Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only João Zilhão.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition is a watershed. By the later Upper Paleolithic, all continents were occupied, all the world’s ecosystems were exploited, and all aspects of ethnographically observed hunter-gatherer culture the archaeological record can preserve are indeed found. Prior to about 100,000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhaneta Gjyshja.

The Shkodra Archaeological Project (PASH) took place in the Shkodra region of northern Albania. Shkodra presents a wide variety of ecosystems and landscapes, which interact with each other, leading to variation in human settlement, social behaviors, and land use, from prehistory to modern times. During the project, fifty-nine grinding stones were collected from various sites. Preliminary analysis shows that they vary in size and type, are composed of different materials, and belong to different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vassilis Kilikoglou. Anno Hein.

Historically, pottery provenance studies in the Aegean were conducted by the application of chemical techniques for element determination. The underlying principle was that ceramics made with the same clay paste should exhibit lower chemical variability than those with different pastes. Although this principle has not changed over the years, pottery studies have undergone serious analytical and most importantly, methodological developments. The main reason for the methodological developments...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jade Robison. Olivia Navarro-Farr. P. Nick Kardulias.

The arrival of the Bronze Age (2300-1000 BC) ushered in many changes in the Mediterranean, including the emergence of the Nuragic culture on the island of Sardinia (Italy). The Nuragic culture takes its name from the nuraghi, the more than 7,000 dry-stone towers that dominate the landscape. The Nuragic population engaged in an extensive trade network within the Mediterranean throughout the Middle and Late Bronze Age (1700-1000 BC), trading with Mycenae, Cyprus, and mainland Italy. Contact with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Zinsious. Jonathan Haws.

Archaeology as a practice is destructive thus once a site is excavated it is gone forever. Accurate and precise recording of spatial data is critical to preserving information. Higher resolution data collection may lead to better spatial analysis of the site. This endeavor improves with the continuing development of technology and methods of recording spatial data. Photogrammetry is a technology that has allowed researchers to accurately record spatial data on excavation, stratigraphy, features,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Wroth. Dan Cabanes. Paul Goldberg. Vera Aldeias. Dennis Sandgathe.

Phytolith analysis can be used to investigate the relationship between hominins, plants, and environmental change. It has proven useful in understanding specific hominin behaviors (e.g., use of fire and fuel composition), and diachronic changes in plant species for paleoenvironmental reconstructions. The integration of phytolith analysis with soil micromorphology allows for an identification of the ways phytoliths were deposited in archaeological sites, and addresses both site formation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen Wroth.

Phytolith analysis at Roc de Marsal, a Middle Paleolithic cave site, SW France, is used to investigate both environmental change and hominin behavior. Specifically, the aims include correlating phytolith types with the microenvironmental context of the site, and how these conditions changed diachronically. We also explore the pyrotechnological skills of Neanderthals at the site, broad patterns of plant acquisition and use, and spatial differentiation. Preliminary analysis of phytolith samples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Madgwick. Angela Lamb. Jane Evans.

This paper explores the interplay between food provision, landscape and power centres in late Neolithic Britain. This period is characterised by iconic megalithic ceremonial complexes, the most famous of which is Stonehenge. These centres represent a new scale of labour mobilisation, not previously seen in Britain. Evidence for feasting, invariably focussing on pork, is rife is in the environs of these monuments, yet settlement evidence is generally sparse. It is likely that these feasting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash. Terry O'Hagan. Elise Alonzi. Franc Myles. Anne Wildenhain.

Pilgrimage traditions on islands along the coast of Connemara in western Ireland provide a valuable context for exploring the relationship between ritual practice, identity, and political economic change from a long-term perspective. The island of Inishark, Co. Galway, contains a number of ritual remains dating from the 9th-13th centuries, including a church, a holy well, cross-slabs, one or more burial grounds, as well as a number of penitential stone platforms known as leachta. Islanders in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

This paper explores how a relational approach centered on the concept of taskscape could reinvigorate analyses of how pilgrimages create, sustain, or transform human-environment relations. Medieval and modern traditions of pilgrimage in Ireland are renowned for their engagement with ‘natural’ places and objects, such as mountains, springs, and stones. Some take this focus as evidence of an animistic pre-Christian heritage, but few have questioned how such practices structured peoples’ ideas and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only JULIAN MARTINEZ.

El arte rupestre de la Prehistoria Reciente de la Península Ibérica ofrece un conjunto de datos de importante relevancia para estudiar el aparato simbólico de las sociedades complejas y sus implicaciones territoriales. Su amplia distribución también ofrece la oportunidad de discutir sobre la ocupación del territorio desde la perspectiva de la Arqueología del Paisaje. El espacio se convierte en un eje estructural en el que también es posible plantear las alternativas socio-económicas de las...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neil Price.

The contextualised meaning of specifically ‘Viking’ identities, in relation to the general population of early medieval Scandinavia, is a topic of perennial debate. Who were the Viking raiders, how did they see themselves, and how did others see them? How did our artificial construct of ‘the Viking Age’ actually begin? A key concept in unravelling these problems may be what the Vikings’ much later successors, the pirates of the so-called Golden Age, called "the new government of the ship". Over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hoffman.

This study focuses on the cultural, political, and biological factors that led to the formation of a unique pattern of dental pathology within an Icelandic population at Haffjarðarey, Iceland between the 13th and 16th Centuries . The Haffjarðarey church and cemetery clearly served as an important meeting place and burial site for the surrounding region during this period. A paleopathological analysis of the population reveals a high rate of ante-mortem tooth loss, severe tooth wear, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Mason.

The early Iron Age (EIA) landscape in central and south-eastern Slovenia is dominated by hillforts and barrow groups. These monumental structures express and symbolise elite power in the landscape. Despite traditional emphasis on outside agency in the formation of these landscapes, it will be shown that the EIA landscape incorporated and transformed many places of the preceding Late Bronze Age (LBA) landscape, often through monumentalisation. The expansion of hillfort settlements coincides with...

IMAGE Uploaded by: Jonathan Haws

Site plan based on 1x1 m alphanumeric grid system.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Denis Waudby.

Here I review ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer groups from North America, Siberia, and Scandinavia to examine plant-fibre material cultural heritage and natural husbandry practiced by these societies. This study considers plant-fibre textiles and their diagnostic differential typology to aid understanding of plant fibre processing and utilization and attendant diagnostic features. The poor preservation of European plant-fibre directs diagnostic trials to modern reference material and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. Van Zeist. W. A. Casparie.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Runnels.

Palaeolithic stone tools have been identified on a number of Greek islands recently. These include the oceanic island of Crete, where lithic artifacts on the southern coast at Plakias occur in association with raised marine beaches and paleosols in karstic depressions dated to > 130 kyr, and on the northern coast at Mochlos Bay associated with as-yet undated Pleistocene alluvial fans. Other islands, including Ayios Efstratios, Alonissos, Gavdos, Kephalonia, Lesvos, Melos, and Naxos, have also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Straus.

Decades of research involving new excavations, chronometric dating, artifact and faunal analyses, site distribution studies and isotopic analyses have refined our understanding of the transitions from Upper Magdalenian to Azilian and then to a variety of Mesolithic cultural traditions in the period between the Allerod and Boreal climatic phases in the classic region of Cantabrian Spain. There are indicators of both continuity in some aspects of settlement, subsistence and technology at some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helga Rösel-Mautendorfer. Ines Bogensperger.

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 EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these 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 using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Metzger.

This PhD research investigates the use of polished flint discoidal knives from the Late Neolithic/ Early Bronze Age, which are reportedly unique to the British Isles. No scientific study has been performed on these artifacts and functional understanding to date is based on contextualized hypotheses from the literature. The three main hypotheses from the literature are that the discoidal knives are perceived as: 1) unused status symbols; or that they were used 2) for butchering; or 3) for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Steinberg.

The 9th century Norse settlement of Iceland resulted in a system of semi-territorial petty chiefdoms, with local and island-wide regular assemblies. The volcanic island was divided up into four quarters, each with three or four local assemblies. Farmers had to pledge their allegiance to one of the chiefs within their quarter, creating a patchwork of alliances. Farms themselves may also have been cobbled together from non-contiguous blocks which allowed access to different environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G. Clarke.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Harper.

For over a decade it has been suggested that several events of the fourth millenium BC in Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine – the rise and fall of the giant-settlements of the Tripolye culture in Central Ukraine, the abandonment of Gumelnița tell settlements in the Danube valley, and the dissolution of the “Old European” complex and advent of the Bronze Age – were influenced by climatic factors, notably the 5.9 ka event and the beginning of the Subboreal period. However, the simple synchronicity of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Albert J. Ammerman. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza.

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.