Ireland (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
751-775 (1,101 Records)
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...
Pervasive Landscapes of Inequality: Want and Abundance within a Hyperobject (2018)
As globalization matures, environmental, social, and economic factors continue to create ever-expanding landscapes of inequality. Among these drivers, human-driven environmental degradation has, for centuries, operated as a significant producer of inequality. Anthropogenic climate change today perpetuates and strengthens these multi-generational, regional-scale phenomena of landscape change. These processes, such as sediment erosion in Iceland during the past millennium, create a ‘second nature’...
Petrographic and Chemical Analysis of Grinding Stones Collected in Shkodra, Albania (2017)
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...
Phenotypic Perspectives on Biological Variation at Phaleron (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Phaleron is an important site in the history of ancient Athens and preserves a unique record of life in the past. One of the more compelling aspects of the site is the range of mortuary treatments documented there, including multiple groupings of non-normative burials, a series of co-interments...
Physical Effects of Social Status in Early Medieval Thuringia: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Health and Disease among Individuals from the Merovingian Cemetery of Großvargula, Germany (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Merovingian society (450–751 CE) was strongly stratified with differences in social standing being written in law and affecting many aspects of life, such as occupation and access to material, nutritional, and medical resources. How did these status differences become embodied in Early Medieval Thuringia? This study explores the cumulative effect of...
“Picking at the Scabs of Ancient Wounds”: The Derry Excavations Collection (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “Derry Excavations Collection” (DEC) is a legacy collection recovered during a series of late 1970s salvage excavations conducted by archaeologist Brian Lacey in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland. This project focuses on a subset of artifacts associated with a seventeenth-century “town ditch”...
Picturing the Written, Read, and Spoken Prayers to Zell: Devotional Therapeutics for (In)Fertility and Motherhood at Mariazell (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Motherhood" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mountains of the Austrian province of Styria, the Catholic pilgrimage shrine of Mariazell claimed many healing miracles during the later Middle Ages (ca. 1200–1550). Notably, many of these miracles address ailments of fertility and parenthood, including infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant death. Early sixteenth century visual culture of...
Pilgrimage Centers as Persistent Places: Spiritual Magnetism, Affects, and Atmospheres (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pilgrimage centers and shrines are persistent places due in large part to spiritual magnetism, defined as the power of a place of pilgrimage to attract devotees. Most scholars, following James Prestons’ original treatment of the term, believe spiritual magnetism comes from and is conferred by humans based on cultural,...
Pilgrims and Pebbles: The Taskscape of Veneration on Inishark, Co. Galway (2017)
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...
Pirates and Prostitutes - Seeking the invisible: Identifying the cultural footprint for illicit activity in early 17th-century Ireland (2013)
The North Atlantic headquarters of the ‘Confederacy of Deep-Sea Pirates’ was located along the southwest coast of Ireland. Here pirates lived and traded with native Irish, government officials and English settlers under the Munster Plantation. Many of the pirates’ families lived locally and ran legitimate businesses ashore. Prostitutes also operated within this remote landscape where the lines between legal and illicit were constantly blurred. Contemporary historical documents inform on these...
Pirates, Pepper and Prostitutes – illicit trade in goods and pleasure in 17th-century West Cork. (2016)
The southern coast of Ireland in the early-17th century enjoyed a booming trade in exotic goods like pepper, cinnamon and other spices. This was underscored by an even brisker trade in pleasures of the flesh where the women in the pirates’ lives ran successful businesses of their own, providing safe houses, taverns, inns and brothels that tapped into the business of plunder. This was a time and place when illicit activity was the norm, when ships bringing plundered goods operated openly and...
Pit Technology in the Iron Age (1988)
Article for Popular Archaeology on Iron Age pit technology: types, interpretation, and excavation.
Pitchstone in Prehistory: New Insights into the Mesolithic and Neolithic use of Pitchstone in Scotland (2019)
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...
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...
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...
Population, area, and infrastructural measures for Roman cities of the Imperial period (2019)
Data analyzed in: Hanson, John W., Scott G. Ortman, Luis M. A. Bettencourt, and Liam C. Mazur (2019). Urban form, infrastructure, and spatial organization in the Roman Empire. Antiquity 93(368).
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...
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...