United Kingdom of Great Britain and Nort (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
901-925 (1,331 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pitchstone is a glassy volcanic rock similar to obsidian but in Europe, its geological occurrence and its use as a raw material for prehistoric chipped-stone assemblages are much more restricted. In northern Britain where good quality flint is scarce, pitchstone circulated widely in the Neolithic with artifacts made from this...
Place, Practice, and Pathology: Dental pathology in Medieval Iceland (2017)
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...
Places for Others: Archaeological Perspectives on the Carceral Society (2013)
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, by December 2009 approximately 7.25 million American adults were under some form of correctional supervision – a category that includes probation, parole, jail and prison. This population represented 724 people per 100,000 – or 3.1% of adult US residents. The evolution of our carceral society was neither inevitable nor accidental. This paper explores archaeological perspectives on institutional confinement to question why a leading modern state...
Pleistocene Occupation of the Greek Islands: The Perspective from Crete (2017)
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...
Plus ça Change: Archaeology and Incarceration (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spike Island Male Convict Depot opened in 1847 at the height of the Great Famine in Ireland as part of the colonial government’s response to the rise in ‘criminality’ that accompanied mass starvation. The site has a global reach, not just because it was an embarkation point in the transportation of convicts around...
Plymouth, Devon in 1620 (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Plymouth had grown from a regional trading port into the English western base for exploration and military expeditions. This talk aims to examine how the integration of documentary, archaeological and cartographic evidence can help to show what Plymouth looked like at the time of the visit of the Mayflower & the Speedwell in 1620. Though plans had been made, after the passage of the...
Political and Economic patchworks in Viking Age Iceland (2017)
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...
Political Ecology Materialized in a Medieval Icelandic Landscape (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past ecological and political-economic changes are embedded in the materiality of the landscape, and investigating correlations between such changes can suggest how relationships between ecology and economy were structured and managed within past societies. Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century by wealthy...
Politics and Possibilities in Prehistoric Europe: An Alternative View on Power and Wealth (2024)
This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An overarching idea of *The Dawn of Everything* is that archaeologists should be encouraged to explore the past as a world of possibilities, not the least with regard to social and political organization. Taking up this call, this paper will reexamine two of the main conceptual...
Population Replacement and Radiation and the Decline of the Great Moravian State (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. Great Moravia is credited by historians as the first Slavic state, existing briefly in the ninth and early tenth centuries. Internal disputes, Magyar incursions, conflicts with the Frankish Empire, and climate change events contributed to the decline and demise of the Great Moravian state. Although these events are supported by archaeological...
Populations and Settled Areas for Medieval European Cities (2016)
Data analyzed in the paper, "Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities," by Rudolf Cesaretti, Jose Lobo, Luis M. A. Bettencourt, Scott G. Ortman, and Michael E. Smith, published in PLOS ONE in September, 2016.
A Portable Photogrammetry Rig for the Reliable Creation of High-Quality 3D Artifact Models in the Field (2015)
3D modeling is becoming an increasingly utilized tool in archaeology. Currently, there are three principal ways of obtaining 3D models of objects: laser scanning, white light scanning, and photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is becoming increasingly popular since it is relatively inexpensive, mobile, and requires less equipment that has the possibility of malfunctioning. This poster presents a photogrammetry rig consisting of materials that can be obtained easily in the US. These include a kitchen...
Portuguese Ceramics from Newfoundland, Canada. (2013)
This paper will discuss the presence of Portuguese ceramics found on the island of Newfoundland, Canada. The Newfoundland cod fishery became an important part of European trade networks which expanded across the Atlantic during the early modern period. A multinational seasonal fishery was established on the island in the sixteenth century, with this seasonal presence being augmented by permanent English and French colonies during the seventeenth century. An extensive collection of Portuguese...
Post-Mortem Interactions with Human Remains at the Covesea Caves in NE Scotland (2017)
As liminal places between the above-ground world of daily experience and the underworld, caves form a persistent focus for human engagements with the supernatural. As such they have frequently been used as places for the dead, whether as final resting places or as places of transformation. Late Bronze Age human remains were recovered from the Sculptor’s Cave, on the Moray Firth in North-East Scotland, during the 1920s and 1970s. They suggest the curation and display of human bodies and body...
Post-Mortem Interval and Age-at-Death Estimation through Forensic Proteomics (2018)
The estimation of the post-mortem interval (PMI) and the age-at-death (AAD) are both important aspects of forensic anthropology for which numerous methods have been developed, each with different limitations. As proteins represent biomolecules that carry out a wide range of functions, many of which structural to the tissues undergoing decomposition, and the collection of these (i.e., the proteome) is dynamic not only throughout life, but also post-mortem, proteomic methods have great potential...
Post-Mortem Manipulation, Movement, and Memory in Copper Age Iberia (2017)
Post-mortem manipulation of human remains played a critical role in mortuary practices in Copper Age Iberia (c. 3250-2200 BC). During this period in Spain and Portugal, individuals were buried communally in tholos-type tombs, as well as natural or artificial caves and rock shelters. Evidence from across Iberia suggests that mortuary practices included the manipulation and movement of previously interred bodies, either in order to clear space for new individuals, or to facilitate secondary...
(Poster) Unlocking the data behind the Chora of Metaponto publication series: "on-the-fly" solutions for sharing and archiving an evolving collection (2015)
Archaeological publishing is moving from the traditional model of the print monograph (as the definitive word), to an open and interactive model in which it is expected that primary data and the processes of their collection and interpretation are exposed for the reader to validate, re-use, and reinterpret. Online representation of archaeological data and research, then, must achieve transparency, exposing the relations between field collection and research methods, data objects, metadata, and...
Postmortem Rituals: Skeletal Manipulation of a Late Antiquity Burial in Portugal (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Freixo Archaeology Project was initiated in 2015 to investigate the nature of Roman Imperial occupation in the Iberian Peninsula with an interest in the symbolic and ideological reuse of sacred space. Freixo is located within the Municipality of Redondo in southeastern Portugal, where a sixteenth-century Christian church overlays an ancient Roman...
The Potential for Georeferenced Spatial Data on Coastal Erosion Sites (2017)
Coastal erosion sites contain the same complexity as any other site; however, the sequences are often truncated and the recovery conditions require adaptive approaches. Although these sites are eroding, there is a need for equal rigor in their recording. The coastal erosion site at Swandro, Rousay, Orkney, has been recorded using a variety of georeferenced data sets. This paper examines the potential of micro-analysis of the 3-dimensional coordinate records of artifacts and geo-referenced...
Pots, Pipes & Plantation: Material Culture & Cultural Identity in Early Modern Ireland (2016)
Existing sectarian divides in Northern Ireland are still perceived to originate from the 17th century expansion of British colonial control into Ireland, most resolutely seen in the atrocities of the Northern Irish Conflict, or ‘the Troubles’. However an explosion of urban historical excavations in recent years has illuminated an archaeological record that appears to contradict dominant political powerhouses and rhetoric. Archaeological investigations throughout the former transatlantic port...
Potteries: Ceramics and the 50th Anniversary of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (2016)
Ceramics analysis is central to historical archaeology on both sides of the Atlantic; indeed, the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology [SPMA], which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2016, originally grew out of a group dedicated to the study of post-medieval ceramics in Britain. This poster outlines some key components of SPMA's internationally significant contribution to ceramics analysis in historical archaeology over the last 50 years, as part of the celebration of this significant...
Pottery assemblage data from Roman Britain (2023)
Data analyzed in: Ortman, Scott, Olivia Bulik, Rob Wiseman, José Lobo, Luis Bettencourt and Lisa Lodwick (2023) Transport Costs and Economic Change in Roman Britain. European Journal of Archaeology:1-24 AND Wiseman, Rob, Olivia Bulik, José Lobo, Lisa Lodwick and Scott G. Ortman (2023) The Impact of Transportation on Pottery Industries in Roman Britain. Open Archaeology 9(1).
Poultry in Motion: Chickens and Other Domestic Birds in Post-Medieval Cities (2013)
Chickens, turkeys and other domestic avian taxa were brought to and sold at city markets, kept by city-dwellers for various products and contributed to the general sensory experience of being in a city. Unlike other livestock, poultry were inexpensive and possible to husband successfully within the confined spaces characteristic of city life. Little is known about poultry husbandry in the post-medieval period apart from what can be gleaned from documentary sources and research has been limited...
Powerful Objects: Traditional Beliefs about Neolithic Axes and Knives in Shetland (2017)
In the Shetland islands off the north coast of Scotland there was major exploitation of a lithic source known as riebeckite felsite during the Neolithic period. This source provided the raw material for the majority of stone axes known from the archipelago and also for objects known as Shetland knives. At the source, North Roe, mainland Shetland intrusive dykes of felsite occur in granite. Integrated, multi-scalar survey and excavation by the North Roe Felsite Project has demonstrated that some...
Practical Applications of Underwater Laser Scanning in Maritime Archaeology Compared to Micro-bathymetry Sonar and Photogrammetry (2017)
Advances in multi-beam sonar have produced high density (and in the case of photogrammetry) textured, photo-realistic results of various underwater archaeological sites by rapidly capturing information in areas that are difficult or otherwise inaccessible to diving. In recent years, these technologies have been accompanied by underwater scanning, a method, which offers a step change in resolution, and consequently, significant interpretative potential. However, each method has inherently...