Europe (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (1,217 Records)
In the eastern Mediterranean area, coherent patterns and synchronous events around 4.2 kaBP suggest an obvious link between cultural upheaval in urban societies and climate forcing. Here, the 4.2 kaBP aridification event is thought the cause of severe economic consequences and social unrest. The picture for the central and western Mediterranean regions, at the interface of North Atlantic (Bond event 3) and monsoon-influenced climate, is different. It remains unclear whether supra-regional...
Climate Teleconnections Synchronize Human Population Dynamics (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate variability can significantly constrain the population dynamics of ancient agrarian societies, although its direct influence is often mediated by a complex interplay of social, ecological, and technological factors. Untangling these relationships in the archaeological record is challenging due to...
Coastal Erosion as an Arena for Change (2017)
The problem facing archaeological heritage through loss and damage caused by rising sea levels and increased storminess requires responses that are multi-facetted and creative. Sufficient resources to deal with exposed archaeological sites and deposits through established ‘preservation by record’ methodologies are not available anywhere. In the Scottish archipelago of Orkney the combination of sand and low lying shores and extremely rich archaeological heritage make the problems of coastal...
Cod, Sand & Stone: Proto-Industrial Scale, Medieval, Commercial Fishing at Gufuskalar in Western Iceland (2015)
At the start of the 15th century a major commercial fishing was built on the far western coast of Iceland at a farm called Gufuskalar. During the winter months cod fish were caught, processed and dried on site for trade with continental European merchants. This paper details the rescue excavations at the site and discusses some of our preliminary results. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative...
Coins of the McGhee Collection (2016)
Coins in the ancient world provided a medium for the propaganda of rulers and other influential individuals. Analysis of coins alongside an understanding of their historical context can reveal their significance. In 2014 the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History received a donation of assorted Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins from Ambassador George C. McGhee. This project analyzes and catalogues these coins by translating their inscriptions and interpreting their images to determine...
Collaboration, collaborators, and conflict: ethics, engagement, and archaeological practice (2017)
Collaboration in contemporary archaeological parlance principally refers to active engagement with one or more selected groups of stakeholders and co-producers of knowledge. But knowledge is always produced for a purpose, and collaboration, or to be a ‘collaborator’ in conflict settings implies an allegiance, often deceitful, to one cause or another. When embedding archaeology in conflict transformation activities, being seen as a ‘collaborator’, or partisan, can actively work against the aims...
Collaborative and Community Archaeology: A View from Europe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community archaeology from a European perspective—comparative analysis.
Collective Action in Iron Age Europe: Public Assemblies as Arenas for Participatory Government (2017)
Public assemblies were a common phenomenon in Iron Age and Early Medieval Europe. In these large collective meetings, important decisions concerning war, peace, the choice of military leaders, legislation and the administration of justice were taken. Together with their political role, they also fulfilled other simultaneous functions, including religious festivals and the holding of fairs. Once believed to be archaeologically invisible, recent research has identified the remains of a large...
Collective Memory and the Mycenaeans: The Argolid, Messenia, and the Mani Compared (2016)
The concept of collective memory has received some attention in archaeology, but has not been systematically applied to processes of state formation and sociopolitical change. In this paper I model the evolution of collective memory systems in Greece from the Neolithic to Iron Age, with a focus on Mycenaean regions. The Argolid, Messenia, and the Mani – using The Diros Project’s excavations of a Mycenaean “ossuary” at Ksagounaki as a primary example – vary in terms of how collective memories...
Collectors' Handbook of Marks & Monograms on Pottery & Porcelain
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.
Colonization Models of Iceland: new Archaeological and Environmental Data (2015)
This study aims to improve the dating resolution of archaeological and environmental data from the earliest sites of human occupation in Iceland in order to understand better the timing, scale and rate of the colonization of Iceland. This can be achieved through critical examination of the whole corpus of approximately 650 sites which is now accessible; through cross-referencing of different dating methods – primarily tephrochronology, radiocarbon dating and typology – and through application of...
Colonization or Migration? Applying colonial theory to Post-Roman Britain (2016)
Colonial studies has long ignored early medieval Britain. However thanks to archaeology it is possible to reconstruct enough the conditions of the fifth and sixth centuries to understand the impact of the multiple colonizations. England experienced two distinct occupations by foreign parties before the Norman Conquest: the expansion of the Roman Empire into Britain ending in 410 AD and the Anglo-Saxon migration beginning in the mid-fifth century. Neither of these occurrences has been discussed...
Colonizing Yourself: The British colonization of Britain (2016)
Often discussing Colonialism means discussing the colonized and the impact of the colonizers on them highlighting indigenous responses to the situation as well as looking at methods of resistance and signs of the agency of the colonized. All too often we overlook the impact of this process on the colonizer. I argue that during the rise of the British Empire the role of colonizer became such a part of national identity that it colored interpretations of British prehistory. This is most evident...
Combining residue analysis of floors and ceramics to identify activity areas and the use of space (2016)
Residue analyses have been applied for more than 40 years to the study of ceramics and floors (Barba, Bello 1978; Condamin et al. 1976). This has allowed to better understand ceramic contents, on the one side, and the traces left by human activities on floors, on the other. Both these disciplines provide important information on human activity markers, focusing on the use of ceramics in the first case and the use of space and the function of structures in the second. However, a deeper...
Combining Strontium and Sulphur Isotope Analysis to Reconstruct Paleolithic Reindeer Mobility (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the movement patterns of past animals is key to unravelling Paleolithic hunter-gatherer mobility and landscape use. Strontium isotope analysis (87Sr/86Sr) has long been used as a proxy for provenance studies based on the high correlation between strontium values in faunal tissues and underlying lithology....
Commingled, communal and complex: reconstructing Iberian Copper Age mortuary practices (2015)
Fragmentary and commingled human remains recovered from salvage excavations present bioarchaeologists with a number of interpretative challenges, including calculating MNI in the absence of detailed provenience information, untangling post-excavation commingling of remains, and analyzing high volumes of recovered material. Importantly, analytical techniques developed in recent research on forensic and archaeological taphonomy can help overcome some of these difficulties. Here I focus on the case...
Communicating in Three Dimensions: Questions of Audience and Reuse in 3D Excavation Documentation Practice (2018)
After excavating the Praedia of Iulia Felix at Pompeii in 1755, architect Karl Weber published the building with an axionometric illustration that showed the remains in three-dimensional perspective. In doing so, Weber communicated additional information about the form of the building in a manner that was both accessible to a lay audience and sufficiently "scientific" for a scholarly one. By contrast, digital 3D documentation methods in current archaeological practice often reinforce a division...
Communities of Archaeological Inquiry: Documenting a German Neolithic Landscape in Cooperation with Avocational Archaeologists (2015)
This poster explores the history, methods, motivations, and contributions of three avocational archaeologists whose lifelong legacies helped to shape an international research project on the Neolithic settlement of the southeastern Swabian Alb in Germany. Their efforts to document site locations and build significant private collections span three generations, from the 1920s to today, and led to the discovery of a rich archaeological landscape previously unrecognized by professional...
Community action at sites threatened by natural processes (2017)
Around the world, thousands of archaeological sites are threatened by coastal processes. Although many countries have successfully implemented schemes to address threats from development, this is not the case for sites at risk from natural processes. Without developers to fund mitigation projects, the scale of the problem appears enormous, and it is difficult for individual agencies to commit to preserving, or even recording, everything at risk. Systems are needed to update information and...
A comparative assessment of Upper Paleolithic lissoir (smoother) manufacture and use (2017)
Recent studies have brought focus to a category of bone tools previously thought to be restricted to modern humans. Excavations of layers dating to approximately 50 kya from two different sites in southwest France, Pech-de-l’Azé I and Abri Peyrony, have produced four nearly identical fragments of bone tools identified as lissoirs (a French term meaning "smoothers"). Lissoirs are specialized tools thought to have been used in hide preparation. Although this tool type has been defined in various...
Comparative Ecodynamics of North Atlantic Islands: A progress report (2016)
Support from US, Canadian, Scandinavian, and UK funding bodies 2007-16 has made possible a sustained multi-investigator multi-regional interdisciplinary series of investigations of the offshore islands of the North Atlantic (Faroes, Iceland, Greenland) coordinated by the NABO research cooperative. These islands were connected by Viking Age migrations from mainland Scandinavia and the British Isles, and the diverse fates of their human populations during the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods...
Comparative Eurasian Statecraft: al-Andalus in the context of the Medieval West (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Attempts to describe and explain differences between Western and Asian state structures have a long history, starting with Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production and Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism.The bottom-up approach offered here argues that differences between the two forms are due largely to the way primary...
A Comparison of "Scenes" in Parietal and Non-Parietal Upper Paleolithic Imagery: Formal Differences and Ontological Implications (2017)
Upper Paleolithic cave art is well-known for its skilled execution, specifically the use of shading, relief, and perspective to render life-like depictions of Pleistocene fauna. Cave art is equally well-known for a near absence of flora, humans, and scenes. In this regard, parietal imagery is distinct from "art mobilier," where these are more common. However, defining "scenes" as a graphic phenomenon can be problematic, and identifying them among superimposed and fragmented images more so....
A complex systems and network science approach to the emergence of social complexity on Cyprus during the Prehistoric Bronze Age (2016)
People who seek wealth and power structure and restructure the social networks that underlie society. From these networks that bind people together and facilitate the movement of goods, services and information, emerges the phenomenon we call social complexity. To better understand this phenomenon in past societies, this project uses data from the Prehistoric Bronze Age on Cyprus (2400-1700 Cal BCE) and novel methods derived from complex systems and small world network science, and modern...
Complexity in space and time: spatio-temporal variability and scale in simulations of social-ecological systems (2015)
Over the last decade, the Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics Project has integrated complex systems concepts with computer simulation and empirical data in research on early farming systems. We have developed a computational laboratory, composed of multiple interacting models that are dynamically and recursively linked. to study how small-holder Social-Ecological Systems (SES) grow and change over time, how they react to major system state change, and how specific system variables affect the...