. Trauma was investigated to reveal possible types, causes and rigor of activities in this sedentary...
Preliminary Research on the Bone, Antler, and Tooth Artifacts from Haminmangha Site, Inner Mongolia (2017)
The Haminmangha Neolithic site is located at Horqin Left Wulat Middle Banner, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and dates back to 5500-5000 BP according to radiocarbon dating results. More than 100 bone, antler and tooth artifacts were unearthed from Haminmangha. These artifacts include stone knives with bone handles, bone darts, arrowheads, needle cylinders, needles, daggers, awls, and hairpins, horn, antler awls and borers, tooth ornaments and other bone and antler materials. According to the...
Preliminary Results of Petrographic and Chemical Analyses of Lapita Pottery Assemblage Excavated from Kurin Site, Mare Island, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we will illustrate the number of possible pottery-making locations that we have identified so far from the Lapita pottery assemblage excavated at Kurin site, Mare Island, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia. We first examined the non-plastic inclusions to determine whether minerals and rock fragments identified through a petrographic microscope may...
Presence of the Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Complex (MTBC) in ancient skeletal samples from Ukraine (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research aims to investigate biocultural interactions by studying ancient disease among the Tripolye, a Neolithic group dating to 4,900-2,900 calBC, and one of the first agricultural populations in Eastern Europe. The Tripolye lived at higher population densities and had closer contact with bovines than the hunter-gatherers that came before...
Provenance Study of Obsidian Artifacts from the Neolithic Settlement Masis Blur (Armenia) using Portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (2015)
Over the past two decades, provenance research on obsidian from Armenia has been on the rise, primarily for provenience purposes, however, with only few studies on obsidian archaeological artifacts. In these studies, the geochemical characterization of obsidian artifacts and geological sources was carried out using different laboratory-based techniques such as INAA, ICP-MS and XRF. The current project presents preliminary results obtained with a portable XRF (pXRF) on the chemical...
The Proximity of Communities to the Expanse of Big Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While members of the communities living near or on archaeological sites have frequently been hired around the world to dig on archaeological excavations, they have very rarely participated in the recording or documentation of those excavations. They have played even less of a role in designing the structures of either paper or electronic data...
Public Archeology in Poland on the Example of the Leading Archaeological Reserves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century in post-war Poland, human past researchers have paid more and more attention to shaping knowledge of the public by disseminating results of archaeological research. Today, the field of archeology called "public archeology" is characterized by the multifaceted nature of the problem. One of its issues is...
Putting Life into a Stone Age Dwelling Construction: A Joint Venture of Local Volunteers and Archaeological Scientists (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public participation in archaeological projects is becoming ever more essential, and experimental archaeology is an excellent way of reaching out and creating a scientific community in which both the general public and archaeological scientists can learn from each other. At Masamuda near Rotterdam (Netherlands), local volunteers have established an...
Radiocarbon Dates and Freshwater Resource Use within Prehistoric Diets (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The human remains of Early to Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age populations surrounding Lake Baikal have known and large offsets in their radiocarbon ages caused by “old carbon” in freshwater ecosystems. This freshwater reservoir effect (FRE) causes human radiocarbon ages to appear...
Raw Material Procurement and Production Technologies of Turquoise and Nephrite Jade in Prehistoric China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As gold is for the West, jade has been one of the finest symbolic vehicles in the East since prehistory. In recent years, a large amount of nephrite accessories have been excavated from early Neolithic-Bronze Age archaeological sites in Northeast China, Cis-Baikal, and the Russian Far East, posing...
(Re)new(ed) Perspectives on Mortuary Practices at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (2017)
At Çatalhöyük, as elsewhere in the Neolithic Near East, there is an emphasis on the manipulation and redistribution of human body parts, with particular attention paid to the skull. Evidence for this practice occurs with the observation of ‘headless’ primary burials and the secondary re-deposition of disarticulated crania and mandibles within primary and secondary burial contexts. The manner in which these practices were carried out and the motivations for such behaviour have been the subject of...