Republic of Yemen (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only McClean Pink. Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpreting the use of material culture in mortuary contexts provides an intimate view of social identity of both the deceased and mourners in ancient societies. However, the material remains of mortuary practices throughout the Nabataean Kingdom in Jordan have not been systematically investigated. Comparing the material culture between contemporary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Fitton.

The Swahili of East Africa are regarded historically as a maritime culture, whose coastal sailing networks and prosperous Indian Ocean trade connections can be dated back to at least the 7th century CE. Archaeological investigations have demonstrated that maritime elements were deliberately embedded in the architecture of the famous second millennium Swahili stonetowns, but a focus on urban areas has sometimes been at the expense of areas of potential maritime infrastructure within settlements,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Belcher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the third millennium BCE, one of the earliest civilizations emerged in South Asia, the Indus Valley Tradition/Civilization. It had a trade network that spread throughout the Persian and Arabian Gulf, including sites on the Omani coast. This paper will compare two sites, Balakot on the Makran coast of Pakistan associated with the Indus Valley...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele Buzon. Sarah Schrader.

Tombos, located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, was established as an Egyptian colonial site in Nubia during the New Kingdom period. Burials provide evidence for high level Egyptian administrators and support staff as well as local community members. Previous investigations of the Tombos remains have indicated that individuals buried at Tombos participated in relatively low levels of strenuous physical activities, indicative of roles such as administrators, scribes, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akshay Sarathi. Laure Dussubieux. Jonathan Walz.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unguja Ukuu (sixth–eleventh cenuries CE) and Kizimkazi Dimbani (twelfth century CE) are early trading sites on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania in eastern Africa. Here we investigate patterns of glass bead trade at these sites, examining continuities and change between sites and over time. Glass bead samples from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. Niloofar Bagheri-Jebelli.

Extensive archaeological field work and multidisciplinary research in recent decades shows that communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers during the tenth millenium BC built the earliest presently known monumental structures during the PPNA (ca. 9600–8800 BC) at the ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe and nearby PPNB settlement sites in present-day Urfa province, southeastern Turkey. However, the earliest evidence of agriculture dates to a later period (early PPNB, ca. 8750 BC, terminus post quem)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theo Kassebaum.

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of the herd is often deployed when discussing systems of animal management in the ancient past, sometimes explicitly but most often implicitly. Due to the nature of the archaeological record, zooarchaeological assemblages often compress multiple generations of livestock into a single dataset....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Wright. Jeong-Heon Choi. Jessica Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in understanding the Pleistocene archaeology of Africa depend on well-dated models of human behavioral change. Portions of southern Africa with limestone caves and eastern Africa with volcanic tephra have datable materials (uranium and argon, respectively) beyond the limit of the radiocarbon clock (50ka)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher DeCorse.

This paper examines Portugal’s and Spain’s varied contacts, intersections and colonial aspirations in West and western Central Africa. Portugal and Spain share centuries of culture history, religion, and governance, and were united under the Iberian Union between 1580 and 1640. Yet within the context of European expansion into the non-Western world, they have often been considered distinct with regard to their histories and as foci of study. Pushing beyond national pasts, this paper...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jamie Hampson.

In many countries, cultural and socio-political identity is still shaped, manipulated, and presented through rock art. Both on and off the rocks, pictographs and petroglyphs are powerful tools. In this poster, I present results from ten years of fieldwork in southern Africa, northern Australia, and west Texas. I focus on re-contextualised rock art images, in commercial settings, in academic publications, and as integral components of national symbols. I also consider innovative new visitor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monika Baumanova.

Organisation of space in preserved buildings and town layouts in sub-Saharan Africa have increasingly been in the research scope of archaeologists and architectural historians alike. The methods of space syntax and its associated theory have, especially since 2000’s, paved its way to African archaeology and used for new interpretations of architecture e.g. of Benin, Dahomey and the Swahili coast. Traditionally, space syntax is undertaken using access analysis graphs for individual buildings,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reuven Yeshurun.

In zooarchaeology, Contextual Taphonomy means the integration of the stratigraphic and contextual data with zooarchaeological and taphonomic data, to clarify the 'life history' of a faunal sub-assemblage in a given context. The approach uses animal remains to explain variability among site features by looking into the differential taphonomic histories of the bones, most importantly in the post-discard stage. Archaeofaunal remains are normally ubiquitous in foragers’ camps and their histories are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her career Debra Martin has utilized an innovative, multidisciplinary, and theoretical approach to bioarchaeology. One of her most significant contributions to archaeology has been her pioneering work on violence, utilizing social theory and current methodologies in order to interpret the skeletal evidence. Her...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chapurukha Kusimba.

The role of ritual in the rise of complex societies is well understood in many regions of the world. In contrast, the roles ritual may have played in state collapse, regeneration, and resilience remains inadequately theorized in archaeological studies of the political dynamics of complex societies. This paper will evaluate the role of ritual in the emergence, resilience, and collapse of chiefly and state societies in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. Social and symbolic factors especially the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Fleisher. Stephanie Wynne-Jones.

The residents and rulers of Swahili towns along the eastern African Swahili coast fashioned cosmopolitan worlds through their participation in long-distance trade both across the Indian Ocean and into the continental interior, their conversion to Islam, and the construction of cities that incorporated styles from across the Indian Ocean world. The creation and use of a local coinage—silver from the 8th-10th centuries, and copper from the 11th century onward—is often viewed as a way that town...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ceri Ashley.

Mapungubwe’s influence spread deep into the regional hinterland, drawing in far-flung communities, trade networks and people. The traditional picture of a centripetal economy however has been challenged recently by work at these so called peripheries, indicating unexpected levels of autonomy and material wealth. While the place of these newly explored hinterlands need to be re-theorised and their agency acknowledged, there is danger in swinging the interpretive pendulum too far towards a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Hixon. Kristina Douglass. Henry Wright. Brooke Crowley. Laurie Godfrey.

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing and subsequent environmental impacts of the human settlement of Madagascar remain key topics of debate in archaeology. Located approximately 250 miles off the East African coast, Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world, appears to have been one of the world’s last large landmasses to...

DATASET Jade d'Alpoim Guedes. R. Kyle Bocinsky.

Database of appearance of crops, period of use and associated radiocarbon dates across Eurasia

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shadreck Chirikure.

The legacy collections from Great Zimbabwe (CE1000-1700) emanated from uncontrolled treasure hunting expeditions of the late 19th and early 20th century and the sporadic professional digs conducted at various points throughout the twentieth century. As a result of this colorful history, most materials from the site are scattered in different archives where they are gathering dust with little or no research being performed. This contribution discusses a technological and typological analysis of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugene Smith. Racheal Johnsen. Jayde Hirniak. Minghua Ren. Curtis Marean.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Placing archaeological sites on the same timeline across the African continent is essential for determining the initial appearance of key human behaviors and cultural features. Analytical error associated with traditional dating techniques makes these determinations difficult. Cryptotephra, which are small (<80 micron)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Scott.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. British archaeologist Crystal Bennett (1918–1987) is considered one of the formidable British female archaeologists of the Middle East, conducting investigations across Jordan and beyond from 1957 to 1983. As Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s student at the University of London in the early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ahmed Alsherif.

This paper discusses what kind of cultural and historical correlation between Tefinagh inscriptions and rock art in the Tadrart Acacus. The Tuareg alphabet, Tefinagh, is one of ancient African alphabets documented not only in Libya but also Algeria and Tunisia, among other countries. It is traditionally taught by a mother to all her children. This alphabet, which dates back at least to the second half of the first millennium B.C.E, is used by approximately 50 percent of the Tuareg for short...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hans Barnard.

The study of the ancient cultural history of northern Ethiopia, modern Tigray, often includes an interpretation of the obvious connections with the Arabian Peninsula, to the east, and the Nile Valley to the west. Less attention is usually given to contacts with the African heartland, to the south, and the relatively arid region between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea, usually referred to as the Eastern Desert, to the north. The cultural connections with the latter are reflected in linguistic and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elham Ghasidian. Saman Heydari-Guran.

Located in western Eurasia, at the crossroads of human migrations out of Africa during the Pleistocene, the Iranian Plateau stands at the centre of models of anatomically modern human dispersals out of Africa. This paper aims to understand the cultural diversity among the first modern human populations in the area, and the implications of this diversity to evolutionary and ecological models of human dispersal through the Iranian Plateau, by re-examining four key UP lithic assemblages from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Edwards. Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Tell Hisban in Jordan was seasonally occupied by nomadic agropastoral tribes for over a thousand years. In the latter half of the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire instituted the Tanzimat, a series of reforms intended to solidify control over the region, including a new system of private land ownership. This new land law conflicted with traditional...