Sultanate of Oman (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
276-300 (510 Records)
Lithic miniaturization, the systematic production of small stone artifacts by controlled fracture, was a pervasive feature of late Pleistocene lithic technology. Smaller toolkits enabled humans to exploit raw materials more efficiently, to produce composite tools more effectively, to reduce a wider range of rocks, and to increase mobility by lightening toolkits. These benefits allowed humans to occupy a wider range of ecological niches. Archaeologists working in southern Africa have long...
Lithic Procurement at a Levantine Desert Refugium during the Middle Pleistocene (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 at Shishan Marsh 1 in the Azraq Basin, Jordan have uncovered several artifact-bearing layers that date to the late Middle Pleistocene (300-220kya; 130-120kya). A paleoecological assessment of sediments from this period indicates predominantly arid and warm conditions in the region, similar to those of the present. Hominins living under these...
Lithic Technology and Reduction Strategies at Shishan Marsh 1 (2017)
The 2013-15 excavations at Shishan Marsh 1 have revealed an impressive array of stone tools at this Middle Pleistocene Oasis. More than 7000 stone tools including: handaxes, scrapers, modified and utilized flakes, burins, Levallois points and flakes, cores, small pebble tools and debitage associated with tool manufacture and refurbishing, have been analyzed. Analysis was conducted on all tools and debitage using the lithic attribute analysis method, and low and high power magnification to...
Lithics and Learning: Communities of Practice at Kharaneh IV (2018)
Flintknappers during the Levantine Epipaleolithic were proficient at microlith production, these skills were learned and passed down from one flintknapping generation to another as no one is born with the innate ability to flintknap. By utilizing practice theory and a chaîne opératoire approach to the Epipaleolithic chipped stone tool reduction sequences of narrow-nosed cores at Kharaneh IV, I strive to identify how individuals learned to flintknap, from raw material acquisition to the...
Lived Space of Displaced People: A Comparative Approach to Contested Spaces in Iron Age Northern Mesopotamia and Modern Europe (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology grapples with the materiality of past subjects’ perception and organization of space, as drawn from objects, landscapes, architecture, and pictorial or textual representations. Generally what emerges from these data is a dominant or normative conceptualization of space. However, space is not merely the...
Living with the Dead: Burial Practice at Kenan Tepe, Turkey, During the Ubaid Period (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. Due to the generosity of Dr. Bradley Parker I had the opportunity to analyse the Ubaid Period burials from Kenan Tepe, Turkey. These burials provide a glimpse into the social dynamics and ritual practice of Kenan Tepe’s Ubaid Period community. The burials are divided into two groups: infants buried in courtyards...
Living with the Dead: Plastered Skulls and ‘Continuing Bonds’ (2017)
This paper considers the phenomenon of plastered skulls from the Neolithic of the Middle East, exploring a re-interpretation of evidence. Plastered skulls result from the burial and later retrieval of crania, onto which is sculpted a face using plaster. These were then used and displayed within household contexts. Rather than traditional interpretations which revolve around status and hierarchy or social cohesion, this paper suggests a reinterpretation based on the modern bereavement theory of...
Localizing the Imperial Grain Economy in Mamluk Syria: Expressions of Village-Level Initiatives in 14th-Century Transjordan (2017)
How did the medieval Islamic state realize its objectives in natural resource management? How can we distinguish the "hand of the state" from that of local initiatives in land use? This paper is an attempt to evaluate planting and watering strategies, differentiating imperial agro-policies from local practice at the village level. The focus is the intensification and diversification of grain production in 14th century Syria. Grain fields were the most valuable of the agrarian iqṭaʿāt (grants of...
Long-Term Climate Change: A Case Study on Climate Records from the Middle East in Relation to the Neo-Assyrian Empire Agriculture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neo-Assyrian Empire as one of the major empires in the Ancient Near East emerged soon after late Bronze Age collapses. It ruled Mesopotamia from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to western parts of Iran and to Persian Gulf during the first millennium B.C. in a cold period in theHolocene Epoch. For my thesis, I am focusing on their plant cultivation,...
Luminescence Age Calculation Models, Termites, and Dune History in the Northern Kalahari Desert, Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often accept optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages with less critical review than those derived from the more commonly used radiocarbon dating methods. This is largely because of an incomplete understanding of optical dating techniques and the modeling assumptions used to calculate these ages....
Macro- and Microscopic Effects of Heating in Lithics: Potential Indicators of Human-Controlled Fire? (2018)
Outside of clear association of human activities and fire features (e.g., a constructed hearth and artifacts), a perennial challenge persists in linking human/hominin behavior to the control of fire. This particularly vexes ongoing investigations to determine early human-fire interaction(s). Although natural landscape fires can be intense, their tendency to move quickly may limit modifications in lithic material at ground level. Studies examining the effect(s) of heating tool-stone at different...
The Making of Agro-pastoral Landscape of the Tibetan Plateau: A Zooarchaeological Perspective (2018)
The vertical ingredient of the Tibetan Plateau plays a unique role in making of the highland agro-pastoral landscape. We divide the Tibetan Plateau into three eco-altitudinal zones: areas below 3,000 m.a.s.l.; areas between 3,000 and 4,200 m.a.s.l.; and areas above 4,200 m.a.s.l. Today, pastoralists and farmers utilize different faunal and floral taxa in the three zones, partly as risk aversion strategies. In this paper, I review the zooarchaeological evidence dated between 6,000 and 1,000 BP...
Man does not go naked: Textilien und Handwerk aus afrikanischen und anderen Ländern; Festschrift für Renée Boser-Sarivaxévanis (1989)
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...
Manot 1 brain characteristics (2017)
Manot is a nearly-sealed, active karstic cave located in the hilly landscape of the western Galilee, Israel. It contains abundant archaeological accumulations attributed to the early phase of the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) period as well as evidence for the Middle Palaeolithic (MP). During the initial survey of the cave (2008), a nearly complete calvaria (Manot 1) was found. The specimen was dated to ~55 ky by the U-Th method. In an earlier study, Hershkovitz et al 2015 described the...
Manot 1 calvaria and Aduma skull: are they the same? (2017)
The Manot 1 calvaria demonstrates a mosaic of "archaic" and modern traits. Although the taxonomic significance of this combination of features is not clear, a similar combination of archaic and modern features exists in the fossil record across sub-Saharan African and the Middle East until after 35 kya. The aim of the current study is to examine the possibility that the Aduma skull, Ethiopia (60-90 kya) is the mother population that gave rise to the Manot Cave hominins. This was carried out by...
Material Assemblage and Social Changes in Central Tibet, the Second and the First Millennium B.C. (2018)
Compared to the relatively well-researched area of Eastern Tibet Plateau, the archaeology of Central Tibet has long been neglected. This paper offers a review of academic debates concerning the site of Qugong and analyzed the newly found materials in Bangga and Changguogou site. Based on the available materials and 14C dating data, I here propose a primary chronological framework in Central Tibet and revealed the cultural affiliations of Central Tibet with Central Asia, as well as the cultural...
Material Geographies of Multi-Family Neolithic Households (2018)
This paper explores how people within Neolithic villages were potentially connected to co-resident multi-family households, and considers the potential material footprint of multi-family households within Neolithic villages. As seen from ethnographic cases, in some cases residential buildings of House Societies had a range of functions including as dwelling locations, origin-places, council houses, or meeting-houses. Echoing other research this paper decouples the social unit of the House from a...
The materiality of life and death: Dress ornaments and shifting identities at Hasanlu, Iran (2017)
The site of Hasanlu, Iran, was destroyed thoroughly by a marauding army in approximately 800 BCE, leaving a hulk of smoking rubble that was a virtual tomb for the hundreds of residents and combatants who weren’t able to escape its citadel. The excavations of Hasanlu, led by Robert H. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, took place between 1956 and 1977, and uncovered a remarkable range of contexts containing personal ornaments within the relatively narrow historical horizon of...
Measuring performance under sail (2009)
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...
Meat on the Hoof: Isotopic Evidence of Administrative Herd Management at Khirbet Summeily, Israel (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Khirbet Summeily is an Iron Age II site located northwest of Tell el-Hesi in Southern Israel. Excavations have revealed a large, singular structure with an adjoining ritual space dated to the Iron Age IIA (ca. 1000–870 BCE). Recent interpretations suggest the site was integrated into a regional economic and political system and functioned as a potential...
Medieval worldbuilding and cosmopolitics: Armenia on the Silk Road (2017)
This paper presents observations from recent seasons of research in the Vayoc Dzor region of southern Armenia, in the context of a long-term and multi-sited program of investigations into the intersections of locally situated highland social phenomena within the broader Silk Road cultural ecumene during the late medieval period (AD 12th-15th centuries). This ongoing project builds on an understanding of late medieval Armenian participation in and co-production of the worlds of the Silk Road,...
Mesopotamian Clay Tokens, Pilgrimage, and Interaction (2017)
This study explores the possibility that some Mesopotamian clay tokens were pilgrim’s tokens, which signified interaction with spiritual powers or transactions with a shrine’s religious specialists or administrators. Pilgrim’s tokens around the world have often been made of earth and clay, some as effigies of goods desired or symbols of shrines and their spiritual forces, that are carried in bags, miniature ceramic vessels, or bullae. Previous investigations indicate that earthen artifacts have...
Mesopotamian Megasites before Uruk (2017)
Discussions of "alternative" trajectories of urban growth are often compared to "classic" models from Old World civilizations, and most often Mesopotamia. It is said that Mesopotamian cities were dense and spatially discrete from their agricultural hinterlands, in contrast to new models of low-density urbanism. In fact, the earliest large settlement agglomerations ("megasites") in Mesopotamia were discontinuous and far less dense than the mature cities of the Bronze Age (after 3000 BC). This...
Mest als bron voor verkoold plantaardig materiaal uit opgravingen in het nabije oosten: waarnemingen en experimenten (1991)
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...
Metal and vitreous production technologies at the Early Bronze Age Resuloğlu (Central Anatolia, Turkey) (2018)
Modern day Çorum is the homeland of the Hatti people, the culture that later formed the Hittite Empire. Resuloğlu, dated to the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2500–2100 BC), is one of the few Hatti sites being systematically excavated. The site, located on a hilltop near the Delice River, consists of a cemetery area and settlement that spreads over two opposing–once connected–ridges with numerous extraordinary metal and vitreous artifacts. The settlement exemplifies well the self-sustaining pre-Hittite...