Europe (Geographic Keyword)
501-525 (1,215 Records)
One of the most prominent landscape features of the Hallstatt Culture that more or less stands for the Early Iron Age of the Central Europe are hillforts. They are usually located on prominent spots in landscape and surrounded with some kind of fortification. This paper will try to combine geographic and social contextual analysis of these enclosures and create complex model of their meaning within cultural and physical landscape of the Iron Age communities. Usually they are interpreted as...
HistoGenes: Integrating genetic, archaeological and historical perspectives on Eastern Central Europe of the 1st millennium CE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I will present the ERC-sponsored project HistoGenes, an interdisciplinary project that engages archaeologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and historians in a fine-grained analysis of more than 6,000 burials in the Carpathian Basin between 400 and 900 CE in order to understand population changes, mobility, social structures, and cultural practices in...
Historic England: Creating an Engendered Past in Iron Age Britain (2016)
Artists’ reconstructions are one of many ways to present how people lived in the past, particularly in the case of cultural heritage. Specific ideas of gender are routinely perpetuated through such imagery, often reinforcing certain preconceptions of gender roles in the past within both public and academic consciousness. This paper presents a selection of archaeological reconstructions commissioned by Historic England representing life in Iron Age Britain. It addresses the visual language of the...
Historical Ecology in the Cold and Wet: Carole Crumley’s North Atlantic Legacy (2016)
In 1990 Carole Crumley organized a School of American Research (SAR) seminar that brought together a group of researchers from different areas with interests in a wide range of periods and topics in world archaeology and human ecology. This disparate group was united by Carole’s vision of a fresh approach to the interactions of environment and society through time- something beyond the increasingly stale processual/ post-processual debates of that period. Her vision of a dynamic interaction of...
The Histotaphonomy of Human Skeletal Exposure within a Neolithic Long Cairn at Hazleton, UK (2017)
The total excavation of the Cotswold-Severn Neolithic long cairn at Hazleton was unusually meticulous and represents an excellent example of long term skeletal exposure. Some discussion exists around the nature of bodies prior to deposition in theses long cairn structures and histotaphonomy is here used to consider this question. The human remains at Hazleton were recovered from two spatially distinct stone-lined chambers in a highly disarticulated and commingled state. During excavation each...
Hitler's Fortress Builders: The Use of Non-Destructive Testing to Quantify the Differential Treatment of Labourers on Second World War Alderney (2017)
World War II left behind archaeological evidence of an impressive magnitude on the British Channel Islands, and today many of these features lay untouched. It was throughout my Master's research at Glasgow University in 2013-2014 that I developed a project to enhance our archaeological understanding of these concrete relics. Using a specific set of methods, I was able to accurately and non-destructively test the compressive strength of several concrete features. Combining this raw data with the...
Holy Wells across the Longue Durée (2016)
Sacred springs and holy wells in northwest European prehistory evidence multi-period veneration, yet are archaeologically-resistant sites. This paper assesses evidence for votive deposition at sacred watery sites with a focus on the Iron Age to Christian transition in Ireland. While recent scholarship deconstructing “the Celts” has also dismissed contemporary holy well practices as invented traditions or as Roman introductions, ongoing veneration at nearly 1000 Irish well sites is part of an old...
A Home Above the Bay: A Neolithic Domestic Structure on the Mani Peninsula (2016)
Over the past five years, the Diros Project has conducted multi-disciplinary investigations in Diros Bay near the modern day town of Pyrgos Dirou on the Mani Peninsula, Southern Greece. Excavations aimed at gaining a better understanding of the chronological and functional relationship between the Neolithic Alepotrypa Cave and the contemporary external settlement on the nearby promontory. Excavation trenches were selected based on preliminary data recovered through surface collection and remote...
The Home Network: X-ray Florescence and Geochemical Data of Post-Medieval Ceramics in Ulster (2016)
The area known as Ulster is one region where complex colonial and ethnic relationships are evident in the past, as well as in the present. This study looks specifically at the trade of ceramics in Post-Medieval Ulster, to see if coarse earthenware ceramics are being imported from elsewhere along with English refined earthenwares or if they are being produced locally in Ireland. Through the use of portable X-ray florescence (pXRF), the multi-elemental makeup of 1342 sherd will be examine to...
Homo Cognitive Development (Contextualized in Middle Paleolithic Burials) (2015)
The cognitive developments that occurred in the Homo genus over 100,000 years ago enabled expansive forms of consciousness, facilitated increased creative capacities, and in so doing allowed hominins to consider concepts that were previously unimaginable. These developments are rooted in social origins, possibly extending back to the Australopithecines, and their emergence is expressed through the first burials of the dead – both by Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. However, these burials of Europe...
Horseback riding and the unintended consequences of innovation (2015)
Every technological innovation carries a social agenda, usually one that was not intended or even foreseen by its inventors. The domestication of the horse in the Eurasian steppes probably was initially an attempt to secure winter-adapted meat animals, but horseback riding transformed the initial innovation into a revolution in transport. Riding made steppe herding more efficient, transformed tribal raiding, and eventually was combined with wagon transport to create a new way of life based on...
House-Burning in Serbia (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.
Household Cluster at Brzesc Kujawaski 3: Small-Site Methodology in the Polish Lowlands (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.
How Art Began: Understanding the Thought Processes of Prehistoric People Through the Study of Cave Art and Experimental Archaeology. (2015)
Upper Palaeolithic cave art in the Franco-Cantabrian region is associated with some of the first visible, material, and social production processes of anatomically modern humans. Since art is a component of culture, and culture is a component of human evolution, the integration of evolutionary and cultural theories is key in understanding Upper Palaeolithic cave art. The present study inventories the techniques, materials, and image contexts from Chauvet, Lascaux, and Cosquer caves in France,...
Human ecodynamics of late Neanderthal survival and anatomically modern human expansion at the Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition, Lapa do Picareiro, Portugal
With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Jonathan Haws (University of Louisville) and Dr. Michael Benedetti (University of North Carolina Wilmington) are leading a multi-year study of Neanderthal extinction and replacement by anatomically modern humans in central Portugal. The project brings together an international team to recover high-resolution archaeological, geological and paleoecological records from the excavation of Lapa do Picareiro, a cave in central Portugal. Our...
Human mobility during the Greek Neolithic: A multi-isotope analysis of the burials from Alepotrypa Cave (2016)
This study measures strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) isotope ratios in human and domesticated animal teeth from Alepotrypa Cave, a cave that was used for both shelter and burial of the dead from the Early to the Final Neolithic period (6000 – 3200 BC) in southern Greece. Previous radiogenic isotope research on archaeological material in Greece indicates that there are significant differences in 87Sr/86Sr ranges in the Aegean due to the complex geology (Nafplioti 2011;...
Human occupation of Lapa do Picareiro (Portugal) during the Last Glacial Maximum (2016)
During the Last Glacial Maximum, abrupt climate changes created highly variable paleoenvironments inhabited by human populations across the Iberian Peninsula. Pollen and sedimentary analyses from deep-sea cores off Portugal provide records of regional-scale paleoenvironmental responses to the climate shifts that punctuated the LGM. Archaeological assemblages from caves and rockshelters offer a more local-scale understanding of human-environment interactions during this period. One site in...
Human Occupation of the Central Balkans during the Last Glacial Maximum: Recent Results from Serbia (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. The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), or Marine Isotope Stage 2, produced some of the most extraordinary environmental challenges faced by Homo sapiens during the Pleistocene. Large parts of temperate and subarctic Eurasia were depopulated, as humans retreated to areas with relatively favorable conditions. Although the Balkans...
Human response to sea-level change in the Early Holocene: examples from the continental shelf (2015)
Human response to sea-level rise is an important aspect within the broader topic of coastal prehistory. Sites found on today's continental shelf directly contribute to the archaeological record and are, in some cases well preserved under water. Recent emphasis on continental shelf archaeology, or submerged prehistory, has encouraged prehistorians to embrace underwater archaeology in order to fully appreciate past lifeways and adaptation to sea-level change in the final Pleistocene and early...
Human response to the Younger Dryas and 9.3 ka event along the southern North Sea basin: a comparison. (2016)
Besides the climatic deterioration, both the Younger Dryas (starting with the IACP or GI-1b) and the 9.3 ka event severely affected hunter-gatherer’s environment. Along the southern North Sea basin (northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands) both climatic events are connected with increased and repeated forest fires of large stands of pine forests and major drops of the water level in rivers, lakes and ponds. In this paper we will investigate how this changed environment conditioned...
Human responses to Late Pleistocene environmental change in South-Western France (2015)
A key question for archaeologists studying the late Pleistocene is how human populations responded and adapted to the dramatic, and often rapid, global climatic changes which characterised this glacial period. Using a range of archaeological data attributed to the Upper/Final Magdalenian and Azilian techno-complexes (15 000-10 000 uncal BP), this paper assesses the evidence for changes in settlement patterns and human demography during the Late Pleistocene in South-Western France. Data on...
Human-Material Interactions during the Aurignacian of Europe, 35,000–27,000 BP: An Analysis of Marine Shell Ornament Distribution (2018)
This research explores dynamic relationships between people and materials during the Aurignacian period of Europe, 35,000-27,000 BP. More specifically, a network analysis is used to determine whether there are discernible patterns in the geographic distribution of marine shells used for the creation of beads and pendants. As early inhabitants of Europe moved across the landscape they came into contact with others and left behind material traces of these interactions. Whether these artifacts came...
The Human-Mediated Evolution of Cattle and Its Impact on Cattle-Based Agriculture in the Neolithic of the Polish Lowlands (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cattle were the most important domesticated animal in the Neolithic of the Polish lowlands. The paper will explore the character of human-mediated evolution of cattle following rapid development of Neolithic groups in the region, the need of adaptation to new ecological niches and the strain caused by climate change and human induced environmental pressure. It...
Humans, Fire, and Food Production: Examining the spatial and temporal patterns of changing burning practices during the transition to agriculture in the Western Mediterranean (2015)
One of the principle objectives of current archaeological research is to improve our understanding of the recursive relationship between humans and their environments through time. Following this objective, archaeological and paleoecological analyses have demonstrated that fire and humans have a coupled relationship in almost every biome on earth. The processes through which humans modify landscapes with fire reflect the complexities of human-environmental relationships, especially in the ...
Hunter-Gatherer / Agricultural Frontier in Prehistoric Temperate Europe. In: the Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries (1985)
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.