Kingdom of Spain (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
901-925 (1,551 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bronze Age settlements in the Evora district of Portugal are typically located in rocky terrain with an apparent preference for locations in the highlands. During the Iron Age we see a shift of this settlement pattern, as highland sites are abandoned and new settlements appear at lower altitudes. Was the initial selection of highland sites influenced by the...
A Method to Extract Collagen from Archaeological Leather for Species Identification with ZooMS (2017)
Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) is a rapid peptide fingerprinting technique capable of identifying species provenance in several archaeological materials of biological origin, and most commonly used on bone. Leather has proven resistant to analysis not only by ZooMS, but also to DNA extraction due to the tannins that are present in the material. We have used alkali (NaOH) to increase the solubility of the tannins and thereby extract them before enzyme digestion. This has allowed us...
Microbial Communities from Soil and Coprolites (2018)
With implications involving health, nutrition, and even behavior, research into the human microbiome is a burgeoning field within the biological sciences. Less well understood is whether humans, both modern and past, share(d) a recognizable core microbiome. Archaeological materials represent a window into microbiome structure and function of ancient peoples. Assuming microorganisms or their DNA persist for many years under optimal conditions, coprolites should represent time capsules into the...
Micromorphological Investigations of Site Formation History between Layers XVII and XVIII at Middle Paleolithic Rockshelter Crvena Stijena, Montenegro (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Late Middle Paleolithic in the Western Balkans: Results from Recent Excavations at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rockshelters are subject to many geological processes driven by natural and human agents alike. The sedimentary context that surrounds artifactual data is a vital resource to the scientific exploration of human behavior in the Middle Paleolithic. To connect assemblages and...
Micromorphology of Earthen Architecture at Palaikastro, Crete (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent geoarchaeological studies of earthen architecture have demonstrated the social and environmental information that may be gained from combined macroscopic, microscopic, and elemental analyses of mudbricks and degraded building materials. Micromorphology can elucidate construction...
Microstratigraphic and Biomolecular Identification of Seaweeds in the Mesolithic of Atlantic Iberia, SW Europe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesolithic shell mounds are prominent testaments of the prehistoric coastal adaptations along the Atlantic shores of Europe. In the Iberian Peninsula, postglacial hunter-gatherers largely turned to coastal regions and lived...
Microstratigraphic and Geochemical Contributions to the Study of the Burial Practices and Taphonomy of the Mycenaean Shaft Grave of the ‘Griffin Warrior’, Pylos, Greece (2018)
Results of a microstratigraphic and geochemical approach are presented here in reference to study of the Mycenaean ‘Griffin Warrior’ shaft grave at ancient Pylos. Soil and sediment micromorphology are used to address questions concerning the preparation of the tomb, the mode of corpse deposition, and taphonomy of the burial. Processes and activities such as the preparation and configuration of the floor and other earthen constructions inside the tomb are considered, as well as the rapidity of...
Middle Paleolithic Land Use in the Northern Adriatic: Preliminary Data from the Open-Air Site of Campanož (Croatia) (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 site of Campanož, located in the south of the Istrian peninsula, is a relatively new discovery of the Middle Paleolithic record of Croatia. Because it is a stratified open-air site, its discovery has opened questions regarding Middle Paleolithic land use in a region that has until now been heavily biased toward cave...
The Middle to Upper Paleolithic Site of Abri des Merveilles in Southwestern France: An Assessment of the Integrity and Research Potential of an Historically-Excavated Museum Collection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As museum shelves buckle under the weight of virtually forgotten boxes of artifacts, many institutions are questioning the future curation of these historically excavated materials. Much of this material is comprised of Paleolithic artifacts excavated during the infancy of American archaeology abroad. This project was undertaken to evaluate the integrity of a...
The Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in southern Iberia: New dates from Lapa do Picareiro, Portugal (2017)
The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic in western Eurasia remains a hotly debated and intensely researched archaeological problem. Recent developments in radiocarbon dating and genetics have permitted some refinements to our understanding of the spatiotemporal process but many issues remain unresolved. For the Iberian Peninsula, Zilhão’s ‘Ebro Frontier’ model of late Neanderthal survival and subsequent replacement by anatomically modern humans has held sway for over two decades....
Migrant Health in the Past: Assessment of Differential Growth Conditions between Locals and Nonlocals to Medieval London (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous bioarchaeological work in medieval London (ca. 1000–1540) has produced evidence of higher survivorship and lower hazards of mortality and, by inference, better health in adults with nonlocal isotopic (lead and strontium) signatures compared to those with local signatures. This may be a medieval example of...
Migration and Cultural Change: Effects of Migration on Ritual Practices in Early Medieval Britain and Colonial America (2017)
A migration can have several different effects upon a native population as the groups interact: the decimation of one population either to famine, disease or war, the cultural integration of the two groups either forcefully or peacefully, or the continued separation of the two cultures through distance or social stratification. These effects are perhaps best understood archaeologically through an examination of the European and Native American interactions beginning in the 16th century and those...
Migration and Dental Nonmetric Variation in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary (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. Throughout history, the Carpathian Basin has been a natural crossroads for populations migrating between Europe and the rest of Eurasia. During the medieval and early modern periods, three major migrations shaped the demography of the basin: 1) the migration of the Avars; 2) the conquest of the Magyars; and 3) the invasion of the Ottomans. While...
Migration and Population Structure Among Two Late Medieval Polish Populations (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Poland" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This bioarchaeological study employs biological distance analyses using dental metrics and morphology of 840 individuals from 25 sites to evaluate changes in population structures in Poland during the High to Late Middle Ages (eleventh to sixteenth centuries AD). Samples represent medieval Polish, German, Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Kievan Rus...
Migration, Monuments, and Memory in Fifth-Century Britain (2018)
The fifth century in Britain is one of dramatic cultural, social, and economic change, transforming the late-Roman communal landscape into one dominated by Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. These changes have often been attributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire or the arrival of immigrants from the continent. This paper uses ArcGIS, isotopic studies, and multivariate statistics to investigate the relationship between where people came from, where they chose to bury their dead, and what they sent with...
Military Encounters between Vascones and Barbarians in Francia and Iberia between the End of Roman Rule and the Eleventh Century (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pursuit of Basque national identity in the Western Pyrenees Mountains emphasized their linguistic isolation (i.e., last speakers of a non-Indo-European language) and purported ethnic antiquity (i.e., residents since, if not before, the Last Glacial Maximum). This overshadowed inquiry on...
"Milk sweet and sower, bread in cakes": United and Divided Foodways in Post-Medieval Northern Ireland (2018)
Post-Medieval ethnic identities in the British Isles display similarities and differences. Across the landscape of Northern Ireland, where indigenous people were subject to English, Scottish, and Welsh colonization, a sharing of material culture is evident across all groups. For example, English fine earthenwares, locally produced coarse earthenwares and locally made tobacco pipes are equally distributed, regardless of property owners’ ethnicity. This suggests that a culturally blended...
A Miniature Brooch and Gaming Pieces: The Story of the Smaller Objects from the Late Iron Age Elite Burials of Southern England (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two iron firedogs, a tripod for a cauldron, a small amphora of Graeco Italian type, a bronze jug, glass vessels and Samian dishes. These are the objects selected for a catalogue record and for inclusion in the historic museum display of the 30 or so objects discovered in a Late Iron Age burial at Stanfordbury, Bedfordshire in southern England. But what about the...
Mining and interpreting archaeo-geophysical data through excavation – a case from prehistoric Knowlton (Dorset, UK). (2017)
Identified by aerial photography, the presence of a presumed prehistoric long-barrow and ring ditch called for detailed investigation by targeted excavation. Located in Dorset (UK), the features are presumed part of a larger ritual environment of which the ‘Knowlton Circles’, a complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, are best known. To aid in planning excavations and add to subsequent interpretation, detailed geophysical prospection, in the form of multi-receiver electromagnetic...
Mining, Migration, and Movement in Roman Iberia (2017)
The Iberian Peninsula was a rich source of metals in antiquity, and indigenous people practiced mining in many areas from at least 4000 BCE. Following Roman conquest of the region in the late 3rd century BCE, the scale of mining increased dramatically to accommodate the growing needs of the Roman Empire from the production of coins to the creation of urban water infrastructure. This growth catalyzed episodes of migration of people and movement of materials in ways that stimulated both regional...
Minoans at Aghios Nikolaos? Preliminary Results of the Khavania Topographical and Architectural Mapping Project (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of the Khavania Topographical and Architectural Mapping Project (2019), whose primary objective was to document all natural and anthropogenic features at the coastal site of Khavania, East Crete. Exploration of the eastern and southern shores of the Mirabello Bay has produced abundant evidence for cultural...
Mirrors in the Adriatic Region: Holders, Contexts, Exchanges (2024)
This is an abstract from the "And They Look into the Mirror for Answers: Mirror Analysis to Understand Its Holder" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Adriatic Sea (seventh–second century BC) was a place where consistent encounters and trades happened between the many peoples and cultures who lived on its shores (Etruscan, Picenes, Daunians, Greeks, Illirian . . .). This paper focuses on the use of mirrors in this area by analyzing the...
MIS5e Sites in Eurasia (2020)
Site locations and references for Neanderthal sites dating to the MIS5e, or Eemian Period, in Europe/Western Eurasia. Sites in this dataset were used in two publications: 1. Nicholson, C. 2019. Shifts Along a Spectrum: a longitudinal study of the western Eurasian hominin fundamental climate niche. Environmental Archaeology: Journal of Human Palaeoecology. 1461-4103:1-16 2. Slimak, L., and C. Nicholson, 2020. Cannibals in the Forest: A comment on Defleur and Desclaux (2019). Journal of...
The Missing Link? Sardinia, Corsica and Italy and their Connections in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (2017)
The late Bronze and early Iron Age were periods of population movement and change and recent scholarship has highlighted the multi-directional interactions and networks involving the various communities across the whole of the west Mediterranean, as opposed to more static core-periphery models. In Sardinia, for example, this has emphasised the binary relationships between Phoenicians and the local Nuragic communities. With a greater awareness of local networks and connections the regional...
The Missing Medieval in the North Atlantic (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the North Atlantic has overwhelmingly focused on the long-term political and environmental impacts of the Viking Age colonization of these remote, marginal islands. In places like Iceland, these impacts were profound and resulted in the radical transformation of the previously...