Republic of Armenia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
376-400 (1,103 Records)
This paper presents a Landscapes of Warfare case study, combining textual documentation, archeological data and GIS analysis to elucidate the effects of pervasive warfare on the development of Urartu, a highland empire that existed in the ancient Near East in the 1st Millennium BCE. Specifically, I argue that forts, fortresses and fortified settlements were strategically placed for both defensive communication as well as the systematic surveillance of roads. The paper contributes to scholarly...
Feeding the Household and the Spirit During the Ubaid Period at Kenan Tepe, Turkey (2019)
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. During the Ubaid Period, a small village overlooked the Tigris River at the site we now call Kenan Tepe. Here, household members carried out activities both inside and around their houses, as well as utilizing roof-top spaces. During its habitation one of the structures burned and collapsed, preserving evidence...
Feeding Vessels in Later European Prehistory (2018)
Small vessels with spouts, from which liquid can be poured, are known from settlements and graves of the European Bronze and Iron Ages. Sizes, shapes and decorations are highly variable, and although they generally fit the period-specific style, they represent a functional type. One explanation for this vessel form is libation – the act of pouring a liquid as a sacrifice to a deity. Recent discoveries, however, reinforce an association with children’s graves and suggest a function as feeding...
Fetal Burials at San Giuliano (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. The burial of unbaptized fetuses at San Giuliano exposes friction between the institutional church and medieval Italy's laity. The church's theology of Original Sin, baptism, and salvation left young children especially vulnerable to dying unbaptized and being denied...
Field Walking and Walking the Field (2017)
While we have gradually accepted that archaeological survey is as integral to our research as the overly-valued practice of excavation, the emotional dimensions of survey where one connects with the landscapes and with its occupants are hardly discussed, especially in the case of long-term surveys. What does a heart-centered survey project look like? How does the intimacy that comes from field walking inform the archaeology? As well, we are all participants in the field of archaeology, and...
Filling the Gap: Caves, Radiocarbon Sequences, and the Meso-Neolithic Transition in SE Europe (2017)
Radiocarbon sequences from some cave sites in the Balkan and Italian peninsulas show a temporal gap between Mesolithic and Neolithic occupations. Some authors have seen this as a regional phenomenon and have sought to explain it in terms of a general population decline in the late Mesolithic, which facilitated the replacement of indigenous foragers by immigrant farmers. In this paper, we re-examine the evidence and consider alternative explanations for the Meso-Neolithic ‘gap’, focusing on...
A Finer View of Regional Socio-political and Economic Change in the Southeast Aegean: Ceramic Production along the Datça Peninsula (2017)
Situated along the dramatic Datça Peninsula in southwest Anatolia, the port-town of Burgaz provides a flourishing landscape of ceramic production and valuable case study for investigating the intersection of local dynamics and larger Mediterranean social, political, and economic shifts. During the Archaic and Classical periods Burgaz developed into a thriving commercial and cultural center by virtue of its proximity to fertile land and centrality within the Gulf of Hisarönü. From the mid-fourth...
A Fingerprint Assemblage from a Late Bronze Age Canaanite Cultic Enclosure at Tel Burna in the Southern Levant: The Division of Labor According to Age and Sex (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The identity of producers is a perennial question in the anthropological and archaeological study of craft production. Who made the vessels and figurines used for ritual practice and feasting in the Canaanite cultic enclosure at Tel Burna? Our project attempts to answer this question by determining the age and sex of fingerprints preserved on a selection...
FINISTERRA - Population Trajectories and Cultural Dynamics of Late Neanderthals in Far Western Eurasia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, knowledge of the processes involved in the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the successful expansion of our species across Eurasia has substantially increased. Still, the spatiotemporal variability of the presumed mechanisms behind Neanderthals’ demise makes evaluating the replacement at a continental scale very challenging. Iberiaa,...
Fire Use in the Levantine Early Epipaleolithic: The Dibble and Colleagues Lithics Count Method (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using a count method of complete and proximal burnt lithics ≥2.5 cm, Dibble and colleagues recorded a pattern of fire use by southwestern France Neanderthals whereby fire use was more common in warmer rather than colder intervals of the late Pleistocene. Recent work by Abdolahzadeh and...
The first cultural landscapes of Europe - and before... (2017)
Cultural landscapes appear relatively late in the human history. In Europe, between c. 40-20.000 BP, people for the first time seem to have transformed (parts of) their environment intentionally on a significant spatial scale in order to make places and areas "fit" for future activities. Already between 40.000 and 30.000 BP, prominent natural formations and hidden places were marked with signs and symbols to enable distant communication. From c. 25.000 BP onwards, on-site constructions, such as...
The First Paleoecological Analysis Derived from a Small Vertebrate Assemblage from the Byzantine Galilee and the Implications for Settlement Patterns (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The flourishing of settlements in the Levant during the Roman-Byzantine period has been attributed to an increase in humid conditions between 300 –700 CE with a concomitant increase in tree cultivation. Small vertebrates which provide high-resolution paleoecological proxy are rare in the Byzantine period overall and totally absent from Galilean sites. This...
The First Quarantine: Lessons from Past Epidemics (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In a world changed by COVID-19, it is valuable to look at past reactions to epidemics and learn from them. Modern economies and political systems are designed with the assumption that such events cannot happen. The real risks in food and staples production and distribution in America and Europe or the inability to protect the work force for just a few months...
Fluid Ethnoarchaeology: A Study of British-Era Water Fountains in Athienou, Cyprus (2017)
The Athienou Archaeological Project (AAP) has conducted excavation and survey work in Cyprus since 1990. Ethnoarchaeological and ethnographic research have accompanied the other field investigations to create a holistic examination of the community situated at the southern end of the Mesaoria, a fertile agricultural plain in the central part of the island. The semi-arid summer climate makes access to water a major concern of the residents of Athienou. A number of public fountains scattered...
Fluorescence Applied to Modern Carnivore Excrements. A Reference Collection for Archaeological Deposits (2018)
Traditionally, coprolite identification in archaeology has been limited to hyenids, the most well-preserved and recognizable fossilized faeces, although non-hyena carnivore coprolites are also present in some Pleistocene deposits displaying a wide range of morphological variation (e.g., elongate, spherical, globular, sub-cylindrical, oval, tubular). Common micromorphological characteristics of these different excrements are the appearance of an amorphous phosphatic, optically isotropic and, a...
Food Futures: Culinary Archaeology and Anticipating the Future (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Imagining what a culinary archaeology might look like involves anticipating the future. In fact, all archaeological practice is concerned with the future even if it is not stated explicitly and archaeologists working on food preparation practices are no exception. As climate change continues to impact (at an alarming rate) sites, travel, collections, data...
Forced Migration in the Assyrian Empire, on the Periphery and in the Heartland (2019)
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. Premodern states could and did reorganize the spatial demography of their domains. In the ancient Near East, the kings of the Assyrian Empire (ca. 900-600 BC) made grandiose claims in propagandistic inscriptions to have relocated entire kingdoms, and many thousands of persons, with their realm. The research of...
Forensic Methods for the 3D Reconstruction of an Infant Burial in Arma Veirana Cave, Liguria, Italy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spatio-temporal models can function as detailed digital surrogates of archaeological sites, providing the context and content needed to enable analytical reasoning by means of interactive visualization. The starting point is often surveying techniques based on light detection and ranging as well as photogrammetry,...
Forging Identity: The social and symbolic significance of torques in the Iron Age Castro Culture (2017)
The Iron Age Castro Culture of northwestern Iberia was steeped in the crosscurrents of disparate cultural influences. Linked to areas of temperate Europe by Atlantic trade routes, the Castro Culture was also subject to the encroachments of Mediterranean powers moving through the Iberian Peninsula. These diverse influences manifested in the Castro Culture in a variety of ways, including in methods of personal adornment. The gold and silver torques left by the Castro people are the best example of...
Formation and Transformation of Communities in Prehistoric Khorasan (2017)
This paper evaluates the previously proposed sequence of transformations in prehistoric social organization in Northeastern Iran (Khorasan) using geospatial analysis of settlement distributions. The proposed sequence begins with agricultural villages during the Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic, transitions to craft-producing towns during the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, culminates in a process of proto-urbanization and the emergence of state-like structures during the Middle Bronze...
Fox Overabundance and Human Response in the Earliest Villages of the Near East (2017)
Ethological and ecological studies point to the proliferation of small mammalian carnivores, most notably red fox (Vulpes vulpes), in human-modified environments. Foxes prey on human trash and consequently their populations in and around settlements are denser, their survival rate is improved and their foraging territories contract, centering on refuse dumps. This carnivore overabundance leads to a series of effects on the local ecosystems. The foxes’ strong commensal relationship with humans...
From Empire States to Country Estates – The Story of the Fallow Deer’s Global Conquest 6k BP to Present (2017)
It took millennia, but the European fallow deer (Dama dama) a beautiful cervid species native to the eastern Mediterranean has gradually been transported around the world - its modern distribution ranging from New Zealand to the Caribbean. The translocation of fallow deer was accompanied by a remarkably consistent culture of hunting and emparkment that altered landscape and environment. Using a combination of (zoo)archaeology, isotope analysis and genetic research to reconstruct the timing and...
From Goddesses to Zoomorphs: Figuring Out Figurines at Çatalhöyük (2017)
The infamous seated goddess, flanked by two leopards, is perhaps the most sensationalized figurine to have been unearthed at Çatalhöyük, prompting narratives of prehistoric cults and religion. Yet research conducted since its discovery by James Mellaart has shown that zoomorphic, rather than anthropomorphic, types are predominant in the figurine assemblage. In this paper, I trace the history of changing recording systems, analytical methodologies, and interpretations of figurines at Çatalhöyük....
From Homes to Ruins: Ethnoarchaeology and Small-Scale Village Dynamics at Post-19th Century Kızılkaya, Central Turkey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drawing on interviews with former residents of the abandoned Turkish village of Kızılkaya, as well as photogrammetry and other visual research, in this poster we consider how this post-1800 rural village was organized around the household, the mosque, access to the river, and raising and caring for animals. The rural village of Kızılkaya, located in the...
From Liburnian to Ottoman: Unraveling Settlement History at Nadin-Gradina, Croatia (2017)
Ancient cityscapes with long occupational histories have great potential for reconstructing changes in social structure, spatial planning, political governance, identity, economy, environment, and climate. Recovering such information, however, poses many challenges, both human and financial. Archaeological deposits are often deeply buried and palimpsestic, representing a complex mixture of processes including collapse, partial abandonment, repurposing, and reoccupation. Yet, anthropological...