Europe (Geographic Keyword)
976-1,000 (1,217 Records)
The Magura Uroiului rock formation, located at the confluence of the Mures and Strei Valleys, is a natural, dominating fortress on the landscape. This rock formation has been utilized by groups including, the Hallstatt, Celtic, and Late Iron Age Dacian. The focus of this presentation is the First Iron Age mortuary monument located at the base of the rock face. This monument yielded both human and animal remains, with primary and secondary burial practices of the human remains occurring. The...
The Salmon of Knowledge: Determining the influence of marine-derived isotopes on the diets of medieval and early modern Irish populations (2015)
Many medieval and early modern villages and abbeys in County Galway, Ireland are situated directly on the coast. This study seeks to understand the pathways that marine resources follow as they enter diets of religious and lay Irish populations by using isotopic, ethnographic, and historical evidence. The isotopic portion of this study elucidates how marine-derived isotopes cycle through the coastal Irish landscape and are included in the diet. Ecological sampling on the Atlantic island,...
Sample Analysis of British Middle and Late Bronze Age Material, Using Optical Spectrometry (1959)
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.
Sandbagging the Past: Rescue Excavations at a Medieval Icelandic Fishing Station (2016)
Since it's discovery in 2008, archaeologists have been performing rescue excavations at the site of Gufuskálar in Western Iceland. During the Medieval Era this site was home to one of the largest commercial fishing operations in Iceland at that time. Little is known about these early commercial ventures and most of these early fishing stations have been destroyed by later episodes of town-building. Gufuskálar is one of the best preserved examples of a medieval fishing station but, as with many...
Scaling Down: Kalmyk Steppe Pastoralist Strategies and Small-Scale Migration (2016)
A key theme in both archaeological and historical research of the Eurasian steppe has been the practice of pastoral nomadism. Researchers have particularly focused on issues of mobility within this economic strategy. Perhaps due to academic preoccupation with origins and the attractiveness of both grand-narratives and historical analogy, large scale migration has received a lot of academic and popular attention. However, pastoral nomadism as an economic strategy often only employs small-scale...
Scenes of spectacular feasts: Gravettian hunters’ sites in Central Europe. (2015)
The Gravettian technocomplex arose about 30,000 years ago and expanded into nearly all of Europe during the next millennia. The most distinctive features of the individual stages of Gravettian cultures are backed bladelets, shouldered points, and zoomorphic and anthropomorphic art objects. Complex early Gravettian sites are found in South Moravia (Czech Republic), dated about 27-25,000 BP. Pavlov I and Dolní Vĕstonice I and II are long-term open-air campsites. Gravettian sites of a later phase...
Science and Archaeology: An object-centred perspective (2017)
According to Kristian Kristiansen, archaeology is now undergoing a major paradigm-shifting phase akin to the ones that defined the discipline in the mid-1800s and mid-1900s. He dubbed it ‘the third science revolution’, for fast-developing scientific methods, chiefly A-DNA and stable isotope analyses, sit at the core of the current changes. Arguably, similar if less visible changes are occurring in material culture studies. These are fostered by the marrying of new theoretical approaches (e.g....
The Scientific Investigation and Cultural Implications for the Use of Prestigious Substances in the Ancient Mediterranean (2017)
The role of organic residue analysis in archaeological research has shifted from an intermittent side project of interested analytical specialists to becoming standard components of an archaeological research program with a growing number of archaeologists being trained in both excavation and analytical instrumentation. Such developments within the field of archaeology not only highlight the benefits of applying a range of scientific techniques, but also expand the scope of archaeological...
Scotland’s Coastal Heritage at Risk: prioritizing action and connecting research and citizen science at sites threatened by the sea (2016)
In Scotland, there is a long tradition of archaeologists working at sites threatened by coastal erosion. Government Agency, Historic Scotland, has sponsored a series of coastal surveys in order to locate sites; and the SCAPE Trust has worked with national and local heritage bodies to prioritize action and produce an interactive ‘Sites at Risk’ map from the data. The map includes sites of all periods and site types, many of which contain a wealth of palaeoenvironmental data. The coast is a highly...
Sea Shells by the Sea Shore: microstratigraphic investigations of the Cabeço da Amoreira Mesolithic shell midden (Muge, Portugal) (2015)
Cabeço da Amoreira is a long-known Mesolithic shell midden located in the shores of the Muge River in Portugal. Like in similar midden contexts, sedimentation is greatly influenced by anthropic inputs associated with an intensive exploitation of marine and estuarine resources. The abundance of shell-fish refuses favors an intricate and laterally variable stratigraphic succession of layers and lenses, which result in an extensive artificial mound. The complex stratigraphy of shell midden sites...
The Search for Remains and Material Evidence on World War II Bomber Crash Sites: Combining Geophysics and Traditional Archaeological Approaches (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During World War II, the United States and other countries lost many airmen in plane crashes. Crash sites vary considerably in size and complexity, with buried and near-surface components that must be located, assessed, and perhaps excavated. Geophysical survey is one way to improve the...
The second voyage of Odysseus: Tale of the traveling warrior of Bronze Age Europe (2016)
Elites and the deconstruction of elite-centered perspectives of past societies have long been at the focus of archaeological approaches. In European Bronze Age research there is a revitalized interest in reconnecting diverse regions and understanding them as parts of an abstract pan-European ideological system - the warrior ethos. The primary theoretical vehicle employed in this endeavor, institutional analysis of synchronic societies, draws our attention to social and political structures...
The Secret Lives of Paleolithic Teens: Puberty Assessment of Adolescents in the European Upper Paleolithic (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. In recent years, archaeologists have made real progress in understanding the lived lives of Paleolithic children, but adolescents from this period remain understudied. In this study, we use maturational markers developed on the skeletons of medieval English children to...
The Secrets in Caves: Use of Caves by Secret Societies (2017)
Caves have been recognized as important prehistoric ritual sites for well over a century. Yet, archaeological discussion of the rituals conducted in caves has rarely gone beyond the platitudes that they were locations for contacting the spirits, invoking powers of fertility, or burying the dead. This paper attempts to place the ritual uses of many caves in a more specific ritual context by documenting the ethnographic ritual use of caves by secret society members and relating this to some...
Settlement and rituals. The red deer at Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic settlement sites in SW Norway (2017)
The red deer is one of the most common motifs at several Late Mesolithic rock carving sites along the coast of southern Norway. It is assumed that this animal was both an important food resource as well as an object of rituals and religious beliefs during this period. The focus of this paper will be to examine how the red deer appears in different contexts at settlement sites during the Stone Age, and to explore how these contexts reflect diverse activities, including rituals and ceremonies. Our...
Settlement Patterns and Land Use in Neothermal Dalmatia, Yugoslavia: 1983-1984 Seasons (1987)
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.
Settlement Patterns, Land Tenure and Social Structure: a Diachronic Model: In: Ranking, Resource and Exchange (1982)
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.
Settlement scaling and the emergence of the Greek polis (2017)
The collapse of the Mycenaean palatial centers at the end of the Late Bronze Age (circa 1190 BCE) and the nature of society in the ensuing "Dark Age" or Early Iron Age have long been important topics in the study of prehistoric Greece. The centuries after the collapse were characterized by a seeming decrease in population, changing patterns of settlement, less political centralization, a decline in trans-Mediterranean trade and the production of luxury goods, and the disappearance of the Linear...
Settlement scaling in Medieval Europe and Tudor England (2017)
From an archaeological perspective, the settlements of Late Medieval Europe lie far to one end of the social complexity spectrum. But from a modern perspective, they are decidedly ancient. Without the institutions and technologies of modern capitalism or the industrial revolution, Late Medieval settlements are commonly characterized as unproductive consumers within dynamic agrarian economies. Both economists and historians have assumed that the benefits of urban agglomeration economies – their...
Settlement scaling theory, specialization, and the Greek and Roman world (2017)
In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in using urbanism as a means of investigating the economy of the Greek and Roman world. The most recent research on the relationship between urbanization and economic growth suggests that the correlation between them is not as straightforward as once thought. There is a growing corpus of theory, however, that suggests that modern settlements act as ‘social reactors’, which increase the number of opportunities for interactions between...
Settlement Strategies and Environmental Features in the Sardinian Bronze Age: a Remote Sensing Approach. (2015)
In this paper, we provide a remote sensing approach for the analysis of the settlement patterns of the Nuragic civilization, using data from Landsat 7 ETM+ in a sample area of Sardinia (Gallura). By evaluating archaeological and geological data through remote sensing imagery, we outline a territorial characterization to identify patterns in the settlement choices of the Bronze Age communities, through the use of Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Statistical Analysis. The applied method...
Severe skeletal lesions and loss of bone mass in a child associated with a case of spinal tuberculosis and prolonged immobilization (2017)
This paper describes the lesions identified in the skeletal remains of a 9 year-old girl who died of pulmonary tuberculosis in Lisbon, Portugal, in the 1940s. This individual is housed in the skeletal collection at the National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon. These remains show a variety of lytic lesions on the ribs and thoracic vertebra, with complete destruction of the bodies and fusion of the vertebral arches of 4 vertebrae at a 60 angle. The individual was likely bedridden for...
Sex differences in pre- vs. post-Black Death trends in developmental stress markers (2017)
Previous research revealed trends in periosteal new bone formation in medieval London that are consistent with improvements in health following the Black Death (c. 1347-1351). However, periosteal lesions can occur in response to a wide variety of factors at any age, so it remains unclear how the epidemic affected patterns of physiological stress specifically among subadults. To further our understanding of changes in physiological stress before and after the Black Death, this study examines...
Sexual dimorphism and morphological variability with regard to the socio-economic structure of the Early Medieval European Population (6th – 9th century). (2015)
The socio-economic conditions of past societies can be studied with the help of the biological characteristics of human skeletons. We intend to focus on the early medieval Central and West European populations. The subject of our contribution is a study of the sexual dimorphism and biological diversity on the basis of non-metric and metric traits in relation to socio-economic conditions. We focused primarily on the traits associated with the locomotor apparatus. The aims were to establish :...
The Shaman in the Cave? Testing for entoptic imagery in Upper Paleolithic geometric rock art. (2017)
It has been proposed that much of the rock art of Upper Paleolithic (UP) Europe can be interpreted as the result of shamanistic visions and related spiritual practices (e.g., Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1998; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 2001; Lewis-Williams 2002; Whitley 2005). This theory is based on a combination of analogy with modern hunter-gatherer groups, and recent neuroscience studies on the universality of human physiological response when in a trance state. Specific geometric signs found...