Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (450 Records)
Tropical environments vary significantly in terms of rainfall and seasonality; these differences make a difference in the kinds of land use strategies that work over the long term. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and constraints of tropical environments in South Asia, considering the range of land use practices deployed over the last 6,000 years in this region. I argue that some practices which could be called sustainable also come at a high cost in terms of human dignity,...
Abu Shusha: Integrating and Correlating Surface Features with Magnetic Susceptibility (2018)
This research looks at Tel Abu Shusha in the Jezreel Valley of Israel, an understudied site in a strategically important Levantine area with potential evidence of Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman settlements. Surface survey was completed in nine square kilometers around the Tel, resulting in ceramic density data as well as over 2,500 mapped surface features in GIS, such as quarries, wine presses, and architecture. Additionally, four magnetic susceptibility grids were taken in this area, each one...
Acheulean Hominins and Out of Africa Dispersals: Challenges and Advances (2018)
The dispersal of Acheulean hominins outside of Africa is one of the most important research areas in human evolutionary studies, having been the topic of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists for many decades. Yet, precise knowledge about the timing and geographic movement of archaic hominins across Eurasia is still in its infancy. The aim of this presentation is to discuss what we currently know about the distribution of Acheulean hominins, and to report on new field work findings in southern...
Adapting to Changing Resources: A Petrographic Analysis of Iron I Pottery from Tel Miqne-Ekron (2018)
The arrival of foreigners to the southern Levant at the beginning of the Iron Age (1200-1000 BCE) has been recognized in the material culture, as have changes in this material culture over time. These developments, resulting from interaction with the local population, have been interpreted as assimilation, acculturation, creolization, and most recently entanglement. In this poster, we examine these transformations through the lens of technological, i.e. those aspects of pottery manufacture that...
The Afterlife of a Desert Estate: The Qasr Complex at al-Ḥumayma, Southern Jordan at the Turn of the Second Millennium AD (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. From 1992 to 2002, the Humayma Excavation Project investigated a fairly modest palatial structure dubbed Field F103 at the site of al-Ḥumayma in southern Jordan. Early on, the excavators recognized that this structure should be identified as the qasr and mosque complex described in Arabic historical sources as having...
The Agency of Monsoons in South Asia (2018)
Every June through September, the inhabitants of South Asia welcome and celebrate the southwest monsoons. The monsoon winds are the lifeline of this region but also a major threat, inspiring societies to devise mechanisms to both harness their potential and subvert the damage they may cause. This paper analyzes prehistoric and historical responses to monsoons in South Asia in terms of their unpredictable nature, and examines how the monsoons both facilitate and constrict people’s actions. In...
Agricultural Landscapes of the Mesopotamian-Zagros Borderlands (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Diyala River Region in northern Iraq has long served as a strategic political, economic, and cultural borderland between the Mesopotamian alluvium and the Zagros Mountains. The region is also environmentally complex, encompassing a steep gradient of agroecological zones ranging from irrigated alluvial...
Agricultural Practices of the Qin People from the Warring States Period to the Qin Dynasty: A Case from the Matengkong Site in Guanzhong Basin, China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeological studies, the Qin people have often been the subject of research. The areas of investigation about the Qin include their origin, structure of tombs, funeral rites and interment processes, and cities and settlements. Although there are some studies on the Qin...
Agriculture in the “Land of Hatti”: The Politics and Ecology of Farming in Late Bronze Age Central Anatolia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hittite empire is the first supraregional polity documented in the history of central Anatolia. The core of the Hittite polity, the “Land of Hatti”, extended on a landscape which could be regarded as particularly challenging to the establishment of a reliable and productive centralized agricultural system. The traditional Anatolian farming system...
An Agroecological Perspective on Crop Domestication in Western Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestication has been discussed inter alia as a syndrome, a case study in niche construction and a reversible process. These perspectives frame new understandings of how management practice shaped domestication processes. For plants, recent experimental work has also been important for clarifying the effect of domestication...
‘All things being equal’? Multiplex Material Networks of the Early Neolithic in the Near East (2018)
Archaeological network research typically relies on material culture similarities over space and time as a proxy for past social networks. In many cases, a range of different types of material culture are subsumed into reconstructed connections between nodes. However, not all forms of material culture are equal. Different types of objects may be caught up in rather different forms of social relationship – crudely put, ‘personal’ items such as jewellery may perhaps have more social and cultural...
Analytical Models for At-Risk Heritage Conservation and 3D GIS (2018)
In the period 2011-2017, scholars from the University of California Merced and Cardiff University recorded the fragile earthen architecture of Çatalhöyük, Turkey employing cutting-edge conservation technologies to monitor the site and gather new data. Our goal was to model and analyze the site decay and plan conservation interventions. Tools and methods for this initiative include blending site monitoring data and digital documentation data from environmental data loggers, terrestrial laser...
Ancient and Historic Glass Production in India: Preliminary Results of Raw Material Analyses (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass—and particularly the glass bead—was a common commodity of Indian Ocean trade, beginning as early as the mid-first millennium BCE and continuing through the second millennium CE. While existing elemental and isotopic analyses of glass beads recovered from outside India have identified glass production recipes likely from...
Animal Bones from Hazor, Israel and a Cautionary Tale of Interpreting Past Ritual (2018)
Within recent years, feasting and other forms of ritual consumption have become more frequently identified in the archaeozoological record of the ancient Near East. Reasons for more frequent identification of ritual sacrifices and feasts vary, but two driving forces certainly are archaeological context, bones found in or near special architecture, and the cultural milieu formed by the region’s ancient textual record. In contrast, I have a skeptical tale to tell of ritual production and...
The Animal Provisioning System for a Late Bronze Age Temple at Hazor, Israel (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. The tel site of Hazor, Israel is one of the largest such occupational mounds in the southern Levant. Excavated in the 1950s, 1960s, and continuously since the 1990s, archaeologists have uncovered monumental public buildings. One such building, now identified as one of several Late Bronze Age temples,...
Animals at the Periphery: Investigating Urban Subsistence at Iron Age Sam’al (Zincirli Höyük, Turkey) (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 site of Zincirli Höyük, the ancient city of Sam’al, provides nuanced archaeological testimony to the complex interactions between imperial ambition and local concern in the Iron Age of Southern Anatolia (ca. 850–600 BCE). During this period, Syro-Hittite...
Animals Do Speak but Are We Listening? Perspectivism, Slow Zooarchaeology, and Contemplating Animal Domestication (2023)
This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I argue that animals do in fact speak to us and discuss several ways in which this framework can be approached. Through consideration of perspectivism as well as methodological approaches designed to disrupt zooarchaeological work as usual, I attempt to take animals seriously by listening to...
The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring our Understanding of Socio-Environmental History (2017)
Much scientific debate has focused on the timing and stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. In this paper, we argue that strident debate about the Anthropocene’s chronological boundaries arises because its formal periodization necessarily forces an arbitrary break in a long history of human alteration of environments. The aim of dividing geologic time based on a "step-change" in the global significance of socio-environmental processes goes directly against the socially differentiated and...
Anthropomorphic Figures in Arabian Rock Art (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art is vastly abundant in Arabia, and there are large concentrations of panels in key localities. Hail, Najran and Tabuk are the most prominent ones. These three localities house thousands of panels, which can be multi-period, and were done in various styles and engraving techniques. Anthropomorphic figures can give us an insight into these past...
Application of Metric Sex Estimation Standards at Tell Abraq: A Study of the Humerus (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Estimating sex in commingled assemblages may have an increased reliance on metric methods. These metric methods are often based on known collections that differ in geographical location and historical time period from the commingled collections to which they may be applied. In this presentation, we detail the testing of...
Approaches to Lithic Technology: How Archaeological Practice Influences Interpretation of Past Lifeways through the Lens of Kharaneh IV (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural affiliation and change in the Epipaleolithic (EP) period of Southwest Asia has historically been marked through microlithic stone tool technologies, where stone tool manufacturing is focused on the production of a large number of small bladelets then retouched into various microlith types. While researchers...
Approaching (In)Equality in the Indus Civilization: A Preliminary Analysis of House Size at Mohenjo-daro (2023)
This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of South Asia challenges theories about the deep history of inequality, but data from its first cities are rarely included in comparative studies. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a preliminary analysis of spatial data produced by the early twentieth-century...
Aquatic Neanderthals and Paleolithic Seafaring: Myth or Reality? Examples from the Mediterranean (2018)
It long has been assumed that most of the world’s islands, especially remote ones, were first visited or colonized by fully modern humans. With few exceptions, these events occurred late, during the Neolithic or later, with an implied assumption that most islands could not support hunters and gatherers. We know that this scenario is no longer viable, with examples from Australia and southeastern Asia, such as Flores and Sulawesi, suggesting considerable antiquity extending prior to the...
The archaeobotany of plant microfossils in South Asia - History and Perspectives (2017)
The analysis of plant microfossils has progressed immensely in recent years. The increase in the number of phytoliths and starch grains works in several disciplines has substantially extended our knowledge about these microfossils, while at the same time diversifying the approaches by which they can be used as archaeological and palaeoenvironmental proxies. This presentation will discuss the history and developments of plant microfossils in South Asia.
Archaeofauna and Archaeobotany studies in Northwestern South Asia: Past, Present, and Future (2017)
Both Zooarchaeological and Paleoethnobotanical studies have been carried out on animal and plant remains from archaeological sites in northwestern South Asia for at least a century. These investigations, while providing important insights into the hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoral economies of the region, have lagged behind those carried out in other parts of the world in both quantity and quality. Indigenous practitioners of both sub-disciplines are few, and interest in these aspects of...