Georgia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Györgyi Parditka. Paul R. Duffy. Julia I. Giblin. László Paja.

The transition to the Middle Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement and social organization. Upon first glance, the Körös-Region was no different from its neighbours. Tell sites emerged, population increased, farming intensified, and people engaged in long distance trade. The international Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology (BAKOTA) project has studied this area through settlements and mortuary archaeology for over 11 years. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madelynn Von Baeyer.

This paper presents archaeobotanical data from the Late Chalcolithic (LC) archaeobotanical assemblage at Çadır Höyük, a mounded site on the north central Anatolian plateau with almost continuous occupation from the Middle Chalcolithic through the Byzantine period. The analysis will focus on both descriptive and quantitative data from samples dating to around 3600 B.C.E. from a communal cooking area at Çadır. It will examine how archaeobotanical analysis can be used as a line of evidence to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Fritz. Gilles Tosello.

En art paléolithique, les "scènes" sont rares et leur identification repose le plus souvent sur la présence d'un acteur humain ou anthropomorphe. Paradoxalement, la thématique paléolithique compte moins de 5 % de figures humaines pour 95 % d'animaux. Cela signifie que la majorité des assemblages que l'on retrouve dans les grottes sont constitués d'images animales. Or dans nos cultures, l'image humaine est centrale et lorsque nous parlons de scène, nous recherchons intuitivement la référence à...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Ristvet.

Pilgrimage is a popular phenomenon, one which involves people traveling to and gathering at specific places during specific times, usually as part of a shared religious tradition. In the Ancient Near East, religious travel existed alongside other forms of mobility with important political and social consequences, like peripatetic kingship—in which there is no one fixed court—a characteristic of the Urartian (ca. 800-600 BC), Achaemenid (ca. 550-330 BC), and Seleucid (ca. 300-100 BC) empires, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Luurtsema. Kara Larson. Henry Wright. Alicia Ventresca Miller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Uruk period (4100 - 3100 BCE) was a transformative time in Southwest Asia, marked by the precursors of writing, the rise of urbanization, and an intensification in cross-cultural interactions. Subsistence strategies were shifting as well, as hunting declined relative to herding and animals such as sheep and goats became favored for both their primary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only João Zilhão.

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. The Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition is a watershed. By the later Upper Paleolithic, all continents were occupied, all the world’s ecosystems were exploited, and all aspects of ethnographically observed hunter-gatherer culture the archaeological record can preserve are indeed found. Prior to about 100,000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhaneta Gjyshja.

The Shkodra Archaeological Project (PASH) took place in the Shkodra region of northern Albania. Shkodra presents a wide variety of ecosystems and landscapes, which interact with each other, leading to variation in human settlement, social behaviors, and land use, from prehistory to modern times. During the project, fifty-nine grinding stones were collected from various sites. Preliminary analysis shows that they vary in size and type, are composed of different materials, and belong to different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Stojanowski.

This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Phaleron is an important site in the history of ancient Athens and preserves a unique record of life in the past. One of the more compelling aspects of the site is the range of mortuary treatments documented there, including multiple groupings of non-normative burials, a series of co-interments...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janling Fu. Sherry Fox. Rachel Kalisher. Kathryn Marklein. Adam Aja.

During the 2013-6 seasons, an extramural cemetery was discovered at the coastal site of Ashkelon in Israel. Dated almost entirely to the Iron IIA period, more than 200 sets of remains were exposed and excavated, providing for the first time a secure and sizeable number of burials from which to generate an understanding of Philistine burial practices and mortuary ritual. The majority of bodies were found in primary inhumation with various depositional practices observed, among them simple pit,...

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 Samantha Porter. Gilbert Tostevin. Goran Pajovic. Nikola Borovinic. J. Anne Melton.

This is an abstract from the "The Late Middle Paleolithic in the Western Balkans: Results from Recent Excavations at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In order to understand changes in the way hominins have used a site through time, it is critical to understand temporal changes in artifact density (i.e., a quantitative measure of the number of artifacts relative to the amount of supporting sediment in a given stratigraphic...

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 Johan Jarl. Angela Bruch.

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Southern Caucasus is a biodiversity hotspot, encompassing a spectrum of environments from temperate forests to semidesert steppes. Having seen hominin occupation since 1.8 Ma, the region offers a unique opportunity to study the expansion and evolution of the genus Homo, as well as their interaction with the local...

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 Jesse Wolfhagen. Max Price.

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. Richard Redding’s work on “breaking the mold” on how we explain the development of food production is emblematic of the major contributions he made to zooarchaeological thinking: his creativity, curiosity, and willingness to question dearly held beliefs. In this paper, we overview some of Redding’s many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Kilgore.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Motherhood" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mountains of the Austrian province of Styria, the Catholic pilgrimage shrine of Mariazell claimed many healing miracles during the later Middle Ages (ca. 1200–1550). Notably, many of these miracles address ailments of fertility and parenthood, including infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant death. Early sixteenth century visual culture of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

This paper explores how a relational approach centered on the concept of taskscape could reinvigorate analyses of how pilgrimages create, sustain, or transform human-environment relations. Medieval and modern traditions of pilgrimage in Ireland are renowned for their engagement with ‘natural’ places and objects, such as mountains, springs, and stones. Some take this focus as evidence of an animistic pre-Christian heritage, but few have questioned how such practices structured peoples’ ideas and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Hoffman.

This study focuses on the cultural, political, and biological factors that led to the formation of a unique pattern of dental pathology within an Icelandic population at Haffjarðarey, Iceland between the 13th and 16th Centuries . The Haffjarðarey church and cemetery clearly served as an important meeting place and burial site for the surrounding region during this period. A paleopathological analysis of the population reveals a high rate of ante-mortem tooth loss, severe tooth wear, and...

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 Curtis Runnels.

Palaeolithic stone tools have been identified on a number of Greek islands recently. These include the oceanic island of Crete, where lithic artifacts on the southern coast at Plakias occur in association with raised marine beaches and paleosols in karstic depressions dated to > 130 kyr, and on the northern coast at Mochlos Bay associated with as-yet undated Pleistocene alluvial fans. Other islands, including Ayios Efstratios, Alonissos, Gavdos, Kephalonia, Lesvos, Melos, and Naxos, have also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Steinberg.

The 9th century Norse settlement of Iceland resulted in a system of semi-territorial petty chiefdoms, with local and island-wide regular assemblies. The volcanic island was divided up into four quarters, each with three or four local assemblies. Farmers had to pledge their allegiance to one of the chiefs within their quarter, creating a patchwork of alliances. Farms themselves may also have been cobbled together from non-contiguous blocks which allowed access to different environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Furholt.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An overarching idea of *The Dawn of Everything* is that archaeologists should be encouraged to explore the past as a world of possibilities, not the least with regard to social and political organization. Taking up this call, this paper will reexamine two of the main conceptual...

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 Jennifer Jones.

The University of Minnesota Duluth Project is working at al-Lajjun to understand the initial period of population aggregation in the southern Levant. At this time, settlements of 5-10,000 people, some with fortification walls, developed. The economic and political organization of these larger groups of people, whether hierarchical or heterarchical, competitive or cooperative, embedded in or separate from kin groups is under debate. Our research seeks to add to this discussion by detailing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Ragsdale.

This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Great Moravia is credited by historians as the first Slavic state, existing briefly in the ninth and early tenth centuries. Internal disputes, Magyar incursions, conflicts with the Frankish Empire, and climate change events contributed to the decline and demise of the Great Moravian state. Although these events are supported by archaeological...