Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
401-425 (761 Records)
This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the generosity of Dr. Bradley Parker I had the opportunity to analyse the Ubaid Period burials from Kenan Tepe, Turkey. These burials provide a glimpse into the social dynamics and ritual practice of Kenan Tepe’s Ubaid Period community. The burials are divided into two groups: infants buried in courtyards...
Living with the Dead: Plastered Skulls and ‘Continuing Bonds’ (2017)
This paper considers the phenomenon of plastered skulls from the Neolithic of the Middle East, exploring a re-interpretation of evidence. Plastered skulls result from the burial and later retrieval of crania, onto which is sculpted a face using plaster. These were then used and displayed within household contexts. Rather than traditional interpretations which revolve around status and hierarchy or social cohesion, this paper suggests a reinterpretation based on the modern bereavement theory of...
Local Organization in Imperial Settings: Evidence from Late Antique and Middle Islamic Dhiban, Jordan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the many intellectual legacies of Richard Redding’s work is his exploration of how local communities made provisioning decisions to meet both their own local needs and demands by political authorities. This paper examines these themes among inhabitants of ancient Dhiban, Jordan during the Late...
Localizing the Imperial Grain Economy in Mamluk Syria: Expressions of Village-Level Initiatives in 14th-Century Transjordan (2017)
How did the medieval Islamic state realize its objectives in natural resource management? How can we distinguish the "hand of the state" from that of local initiatives in land use? This paper is an attempt to evaluate planting and watering strategies, differentiating imperial agro-policies from local practice at the village level. The focus is the intensification and diversification of grain production in 14th century Syria. Grain fields were the most valuable of the agrarian iqṭaʿāt (grants of...
The Location for the Origin of Domesticated Sorghum in Africa: A Brief Review of Some Cultures in the Sahara, Nile, and Sahel (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses have established the location for the origin of domesticated sorghum occurring in the far eastern Sahel of Sudan during the fourth millennium BC associated with the Late Neolithic Butana Group. For over a half century, sorghum domestication has been hypothesized as occurring somewhere in the Sahelian...
Long-Term Climate Change: A Case Study on Climate Records from the Middle East in Relation to the Neo-Assyrian Empire Agriculture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neo-Assyrian Empire as one of the major empires in the Ancient Near East emerged soon after late Bronze Age collapses. It ruled Mesopotamia from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to western parts of Iran and to Persian Gulf during the first millennium B.C. in a cold period in theHolocene Epoch. For my thesis, I am focusing on their plant cultivation,...
Longevity and authority in a mobile world the megasites of the Ugandan grasslands (2017)
Much of the recent past of Great Lakes Africa is characterised by short-lived settlements and mobile societies, that produced ephemeral occupation sites. In part because of this, attention has long been drawn to sites like Bigo and Ntuusi which seem to offer much more substantive archaeological remains. Yet, notwithstanding the longevity of the latter and the extent of both, this is clearly not a simple occupation site featuring a large population. Rather it is much more effective to understand...
Macroscopic Comparative Studies of Archaeological Data: Spatiotemporal Variability in Lithic Technology of Paleolithic Asia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comparative studies using archaeological data on a broad spatiotemporal scale can provide an overview for investigating significant questions in human history and can promote discussions among scholars from different disciplines. This talk will present the results of a quantitative analysis of lithic technologies from the...
Mai Adrasha and Its Neighbors (2017)
A team from UCLA in cooperation with the Tigrai Culture and Tourism Agency and the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage of Ethiopia has completed two excavation seasons at the site of Mai Adrasha located about 70 kilometers west of the ancient capital of Aksum. With the information gathered in these excavations, we can now begin to compare Mai Adrasha to neighboring sites and place it within its regional framework. Radiocarbon dates from the first season of excavation...
The Making of Agro-pastoral Landscape of the Tibetan Plateau: A Zooarchaeological Perspective (2018)
The vertical ingredient of the Tibetan Plateau plays a unique role in making of the highland agro-pastoral landscape. We divide the Tibetan Plateau into three eco-altitudinal zones: areas below 3,000 m.a.s.l.; areas between 3,000 and 4,200 m.a.s.l.; and areas above 4,200 m.a.s.l. Today, pastoralists and farmers utilize different faunal and floral taxa in the three zones, partly as risk aversion strategies. In this paper, I review the zooarchaeological evidence dated between 6,000 and 1,000 BP...
Malaria in the African Indian Ocean Islands: Prospects and Challenges for Biomolecular Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Malaria remains one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting human populations, with over 200 million cases and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide, most of which focused on the mainlands of sub-Saharan Africa. While malaria is an “old” disease on the mainland dating back tens of thousands of years, its history on...
Man does not go naked: Textilien und Handwerk aus afrikanischen und anderen Ländern; Festschrift für Renée Boser-Sarivaxévanis (1989)
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...
Manot 1 brain characteristics (2017)
Manot is a nearly-sealed, active karstic cave located in the hilly landscape of the western Galilee, Israel. It contains abundant archaeological accumulations attributed to the early phase of the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) period as well as evidence for the Middle Palaeolithic (MP). During the initial survey of the cave (2008), a nearly complete calvaria (Manot 1) was found. The specimen was dated to ~55 ky by the U-Th method. In an earlier study, Hershkovitz et al 2015 described the...
Manot 1 calvaria and Aduma skull: are they the same? (2017)
The Manot 1 calvaria demonstrates a mosaic of "archaic" and modern traits. Although the taxonomic significance of this combination of features is not clear, a similar combination of archaic and modern features exists in the fossil record across sub-Saharan African and the Middle East until after 35 kya. The aim of the current study is to examine the possibility that the Aduma skull, Ethiopia (60-90 kya) is the mother population that gave rise to the Manot Cave hominins. This was carried out by...
Mapping MSA Deposits: Regional Geological Investigation of Upper Chari Member Sediments in the Ileret Region, East Turkana, Kenya (2017)
The Ileret region of the Koobi Fora Formation (KF Fm.), located in Kenya’s Turkana Basin, has historically been the focus of extensive archaeological research. Mid-Late Pleistocene units have previously lacked defined sedimentary beds due to an understudied unconformity of the upper Chari Member (1.34 Ma to 10 Ka). This represents a substantial limit to Middle Stone Age (MSA) research. Recent fieldwork (2016) incorporated a geoarchaeological survey of the upper Chari Member. Here we describe and...
Marshlands and Early Mesopotamian Urban Form (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta were for millennia among the largest wetland systems in Eurasia. The Gulf coast, the river delta, and marshes extended further north ca. 8000–2000 BCE than they do today. As a result, the world’s earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia may have emerged 6,000–5,000 years ago within or on the edge of wetland and...
Material Assemblage and Social Changes in Central Tibet, the Second and the First Millennium B.C. (2018)
Compared to the relatively well-researched area of Eastern Tibet Plateau, the archaeology of Central Tibet has long been neglected. This paper offers a review of academic debates concerning the site of Qugong and analyzed the newly found materials in Bangga and Changguogou site. Based on the available materials and 14C dating data, I here propose a primary chronological framework in Central Tibet and revealed the cultural affiliations of Central Tibet with Central Asia, as well as the cultural...
Material elaboration and monumentality: Mortuary beads, pastoralists, and social innovation in northwest Kenya (2017)
Megalithic architecture appeared suddenly in northwest Kenya 5000 years ago in tandem with the earliest pastoralists in the region. As Lake Turkana’s levels dropped, these people built "pillar sites" – massive feats of labor and coordination that represent one of the earliest instances of monumentality in Africa – in a brief explosion of material and architectural elaboration. The burials associated with these pillar sites are highly ornamented, with thousands of beads made from stone, bone, and...
Material Engagement and the Incarceration Experience at Amache (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Diverse and Enduring: Archaeology from Across the Asian Diaspora" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Biennially field school students, researchers, and community members assemble at the Granada Relocation Center (Amache) for a five week field season culminating in a two day community open house. This diverse group surveys, excavates, and discusses the historical events surrounding the incarceration of Japanese...
Material Geographies of Multi-Family Neolithic Households (2018)
This paper explores how people within Neolithic villages were potentially connected to co-resident multi-family households, and considers the potential material footprint of multi-family households within Neolithic villages. As seen from ethnographic cases, in some cases residential buildings of House Societies had a range of functions including as dwelling locations, origin-places, council houses, or meeting-houses. Echoing other research this paper decouples the social unit of the House from a...
The materiality of life and death: Dress ornaments and shifting identities at Hasanlu, Iran (2017)
The site of Hasanlu, Iran, was destroyed thoroughly by a marauding army in approximately 800 BCE, leaving a hulk of smoking rubble that was a virtual tomb for the hundreds of residents and combatants who weren’t able to escape its citadel. The excavations of Hasanlu, led by Robert H. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, took place between 1956 and 1977, and uncovered a remarkable range of contexts containing personal ornaments within the relatively narrow historical horizon of...
Measurement Variability in a Collection of Modern Gazelle (Gazella gazella) Skeletons and its Archaeological Implications (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Linear skeletal measurements have long been harnessed by zooarchaeologists to differentiate animals by taxon, breed, age, and sex, to investigate domestication and animal management strategies and the impact of factors such as climate change and anthropogenic activity. However, due to equifinality, interpreting archaeological body size data remains...
Measuring performance under sail (2009)
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...
Meat on the Hoof: Isotopic Evidence of Administrative Herd Management at Khirbet Summeily, Israel (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Khirbet Summeily is an Iron Age II site located northwest of Tell el-Hesi in Southern Israel. Excavations have revealed a large, singular structure with an adjoining ritual space dated to the Iron Age IIA (ca. 1000–870 BCE). Recent interpretations suggest the site was integrated into a regional economic and political system and functioned as a potential...
The Medieval Necropolis of Mouweis (Shendi Area, Sudan): Bioarchaeological Insights (2017)
The site of Mouweis is a Nilotic city of the Meroitic period excavated by the Louvre Museum since 2007. This settlement includes a 1st century AD palace, later destroyed and reduced to a hill-shaped ruin. During the medieval period, a cemetery was created in the demolition level of this palace. Radiocarbon dating reveals a funerary occupation between of the 8th to the 14th century. Burials were mainly individual with a uniform typology and follow the same orientation as the structure of the...