United Kingdom of Great Britain and Nort (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,051-1,075 (1,331 Records)
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...
Secrets in the Stones: Stones with Inclusions in the Passage Tomb Tradition (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The passage tombs of Atlantic Europe are a lasting memorial to a society with a knowledge system encompassing aspects of engineering, astronomy, and stone-working. The stones used to build these monuments have been explored from a range of perspectives. It seems likely that stones were chosen based on criteria such as color, source, and texture, and some...
Sedimentary DNA Displays the Upper Paleolithic Human-Carnivore Interface in El Mirón Cave (Spain) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans and carnivores competed for the same ecological niche during the Paleolithic, including caves used as shelters that they even alternately occupied in many cases. Through the presence of archeological material, including animal bones, we can assess the human occupation periods and their intensity. Iberia represents one...
Seeding Colonialism; European trade Beads within Native American Contexts (2017)
The typological and scientific study of trade beads in Native American contexts has contributed a great deal to understanding contact period sites (ca. 1607–1783). The Cape Creek site, NC is a perfect example of British-indigenous connectivity in the contact period and is important for understanding interaction in the Southeast. Unlike other studies of this type that mostly focus on mortuary sites, Cape Creek is a village settlement and will therefore provide a different view of day-to-day...
Seeing beneath the soil. Prospecting methods in archaeology (1990)
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...
Seeking Justice in Black Spaces: The Geography, Memory, and Power of Race Massacres in the United States (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Many urban centers bear the scars of anti-Black violence and race massacres. Predominately Black spaces have been especially susceptible to various forms of racial unrest at the hands of their white counterparts. Massacres such as those in the Snowtown neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island in 1831 and the...
Seizing Jerusalem: Archaeology, landscape preservation and the ‘Wall’ (2013)
The battle for land(scape) and territorial control is a key element in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the 'struggle for Jerusalem'. This paper focuses on the impact of the ‘Wall’ on the archaeologically rich and environmentally sensitive Refaim Valley—'the bread basket of Jerusalem'. Here environmental and heritage discourses are being used to legitimize the transformation of the valley from a Palestinian agricultural resource to an Israeli ‘Biblical landscape’ conservation area. This...
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 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 Shifts and the Transformation of Power in Medieval Italy: Preliminary Results from the Excavation of the Castle of San Giuliano (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northern Lazio, Italy, was a region of shifting boundaries in the Middle Ages. Across the medieval centuries, it encompassed the southern extent of Lombard territory, a southwestern edge of Byzantine lands, and a northern portion of the Papal States. Given the scant textual documentation of this...
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...
Sex-Specific Patterns of Survival in the Context of Urbanization and Environmental Change in Medieval and Post-medieval London, England (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval and post-medieval populations in England experienced several crises, including famines and plague epidemics. These occurred at a time of increasing social inequality, urbanization, and shifting climatic conditions. This study examines temporal trends in survivorship (as a proxy for health)...
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...
Shared Heritage: World War II American Military Loss Sites in Europe (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historic archaeological sites associated with World War II American military losses on foreign lands represent the physical remains of a shared cultural heritage. Such sites are irreplaceable phenomena of significance to the past of both nations and for the knowledge and understanding of our shared cultural...
Sharing and Using Knowledge Derived from Experience: Early Cultural Resource Evaluations of the OCS (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Perspectives on the Future, and the Past, of Underwater Archaeology in the Cultural Resource Management Industry" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 1970s, the United States federal government initiated a program to protect submerged cultural resources of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) from the impacts of federally permitted undertakings. The impact of permitted mineral exploitation on cultural...
Sherd movement in the ploughzone - physical data base into computer simulation (1989)
During the last decade a major research program has been carried out at the Butser Ancient Farm to explore the annual movement of simulated potsherds in the plough soil under a continuous arable regime (Reynolds 1986).The reasons for this program lie in the fundamental question of whether the topsoil overlaying an archaeological site should be regarded as worthy of excavation in that the artefacts it may contain still bear a relationship to underlying features and therefore will have some...
Shifting Baselines of the British Hare Goddess(es?) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of past religions tend to fall into one of two camps: tightly-focused empirical examinations of a particular religious culture, or wide-ranging phenomenological studies divorced from any local context. Little scholarship engages with the middle ground of longue durée development in particular phenomena within the same geographic region or ecological niche....
Ships and feet in Scandinavian prehistoric rock art (2017)
Scandinavian rock art was created from the Late Neolithic through the Early Iron Age. The majority of these images were produced in the Bronze Age – a period when postglacial isostatic uplift altered much of the Scandinavian coastline. Although the lexicon of rock art motifs is diverse in Scandinavia, this paper will focus on two key figurative motifs: ships and human feet. It presents results from two different studies. The first is a Scandinavian-wide GIS-based analysis that explores the...
Shipwreck 43 and the formation of the ship graveyard in the central basin at Thonis-Heraclion, Egypt (2013)
Investigations into the submerged port-city of Thonis-Heraclion by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology, under the direction of Franck Goddio, have revealed a complex maritime landscape. Topographic and geoarchaeological research at this site has revealed the shape of the port, the major monumental structures of the city and how it all came to be submerged, as well as the wrecks of sixty-four ancient ships dating from the 8th to the 2nd centuries BC. This paper will investigate a...
Short Reduction Sequences at the First European Peopling: An Example of Expedient Technology? (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early European peopling (about 1.5 Ma) is characterized by a low number of sites and lithic assemblages often consisting of a few hundred pieces. Despite these limitations, it is possible to define the technical behavior of these early Europeans with sufficient accuracy. The reduction sequences are always...
Short-term Neanderthal Occupations and Carnivores in the North-East of Iberian Peninsula (2017)
Short-term human occupations can be developed in very distinct places and be related to very diverse functions. The low number of items left by the human groups in these sites usually generates discrete assemblages, which often adds difficulties to the subsequent archaeological interpretations. In the European Middle Paleolithic, are common short-term human occupations in caves and rock-shelters frequented by carnivores as well (bears, hyenas, large felids, canids and other small carnivores) as...
Shot at Dawn: Memorialising First World War Executions for Cowardice in the Landscape of the UK's National Memorial Arboretum (2016)
The National Memorial Arboretum is the United Kingdom's 'national centre of remembrance', which 'commemorates and celebrates those who have given their lives in the service of their country, all who have served and suffered as a result of conflict, and others who, for specific or appropriate reasons, are commemorated here'. One of the memorials remembers the 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed for cowardice and desertion during the First World War, but subsequently...