Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
426-450 (624 Records)
Understanding Neolithic sites in southwest Asia is often difficult because of the lack of preservation of organic remains and the effects of various taphonomic processes that alter the original record. It is, therefore, critical that we maximise the information that can be acquired from these sites. Here, we use an ethnographic approach to test the potential of using plant phytoliths and geochemistry to aid our interpretation of southwest Asian Neolithic sites. We sampled two Neolithic...
Picking Up the Pieces: The Continued Influence and Impact of Redding's “Breaking the Mold” on Animal Domestication (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. Richard Redding’s work on “breaking the mold” on how we explain the development of food production is emblematic of the major contributions he made to zooarchaeological thinking: his creativity, curiosity, and willingness to question dearly held beliefs. In this paper, we overview some of Redding’s many...
Pit-House Complexes: A New Form of Rural Domestic Architecture in Hellenistic and Post-Hellenistic Central Asia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To date studies of ancient Central Asian rural architecture are marked by an imbalance with much attention focused on the estates of elite landowners and less effective nods to non-elite pithouse structures. Recent excavations at Bashtepa in the Bukhara Oasis of Uzbekistan (2021) have revealed an intermediary form of domestic...
Place Making and Ephemerality (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At first the two ideas of this paper’s title can seem contradictory, but as three separate words they come together. What is the valency between the hypothesised solidity of an archaeological place and the stream of events that go into making it, transforming it, and erasing it? The ephemeral nature of the archaeological sites created...
Plant and Animal Remains from Old Babylonian Ur (2018)
Archaeologists have been examining the great cities of ancient southern Mesopotamia for well over a century now, but as yet we have limited understanding of their subsistence economies. For decades researchers more or less ignored the wealth of faunal and botanical remains in and around ancient Mesopotamian architecture. Over the course of the twentieth century researchers began to recover animal bones and teeth, but as few digs dry-screened or floated their soils the resulting assemblages...
Plant based textiles and basketry at Harappa, Pakistan (3700-1900 BCE) (2017)
Excavations at the site of Harappa undertaken by the Harappa Archaeological Research Project between 1986 and 2010 have recovered a wide variety of artifacts relating to plant based textiles and basketry from between 3700 to 1900 BCE. This paper will present the results of the analysis of archaeological evidence and experimental studies used to develop more accurate interpretations of the nature of early plant based fibers and basketry. Woven textile impressed terracotta beads and spindle whorls...
The Politics of Archaeology: Reflections on the Early Decades of the 21st Century (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. In 2003, Bradley Parker co-organized a workshop at the University of Utah exploring the politics of archaeology, with emphasis on the Middle East. Both at the workshop and in the resulting edited volume, Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: The Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East, contributors...
The Politics of Soils on the Medieval Deccan, Southern India (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the politics of soils on the Medieval Deccan. Drawing on inscriptional stelae that record land donations and distinctions, multi-spectral remote sensing datasets, micromorphological analyses, and archaeological survey results, it evaluates how the classification, distribution, and...
Post-Charring Bacterial Degradation of Archaeological Lentils by Bacterial Degradation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to common knowledge, the preservation of stable isotope values in archaeological seeds requires that they be charred at low temperatures, because charring reorganizes sugar and protein polypeptides into stable Maillard reaction products. Charred seeds are understood to be resistant to diagenetic...
Potential Refugia in the Levant During the Pleistocene and Their Use by Hominins (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interest in the possibility that refugia have played an important role in human evolution has grown in recent years. A refugium is a relatively small area in which a population may be able to survive during a period of unfavorable conditions. Here, we report preliminary results of a study that is seeking to identify refugia in the Levant that were occupied...
Predomestic Animal Management and the Social Context of Animal Exploitation in SW 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. More than a century of faunal work seeking evidence for the origins of domestic livestock in SW Asia has shed considerable light on the timing, locations and processes of animal domestication. The early stages in the shift from hunting to herding, however, remain difficult to identify and as a result both the mechanisms and...
Prehistoric farming in Europe (1985)
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...
Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Plant Food Use in the Northern Zagros: New Evidence from Carbonized Plant Macro-remains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on plant remains over the past two decades increasingly point to the importance of plant foods in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer subsistence. In this paper I will present recent results of archaeobotanical research on carbonized plant macro-remains from late-Middle, Upper Paleolithic and...
Prehistoric Pointillism: Rock Art near ‘Amlah, Oman (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art is one of the most ubiquitous archaeological features in southeastern Arabia, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood aspects of the region’s prehistory. Re-occurring motifs of people, weapons, camels, horses, and other animal figures appear in similar forms across the UAE and Oman, and many were produced...
Preliminary Findings from the Cemetery at the Medieval Ilibalyk Site in Southeast Kazakhstan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ilibalyk (Usharal) site in southeastern Kazakhstan is the location of an ongoing excavation of a medieval (13th-14th centuries CE) Christian cemetery and settlement. Ilibalyk was located along the trans-continental trade networks often called the Silk Roads. Many trade goods from across Eurasia have been found in association with burials at Ilibalyk....
Preliminary Results of Skeletal Analysis from the Early Muslim Period Cemetery of Bukhara (Uzbekistan) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bukhara (in modern Uzbekistan) was a center of learning, power, and innovation during the “Lost Enlightenment” of the late first and early second millennium CE in Central Asia. At the same time, the metropolis faced crises familiar to city-dwellers today, such as controversial land use policies and outbreaks of infectious disease. In the summer of 2022,...
Preparing the Surface (PRESUR): The Forgotten Step of “Seasoning” Food Processing-Ground Stone Tools and Its Implications for Use-wear Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Southwest Asia ground stone tools used in food processing, like mortars and querns, started proliferating at the end of the Paleolithic. Recently these tools have received increased attention with researchers attempting to establish what food these tools were used to process through microscopic use-wear and residue analysis. However, there is an aspect...
A Probabilistic Approach to Study Diachronic Patterns in Human Behavior: A Case Study from the Paleolithic Sequence at Jebel Faya, UAE (2018)
Jebel Faya is a key Paleolithic site in Arabia. The site provides important data on the history of human occupation of desert environments during the Late Pleistocene. One central question is if the observed diachronic pattern of occupation is largely driven by climatic change, as often assumed, or if other factors such as adaptation processes play significant roles. Based on the assumption that survival in the often unpredictable environments of SE Arabia requires increased behavioral...
The Production and Use of Chipped Stone Tools during the Metal Ages in the Southern Levant – Evidence from Abu Snesleh (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Bronze Age (MBA, c. 2000–1500 BCE) in the southern Levant (modern day Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and southern Syria) is characterized by a re-urbanization, and extended use and specialized production of metal objects which obviated the use of chipped stone tools, of which production has long been considered to have significantly declined after the...
Ptghavan-4: A Middle Paleolithic Open-Air Site in the Debed River Gorge, Armenia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recently excavated site of Ptghavan-4 in the Armenian Highlands provides rare data on Middle Paleolithic hominin behaviors during the early Upper Pleistocene. The site contains a dense accumulation of lithic artifacts that are Middle Paleolithic in character within a pedogenically modified aeolian deposit, which...
Pushing Boundaries in the Scientific Investigation of Glass: A New Project to Source Ancient Indian Glass (2018)
Scientific investigation of archaeological glass has advanced, beginning in the early 2000’s, with studies relying more heavily on determination of trace element concentrations to differentiate production recipes depending on distinct ingredient sources and the use of larger corpuses of artifacts to more easily and reliably reveal production patterns. At the same time, isotope analyses (e.g., Pb, Sr and Nd) attempting to source raw materials used to manufacture glass in antiquity grew in...
Qajaq: Kayaks of Siberia and Alaska (1986)
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...
Quaternary Vegetation and Climate in the Lesser Caucasus, an Update (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The numerous archaeological discoveries in the Lesser Caucasus document the crucial role that this territory had for humans more than 2 Ma. In particular, the scientific debate has highlighted its strategic position for phases of migration “out of Africa,” and expansion to the Eurasian continent. The role of climate...
Railroads and the Historic Resources to Understand their Significance (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Transitioning from Commemoration to Analysis on the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah: Papers in Honor and Memory of Judge Michael Wei Kwan" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological research of a railroad, while not dissimilar to researching the history of a place, has unique aspects that make it challenging if one is not familiar with the subject. When envisioning a railroad, most people think of...
Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Experimental Archaeology of Beer and Community (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A pint of beer is more than a "simple" beverage. The presence of ethanol resulting from the yeast-based fermentation contributes to making beer a unique form of embodied material culture that has fermented alongside humanity since well before written records. It is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, and is regularly discussed in...