Faroe Islands (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (885 Records)
An overview of project design and preliminary results from two field seasons of research aimed at expanding our understanding of settlement in later medieval Ireland. The field school program run by Foothill College at Ballintober Castle in Co. Roscommon has made remarkable progress 1) identifying possible phases of Anglo-Norman and subsequent Gaelic Irish castle construction and occupation, 2) utilizing different geophysical techniques to find a Deserted Village associated with the castle,...
The Castles in Communities Model: An Integrative Approach to a Field School, Research Project and Community Collaborative in Ireland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Castles in Communities: Medieval Ireland Past to Present (CIC) is a multi-year project in Ballintober, County Roscommon, Ireland, with a trifold identity of an archaeological and anthropological field school, a research project focused on medieval Ireland, and a community collaborative focused on heritage preservation and celebration. The underlying premise of...
Castles in Communities: Recent Findings in the Field (2018)
The archaeological and anthropological field school Castles in Communities, organized by Foothill College, completed its third field season this past summer at the site of Ballintober Castle, County Roscommon, Ireland. The construction of Ballintober Castle (early 14th century) is attributed to the Anglo-Norman Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster. Shortly after its Anglo-Norman occupation, the castle came under Irish control (1381) and has been the property of the O’Conor family ever since. After...
Castles of Conquest or Factionalism and the Creation of Political Landscapes (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. Castles play a significant role in the creation of a social and political landscape. The placement and proximity of castles to each other and to other places in the landscape can be markedly different depending on the political circumstances of their creation. The castles of Germany’s Altmühltal...
Celtic Crosses and Quetzal Masks: On the (Re)production of the Archaeological Record (2017)
In an era of globalization and mass production, archaeological objects and images are not immune to being transformed into commodities and sold for profit. This (re)production of the past can profoundly influence the ways that consumers understand the history of particular times and places—often erasing the experiences of marginality and resilience that archaeologists work so hard to recover. This paper examines two distinct cases in which historical images (and periods) are being transformed...
A Census of Women in the Upper Paleolithic (2017)
Binary models of gender are often uncritically applied in paleoanthropology, even if the biological sex or gender identity of a specimen or representation is ambiguous. In the Upper Paleolithic, indicators ranging from simple bifurcating lines to overt representations of secondary sex characteristics may be used to identify an illustration, engraving, or piece of portable art as "male" or "female." These taxonomic rubrics are rarely stated explicitly. Still, the impression given by an overview...
Centuries of warrior boat graves - the Valsgärde burial ground (2017)
The Valsgärde burial ground is one of key sites for the Viking phenomenon project. This burial site was used for more than 1000 years. It is the best preserved and the only "entirely" excavated boat grave site in Sweden. Here we can follow the changing burial rites and interactions with the world during the 1st Millennia AD. Valsgärde has been seen as a place where an unbroken series of male elite individuals were buried for nearly eight centuries. However, detailed studies of all burials, both...
Ceramics production and trade in Western Anatolia: A reexamination of the ceramic mould-making process at Seyitömer Höyük in Kütahya, Turkey (2017)
During the Early Bronze Age at Seyitömer Höyük, ceramics began to be standardized in their shape and size through the use of a mould-making process. Evidence from the archaeological record suggests that this innovative technique was incorporated at the site due to the increase in trade and demand for ceramics from other settlements in Anatolia, from nearby Küllüoba to faraway Troy. The early use of a mould-making process established Seyitömer Höyük’s pivotal role as a ceramic hub and trading...
Ceramics provenience: chemical analysis of ceramics and clays in Eastern Hungary via LA-ICP-MS (2017)
This project explores the provenience of ceramics found at the Bronze Age Békés 103 cemetery. By answering the question of where these ceramics came from, it is possible to hypothesize which Bronze Age communities used the cemetery. To do this, clays were collected throughout Eastern Hungary for chemical analysis. Clay is often found along river banks, but many modern rivers may have been polluted. Instead, paleo-meanders of modern rivers were chosen as collection sites; these were identified...
Cetacean Exploitation in the Medieval London (2017)
Zooarchaeology aims to reconstruct the relationship between humans and animals based on the bone remains of these animals. However the field is often primarily concerned with (domesticated) terrestrial mammals, frequently neglecting cetaceans. This can be ascribed to the fact that zooarchaeological cetacean remains are often too fragmented for identification and a general lack of extensive cetacean reference collections for comparison, resulting in poor understanding of early human-cetacean...
Changes to the Western Eurasian Hominin Climate Niche (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The climate niches that early modern humans and our earlier hominin ancestors inhabited have undergone major changes over time. This study documents climate niche expansions, contractions, and stationarity across four time periods (Last Interglacial, Last Glacial Maximum, Mid-Holocene, and 1950¬–2000) in western Eurasia. Using spatially gridded global...
Changing Social Spatiality in Mounded Funerary Landscapes (2017)
Funerary landscapes, as places where all fractions of society meet to honour the rituals of social and identity-building importance, can be used to attain an insight into group-specific attitudes towards spatiality. These attitudes allowed for people's engagement with various elements of their environment as a means of deliberate creation of lasting ritual landscapes. However, social spatiality in funerary contexts is not static, but subject to changes in the group's perception of both their...
Changing the Picture – 1000 Hectare High Resolution Magnetometry on the Protected Zone of a World Heritage Site at Avebury, UK (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Monumental Surveys: New Insights from Landscape-Scale Geophysics" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Avebury and Stonehenge, two iconic prehistoric sites in the heart of England, both listed on UNESCO’s list of world heritage have undergone intensive research during the past century. Nevertheless, evolving technologies open access to new data on a landscape scale, thus adding more and surprising information helping to...
Characterizing Ephemeral Paleolithic Occupations at Arma Veirana (Liguria, Italy) (2017)
This paper presents a description of recently studied assemblages from Middle and Upper Paleolithic levels at the site of Arma Veirana, a large cave located in the mountainous hinterland of Liguria. While one Mousterian level shows an intense occupation, all other levels indicate rather short-lived, low intensity occupations. Beyond technological and typological analyses of these assemblages undertaken to characterize them, we also report preliminary data on raw material procurement patterns...
Chert vs quartzite edge reduction using a mechanical device and its relevance to lithic raw material variability, selection and use (2017)
Lithic raw materials diversity in archaeological assemblages is used to address a multiplicity of fundamental questions concerning the evolution of human behavior. Technological systems are considered to be the result of conscious human choices, likely related to different types of rocks characteristics, performance and effectiveness. To test this model, we developed an experimental program using hand-knapped standardized blades on quartzite and chert in an upgraded version of a mechanical...
Child Disability and Prostheses in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2018)
Introduction of dedicated paediatric medicine, was an advancement arriving in Britain late compared to its neighbours such as France’s ‘Enfant Malades’ in 1802. Paediatric hospitals were a consequence of physicians' financial aspirations rather than falsely portrayed ‘community need’ (Lomax, 1998). Their establishment contradicted longstanding attitudes surrounding children as ‘incomplete beings…whom it was wasteful to devote attention to’ (Porter, 1989). Oddly, amputation saw children harness...
The Chronological and Liturgical Context of Charnel Practice in Medieval England: Manipulations of the Skeletonized Body at Rothwell Charnel Chapel, Northamptonshire (2017)
The rare survival of a charnel chapel and the commingled remains of more than 2,500 individuals it houses at Holy Trinity Church, Rothwell, England provides a unique opportunity to investigate the postmortem manipulation of human remains in the medieval period. The apparent paucity of charnel chapel sites in England has led to the dismissal of charnelling as a marginal practice with little liturgical significance, a pragmatic solution to the need for storage of disturbed bones. Yet the evidence...
Chronology and Social Process in Bronze Age Spain (2017)
This research presents an evaluation of the use of morphometrics of ceramic vessels for organizing site chronologies and social interaction. The object of morphometric analysis is to study how changes in artifact shape covary with time and space. This particular method is tested against Bronze Age ceramics from the Valencian region in Spain along the Western Mediterranean. The characteristic stylistic homogeneity of these ceramics has proven especially resistant to chronological fine-tuning...
Circles and Circuits: A Computational Social Science Approach to Neolithic Circular Enclosures (2017)
Through the combination of Social Network Analysis (SNA), Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this paper will examine the relationship between physical and social networks in the Middle Neolithic of Central Europe. This Computational Social Science approach will provide insight into social aspects of the archaeological phenomenon of circular enclosures.
Circum-Atlantic Responses to the Late Antique Little Ice Age (536-660 CE) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of North Atlantic cultures around the margins of the Bermuda Azores Subtropical High offer opportunities to observe parallel impacts on cultures on both sides of an ocean on four continents (Americas, Eurasia, Africa) as changes in global average temperatures influence the size and position of the High. Of special interest is the influence of the...
CITiZAN’s Digital Toolkit: Citizen Scientists Recording England’s At-Risk Coastal Archaeology (2018)
England’s coastal and intertidal archaeology is increasingly at risk from winds, waves, rising sea levels and winter storms exacerbated by climate change and can be revealed suddenly and disappear just as suddenly. However there is no statutorily informed intervention for this heritage outside of the national planning framework for this at-risk archaeology and so no infrastructure in place to systematically record these freshly exposed sites before the next storm potentially washes them away....
Citizen Science and Palaeolithic Art: Investigating the Visual Psychological Background to 15,800-year-old Engravings Online (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present findings from our Citizen Science-focused project that combines Pleistocene Archaeology, traceology, and visual psychology experimentation to offer new perspectives on Ice Age art. Our project visually explores the content and wider context of the 15,800-year-old German Gönnersdorf/Andernach Upper Palaeolithic engraved plaquettes (portable...
Climate and Heritage in the Arctic: Environmental Monitoring and a New European Standard (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To respond to climate change impacts as well as other societal and environmental impacts to archaeological preservation, Norway has been applying environmental monitoring of archaeological deposits and sites since the 1990s. To standardize monitoring methods, tools, and evaluations, a Norwegian Standard was implemented in...
Climate Change, Capacity-Building and Local Engagement: Report on the 2018 Arctic Viking Field School, Vatnahverfi, South Greenland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Eastern Arctic is currently observed to be undergoing significant environmental change as a direct consequence of global warming. For archaeologists working in Greenland, this means the rapid and complete loss of cultural remains due to changing soil conditions. As annual...
Climate Teleconnections Synchronize Human Population Dynamics (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate variability can significantly constrain the population dynamics of ancient agrarian societies, although its direct influence is often mediated by a complex interplay of social, ecological, and technological factors. Untangling these relationships in the archaeological record is challenging due to...