Europe (Geographic Keyword)
651-675 (1,217 Records)
In the Mediterranean Neolithic, obsidian often traveled over 100 kilometers from the geological island sources. The capabilities of interregional maritime transport of many foreign materials by the late 7th millennium BC is demonstrated by the settlement of these islands and with the neolithic package of animals brought from the mainland. The quantity, quality, accessibility, and physical and visual features of obsidian from each source has been well studied, and chemical analysis distinguishes...
Long distance networks in Neolithic Europe (2016)
In Neolithic Europe, certain artefacts made of high-quality stone were distributed over considerable distances. For example, Jade axe heads, which originate from the Alps, were found between 5300 and 3700 BC in small numbers all over Central and Western Europe as far as Brittany, Scandinavia and the British Isles, i.e. up to 1700 km from their original quarries. Likewise, between 4500 and 2200 BC single daggers, arrowheads and other artefacts made of flint that came from Northern Italy have been...
Long distance provenances of jewelry (variscite & turquoise) along Atlantic Europe during the Neolithic (5th -3rd millenium) based on PIXE Analysis (2017)
The exceptional quality of the green lithic adornments (jade axes, beads) deposited in the large grave mounds from Brittany, France, constitute the most impressive funeral architecture of the Neolithic period in Western Europe. The highest density of callaïs jewelry occurs in the Carnac region with over 800 green beads and pendants found in 33 Neolithic sites. A research program based on the chemical analysis of archaeological artifacts and geological samples from European deposits using the...
Long distances/ local dynamics: overcoming ‘culture history’ (2015)
This paper will begin by reviewing how ‘Viking Archaeology’ came about in the 19th and 20th centuries. Formed under the influence of a handful of key scholars, with their primary index of recognition based in Scandinavian museum collections, a widely-accepted paradigm of Nordic precedence was created. Aided by a series of influential Scandinavian publications, this stance produced a seemingly fixed series of cultural references, creating a strongly-identified intrusive ethnic grouping in...
Long time – long house. Dwelling with animals in Scandinavia in prehistory (2017)
The three-aisled longhouse is one of the most long-lived forms of dwelling-place known from prehistory, with its span from the Early Bronze Age (1500 BCE) until the Viking period (1000C CE). During some 2500 years, the architectural outline and form remained surprisingly similar. The three-aisled longhouse is, in terms of human culture (albeit not in geological terms), a longue durée institution, a materialisation of a particular lived space, where humans and domestic animals lived under the...
Long-Term Changes in Settlement Patterns and Local Land Use on the Great Hungarian Plain (2015)
Regional-scale archaeological surveys can reveal long-tem patterns in human settlement in the landscape. However, many survey projects focus solely on defining the extent and age of settlements. A combined use of various methods is required to develop more nuanced understanding of changes in settlement patterns over time. This paper presents the results of a multidisciplinary research project on the settlement history of the Szeghalom microregion in the Körös Region of SE Hungary. During our...
Long-term trends and the sustainability of early agriculture in Neolithic Europe (2015)
The domestication of plants and animals facilitated major changes in human ecology, demography, and social organization. Despite the seeming advantages of domestication, however, new analysis reveals major episodes of collapse in the early agricultural systems in Neolithic Europe. In this paper we present evidence for a progressive deterioration in arable farming conditions, alongside a reversion to wild resource exploitation across different regions in Europe. These apparent failures in the...
The Longevity of Ceramic Production Centres: historical contingency in the analysis of pottery. (2016)
Recent analytical programmes on pottery of the Aegean Bronze Age have identified compositional patterns that not only link the early third millennium to the late second millennium BC, but also clearly lay the foundations for production through to Roman times. Continuity in ceramic craft practice can be understood in terms of specific choices made in raw material selection and manipulation, but also at times through the recurrence of characteristic methods of vessel forming and even the nature,...
The Longue Duree of Malta (Mediterranean) and Lismore (Argyll, Scotland) Compared and Contrasted, and Set within Concluding Remarks (2017)
The author has undertaken fieldwork on both of these two limestone island systems, one in the Mediterranean, one leading into the Atlantic. The paper will reflect on the longue duree development of these two contrasting contexts, in terms of the rhythms of settlement organisation and interaction. The first, Lismore, an area of only 23.5 square km, is set within an enclosed maritime zone close to shore, off the western seaboard of Scotland. The second, Malta, a larger area of 316 square km, is...
A Longue Durée Approach to Obsidian Consumption and Social Value in Prehistoric Sicily (Italy) (2015)
This study focuses on the long-term exploitation of obsidian in prehistoric Sicily and the factors that influenced the procurement and consumption of these raw materials from the sixth to second millennia B.C. A detailed study of 6,287 prehistoric artifacts from 43 sites shows that the vast majority of obsidian found in Sicily comes from a single Lipari subsource, with smaller quantities of Pantelleria obsidian found in the west. Despite differences in the color and physical properties of these...
The Lost Dimension: Pruned Plants in Roman Gardens (2017)
This paper focuses on previously unnoticed evidence for the pruning and dwarfing of plants represented in Roman garden paintings, such as the well-known example from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta. Dozens of other examples of detailed garden scenes are preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Their trompe l'oeil effects created interior garden settings for both living and dining spaces, as well as to extended the perceived extent of actual gardens in exterior courtyards of shops, houses, and...
The Lower-Middle Paleolithic transition(s) – Between Southern and northern France a look from the Bifacial technologies perspective (2015)
The division of the Paleolithic era into the Lower, Middle and Upper Paleolithic is an arbitrary research construct that confounds chronological, behavioral and evolutionary aspects. The Lower/Middle Paleolithic transition has received lesser attention. This transition is depicted as a worldwide change from biface production to flake production through Levallois flaking systems, similar to the way it has been perceived in the initial stages of research. Yet, some European Middle Paleolithic...
Luminescence dating of a Paleolithic site in the Aegean islands (2017)
Survey and ongoing excavations at the Stélida chert source and prehistoric stone tool quarry on the island of Naxos in the Aegean have yielded numerous lithic artifacts of Paleolithic and Mesolithic types. One implication is that the Greek islands may have been inhabited prior to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, a conclusion also drawn from a recently discovered site on Crete (Strasser et al JQS 2011). The Naxos site may be older, and its associated corpus of lithic material is...
"L’Isola che non c’è". Narratives about 8th century Venice / Malamocco (2016)
Venice in the 8th was a key trade centre in the Mediterranean. Between 742 and 812 AD the centre of Venice was not located were it is today. The Duke’s palace and his headquarters were in Malamocco Island. Malamocco is a never-never land (“Isola che non c’è”): its location on the lagoons has never been positioned accurately, and traditional archaeology methods have failed in the description of the materiality of the site. How can modern archaeology fill this gap and project a holistic research...
Machine Learning Species Identification with ZooMS Collagen Fingerprinting (2018)
The creation of a robust method of species identification using collagen fingerprinting, also known as ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) has been useful for objectively defining the composition of the fragmentary component of archaeological assemblages. The method usually works through the measurements of the sizes of collagen peptides following enzymatic digestion, which yield a fingerprint that can be genus or even species-specific. However, even these peptide biomarkers have been...
"Made to Grow Old": Dressers, Delph, and Island Homes in Western Ireland (2015)
Archaeologists have described and discussed households for decades, yet only recently have them made the theoretical leap from residential structures and coresidential units to peoples’ homes. Homes are built, embodied and enlivened by peoples’ actions, thoughts, relationships, experiences and aspirations. This poster presents the results of an ethnoarchaeoogical analysis of homemaking on the islands of Inishbofin and Inishark (co. Galway) as well as Inishturk (co. Mayo) in western Ireland....
Majolica Escudillas of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: a Typological Analysis of Fifty-Five Examples from Qsar Es-Seghir (1984)
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Making amber beads: technological insights into a Late Neolithic and Bronze Age craft activity (2017)
Experimental research of different ways of shaping and perforating amber beads has provided insight into the signatures of different manufacturing techniques and the character of the tools involved. Using stereo and incident light microscopy it was for example possible to distinguish the features from the use of metal tools from the traces resulting from flint implements. Perforating amber with drills made of different raw materials like wood, metal, flint and antler, also show considerable...
Making medieval toys: Using experimental archaeology to engage students in academic enquiry (2016)
The early medieval period is often thought of as a grim, violent era, characterized by conflict and social inequality. It is typically dominated by adult male narratives, albeit with a growing body of work centred on women’s lives. Children have remained in the shadows, sometimes seen but rarely heard. There is limited archaeological evidence for children’s activities and even less appears in textual sources from the Middle Ages. This paper explores the ways in which medieval children’s toys and...
Making One’s Way in the World: identifying and dating prehistoric routeways (2017)
Archaeologists focus on sites. This paper looks at ways of identifying patterns of habitual movement that made those sites part of a living landscape. It draws on palaeoenvironmental evidence, ethnohistory from the American North-West Coast and the micro-scale of human footprints. Patterns of movement by people and animals create structures within landscape, which influence the activities of subsequent generations and the perspectives from which they encounter and perceive landscape. Paths ...
Making the Bioarchaeology of Care Methodology Public: Understanding the Roles of Ethics, Communication and Public Engagement in a Novel Approach to Physical Impairment in the Archaeological Record. (2015)
This presentation will discuss the public perception and communication of the Bioarchaeology of Care approach and the accompanying Index of Care program. The ethical considerations of the methodology, as an integral feature of working with human skeletal remains, will also be considered and discussed within a consideration of who ‘owns’ the past and, more specifically, who (if anyone) owns the remains of individuals. In particular it will focus on individuals who are described as disabled, or...
Making, Baking, Breaking, and Cutting: Experiential Learning through Enacting the Past (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concepts, such as the “chaîne opératoire” and “communities of practice” are central to material analyses and student training at the Gadachrili Gora Regional Archaeological Project Expedition (GRAPE), Republic of Georgia. Teaching abstract conceptual frameworks to undergraduate students is a challenging task for...
Manipulation of the Body in the Mesolithic of North-West Europe (2017)
This paper seeks to situate the phenomena of ‘loose’ human bones in the Mesolithic of north-west Europe within a wider understanding of the role of post-mortem manipulation of the body in the mortuary practices of these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Whilst originally interpreted as the remains of disturbed burials, assemblages of disarticulated human remains have begun to be accepted as evidence for alternative mortuary practices, though their specific nature has so far received little critical...
The Many Roles of Roman Dogs (2017)
The Romans had a strong interest in the natural world. Their relationships with animals extended from animals as food source to animals as exotic curiosities and everything in between. Dogs held a complicated position for the Romans, filling a wide range of roles. For example, dogs could be companions, war weapons, street cleaners, or victims of sacrifice. This variety shows how dogs were conceptualized sometimes as individuals and pets, sometimes as pests, and other times as powerful and almost...
Many Roman Bazaars: exploring the need for simple computational models in the study of the Roman economy (2015)
The study of the Roman economy is a battlefield of sometimes conflicting archaeological and historical models. Each model argues for different factors as the driving forces of the Roman economy. Yet the model authors rarely make explicit how their descriptions of the functioning of Roman trade can be abstracted as concepts that allow comparison with other models. Moreover, the development of these descriptive models has not gone hand in hand with the development of methods that allow for them to...