Europe (Geographic Keyword)
701-725 (1,217 Records)
With implications involving health, nutrition, and even behavior, research into the human microbiome is a burgeoning field within the biological sciences. Less well understood is whether humans, both modern and past, share(d) a recognizable core microbiome. Archaeological materials represent a window into microbiome structure and function of ancient peoples. Assuming microorganisms or their DNA persist for many years under optimal conditions, coprolites should represent time capsules into the...
Microfossils and Micro-XRF: sourcing raw materials for Iron Age to Romano-British pottery production at Burrough Hill hillfort, UK (2015)
Burrough Hill hillfort, east Leicestershire, United Kingdom, is an example of an Iron Age settlement of the Corieltauvi people who occupied the East Midlands in the millennium prior to the Roman occupation of Britain in AD 43. The hillfort is set in a sedimentary landscape with few distinctive rock types. Objectives of the current study are to determine signatures of the local sedimentary deposits, building materials and pottery using ceramic petrography, micropalaeontology, WDXRF and micro-XRF....
Micromorphological study of concotto surfaces protected by the Avellino Eruption in 3,780 BP at the Afragola village in Southern Italy (2015)
The term concotto refers to fragments or patches of hard heated clay that derive from living surfaces, walls and ovens. Concotto fragments are found throughout the Italian peninsula and date from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Current studies express contradictory opinions about whether or not the concottos found on living surfaces represent intentionally constructed surfaces or the secondary products of the contact between hot embers and sediments. This study uses micromorphological analysis...
Microscopic Mapping of Technological Choice: The Use of SEM-EDS with QEMSCAN on Ceramic Materials (2016)
As instrumentation and software packages become increasingly sophisticated, the microscopic world of material culture comes ever more clearly into focus. In doing so, however, we run the risk of privileging the mineral and the elemental above the human, those complex makers and users of ancient artefacts. It would seem, then, that the importance of bridging analytical scales remains as pertinent now as when David Peacock first critiqued the use of mineralogical and chemical techniques for...
Microstratigraphic study of the Neolithic Alepotrypa Cave, Mani, Greece (2016)
Alepotrypa cave is one of the few examples of deep caves being intensively occupied throughout its extension during the Neolithic of Greece. The study of the microstructure and the microstratigraphy of the sediment revealed that the front entrance chambers consist of occupational deposits characterized by constructed clay surfaces and occupational debris. In addition to the several burials, frequent reorganization of the space in the form or fillings, leveling and resurfacing has resulted to...
Microwear and the Resolution of Post-Depositional Modification of Danish Underwater Mesolithic Deposits (2016)
It has been shown that the amount of rounding of a dorsal ridge of an unused flake is a good proxy measure for the amount of post-depositional modification by sediment movement. The technique has been applied often by the Lithic Microwear Research Laboratory to assess the suitability of an assemblage for study of tool use. Here, we report on the application of the technique to a unique problem. Orehoved is a port located in southern Denmark. The repositioning of a bridge carrying traffic between...
Middle Bronze Age Animal Economies: Transitions at Pecica Santul Mare (Romania) (2015)
The Bronze Age is a period of fundamental social and technological changes in Europe, including the emergence of more complex political and economic systems. Pecica "Şanțul Mare," a large tell located in the Carpathian Basin (Romania), provides an ideal case study of economic reorganization throughout the course of the Middle Bronze Age (MBA), when it came to rise as a regional center. The Middle Bronze Age was an era of more centralized control over animal production and specialized horse...
Middle Paleolithic Symbolism: a Review of Current Evidence and Interpretations (1987)
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The Middle Pleistocene at La Cotte de St. Brelade, Jersey (2016)
The important archaeological sequence of La Cotte de St. Brelade, known for both abundant lithic and faunal material recording human activity and environmental conditions over the last 200,000 years, is an exception in this key region making the site unique. La Cotte is also famous for the discovery of late Middle Pleistocene concentrations of mammoth and rhinoceros bone remains, known as ’bone-heaps’ (Scott 1986). Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the formation of these bone...
Middle Pleistocene ‘hunting lesions’: experimental approaches to an archaeological puzzle (2016)
Hunting lesions provide indirect evidence of humans using weapons for subsistence. Potential examples of hunting lesions from the European Middle Pleistocene are limited, having been proposed for one scapula each from the British sites of Boxgrove and Swanscombe. These scapulae, both bearing semi-circular damaged edges, have been suggested to have been impacted by untipped wooden spears, similar to those from the Middle Pleistocene sites of Schöningen and Clacton-on-Sea. Plain wooden spears from...
The Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in southern Iberia: New dates from Lapa do Picareiro, Portugal (2017)
The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic in western Eurasia remains a hotly debated and intensely researched archaeological problem. Recent developments in radiocarbon dating and genetics have permitted some refinements to our understanding of the spatiotemporal process but many issues remain unresolved. For the Iberian Peninsula, Zilhão’s ‘Ebro Frontier’ model of late Neanderthal survival and subsequent replacement by anatomically modern humans has held sway for over two decades....
Migration and Cultural Change: Effects of Migration on Ritual Practices in Early Medieval Britain and Colonial America (2017)
A migration can have several different effects upon a native population as the groups interact: the decimation of one population either to famine, disease or war, the cultural integration of the two groups either forcefully or peacefully, or the continued separation of the two cultures through distance or social stratification. These effects are perhaps best understood archaeologically through an examination of the European and Native American interactions beginning in the 16th century and those...
Migration and Dental Nonmetric Variation in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout history, the Carpathian Basin has been a natural crossroads for populations migrating between Europe and the rest of Eurasia. During the medieval and early modern periods, three major migrations shaped the demography of the basin: 1) the migration of the Avars; 2) the conquest of the Magyars; and 3) the invasion of the Ottomans. While...
Migration and Population Structure Among Two Late Medieval Polish Populations (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Poland" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This bioarchaeological study employs biological distance analyses using dental metrics and morphology of 840 individuals from 25 sites to evaluate changes in population structures in Poland during the High to Late Middle Ages (eleventh to sixteenth centuries AD). Samples represent medieval Polish, German, Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Kievan Rus...
Mining and interpreting archaeo-geophysical data through excavation – a case from prehistoric Knowlton (Dorset, UK). (2017)
Identified by aerial photography, the presence of a presumed prehistoric long-barrow and ring ditch called for detailed investigation by targeted excavation. Located in Dorset (UK), the features are presumed part of a larger ritual environment of which the ‘Knowlton Circles’, a complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, are best known. To aid in planning excavations and add to subsequent interpretation, detailed geophysical prospection, in the form of multi-receiver electromagnetic...
Mining, Migration, and Movement in Roman Iberia (2017)
The Iberian Peninsula was a rich source of metals in antiquity, and indigenous people practiced mining in many areas from at least 4000 BCE. Following Roman conquest of the region in the late 3rd century BCE, the scale of mining increased dramatically to accommodate the growing needs of the Roman Empire from the production of coins to the creation of urban water infrastructure. This growth catalyzed episodes of migration of people and movement of materials in ways that stimulated both regional...
MIS5e Sites in Eurasia (2020)
Site locations and references for Neanderthal sites dating to the MIS5e, or Eemian Period, in Europe/Western Eurasia. Sites in this dataset were used in two publications: 1. Nicholson, C. 2019. Shifts Along a Spectrum: a longitudinal study of the western Eurasian hominin fundamental climate niche. Environmental Archaeology: Journal of Human Palaeoecology. 1461-4103:1-16 2. Slimak, L., and C. Nicholson, 2020. Cannibals in the Forest: A comment on Defleur and Desclaux (2019). Journal of...
Missing Bodies and Cat Skeletons: New Perspectives on Ritual in Viking Age Iceland (2015)
The research that has dominated Icelandic burial practices has until very recently been quite narrow. Burials were excavated to extract the skeleton and artifacts within the grave cut itself, leading to a central theory that Icelandic burials are poor in ritual and culture. Recent excavation and theories, however, have led to open area excavations of pagan cemeteries, which reveal much more complicated ritual. Snorri Sturlusson, the author of the famous Icelandic Sagas and Eddas, might give us...
The Missing Link? Sardinia, Corsica and Italy and their Connections in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (2017)
The late Bronze and early Iron Age were periods of population movement and change and recent scholarship has highlighted the multi-directional interactions and networks involving the various communities across the whole of the west Mediterranean, as opposed to more static core-periphery models. In Sardinia, for example, this has emphasised the binary relationships between Phoenicians and the local Nuragic communities. With a greater awareness of local networks and connections the regional...
Mitigating Climate Change Impacts on Heritage Sites? (2017)
How fast do archaeological deposits, soil features and artefacts degrade? Is it possible to preserve archaeological remains in situ without significant loss of information potential? Climate change causing higher temperatures, increased and more concentrated precipitation events, changes from snow to rain, may lead to an irrevocable loss of information. Even small changes in the conditions of deposition, as caused by the global environmental development or local structural changes, may...
Mobile App Development at the Archaeology Data Service (2015)
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) continually explores new ways to make the data we hold more useful and accessible. One of these avenues has been the development of a mobile app called "Archaeology Britain", which we recently created in partnership with the British Library. This paper outlines the development of this partnership, and our attempt to create an iPad app with unique and interesting content from both organisations. The app presents antiquarian drawings, paintings and maps for some...
Modeling Barrow Landscapes Using QGIS (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The visible commemoration of individuals in early medieval Scotland marks a big change in burial practice, with the shift to inhumation under burial mounds. The barrows, demonstrations of identity and power, are not just located in the landscape but interwoven and embedded within it. This poster presents recent research to recreate and understand the setting...
Modeling Behavior in Digital Places Using Low-Level Perceptual Cues (2015)
Serious games and detailed 3D virtual models that allow researchers to explore multiple scenarios and reflect on different hypotheses or potential reconstructions are growing in number and increasingly viewed as serious scholarly tools. These reconstructions tend to heavily foreground the spatial and visual aspects of a place, a natural reflection of the character of the digital media in use. Studies of potential past experiences of these places, typically focused on movement through them and...
Modeling Maritime Travel in the Bronze Age Cyclades (Greece) (2017)
In this paper, I model maritime connections in the central Cyclades (Greece) to better understand small world network interactions during the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3100-2000 BCE). Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), I create a cost raster of local and seasonal wind and wave patterns in the Aegean. Based on this, I generate an anisotropic model of the time it takes to sail outward from various settlements. When compared with ethnographic and archaeological evidence about travel times for...
Modeling small world networks in the Cyclades (Greece) (2016)
This paper explores how community interaction can be modeled on a local scale using the Early Bronze Age Cyclades (Greece) as a case study. Small worlds—the local, intensive networks of interaction among communities in the Aegean islands—sustained essential ties among small communities that had limited subsistence and few labor resources (Tartaron 2008: 109). By combining material evidence for exchange and ritual deposition, environmental data, and cost-surface analyses of travel time and...