Europe (Geographic Keyword)
251-275 (1,217 Records)
"Specialization" and "generalization" are used as descriptors for Paleolithic subsistence behavior, particularly when differentiating the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. These terms, however, dichotomize and obscure the complexity of subsistence decision-making. Instead, it is more productive to investigate whether Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMH) differed in their perception of thresholds of cost versus gain in processing food. These thresholds are points beyond which the...
Cows, Wolves and Witches: The Question of Marginality within Transhumant Communities of Western Ireland (2017)
Small-scale transhumant movements were once quite common in Ireland, and continued in places like Conamara, Donegal and Achill Island up to the late 19th century and early 20th century. Also known by the term ‘booleying’, these practices involved young people, usually girls, bringing dairy cows up to hill pastures for the summer so as to free up land at home for tillage and winter fodder. However, the seasonal landscapes and settlements which they visited have until recently been neglected by...
Craft and Identity in the Viking World (2015)
When considered at all, objects of bone and antler tend to be discussed in functional terms. Occasionally, ornate objects such as hair combs may be seen as communicators of information. In this paper I will argue that if such objects tell us anything about identity, it is not through their form or ornament, but through the tradition in which they were made. Crafts are grown out of tradition, which means that objects are reservoirs of important cultural and social information. For the...
Craft, Industry, and Landscape, in the Roman Imperial Marble Trade (2015)
This paper provides an introduction to the session and its associated topics, while also presenting a case study of marble quarries in the Roman empire. Long regarded as an example of imperial power shaping craft production in provincial settings, the case study presented here explores these political and social relationships as located practices that play out in a landscape context. The dynamic interplay between local environmental conditions, existing social practices, and political power...
Crafting Choices: Neolithic – Early Helladic II Ceramic Production and Distribution, Midea, Mainland Greece (2015)
Forming part of a broader programme of macroscopic, petrographic, SEM, and NAA analysis of ceramics from Mainland Greece, this paper focuses on the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze II sequence at the site of Midea in the Argolid. Through investigating the technological variability present at Midea, our results suggest significant differences, and continuity, in technological choices over time. Most notable is the decline of grog temper between the Final Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods....
Cranial and Dental Pathologies in Mesolithic-Neolithic Inhabitants of the Danube Gorges, Serbia (2018)
We use anthropological data and a new statistical method to determine if there is a significant change to the health of people found in the Danube Gorges, Serbia (c. 9500–5500 BC), following the arrival of the Neolithic. A gross anatomical study of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia was undertaken on 113 individuals. The results show a high prevalence of porotic hyperostosis (89%) and a lower prevalence of cribra orbitalia (13%). 1308 teeth deriving from 89 individuals were examined for...
A critical reappraisal of Middle Paleolithic diets (2015)
This paper examines dietary patterns amongst Middle Palaeolithic foragers in Europe and southwest Asia from ca 300 to 40 thousand years ago. In both regions, faunal studies show that a relatively narrow range of presumably high-ranked animal species—mostly medium- to large-sized ungulates—was hunted. The present review stresses the importance of considering fat procurement and the effects of transport constraints on faunal assemblages while assessing the diet composition of Middle Palaeolithic...
A Critical Review of the Meaning of Short-term Occupation in Early Prehistory (2017)
One of the main elements in prehistoric research is the study of settlement patterns. In the last five decades, stemming partially from Binford’s research on the topic, the idea of settlement is based on site typology, including the traditional residential and logistic concepts. The latter is certainly marked by the notion of short-term occupation. This concept, used freely by many archaeologists, tends to rely on two main ideas— that of an occupation lasting a short span of time, and...
Cross-cultural comparative approaches to Viking slavery (2016)
Slavery was an integral part of Viking culture, as attested by a variety of contemporary sources such as the observations of the tenth-century Arab envoy Ahmad Ibn Fadlān, which describe the capture, trafficking, sexual exploitation, and employment of slaves amongst Scandinavian societies, including their role in ritual and their treatment after death. Slavery nonetheless remains largely underrepresented in the archaeological record, although a small corpus of finds support historical and...
Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing and the Collaborative Economy: Old Wine/New Bottles, or Genuine Game Changer for Archaeology? (2017)
DigVentures was launched in 2012 as a rewards-based crowdfunding platform designed to enable participation in archaeology and citizen science projects. We were formed by a small team of archaeologists, driven to action by what we saw as the three most pressing needs affecting our sector: the necessity for heritage professionals, museums and cultural organizations to reduce dependence on grants and state funding; the development of digitally enabled alternative finance models that diversify...
Crusader Archaeology at the Crossroads of the 21st Century (2016)
Crusader Archaeology at the beginning of the 21st century occupies a somewhat strange position. While certain aspects of the field are at the forefront of interdisciplinary approaches to archaeological evidence, others remain focused on basic issues of identification, categorization, and preservation. In part this is due to the nature of the field itself. In addition, some studies can only focus on preserving a particular monument from further decay before moving on to the next one. The port...
Cultivating Curiosity: Experimental Archaeology in Undergraduate Courses (2018)
This poster examines the use of experimental archaeology as a teaching tool in undergraduate courses. It looks at issues relating to the design, implementation, and assessment of experimental archaeology projects in upper division courses ranging from 30 to 70 students. The case studies examined here involve group-based projects centred on topics in medieval archaeology from the University of Victoria. Methods for monitoring student projects and assessing diverse experiments will be discussed....
Cultural Associations and Mechanisms of Change in Anthropomorphic Figurines During the Neolithic (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.
Cultural Choices and Exchange Networks: Cereals in Iron Age and Archaic Italy. (2016)
Staple foods offer an ideal opportunity to investigate cultural identity and socio-economic interactions. In Iron Age and Archaic Central Italy several kinds of cereal staples were grown, consumed and possibly exchanged. Different patterns shown by recent archaeobotanical research suggest interesting implications for the understanding of the cultural and political landscape of Central Italy in a period of rapid tranformations. A new method has been developed to detect directly the movement of...
The cultural ecology of Croatia’s cattle: stable isotope and zooarchaeological analyses of an indigenous breed (2017)
Here we present results from a preliminary stable isotope and zooarchaeology study of cattle from the Lika region of northern Croatia. During routine investigation of Bronze and Iron Age faunal assemblages, we identified bones belonging to a small unspecified cattle breed. These same specimens also have unexpected stable carbon and nitrogen isotope signatures, and are more similar to both domesticated and wild browsers than grazing cattle in other regions. We argue that these adaptations were...
Cultural Heritage-Based Reminiscence Sessions in Open-Air Museum Settings to Enhance Well-Being of Persons with Dementia (2018)
Background: The 3-year Active Ageing and Heritage in Adult Learning project (2014-17, EU Erasmus+ program) involved five open-air museums in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, UK, and Hungary. Sessions were conducted in venues matching the era of clearest memories for participating older persons with dementia (PwD), e.g., 1940-ties apartment. University researchers (Sweden, UK, & Denmark) evaluated the project. This presentation describes qualitative results. The objective was to investigate if/how...
Culture-Environment Relationships and Heinrich Stadial 1 in Western Europe: Are Ecological Niche Shifts Implicated? (2015)
A common theme among Upper Paleolithic studies is how hunter-gatherer adaptations may be related to environmental variability, with some focusing on how culture-environment relationships during the Paleolithic are intertwined with ecological niche dynamics. The reason being that when faced with the rapid-scale climatic fluctuations and environmental reorganizations characteristic of MIS 3 and 2, Paleolithic populations could have responded in a variety of ways. Ecological niche modeling methods...
Curation of Human Skeletal Remains and Bioarchaeological Practice in Greek Context (2017)
Human skeletal remains constitute perhaps the most sensitive archaeological material, both biologically and socioculturally. Their recovery, preservation, curation, storage, and analysis are complex issues that need to be addressed within any given biocultural context. Given the country’s geography and the long history of human occupation, Greek field archaeology is intense and ongoing, as part of either rescue excavations or academic research projects. Graves, cemeteries, and human skeletal...
Current approaches to landscape characterisation as tools for the understanding of highlands-lowlands interactions (2015)
In the European Landscape Convention ‘landscape’ means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors. This view approaches landscape as an integrated and integrating concept, requiring a holistic approach to the investigation, protection, management, and planning of space, consistent with the objective of sustainable development. Landscapes are dynamic socio-ecological systems emerging from long-term historical...
Current developments in cyber-infrastructure in European archaeology (2016)
This is a pdf copy of the PPT slides used for this presentation in the SAA symposium. In Europe, as in North America, there has been little attention to the long term issues of digital data curation, with consequent risks of catastrophic data loss. In recent years, however, there has been mounting pressure on government agencies and universities to ensure that the research they fund, and the underlying data, are properly managed, and are available ‘Open Access’. Consequently, several European...
Cutmark Orientation and the Identification of Skill in Experimental and Middle Paleolithic Contexts (2017)
The process of skill accumulation can reveal a great deal about learning, cultural transmission, and the value ascribed by societies to particular tasks or behaviors. Such information is of great interest to Paleolithic archaeologists who are charged with reconstructing these behaviors over vast expanses of space and time. Zooarchaeological remains, and the butchery marks that appear on them, are a potentially rich source of information on skill. Here, we present experimental data on cutmark...
Daily Deeds and Practiced Patterns: Using Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Advance the Study of Daily Life in the Classical Mediterranean (2015)
The patterns of daily life are vitally important to our understanding of the past. What people do to make ends meet, to worship their gods, and to take care of their families and property help define a culture and create identity. However, the routine practices of non-elite people, often occurring in non-monumental spaces, have often not received significant scholarly attention, especially in Classical Archaeology. However, since 2013, an interdisciplinary group of graduate students from six...
Daily Life in a Classical Port City: Archaeobotanical Evidence from Northern Greece (2017)
Recent excavations at Molyvoti, a large fourth century B.C. settlement on the northern Aegean coast, have uncovered a residential neighborhood of homes and roadways laid out on a Hippodamian grid system. Thousands of carbonized plant remains have been identified from excavated domestic contexts including house floors, hearths, and abandoned wells. Macrobotanical results indicate that residents’ diets relied heavily on cereals such as barley and free-threshing wheat. Cereal processing activities...
Dating ancient field walls in karst landscapes using differential bedrock erosion. (2015)
While karst environments present methodological and interpretive challenges to archaeologists, they also provide some unique opportunities. One of these opportunities is the ability to date field walls by measuring divergent rates of bedrock erosion underneath and adjacent to ancient walls. Field walls are traditionally difficult to date, either by using morphological typologies or through the association of diagnostic or chronometric materials. The method presented here, therefore, represents a...
The Dating Game: The Dialogue between Absolute and Relative Techniques in the British Iron Age (2017)
The traditional approach to the Iron Age (c. 800 cal BC–cal AD 43) has been to construct complex chronologies based on artefact typologies. Historically, radiocarbon dating was eschewed in this period, because it was thought to offer less precision than artefact dating. Such views are becoming increasingly untenable, and recent Iron Age research is showing that typological dating produces sequences that are regularly too late. This paper will draw upon British Iron Age research from across the...