Georgia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jakub Sawicki.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea of “unity of culture” in medieval Latin Europe is well known in historical texts, especially when it concerns the so-called “Europe north of the Alps.” Scholars have often suggested that due to long-distance trade, widespread knowledge of Latin, and shared religious ideas, we can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Harkleroad.

Discussions of ritual in society often focus on how ritual is used to bring individuals, communities, and larger social groups together. The role of ritual in violent interactions and warfare is less often considered and often what discussion there is focuses on the use of warfare to procure captives for public rituals, such as execution. Virtually ignored in this discussion is the role ritual plays in routinizing violence and warfare and how this ultimately impacts individuals and societies....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology has the unique power to deeply investigate mortuary space not only to identify lived experiences from human remains but also to illuminate elements of mortuary ritual. However, these two aspects of bioarchaeology still remain conceptually separated: one is biological and the other socio-cultural, one is scientific and the other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristina Real Margalef. Aleix Eixea. Alfred Sanchis. João Zilhão. Valentín Villaverde.

Excavations at Abrigo de la Quebrada (Chelva, Valencia) have revealed 9 archaeological levels belonging to Neanderthal occupations. Level IV, characterised by a high density of lithic (>18,000) and bone (>100,000) remains, has been dated with AMS between 43,930±750 BP (Beta-244002) and >50.8 ka BP (OxA-24855). Human presence in the shelter has been favoured by its location, giving rise to a kind of natural trap where hunting animals would be feasible. The immediate environment is varied (abrupt...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerome Robitaille. Lisa-Elen Meyering. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser. Olaf Jöris. Paul Pettitt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our AHRC/DFG-funded Household Art project explores the content and wider context of the 15,800-year-old Gönnersdorf/Andernach Upper Palaeolithic engraved plaquettes (portable schist) curated at MONREPOS, Neuwied (Germany). We use state-of-the-art 3D scanning microscopic and use-wear technologies in MONREPOS’S TraCEr laboratory and visual psychological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lubna Omar.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper delves into the glaring disparities faced by Middle Eastern archaeologists in disseminating their invaluable knowledge about their own heritage, elucidating how prevailing Western-centric ethical codes fail to redress these issues effectively. A profound asymmetry exists, wherein Middle Eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mietje Germonpré. Martina Láznicková-Galetová. Mikhail Sablin. Hervé Bocherens.

With this contribution, we would like to present our ideas concerning the first steps in the domestication process of the dog. Two main hypotheses on the origin of the dog have been proposed: 1)"Self-domestication" by wolves: Some wolves were following Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to scavenge on the remains of prey left by the prehistoric people at the human settlements. Generation after generation, these wandering wolves adapted themselves to the human dominated environment. 2)"Social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Sarig. Ofer Marder. Omry Barzilai. Bruce Latimer. Israel Hershkovitz.

The study on the partial calvarium discovered at Manot Cave, Western Galilee, Israel (dated to 54.7 ± 5.5 kyr BP, Hershkovitz et al. 2015), revealed close morphological affinity with recent African skulls as well as with early Upper Paleolithic European skulls, but less so with earlier anatomically modern humans from the Levant (e.g., Skhul). The ongoing fieldwork at the Manot Cave has resulted in the discovery of several new hominin teeth. These include a lower incisor (I1), a right lower...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dramatic demographic growth is a hallmark of the urban process, yet reasons for population growth in emerging urban systems are not well understood. This paper draws on archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to ideology of the house and cultural values to explore why populations increased so dramatically in third millennium Mesopotamia. Additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Kulick.

Sequences at Bronze Age Cretan settlement sites are defined by destructive events, natural or anthropogenic, that capture cultural material in a particular time and space. The traditional approach of studying urban archaeological contexts based on these snapshots of material culture is not completely suitable for analyzing transitional phases that occur between these events. However, detailed micromorphological examination of the sediments present in these transitional stratigraphic sequences...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Fernandez-Gotz.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urbanization is a social process, rather than a final destination. More important than debating whether one specific settlement within a system should be classified as "urban," "proto-urban," or "nonurban" is to analyze the wider processes of settlement nucleation and centralization that take place within the larger landscape,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Brunner.

There has been much debate on what defines an Islamic city (madīna) and what made cities become "Islamic" after the Islamic conquest. These studies have often marginalized the Islamic period, associating street encroachment and overall shifts away from the "classical" model as signs of decline. Scholars have relied on western notions of what defines a city and have used strict urban typological models, which do not conform to the region or period. In addition, these studies have neglected to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Hitchings. Edward Banning.

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, many archaeological surveys have the goal of documenting, as completely as possible, the locations and character of sites, many of which are rare, unobtrusive, or both. Increasingly over the last three decades, archaeologists have used predictive models in a GIS to help them target spaces that are most likely to contain sites of interest, or sites under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudine Gravel-Miguel.

Anthropological research suggests that climate and environmental resources influence the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers. My research uses an agent-based model to generate test expectations related to the impact of different geographical and social environments on the social networks formed therein. It focuses on Magdalenian social networks created in the Cantabrian and Dordogne region, and visible through similarities of portable art representations. The regional resources and climate of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Moots.

The Neolithic Transition brought with it a number of changes in the relationships that people had with animals, plants and pathogens. Increasing proximity to domesticated and commensal animals, and larger, denser communities shifted the disease ecologies of these communities and resulted in an increasing number of disease vectors. I use ancient and modern DNA to look at the effects that these new dietary and epidemiological trends had on people in the past and the genomic legacies of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Henry. Sarah H. Ledogar. Jordan Karsten.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Expansion of agricultural communities during the Eneolithic in Europe likely had an impact on the environment due to a need for land, wood for building houses, and agricultural practices (e.g., slash-and-burn). We focus on the Trypillians (an Eneolithic, forest-steppe group) from Southeastern Europe, and how their agropastoral lifestyles impacted their...

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

Our understanding of Neolithic sites in southwest Asia is often impeded by the lack of preservation of biological evidence. As a result, they often consist of a series of structures, the construction and function of which, remains elusive. In order to address this problem we conducted a study which used phytoliths and geochemistry from an ethnographic site in Jordan, Al Ma’tan, to determine if certain building construction techniques and anthropogenic activities leave specific phytolith and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Kerry Sayle. Gordon Cook.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the ongoing results on isotopic research on Middle Iron Age (~400–200 cal BC) populations in Wessex and East Yorkshire. The multi-isotopic approach has been employed to infer population mobility for both the inhumed human population at a series of sites and the faunal assemblages from either the associated settlements or directly recovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Mitchell. Dave Cowley.

This paper will show how using multiple techniques will refresh our understanding of cropmark sites, which is imperative for their protection and preservation. This work comes out of a research project looking at barrow cemeteries in north and east Scotland, the wealth of aerial archive was reviewed and explored through multiple methods. Rectifying and transcribing the aerial APs was one aspect, but ground survey picked up newly identified upstanding barrows at multiple sites. The results extend...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul R. Duffy. Péter Czukor.

A variety of new groups emerged during the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin —some had powerful rulers holding feasts and controlling the trade in commodities, and some were egalitarian peoples leaving little evidence for social differentiation outside of age and gender. This paper uses a comparative and multi-scalar perspective to study two different social trajectories in the Carpathian Basin during the second millennium BC: the Lower Körös Basin in Eastern Hungary, and the Danube and its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodora Moutsiou.

This poster presents the preliminary results of an extensive geo-chemical fingerprinting program using pXRF that was undertaken on a large and diverse lithic collection that included three different raw materials, namely obsidian, carnelian and picrolite. Specifically, the project investigated the use of these three raw materials in Early Holocene lithic assemblages - stone tools and ornaments - from the island of Cyprus, eastern Mediterranean. Obsidian, carnelian and picrolite have been defined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reed Goodman. Paul Zimmerman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geoarchaeological sediments represent robust archives of human-environment interactions. Given the growing importance of paleoenvironmental research in anthropology and the absence of critical chrono-stratigraphic and ecological evidence from challenging contexts/regions, opportunities to refine chronological frameworks through novel instrumentation are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree. Taylor Zaneri.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origin of urbanism is one of the most significant transitions in human history. Archaeologists and historians have been interested in the origins and development of early medieval urbanism since the days of V. Gordon Childe and Henri Pirenne in the early twentieth century. While most of the early studies of medieval towns were based on historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro.

This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his 2002 paper “Breaking the Mold,” Richard Redding wrote that “by focusing on the emergence of tactics of animal use that characterize the Neolithic, we may be missing aspects of the process that are not only interesting but critical to building and testing explanations.” Twenty years later, our...