Europe (Geographic Keyword)
1,176-1,200 (1,215 Records)
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...
Walking to (a)muse: exploring senses of place with Ruth (2015)
Walking with Ruth Tringham has always been a social and intellectual adventure. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to muse on past ways of life while walking with Ruth at a range of different heritage sites in the U.S., Bulgaria and Turkey. Important themes we engaged with during these walks included: exploring different ways to approach contemporary senses of place, thinking about how senses of place may have been significant to prehistoric people, and how to (re)mediate these ideas...
War related social and ritual traits in Rock Art (2015)
War related social and ritual traits are common features in European Bronze Age rock art and native North American rock art. There are some general similarities in the material that needs to be stressed between the North American images and those from Bronze Age Europe, fighters depicted with spears and shields etc. This resemblance speaks of how far un-connected human groups may build similar imageries, given only a set of rather superficial social similarities in general terms. Moreover, the...
Warrior, Priestess, Queen: Scythian Women & Their Roles (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Scythians were a group of people originating in Central Asia that migrated to what is now Ukraine and Southern Russia from the 8th to the 7th centuries BCE. They are well-known for their nomadic way of life, horseback warfare, and apparent lack of a patriarchal society. There is significant evidence that Scythian women were treated as equals to...
Watch out for rocks: a GIS and Agent-Based Modeling approach to the rock art of Northwestern Iberia (2015)
Geographic Information Systems and high-resolution cartography (LIDAR), together with Agent-Based Modeling, are used for assessing the traditional view of open-air rock art as an active element in the shaping of the prehistoric landscape. Petroglyphs have been usually thought to play a major role in the configuration of the different significations of the prehistoric landscapes, their location repeatedly analyzed in terms of spatial proximity with paths and resource-rich areas that would have...
Water Management, Ritual Ideology, and Environmental Change in Bronze Age Sardinia (2016)
The Nuragic culture of Bronze Age Sardinia (c. 1700-900 BCE) is known for building thousands of monumental stone towers called nuraghi throughout the island. However, toward the end of the Bronze Age, Nuragic leaders stopped building nuraghi and instead constructed underground temples over naturally occurring springs. Previous research assumes that this architectural shift took place rapidly in the Final Bronze Age (c. 1175-1020 BCE), representing a sudden rise in the importance of water ritual....
Wave of Advance Model for the Spread of Agriculture in Europe. In Transformations: Mathematical Approaches To Culture Change (1979)
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.
Weaving Identities (2015)
My paper will look at textiles as marker of identity in the Viking Disapora in Britain and Ireland. While oval brooches and metal work have been given prominent roles in the discussion of identity, the textiles they adorned are often only mentioned in passing. However, techniques and fabrics may tell us something about connections with the homelands, as well as identities which are maintained in the areas of the Viking diaspora. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society...
Weichselian Climatic Fluctuations and Neanderthals’ Technical Behaviors in Central Europe (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Weichselian (MIS 5d–MIS 3), the climatic deteriorations and the rapid decrease of the temperatures caused significant difficulties for Neanderthal groups that had to cope with an increased seasonality of resources and faunal turnover. Central European Neanderthals reacted to these new ecological conditions by designing a toolkit composed of...
Wemyss Caves 4D: a review of a community 3D digital documentation project at a challenging heritage site in Scotland. (2016)
Former sea caves at East Wemyss in Scotland are unique because of the carvings within them. These include around 40 surviving Pictish (5th-9th century AD) symbols and animal representations; a possible Viking boat; early Christian crosses; and 19th century monograms and graffiti related to local New Year rituals. Located in a former coal mining area, today you are far more likely to read bad news stories about the impact of vandalism, structural instability and coastal erosion upon this unique...
Wet-Preserved Living Spaces : Measuring Social Inequality from Circum-alpine and Central European Pile and Bog Dwellings (2023)
This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Neolithic and Bronze Age wet preserved settlements are among the most fascinating sites of European prehistory. The circum-alpine sites (“pile-dwellings”) in particular attracted attention early on: because of their excellent preservation, they promised an immediate interpretative access...
What Can We Do With Broken Bones? Paleolithic Design Structure, Archaeological Research, and the Potential of Museum Collections. In: the Research Potential of Anthropological Museum Collections (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.
What did you have for dinner last night? Revealing diet, mobility, and movement of people within Middle Iron Age British society through multi-isotopic analysis (2016)
The Middle Iron Age in southern central Britain (c. 300–150 cal BC) is a period that is often seen as becoming regionally inward-looking. A primary focus of the mixed agriculturalists is on building and maintaining massive hillforts. There is very little long-distance exchange or trade noted in the archaeological record, and the metalwork at the time takes on insular forms (e.g. involuted brooches) that separate it from the Continental connections observable in both the Early and Late Iron...
What if children lived here? Asking new questions of the material culture from old Anglo-Saxon settlement excavations. (2016)
It has been incredibly difficult to identify children's material culture in the archaeological record using the standard parameters of the last century - is it miniature? does it look like a (modern) toy? was it found actually buried with an actual child? But recent developments in the theory of the archaeology of childhood, particularly in relation to children's toys, play spaces and activities, offer new ways of asking questions of objects to reconsider whether they might be child-related,...
What’s in a Hammerstone? Insights on Core Technology at a Neolithic Quarry in Southern Germany (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone shaping tools and hammerstones are among the most ancient and ubiquitous of stone implements in the archaeological record, but they are not commonly studied in detail in archaeological context. This poster presents results of a comparative study of chert objects that show percussion scars at a Neolithic chert quarry in southern Germany. Variation in the...
When Dogs and People Were Buried Together (2018)
Throughout prehistory, dogs and humans have sometimes been interred together in the same grave, in different locations in the world. This practice raises the question of why this practice was so prevalent. Circumstances leading to this practice were variable, but its consistency suggests an underlying factor in common. Using one of the earliest known cases as a point of departure, Bonn-Oberkassel from Germany, we suggest that this underlying factor in common is that dogs and people were regarded...
When Lithics Hit Bones: Evaluating the Potential of a Multifaceted Experimental Protocol to Illuminate Middle Palaeolithic Weapon Technology (2017)
Recent zooarchaeological and isotope analyses have largely settled the debate surrounding Neanderthal hunting capacity. The vast numbers of Middle Palaeolithic sites containing the butchered remains of large ungulates demonstrates the ability to obtain and, often, highly process these carcasses. Nevertheless, evidence for the effectiveness and ubiquity of Neanderthal hunting technology, specifically composite hafted tools, has not been illustrated across either their entire spatial or temporal...
Where are the lives? Characterising settlements from small artefactual debris (2015)
This paper is inspired by consideration of how charred plant macrofossil assemblages relate to past human lives, as one component of the small artefactual debris on settlements. Cultural decisions regarding activity location, rhythm and ‘waste’ deposition mean there can be wide variation in the archaeological remains of an otherwise identical plant processing activity; this issue is common in archaeology as many classes of material, including plant assemblages, are understood with models from...
‘Where Individuals Are Nameless and Unknown’: Osteobiography Reveals the ‘Big Man’, the Ritualist, the Heiress, and the Priest (2017)
In 1957, Christopher Hawkes (of the ladder of inference renown) wrote: "…. the most scientific and therefore the best, because the purest, kind of archaeology is the prehistoric kind, where individuals are nameless and unknown, and so cannot disturb our studies by throwing any of their proud and angry dust in our eyes."1 Because the social identity of the deceased cannot be identified from human remains without analysis, osteobiography, the bioarchaeological reconstruction of the lives and...
White bones in black caves: cave burials and social memory (2017)
White bones in black caves: cave burials and social memory Caves have always been part of contemporary, living landscapes: as such, they have acted not only as natural, cultural, social, economic and ritual places, but also as political locales. One of the most recent, and contested, examples of this phenomenon in Slovenia is the use of karstic shafts as sites of post-war executions between May 1945 and January 1946, in the aftermath of the Second World War. Such sites of mass executions are...
Who Holds Your Light? Revealing relationships through a forensic approach to Upper Paleolithic cave art (2017)
The study of finger flutings, lines drawn with fingers in the soft surfaces of cave walls and ceilings, allows for the identification of unique individuals within a cave’s context. In early years of research we were able to identify men, women, and children in some of the 15 caves which have been studied. These led to discoveries as to which individuals which were often found together in their movement through the caves. The intimacy of cave spaces with artists working side by side, sometimes in...
Who invited the Secret Police? (2015)
In the summer of 1995, a team of British, Bulgarian and American archaeologists, students, helpers and local villagers made preliminary CENSORED at the late Neolithic settlement tell at CENSORED. After a CENSORED field season, during which CENSORED, CENSORED, and CENSORED were regularly engaged in CENSORED by CENSORED, several of the team were CENSORED. In the months that followed, CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED. National press coverage in CENSORED as well as a formal...