State of Eritrea (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (810 Records)
Discerning what makes Homo sapiens distinctive among the rest of the species on the planet has been a difficult task. One suggestion has been our use of symbolic culture, the use and transmission of symbols intergenerationally. There is much discussion, however, about who the first ‘symbol users’ were, partly due to debates as to what actually makes something ‘symbolic.’ In this paper, I discus how anthropologists first came to use symbol as the sine qua non of modern human behavior. Then, using...
Carbon Enamel Isotopes as Proxy for Dietary Changes in the Omo-Turkana Basin between 2 and 1.4 Ma (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the numerous hominin fossils found in the Omo-Turkana Basin dating to between 2.0 and 1.4 Ma., a resolved understanding of their dietary ecology has been challenging due to limited research on similar patterns in contemporaneous large mammals In this study, we use a sample (n = 390) of enamel δ13C values of six Bovidae, Suidae, and Equidae taxa as...
Carnelian Beads from the Site of Kish, Iraq: Differentiating Indus and Non-Indus Carnelian Beads Using Technological, Morphological, and Chemical Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carnelian beads from the site of Kish, Iraq, include a wide range of bead types, including locally produced short cylindrical beads and long biconical beads that are thought to have been produced in the Indus region of South Asia. Beads from different excavation contexts can...
Cause and Effect: Human-Animal Relationships and Zoonotic Brucellosis in Long Term Perspective (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zoonotic diseases remain a persistent global challenge, with some 60% of human pathogens of zoonotic origin. They disproportionately impact the world’s most vulnerable populations, particularly those living in close proximity with their animals and who have less access to health information and care. Archaeology’s cultural and biological datasets have the potential to...
Cautionary tales in the use of captive carnivore tooth mark data (2017)
Evidence for hominin meat acquisition in the form of butchery marks on fossil animal bones dates back to at least 2.6 million years ago. With this new dietary behavior came competition between hominins and large carnivores for animal carcasses. Identifying which carnivores hominins were interacting with would allow various models of the timing and sequence of hominin and carnivore carcass to be evaluated. However, many studies of carnivore tooth marking and damage patterns are conducted with...
Centralized Urban Planning and Economic Segregation: A Case Study Based on Wealth Inequality at Tell Asmar and Khafajah in Mesopotamia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a possible correlation between central planning and economic segregation in ancient urbanized cities. A pre-planned and constructed urban residential area may have fostered an aggregate of inhabitants who had similar traits, such as ethnicity, class, wealth, occupation and religion. Different clusters of people may be discerned between...
Change and Adaptation in Stone Tool Technology in Jordan ca. 1000 BCE (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The decline and replacement of stone tools with their metal counterparts in regions with traditions of metallurgy has been shown to have been a slow and variable process that involved specific types of tools marking the metallurgic transition at different times and in specific contexts. For example, in the region of the southern Levant (Jordan, Palestine,...
Change and Continuity in Agricultural Production in Iraqi Kurdistan, ca. 4000 BCE–1000 CE (2018)
The archaeological site of Kani Shaie is a small (<3ha) tell site located in Iraqi Kurdistan not far from contemporary Sulaymaniyah. Archaeological evidence as well as radiocarbon dates procured from excavations at the site indicate in-habitation from at least 3500 BCE until the Middle Islamic period, ca. 1400 CE. Excavations in 2015 and especially 2016 included a substantial archaeobotanical sampling component, which entailed the sampling of every archaeological deposit and the subsequent...
Changes in the Size and Organization of Storage in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of the Southern Levant (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The size and spatial organization of facilities for the storage of cereals and pulses provide important clues to the socioeconomic organization and degree of inequality of households and communities. In the context of late prehistory in the southern Levant in the Middle East, we might expect changes in storage to result from the growing importance of...
A Characterization of Site Formation Processes at FxJj34, Northen Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any inference of behavior based upon the spatial distribution of archaeological material requires an understanding of site formation processes. Natural agents, such as water flow, may be responsible for post-depositional alteration of buried materials and can result in spatial patterns which mask the behavioral processes associated with the initial deposition...
Chaîne Opératoire in Jade Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since Wu Da-cheng’s Catalogue of Ancient Jades in the Qing Period, research of Chinese jades has largely focused on analyses of their social and ritual significances. In latter half of the 20th century, excavations in Liangzhu, Hongshan, and Xinglongwa culture sites discovered many prehistoric jades. These important discoveries...
Christian Life in Medieval Nubia at el-Kurru, Sudan (2017)
The Nubian site of el-Kurru (modern Sudan) lies along the Nile River about 140 km upstream of Old Dongola, the capital of the Medieval Christian kingdom of Makuria. In 2015-2016, a cemetery adjacent to the settlement was excavated, containing 26 skeletons. Here, I will present current bioarchaeological work on these individuals. Biological profiles were developed, including sex and age ranges, health markers evaluated, and indicators of pathology and trauma identified. Those interred span all...
The clay sleeps: an ethnoarchaeological study of three African potters (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...
Climate Change and Social Sustainability: The Case of the 8.2-kyBP Climate Event and the Demise of the Neolithic Community at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The social strategy of imposed egalitarianism provided solid foundations for the unprecedented growth of the Neolithic community inhabiting the large settlement at Çatalhöyük for more than half a millennium. Its constituting elements comprised symmetry and balance among cross-cutting sodalities, as well as integration of domestic and ritual domains....
Climate Change or Muslims? Collapse of the Late Antique Sasanian Settlements, Mughan Steppe, Iranian Azerbaijan (2018)
Recent research in the borderlands has increased our knowledge on the irrigation systems and urbanization plans of the Sasanian Empire in the late antiquity. In particular, surveys and excavations in the Mughan Steppe indicate that irrigation canals connected nearly all Sasanian settlements. Evidence suggests that after the 7th century AD most of the elaborate settlement system was abandoned and its irrigation infrastructure went out of use. While the exact date of this abandonment is unclear,...
Climate Change, Disease, and the Collapse of Swahili Urbanism (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complex city-states arose on the East African Coast that were hubs of international trade networks. However, by the seventeenth century, most of these settlements had been abandoned. What were the causes of the Swahili state collapse? Historians and archaeologists have implicated climate change as one of the causal factors in the collapse of highly...
Climate Stability and Societal Decline on the Margins of the Byzantine Empire in the Negev Desert (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the absence of a high-resolution climate archive in Negev Desert, southern Israel, it has been challenging to understand why the Byzantine Empire built large towns in this arid region in the fourth century CE—and why it abandoned them three centuries later. In this study, we use dietary and mobility patterns of animals recovered from three Byzantine Negev...
Climatic Narratives across Eurasia: A Comparative Study of the 4.2k Event in Western and Eastern Asia (2018)
In the last two decades, climatic narratives have returned as a central issue in archaeological discourse. The field has been flooded with publications on paleoclimatic reconstructions and we believe it is time for a critical evaluation – both as means of seeking better science, and for building better archaeological narratives. Climate history is composed by an overlapping meshwork of long-standing trends, punctuated events and short-term phases, with impacts ranging from the local to the...
Co-constitutive Peripheries: Settlement Landscapes of Power and Memory on Mauritius (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines changes in settlement patterns in Mauritius over the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and the ways these landscapes are remembered on the island today. I emphasize agro-industrial landscapes as a specific cultural mode of land use and as a spatial phenomenon that has come to define so much of the...
Co-Creating Digital Heritage Resources in Ghana: How Is It Going? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funded by a Canadian SSHRC-funded partnership development grant, our working group of collaborators is engaged in training and capacity building in digital heritage methods in Ghana. Project aims include fostering a community of practice inclusive of archaeologists, heritage practitioners, students...
Cobbling Material Memory: Kings, Gods, and Shrines in an Old Kingdom with Active Roots – Kanazi Palace, NW Tanzania (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last decade, heritage research in Kagera Region of NW Tanzania has responded to community-driven initiatives focused on preservation, tourism, and museum development. This attention to heritage-related programs has fostered several projects that continue to enhance our understanding of appropriate methods for preserving local and...
The Color of Personal Ornaments in Prehistoric Periods of the Levant (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shell beads appear first in the Middle Palaeolithic of the Levant. Their use as personal ornaments is evidence for cognitive abilities and symbolic expressions, however, their colors are limited to white, red and black. Humans’ transition from a foraging economy to agriculture in the Neolithic of the Levant brought...
Combining Proteomic Sex Determination of Archaeological Remains with Isotopic Analyses for Understanding the Development of Animal Husbandry (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Proteomic techniques are being increasingly used in bioarchaeological applications to improve understanding of the human past. However, few studies have focused on the study of tooth enamel for sexing in archaeofaunal remains despite initial studies over a decade ago looking at human teeth. Here we use of...
Come for the Harvest, Stay for the Beer: Alcohol Production in an Ubaid Household in Upper Mesopotamia (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 New Perspectives on Household Archaeology, Bradley Parker and Catherine Foster urged archaeologists to approach households as a dynamic location of repetitive actions and gestures that shaped the formation of the personal, economic, social, political and ideological trajectories of the community. In his...
Comics, Colonialism, & Pseudoarchaeology: The Case of "La Crane de Mkwawa" (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Interactions with Pseudoarchaeology: Approaches to the Use of Social Media and the Internet for Correcting Misconceptions of Archaeology in Virtual Spaces" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are frequently represented in comic books as caricatures, where adventure and profit are exaggerated and the interpretation of finds is oversimplified. In this paper it is argued that these misrepresentations of how and...