Republic of Armenia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
151-175 (1,103 Records)
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...
Change and Adaptation in Stone Tool Technology in Jordan ca. 1000 BCE (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The decline and replacement of stone tools with their metal counterparts in regions with traditions of metallurgy has been shown to have been a slow and variable process that involved specific types of tools marking the metallurgic transition at different times and in specific contexts. For example, in the region of the southern Levant (Jordan, Palestine,...
Change and Continuity in Agricultural Production in Iraqi Kurdistan, ca. 4000 BCE–1000 CE (2018)
The archaeological site of Kani Shaie is a small (<3ha) tell site located in Iraqi Kurdistan not far from contemporary Sulaymaniyah. Archaeological evidence as well as radiocarbon dates procured from excavations at the site indicate in-habitation from at least 3500 BCE until the Middle Islamic period, ca. 1400 CE. Excavations in 2015 and especially 2016 included a substantial archaeobotanical sampling component, which entailed the sampling of every archaeological deposit and the subsequent...
Changes in the Size and Organization of Storage in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of the Southern Levant (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The size and spatial organization of facilities for the storage of cereals and pulses provide important clues to the socioeconomic organization and degree of inequality of households and communities. In the context of late prehistory in the southern Levant in the Middle East, we might expect changes in storage to result from the growing importance of...
Changes on the Land: Gordion in the 1st mill BCE (2017)
Throughout the 1st mill BCE, the inhabitants of Gordion engaged with multiple changes in political power and agricultural strategies, within a diverse landscape with shifting climate regimes. Over most of this period, the city, its industries, and its hinterland population thrived. Using multiple lines of evidence, both material and environmental, this paper explores what we know about changes in the organization of different production spheres at Gordion in order to understand how changing...
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...
Chaîne Opératoire in Jade Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since Wu Da-cheng’s Catalogue of Ancient Jades in the Qing Period, research of Chinese jades has largely focused on analyses of their social and ritual significances. In latter half of the 20th century, excavations in Liangzhu, Hongshan, and Xinglongwa culture sites discovered many prehistoric jades. These important discoveries...
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...
China Vegetation Atlas (2001)
his atlas is another summary result of the publication of "Chinese Vegetation" and other monographs by the vegetation ecology workers in China for more than 40 years. It is a basic map of the country's natural resources and natural conditions. It reflects in detail the distribution, horizontal zonality, and vertical zonal distribution patterns of 11 vegetation types, 54 vegetation types of 796 and subgroups, and reflects more than 2,000 plant dominant species in China. This Atlas consists of...
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.
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 Change and Social Sustainability: The Case of the 8.2-kyBP Climate Event and the Demise of the Neolithic Community at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The social strategy of imposed egalitarianism provided solid foundations for the unprecedented growth of the Neolithic community inhabiting the large settlement at Çatalhöyük for more than half a millennium. Its constituting elements comprised symmetry and balance among cross-cutting sodalities, as well as integration of domestic and ritual domains....
Climate Change or Muslims? Collapse of the Late Antique Sasanian Settlements, Mughan Steppe, Iranian Azerbaijan (2018)
Recent research in the borderlands has increased our knowledge on the irrigation systems and urbanization plans of the Sasanian Empire in the late antiquity. In particular, surveys and excavations in the Mughan Steppe indicate that irrigation canals connected nearly all Sasanian settlements. Evidence suggests that after the 7th century AD most of the elaborate settlement system was abandoned and its irrigation infrastructure went out of use. While the exact date of this abandonment is unclear,...
Climate Stability and Societal Decline on the Margins of the Byzantine Empire in the Negev Desert (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the absence of a high-resolution climate archive in Negev Desert, southern Israel, it has been challenging to understand why the Byzantine Empire built large towns in this arid region in the fourth century CE—and why it abandoned them three centuries later. In this study, we use dietary and mobility patterns of animals recovered from three Byzantine Negev...
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...
Climatic Narratives across Eurasia: A Comparative Study of the 4.2k Event in Western and Eastern Asia (2018)
In the last two decades, climatic narratives have returned as a central issue in archaeological discourse. The field has been flooded with publications on paleoclimatic reconstructions and we believe it is time for a critical evaluation – both as means of seeking better science, and for building better archaeological narratives. Climate history is composed by an overlapping meshwork of long-standing trends, punctuated events and short-term phases, with impacts ranging from the local to the...
Closely Observed Layers: Small Stories and the Heart (2017)
When I tell people I'm an archaeologist, their eyes light up with a wistful look and they say "I've always wanted to be an archaeologist". I could describe one reality, that it is not as glamorous as they think, work is slow and repetitive, and that leaves them disappointed. But usually I describe another reality: what I love about what I do - and they are delighted. However, I have never articulated it in a professional presentation or publication: I excavate layers of dead people’s residential...