Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (523 Records)
The archaeology of the Xiongnu period has grown considerably over the last decade, yet debate still surrounds Xiongnu subsistence practices and the timing for the rise, expansion, and ‘collapse’ of the Xiongnu polity. The problem, in part, has to do with discrepancies between dates that come from the same sites. Some dates have been reported to be earlier when the samples came from human remains. These discrepancies have been attributed to the ‘reservoir effect’. In order to investigate this, we...
The Paleolithic Archaeology of Shirak Province (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. Within Shirak Province in the Republic of Armenia, the open-air site complex at Aghvorik is currently the most prominent site. The Paleolithic sites of Shirak are geomorphologically associated with the Ashotsk Plateau in the north, the Shirak Depression and northwestern slopes of Mt. Aragats in the south, and the...
Pandemic Parallels: The Black Feminist Necropolitics of Excavating Cholera in the Time of COVID (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. “The despair and deplorable conditions within which the black community continued into the realm of death and burial.” While Steven J. Richardson offered these words in 1989, their essence still rings true today. Over the past decade, skeletal remains of nearly thirty individuals have been discovered underneath the 3300 Block of Q Street in...
Pastoral Societies, Holocene Climate and Technology: Perspectives from Iron Age Southern Jordan (Session 4400) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did pastoral societies evolve into more complex social organizations in what is today a hyper-arid desert zone? This paper examines the Iron Age (ca 1200 - 500 BC) data from southern Jordan that indicates relatively little climate change from today, yet the rise of complex pastoral nomadic societies.
Pastoral Territoriality as a Dynamic Coupled Human-Natural System (2018)
Despite research indicating that contemporary pastoral societies are more dynamic than previously assumed, there is a tendency to view South Arabian pastoralists as timeless heirs of a stable, ancient system or along a historical continuum of response to exogenous factors like the development of civilization, introduction of camels, or global climate change. In research triggered by NGS support, we proposal a new conceptual model for pastoral mobility regulated by dynamic feedback loops in...
Pastoralist Intensification and Dietary Dynamics in the Mongolian Steppe: Multi-isotope Analyses of Human and Faunal Collagen (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The initial spread of pastoralism into the Mongolian steppe during the third millennium cal BC marked a major transformation in human subsistence. Dairying was practiced by early pastoralist groups, evidenced by the identification of milk proteins preserved in human dental calculus. However, we have a poor understanding of how the focused...
Patterns of Land-Use and Political Administration Beyond the Core Areas of the Sasanian Empire (2018)
The landscapes of the Sasanian Empire have long been viewed as massive and state-sponsored development projects, in particular in politically and economically core zones. Despite these unparalleled understandings, our knowledge of peripheries and their connection with the sociopolitical organization of the time have still remained as some of the key gaps in the studies of late antiquity. To address these questions, I examine the settlement expansion, water management systems and agricultural...
Perceptions of Disability and Care in Early Islamic Central Asia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we apply an index of care approach to a case study of an individual with progressive pseudorheumatoid dysplasia from an early Islamic cemetery at the site of Tashbulak in southeastern Uzbekistan. Joint degeneration and progressive impingement of nerves would have severely limited individual TBK...
Phoenician Iron Smithing and Cult at Tel Akko, Israel (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations (2010 - 2018) directed by A. E. Killebrew and M. Artzy at Tel Akko, a major eastern Mediterranean Phoenician maritime center and emporium, have uncovered an unprecedented quantity of iron smithing slags, hearths and cultic artifacts, all dating to the sixth - fourth centuries BCE. This assemblage includes fragments of figurines and masks, a...
Photogrammetry, Spatial Patterning, and Site Formation of the Hominin-Bearing Layers at the Lower Paleolithic Site of Dmanisi, Georgia (2018)
The Lower Paleolithic site of Dmanisi, Georgia, is well known for its rich archaeological and paleontological deposits, which include bones from at least five individuals attributed to Homo erectus. Taphonomic analyses show that carnivores contributed greatly to the accumulation of faunal material, while contributions by hominins were present, but uncommon. Recent excavations in the hominin-bearing layers of Block 2 at Dmanisi have revealed a complex underlying basalt formation that likely...
Phytoliths, Geochemistry and Ethnography: A Multi-method Approach for Interpreting the Neolithic Sites of WF16 and ‘Ain Ghazal (2018)
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...
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...
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 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,...
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...