State of Eritrea (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Skinner. Darcy Calabria. Monica Genuardi. Mark Van Horn. Ann E. Killebrew.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reed Coil. Martha Tappen. Reid Ferring. Maia Bukhsianidze. David Lordkipanidze.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georgia Oppenheim. Amanda Stricklan. Rahab Kinyanjui. Sarah Hlubik. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cooking Hypothesis suggests the morphological changes in the Homo lineage, including larger brains, were due to incorporating controlled combustion to cook food. Most archaeological evidence for fire comes from cave sites, which are less likely to be exposed to post-depositional processes (e.g. wind and water) that can destroy combustion evidence. Yet the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Stricklan. Sarah Hlubik. Rahab Kinyanjui. David Braun. Georgia Oppenheim.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Controlled fire could have significantly impacted hominin evolution, providing an adaptive release resulting in reduced teeth and gut size, and larger brains. Evidence of hominin controlled fire is sparse in the early Pleistocene archaeological record. These sites are usually in open-air contexts where taphonomic factors can obscure the identification of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Jenkins. Samantha Allcock. Sarah Elliott. Carol Palmer. John Grattan.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katheryn Twiss. Melina Seabrook. Michael Charles.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Dodd. Ran Boytner.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gideon Hartman.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Frye. Jonothan Reeves. Matthew Douglass. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is often argued that surface assemblages provide insight into human behaviors at a regional scale. Measures of artifact use life and reduction intensity at this broad scale are often used to characterize the structure of stone tool use across space. However, once re-exposed, artifacts are subject to a variety of processes that potentially bias the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. James Skibo changed the way we study pottery. Jim’s archaeological career incorporated many different facets of archaeological research including experimental archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, archaeology, and theory, all focusing on pottery research. One of his biggest influences is combining ethnoarchaeology and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Welton.

The current understanding of the pre-Aksumite period of northern Ethiopia has been heavily influenced by data originating from sites in western Tigrai, particularly those in the area of Aksum. The Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP), however, has also documented substantial evidence for pre-Aksumite settlement further to the east, through both survey and excavation. This paper will summarize ETAP’s efforts to understand the pre-Aksumite period in eastern Tigrai at the site of Mezber,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Habtamu Mekonnen.

The pre-Aksumite to Aksumite transition (PA-A transition) is critically important for the culture history of the Horn of Africa. This period in Western Tigrai (400/300–150 BCE) represents a cultural break between the Sabaean-influenced pre-Aksumite period (≥800–400/300 BCE) and the predominantly indigenous kingdom of Aksum. Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite polities in Western Tigrai were not directly related and marked by significant sociopolitical change. The emerging picture of the PA-A transition in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Arbuckle.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald H Avery. Peter R Schmidt.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Collins. Christopher Ames.

Grassridge Rockshelter sits at the base of the Stormberg Mountains in the northern part of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. This region has only been the focus of two previous major archaeological projects, with research at Grassridge last conducted in 1979 and identifying Holocene Later Stone Age and Late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age occupations. The Grassridge Archaeological and Palaeoenvironmental Project (GAPP) renewed research at Grassridge in 2014. In this presentation, we summarise the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wolfgang Alders. Abdallah Khamis Ali.

We present the preliminary results of a study investigating long-term agricultural history in northern Unguja, the southern island of Zanzibar. In the summer of 2016, we excavated four test pits in modern rice fields to collect bulk, starch, phytolith, C14, and micromorphology samples, as well as samples from upland areas along watersheds, with the aim of characterizing contemporary and ancient land use in the rice-growing western side of the island. We also carried out brief archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only G Déraprahamian. F Abbès.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estabon. David Wescott.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estabon. David Wescott.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estabon. David Wescott.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Knut Bretzke.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Z Krzak.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hanna Erftenbeck.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler Faith. Margaret Avery.

Over the last several decades, Quaternary scientists have developed numerous techniques to generate quantitative paleoenvironmental reconstructions based on the taxonomic composition of fossil assemblages. The appeal of these methods is that, rather than providing reconstructions in qualitative terms (e.g., cooler versus warmer), they offer potential to generate numerical assessments. While these methods have been applied to a variety of fossil organisms, including pollen, diatoms, foraminifera,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Braekmans. Brett Kaufman. Hans Barnand. Ali Drine.

The site of Zita is an urban mound located in southern Tunisia and situated along an ancient trade route from Carthage to Tripoli. It is the highest point on a peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean Sea across from the Island of Djerba, often identified as the Island of Calypso of the Lotus-Eaters from the Odyssey. Established as a Carthaginian settlement around 500 BCE, the city became a Roman regional center in the 1st century CE. Zita still has industrial features such as ceramic kilns and...