West Bank (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
851-875 (1,026 Records)
In 1803, Denmark and Norway abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took effect on 1st January 1803. However, this did not end slavery itself in Africa. Intensification of cash-crop agriculture on the West African coast by the Danish colonists provoked an upsurge in the local slave trade. As the Danish plantation economy solidified, increasing numbers of enslaved people were engaged to labour in these plantations in Ghana. The research examines the documentary and the archaeological data...
The sling in medieval Europe (2006)
J. Whittaker: History, accounts of accuracy, good refs.
Small Carnivore Use in the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic of Kephalari Cave (Peloponnese, Greece): Opportunistic or Optimal? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Pleistocene of southern Greece adheres to many predictions set forth by human behavioral ecology concerning the use of small game in the face of demographic growth, ecological change, and advancements in procurement technologies. In Peloponnese, an increase in small, fast game use...
Social and Spiritual Landscapes in Ancient Mesopotamia (2017)
Ethnobiologists have demonstrated that shared human cognitive processes generate cross-cultural regularities in how people categorize the natural world. The human ability to recognize taxa means that plant and animal classification is not totally arbitrary. In addition, ancient people would have had place-specific knowledge of the particular plants and animals living in the territories they frequented. Representations of plants and animals in relation to each other in a landscape therefore...
Social Interaction at Distance Over the Long Term: Obsidian Sourcing from the Southern Levant (9th – 4th millennia cal BC) (2017)
The McMaster Archaeological XRF Lab is dedicated to undertaking major regional obsidian sourcing studies, not least in the Eastern Mediterranean where we have the North American geological source sample collection. We take a holistic, integrated approach, melding chemical composition with the artefacts’ techno-typological characteristics, contextual information and other pertinent data to produce ‘thick description’ narratives. In this case we consider obsidian circulation and consumption...
Social Reactors Project datasets
Datasets from various publications of the Social Reactors Project
Social Spaces of Central Italy and the San Giuliano Archaeological Research Project (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Every space humans inhabit tells a story about the cultural values, social norms, and lives of those who utilized the space. This paper focuses on the archaeological remains of a medieval fortification and presumed castle located in Barbarano Romano, Italy, atop the...
Society Against the State in Prehistoric Cyprus? Exploring the Politics of Village Life (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite decades of critique, the study of early state formation remains bound up with an evolutionist narrative that situates the state as the natural endpoint of sociopolitical development. It is clear, however, that alternative political projects and trajectories were not only possible but common in the human past. Particular attention has been drawn to...
Socio-Economic Class Status and Health on the Roman Danube: Skeletal Indicators and Mortuary Treatment at Late Antique Viminacium (2018)
Cross-culturally and through time, anthropologists have found that--within hierarchical societies--elites tend to manage resources and allocate risk primarily to their own benefit. There is little reason to believe that Late Roman Imperial frontier elites would have behaved any differently. This paper examines the archaeological relationship between biological 'stress' or health--as inferred from skeletal remains--and socio-economic status / class--as evaluated on the basis of mortuary...
Soil Micromorphology Analysis of Area D at Manot Cave, Israel:insights into site formation processes. (2017)
Manot Cave, discovered in 2008 in Western Galilee (Israel), represents one of the richest Upper Palaeolithic assemblages in the Levant. The site has produced a ca. 55,000 year old anatomically modern human calvarium, as well as Middle Paleolithic to Post-Aurignacian lithic and bone artefacts. The deepest stratigraphic sequence is found in Area D, located halfway down the steep talus. This area shows continuous stratification from dolomite bedrock to an early sterile colluvium, an archaeological...
Sometimes at the Crossroads: Preliminary Results from New Fieldwork on the Southeast Ararat Plain of Armenia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ararat Plain, part of the upper Araxes River valley system in the South Caucasus mountains, represents the largest expanse of arable land in Armenia today. At the southeastern edge of this plain, the Vedi River valley, a tributary to the Araxes, connects the agricultural zones of the plain with the resource-rich mountains and Lake Sevan to the east. The...
Sources and Distribution of Palmarola Obsidian in the Central Mediterranean during the Neolithic (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tiny island of Palmarola, about 35 km south of Cape Circeo (between Rome and Naples, Italy), was an important source of obsidian during the Neolithic in the Central Mediterranean. While thought to have been a minor source, compared to Lipari and Sardinia, extensive artifact analyses in recent years of museum and other collections show that Palmarola...
Sourcing Building Stones in the Ancient Mediterranean: A Review of 25 Years of Provenance Research at the Wiener Laboratory (2018)
From its very inception, the Wiener Laboratory at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens has fostered and supported the integration of geological techniques and methodologies into archaeological research programs in the eastern Mediterranean Basin. One such area of focus includes provenance studies of rocks used in architectural and sculptural programs spanning from the prehistoric to Late Antiquity. By tracing the source quarries of ancient artifacts and features, archaeologists...
Sourcing Lithic Raw Materials in the Namib Desert: Exploring land use and technological organization (2017)
Under a technological organization perspective, archaeologists seek to understand how prehistoric societies organized their activities across landscapes and how variation at individual sites articulates with changes in large scale land use systems. Lithic sourcing offers a powerful tool for testing hypotheses about technological organization and land use, but its application across the globe has, until recently, been hindered by expense and methodological difficulties. In this paper, we use pXRF...
Space and Scale in Reconstructions of the Social Organization of Craft Production (2017)
Archaeologists often speak of production in spatial terms, contrasting nucleated and dispersed forms of crafting. However, the importance of the scale of spatial patterning in production activities (as opposed to "scale" in reference to quantitative output) has yet to be fully explored. It is impossible to relate the spatial distribution of crafting activities to a particular social organization of production without considering spatial scale. An examination of spatial distributions at multiple...
A Space for Living and Dying: The Life-History of Kharaneh IV Structures (2019)
This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The built environment delineates space for daily actions and important moments. Separating the occupants from the external world, walls can create barriers between the outside or can build communities within them. Recent excavations of two structures at Kharaneh IV, an Epipalaeolithic site in Eastern...
The Spatial Distribution of Late Eighteenth Dynasty Tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Valley of the Kings was the royal necropolis of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt. The types of tombs found in the Valley include the larger royal tombs, small-chambered tombs, and pit tombs. It is suggested that the location of the small-chambered tombs in the Valley followed the tradition set forth during the Old and Middle Kingdoms when smaller tombs...
A Specialized City: Fatimid-Era Agriculture at Ashkelon (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient city of Ashkelon was a major economic port in the Near East during the Early Islamic period (ca. 636–1200 CE). Located on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Israel, it was a cosmopolitan city, an administrative center, and a stronghold in the coastal...
Spinning through Time: Comparing Spindle Whorl Assemblages from the Southern Levant (2018)
Spindle whorls, a flywheel attached to a shaft used for the production of thread, are one of the only artifacts related to the textile industry which survives in the archaeological record. At the crossroads between Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the southern Levant is at the intersection of cultural and technological change, particularly throughout the chronological scope of my study: the Pottery Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze I periods. There has yet to be a comprehensive study of...
The spread of iron metallurgy: the African continent (2017)
Theories of the origin(s) of iron production and the spread of ferrous technology have provoked many decades of lively and enduring debate. The notion that iron production developed in one core location – from where knowledge of it spread – has been challenged by claims of early, independent inventions of iron production in Africa, India and China. However, it has proved problematic to verify the timing and contexts of these multi-origin hypotheses without placing undue emphasis on isolated...
Stable Isotope Analysis Applied to the Reconstruction of Paleoenvironment and Landscape Use during the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic at Üçağızlı I and II, South-Central Turkey (2018)
Stable isotope analysis of δ13C and δ18O in herbivore tooth enamel from the archaeological sites of Üçağızlı I and II in south-central Turkey is used to explore human responses to environmental change during MIS 3 in the eastern Mediterranean. Although changes through time in local ambient moisture are associated with changes in the local animal communities, they generally do not correlate with proxies for site occupation intensity, and thus do not indicate depopulation or shorter site stays...
Standards for the presentation of field data (2007)
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...
Starch Remains from Human Teeth Reveal the Bronze and Early Iron Ages Vegetal Diet of Xinjiang, Northwest China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has long been a vital link between Europe and eastern Asia. In the past, understanding prehistoric diets in Xinjiang was based mainly on carbonized plant remains unearthed from archaeological sites and isotopic analyses of excavated human bones. Here, we report on our analysis of human dental residues preserved on...
Statistical Evidence For a New Method of Identifying Anthropogenic Fire in the Archaeological Record (2017)
Clarifying evidence for anthropogenic fire in the archaeological record has been subject to contention and vagueness. This uncertainty centers not on evidence for fire, rather what constitutes it being human-controlled. New research pursuing this question suggests that a peculiar angular fragment, termed thermal curved-fractures (TCF), are the byproduct of knapped materials (flakes, cores, bifaces) exposed at length to high heat. We present here results of experiments expanding our...
The Stone Bridge: Obsidian Circulation and the Friction of Persistent Frontiers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Jose Saramago’s classic "The Stone Raft", the Iberian peninsula breaks free from Europe to float unmoored into the Atlantic, etching into continental geology what David Anthony has termed a "persistent frontier": a fault line demarcating durable cultural, ethnic, and...