Isle of Man (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
426-450 (1,245 Records)
Seabird fowling has long played an important role in the traditional domestic economy of the Faroe Islands, a small North Atlantic archipelago. Direct evidence for seabird exploitation in the earliest period of Faroese prehistory has been lacking, however. In this paper, I present new archaeofaunal evidence for substantial and sustained seabird exploitation in the Faroe Islands from the 9th through 13th centuries CE. The data suggest that seabirds represented a significant resource in the...
Fragile Narratives: Rewriting Ceramic History (2013)
The production process represents the beginning of the life of material things. In this paper I shall argue that the archaeology of pottery production sites is more than ‘industrial archaeology’ in the traditional sense of the term, but rather the archaeology of industrial production in the widest sense. The evidence derived from ceramic waste recovered from production site excavations informs an understanding of the life cycles of those products which progressed beyond the factory gate to the...
The Fragmentation of Pottery in the Ploughsoil (1987)
Field walking has been traditional activity in Britain since the turn of the century. Given the large numbers of amateur archaeological societies spread countrywide, aside from the annual summer excavation, the major activity of these societies usually in the winter has been to walk areas within their regions fairly regularly if not systematically. It is normal, for example, to have special areas where sites are known and rewards will be commensurately high. Such sites therefore become...
Fragmented Bodies: Early Bronze Age Cremation Burials in Kilmagadwood, Scotland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a clear dichotomy between the practice of inhumation and the rite of cremation. From an anthropological perspective, a community’s preference for one or another reflects changes in its beliefs system. Conceivably, this occurred during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age when cremation became dominant. The symbolism that accompanies the...
From bad habits to good manners: developing bourgeois lifestyles in late 19th century Bogota (2013)
In Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, the results of archaeoological work and documentary sources, especially those relating to cadastral history, place the so called "House of the Typographer" as an example of the heterogeneity of dissimilar economic conditions of each historical time and of each individual families. By examining in detail these results it is possible to find changes in the conception of what might be seen as a desirable lifestyle as it is reproduced in close...
From Brixton to Paisley Park: Tribute shrines to rock legends in the UK and USA (2018)
On 10th January 2016, many people flocked to Brixton, London to leave tributes in front of a mural depicting Aladdin Sane, a character developed by the musician David Bowie, who had died that day. The same acts of pilgrimage were seen in April 2016 when ‘Prince’ Rogers Nelson died at his private estate in Minnesota; fans laid flowers and tied purple balloons to perimeter fencing. Such practices of public grieving can tell us a good deal about attitudes to death, commemoration and celebrity. In...
From Empire States to Country Estates – The Story of the Fallow Deer’s Global Conquest 6k BP to Present (2017)
It took millennia, but the European fallow deer (Dama dama) a beautiful cervid species native to the eastern Mediterranean has gradually been transported around the world - its modern distribution ranging from New Zealand to the Caribbean. The translocation of fallow deer was accompanied by a remarkably consistent culture of hunting and emparkment that altered landscape and environment. Using a combination of (zoo)archaeology, isotope analysis and genetic research to reconstruct the timing and...
From Goddesses to Zoomorphs: Figuring Out Figurines at Çatalhöyük (2017)
The infamous seated goddess, flanked by two leopards, is perhaps the most sensationalized figurine to have been unearthed at Çatalhöyük, prompting narratives of prehistoric cults and religion. Yet research conducted since its discovery by James Mellaart has shown that zoomorphic, rather than anthropomorphic, types are predominant in the figurine assemblage. In this paper, I trace the history of changing recording systems, analytical methodologies, and interpretations of figurines at Çatalhöyük....
From Individual to Collective Burial in the Mesolithic of Iberia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from individual to collective burial underscores implicit, but poorly understood, changes in social organization within the Mesolithic and between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. Mosaic in character, this transition is well marked in Cantabria and Portugal, less so in other regions of Iberia. Mortuary...
From Liburnian to Ottoman: Unraveling Settlement History at Nadin-Gradina, Croatia (2017)
Ancient cityscapes with long occupational histories have great potential for reconstructing changes in social structure, spatial planning, political governance, identity, economy, environment, and climate. Recovering such information, however, poses many challenges, both human and financial. Archaeological deposits are often deeply buried and palimpsestic, representing a complex mixture of processes including collapse, partial abandonment, repurposing, and reoccupation. Yet, anthropological...
From Life History to Large Scale: Osteobiography as Microhistory (2017)
Osteobiography, like other types of biographies, extends beyond the individual through entanglements with objects, landscapes, and social phenomena. The approach requires a multi-scalar analysis to understand how bodies both emerge from and create historical process. Osteobiographies are developed by tacking between an individual’s remains and the wider skeletal population to establish a contextualized life history. Conceptualizing osteobiography as a microhistory of human remains is one way in...
From Medieval Wool Tunics to Bone Powder: Rapid Degradation of Norse Middens in Southwest Greenland (2018)
This presentation is one of the products of a series of ongoing inter-connected, international, interdisciplinary fieldwork projects coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative since 2005 in Greenland. The projects drew upon more than a century of prior field research, where four generations of archaeologists described and assessed organic preservation conditions at their sites in several regions of the Norse Eastern Settlement. This created a unique...
From North America to Europe: Preliminary Biomolecular results Regarding the Transatlantic History of the Turkey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While there is a growing body of studies on turkey domestication and use in North America, many questions remain unanswered regarding its introduction to Europe and its subsequent breeding. Which populations of turkeys were imported in Europe and when? How fast did they...
From personal accounts to bureaucratic standards: administration reform in nineteenth century asylums (2013)
Utilising methods drawn from history, archaeology and codicology, this paper will consider the changes and challenges brought about by standardisation of administrative paperwork in public asylums in the nineteenth century. This is drawn from current PhD research based on asylum planning, management and administration in the British Isles.
From Pests to Pets: social and cultural perceptions of animals in post-medieval urban centres (2013)
Cats, dogs, pigs and other animals lived in close proximity to people in post-medieval cities and were probably viewed in terms of their respective functions. For example, cats were kept to deter rodents and exploited for their fur, dogs were protectors of the home and pigs were not only food, but helped to reduce the amount of rubbish where they were kept. However, perceptions and treatment of urban animals were far from static. The emergent animal welfare movement and legislation heralded a...
From Pioneers to Seasoned Professionals: 50 years of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (2016)
2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology. The society is marking this achievement in a number of ways, including a major conference at Sheffield and a special issue of the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology. This poster reveals some of the features of the Society’s history, allowing comparisons and contrasts with the experiences of the SHA. From a side-line interest of museum professionals and amateurs, post-medieval archaeology has grown and...
From Present-Day Fields to Ancient Samples…and Back Again: Strategies for Establishing Principles of Interpretation in Plant Stable Isotope Work (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plant stable isotope analysis presents a series of ‘middle range’ challenges for archaeologists, but also unique opportunities for reconstructing ancient agroecologies. Here we focus on the potential and limitations of modern crop studies for informing interpretation of archaeobotanical cereal and pulse...
From Stone to Screen: Squeezing into the World of Digital Archaeology (2015)
As the field of Digital Archaeology becomes increasingly prevalent, large-scale projects tend to dominate both thinking about and approaches towards the digital landscape. Scholars and students with smaller budgets and resources are often at a disadvantage; we believe renewed energy should be devoted to exploring the value and integrity of small-scale projects. This poster presents From Stone to Screen, a multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and open-access digitization project launched in 2012...
From the Aegean to the Adriatic: Exploring the Neolithization of Islands (2016)
Frameworks for understanding Neolithization have increasingly recognized the complex and multifaceted nature of the spread of domesticates from Southwest Asia into Europe. But how do these factors interplay in unique island settings as compared to the continental scale? This paper takes a comparative approach using sites located on islands from the Aegean and the Adriatic to address changing subsistence and herd management between 10,000-7,000 BP. Based on zooarchaeological and biogeochemical...
From the green belt: an appraisal on the circulation of western Iberian variscite (2017)
The Western half of the Iberian Peninsula plays a significant role for understanding the production and circulation of "green stone objects" (mainly variscite adornments, but also some jadeite axe heads) during the Neolithic and Copper Age of Western Europe. This importance lies in the presence in the area of two out of the three prehistoric variscite mines in Europe. Through an extensive review of the variscite adornments found in the archaeological contexts of Western Iberia, we will try to...
From the Lab to the Cave and Back: 3D Modeling Finger Flutings (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Finger flutings are lines and markings drawn with the human hand in soft sediments in caves and rock shelters throughout southern Australia, New Guinea, and southwestern Europe that date back to the Late Pleistocene. Over the last two decades, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder developed a method to determine characteristics of the creators, such as age, sex...
From the Mousterian to the Bronze Age: The El Miron Cave Project (Cantabria, Spain), 1996-2018 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Miron Cave has a long, rich cultural sequence dated by 92 radiocarbon assays >46,000-c.500 BP. This large, strategically located site contains traces of Mousterian, Gravettian, Azilian, Mesolithic and historic uses and evidence of more significant occupations of diverse duration, intensity and function throughout the Solutrean, Magdalenian, Neolithic,...
From Trench to Tablet: Field Recording, Interpreting, and Publishing in the Age of Digital Archaeology (2017)
Since the arrival of robust mobile tablet devices in 2010, archaeological documentation has increasingly become born-digital. The adoption of digital tools and practices has not gone unnoticed, with reactions ranging from enthusiastic acceptance to outright skepticism. Significantly, scholars are beginning to offer more critical and reflexive views of the issues surrounding the use of mobile devices in archaeological fieldwork, interpretation, and dissemination. The ability to disseminate...
From Trinkets to Privileged Artifacts: The Transition in our Understanding of Paleolithic Personal Ornaments (2019)
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. Among Paleolithic archaeologist, there is general consensus that body adornments are important for exploring the origins of cognitive, artistic and symbolic behavior from an evolutionary perspective. This view contrasts with how Palaeolithic ornaments were perceived during most of the twentieth century when they were...
From Vienna to Shangri-La: competing visions of the modern and new in Birmingham’s municipal housing (2018)
During the 1920s and 1930s local authorities from across Britain visited municipal housing schemes in continental Europe to learn more about the provision of new homes. This included representatives from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, in the midst of replacing crowded urban dwellings. The Birmingham Corporation was particularly impressed by inner-city estates in Hamburg, Vienna and Prague, illustrating their recommendations with photographs of flowerbeds, communal facilities and...