Europe (Geographic Keyword)
951-975 (1,217 Records)
In recent years, industrial archaeology has come to be more associated with historical archaeology when it comes to creating perspectives from which to analyze the evidence of economic industries of all sorts. Farm sites and others that make up rural economic activities—mills, mines, etc.—are all sites of industry, and they should be studied together for a larger view of these industries from different economic and social scales, particularly in the regional sense. In southern Sweden from the...
Rhythms of Settlement Aggregation and Disintegration in Iron Age Bavaria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many parts of Temperate Europe, the first aggregated and fortified urban settlements developed in the Early Iron Age. However, many of these settlements disappeared after a few generations. After a period of decentralization lasting at least two centuries, another episode of settlement aggregation took place in...
Rhythms of Stability and Change in the Central Mediterranean (2017)
This paper explores changing patterns of isolation in prehistoric island societies, and their ongoing connections with the wider world. The case study is the expansion of agriculture in Southern Europe in the 6th millennium BC, and subsequent landscape and cultural evolution in the Maltese archipelago. This was a series of maritime events, establishing connectivity between Mediterranean islands whose inhabitants’ ‘Neolithic package’ lifeway permitted high-density settlements in small islands. In...
The Ribadeo Wreck – Multi-year Photogrammetric Survey of a Spanish Galleon of the Second Armada (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digital Approaches in Nautical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Spanish Galleon Santiago de Galicia was constructed in Italy in the 1590s and sank outside the port of Ribadeo, Galicia in 1597. This important wreck, lying in 10m of water, has been investigated by a multi-disciplinary team led by Dr Miguel San Claudio since 2011. Targeted photogrammetry has been undertaken since 2015, aiming to...
Riders on the Stone (2015)
Horse riding scenes are arguably about the most emblematic representations within post-paleolithic open air rock art in Galicia (NW Iberia). They have been used as a controversial chronological milestone, setting them somewhere between the Final Neolithic and the Iron Age. Such an iconography may be related to a shift in the Human/Nature relationship arising along the Late Prehistory. While not discarding they are showing real activities, we believe the riding scenes could be emphasizing a new...
Risky business: the impact of climate variability on human populations in Western Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum. (2016)
The extent to which climate change has affected the course of human evolution is an enduring question. The ability to maintain spatially extensive social networks and fluid social structure allow human foragers to “map onto” the landscape, mitigating the impact of resource fluctuation. Together, these adaptations confer resilience in the face of climate change – but what are the limits of this resilience and what is the role played by climate variability? We address this question by testing how...
Ritual and Rag Trees in Contemporary Ireland (2017)
In Celtic countries, early Christianity was syncretized with pre-existing religious beliefs and rituals, some of which were maintained and modified through the centuries, while others were subsequently adopted but understood as ancient or essential. One ritual practice inhabiting the border of Christian and non-Christian tradition is seen in the Irish rag tree, a hawthorn with strips of cloth hanging from the branches, often located at holy wells or other Early Medieval ecclesiastical sites....
Ritual and Tombs around the Decline and Collapse of the Pylian State (2017)
The palatial society of the Greek Late Bronze Age collapsed around 1200BC. There were signs of widespread mass destruction throughout Greece and several of the palaces and settlements were abandoned. Two of the largest palaces, however, Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argolid, showed evidence of rebuilding of houses in and around the palaces after the first major destruction fire. The century after the initial destruction of the palaces was a period of turmoil and filled with more devastating fires at...
Ritual Communication, Social Elaboration, and the Variable Trajectories of Paleolithic Material Culture. In: Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers (1985)
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Ritual feasting and its social implications: Analysis of the ritual pits at Dana-Bunar 2- Lyubimets, Bulgaria during the Late Neolithic (5400-5000 BC). (2017)
Ritual feasting and its social implications: Analysis of the ritual pits at Dana-Bunar 2- Lyubimets, Bulgaria during the Late Neolithic (5400-5000 BC).
The Ritual Performance of Gift Exchange in Archaic Greece (2018)
Gift exchange is most often discussed as an economic transaction. Whether goods are exchanged for social, political or cultural capital, the model for examining the practice is based on a commodity framework. However, gift exchange is also a performance, often with prescribed behaviors based on the culture and the individuals participating in the exchange. This behavior clearly falls within the realm of ritual as much as that of trade or economics. In this paper, I discuss gift exchange as a...
Roads and Rivers: The Importance of Regional Transportation Networks for Early Urbanization in Central Italy (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient regional routes were vital for interactions between settlements and deeply influenced the development of past societies and their “complexification” (e.g., urbanization). For example, terrestrial routes required resources and inter-settlement cooperation to be established and maintained, and can be regarded as an...
Rock Art, Warfare and Long Distance Trade (2017)
For most of the twentieth century the Bronze Age rock art in Southern Scandinavia has been seen as a manifestation of an agrarian ‘cultic’ ideology in the landscape. In this context the dominant ship image and the armed humans have been perceived as abstract religious icons, not as active symbols relating to real praxis in the landscape. Whilst violence and war related social and ritual traits indeed are common features in the Scandinavian rock art from the Bronze Age and the violence on the...
Rogue utopians or bumpkins on the margin? Bronze Age mortuary customs in the marshlands of the Great Hungarian Plain (2016)
Many archaeologists argue that the emergence of a social elite in the Bronze Age of the Great Hungarian Plain is due to the parallel appearance of a specialized trade network they were able to control. This poster focuses on the burial customs at the Békés 103 site, a Bronze Age cemetery in Eastern Hungary. This area saw growth in population, the intensification of farming, and increases in metal production during the Bronze Age, but the settlements lack any evidence for social hierarchy. Do...
The Role of Artifact Functional Analysis in Understanding Variation in the Archaeological Record: Assessments from Studies on Tool Design and Use (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding artifact variability observed in archaeological assemblages may untangle key dynamics marking the evolution of major human behavioral traits. Variability likely reflects technological changes allowing early hominins to respond to dynamic Pleistocene environments and evolving...
The role of artifact surface scatters from the Western Morava Valley, Serbia in understanding human population movements during the Early Upper Paleolithic (2016)
There is strong evidence for the spread of anatomically modern humans (AMH) 45,000 to 35,000 years ago in Europe using two major migration routes: a northern one along the Danube River, and a southern one leading through Bulgaria and Greece. Despite being situated between these routes and near some of the earliest AMH sites in Europe, most of Serbia and the Central Balkans seem to lack evidence of these occupations. Part of the reason for this absence of evidence may be due to limited research...
The Role of Bronze Age People in the Post-Bronze Age Landscape: An Integrated Geoarchaeological Approach to Site Formation at Mycenae, Greece (2016)
While human-landscape interaction has been a key question in the archaeology of early complex societies, little research has focused on the effect of occupation on the landscape post-abandonment. At Mycenae, a Late Bronze Age citadel in southern Greece, two distinct deposits, one anthropogenic and one natural, were identified as covering archaeological remains dating to the 12th century, B.C. Here, we present an integrated method combining micromorphology, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), and...
The Role of Intercommunity Feasting in the Development of Social and Economic Complexity at Early Bronze Age Mochlos (2016)
Feasting is a ritualistic social activity that also serves to strengthen the solidarity of a group or reinforce its hierarchical structure. Most frequently found as an intragroup activity, it also occurs at the intergroup level. In this paper, I discuss intercommunity feasting as a social, political, and economic motivator that generated interactions that flourished during the Protopalatial period. Several deposits from the Minoan site of Mochlos in Eastern Crete bridge the entire Prepalatial...
A Roman "House"?: A New Model for Understanding the Origins of the Roman Gens (2017)
Debate concerning the development and origins of the Roman kinship group known as the gens has a long and contentious history. Theses questions, however, necessarily move beyond the primary textual evidence, the standard resource for such studies. Different heuristic models must be utilized to take advantage of all available data, whether it be textual, archaeological, or via ethnographic comparison. I propose the concept of a "house society" as developed by Lévi-Strauss and taken up by numerous...
Roman pigments and the trade in naturally sourced products (2016)
Pigments were used to decorate both wealthy and common houses in ancient Rome but the mechanisms by which raw pigments were collected, traded, and sold have never been studied. A network developed to facilitate the importation of pigments from across a wide expanse of the Roman empire. While the ochres present in a shop in Rome might be locally and regionally sourced, the presence of pigments like madder lake or cinnabar are the result of long chains of commercial transactions, which served to...
ROMANCING THE STONES: ANALYSES OF THE CHIPPED STONE FROM THE TISZA CULTURE SITE OF HÓDMEZŐVÁSÁRHELY-GORZSA, HUNGARY (2016)
ROMANCING THE STONES: ANALYSES OF THE CHIPPED STONE FROM THE TISZA CULTURE SITE OF HÓDMEZŐVÁSÁRHELY-GORZSA, HUNGARY The chipped stone tools from the Gorzsa tell in southeast Hungary have been studied over a period of 15 years with effectively five study seasons (1999, 2000, 2001, 2011 and 2012). A total of over 3,000 chipped stone artefacts were examined in terms of raw material, technology, and microscopic evidence of use, during a study which took place at the Mora Ference Museum in Szeged....
Romanizing Production: A study of Castro Ceramics before and after Roman Imperial Expansion in Northwestern Portugal (2016)
The Civitatis of Bagunte is a fortified hilltop settlement inhabited by the Castro Culture people from the late Bronze Age to the Roman period. Ceramic artifacts from the Iron Age and Roman periods have dominated the assemblages found at Bagunte over the last five excavation seasons. My graduate research focuses on a question of broad implications for economic anthropology and social archaeology: How does colonization affect patterns of indigenous production before and after imperial expansion,...
Rome and cetaceans: Archaeological Evidence from the Strait of Gibraltar (2017)
Over the past 10 years, bones from whales and other marine mammals have been uncovered from archaeological excavations of Roman cities around the Straits of Gibraltar (Baetica and Mauritania Tingitana coasts). The high frequency of archaeozoological remains and their location within fish-preserving contexts (cetariae) has suggested the active exploitation of cetaceans throughout the Roman Imperial period (II BC - V AD). This paper reviews the evidence from Baelo Claudia, Iulia Traducta, Septem...
Ruth's Archaeology (2015)
My contribution to this session will be a personal account of a long-term professional relationship with Ruth as a student and colleague. Ruth and I began the collaboration in the Former Yugoslavia, a country that ceased to exist, and continued with projects in Israel, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Together we were learning the local archaeological practices and were developing our own. Each of us brought something to this process of learning: she - her anthropological interpretation of the material...
Rythm of Youth: Childhood in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Liguria (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a synthesis of recent research that illuminates the reality of forager childhoods at several sites dated to the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene in the region of Liguria (NW Italy). Indeed, recently published data from the sites of Arma di...