Georgia (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,176-1,200 (1,204 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a unique category of socially charged material culture, beer has origins stretching back to people’s first obsession with wild grain. The deep time prehistory of beer coupled with the unique role of its psychoactive properties makes it a compelling bridge between academic archaeology and the public, allowing...
Why colonize? A case study of the early Neolithic Colonization of the island of Cyprus (2017)
Why humans colonize unoccupied lands, such as islands, has always intrigued scholars. Over the past few decades, researchers working on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus have documented both a Late Epipaleolithic occupation and a more substantial early Neolithic colonization episode. The number of such sites remains limited, but is growing with continuing research. For the Neolithic, both Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and PPNB occupations are now well-documented, and are as early as mainland sites....
Wild Meets Domestic at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey (2017)
One of the classic ways the nature/culture dichotomy manifests itself in human interactions with the environment is through the categories of wild and domestic. Some have argued that this distinction is not helpful, and certainly the boundaries are complicated, but it seems most useful to start by asking whether it was meaningful to particular people in the past. Here I will explore whether wild and domestic were relevant concepts to the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük (Central Anatolia), and to some...
Wildfires and Human Communities in Bronze and Iron Age, Armenia: A Macro-Charcoal and Paleo-Temperature (brGDGT) Reconstruction (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans today and in the past have to contend with the impacts of wildland fires. In grasslands, these fires occur frequently at annual to decadal scale. In the Kasakh valley, Armenia, recent research has revealed periods of increased fire activity during the Early Bronze and Late Iron Age and decreased activity in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (Cromartie et...
Will your childhood years kill you earlier? A study exploring the relationship between height, stress and age at death. (2017)
Could shorter legs mean premature death? Stature is a highly complex trait which seems to be influenced by many different factors. To name a few; genetics, social status, through to environment, diet or health issues. However, it has been observed for some time that taller people live longer. For the purpose of current research, data from 10 multi-period sites were collected. The main focus of project is to explore the correlations between height and age-at-death. Additional to this, as it is...
William’s Patent "Cleaner" Ammunition: Enigmatic Bullets from the American Civil War (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Archaeology of Arms: New Analytical Approaches", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Williams Patent bullets (types I, II, and III) are the second-most common bullet type found on American Civil War military sites. Between December 1861 and January 1864, when the Army cancelled manufacturing contracts, an estimated 102,500,000 Williams Patent Bullets had been purchased by the United States Army. Despite their...
Winds of Change – Funerary practices at the dawn of Late Bronze Age in Southeast Hungary (2017)
The transition from Middle to Late Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement, and societal organization. This transition is traditionally seen as a short, war-ridden horizon reflecting the arrival of the Tumulus culture population. Recent research, however, emphasizes the complexity of these transformations, and suggests a longer, less abrupt transition, in which existing Middle Bronze Age populations play a significant role in the...
Witches and Aliens: How an Archaeologist Inspired Two New Religious Movements (2017)
Egyptologist and Folklorist Margaret Murray was a major figure in the creation of professional archaeology in the United Kingdom, President of the Folklore Society, and advocate for women’s rights in higher education. However, another major part of her legacy was the mainstream acceptance of the concept of the "witch-cult," a hidden ancient religion dating back to the Pleistocene but continuing until at least the seventeenth century when it was persecuted by witch-hunters. Historians have...
With a Little Help from my Friends: New Radiocarbon Dates from the Great Hungarian Plain (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The expanded availability and use of radiocarbon dating by archaeologists has significantly reshaped the understanding of longstanding prehistoric narratives. These advances have also challenged the cultural-historic notion of archaeological cultures that have dominated research for over a century. In this paper, we examine recently collected radiocarbon...
Wizards, Dragons and Giants: Creating Motte Castles in an English Landscape (2017)
Medieval motte castles are large flat-topped earth and stone mounds, often coupled with an enclosure or bailey, and represent a characteristic component of the British landscape. Mottes often dominate their immediate surroundings, with many remaining visually impressive monuments to this day. Although their creation often involved substantial landscape change, it is becoming increasingly clear that continuity could also be maintained. Many mottes were placed at points in the landscape with...
Women in small-scale societies: how demographic archaeology can contribute to gender archaeology (2017)
Demography has re-emerged as a growing research area within archaeology. Recent studies have refined archaeological demographic methods and developed models which cite demographic change as a key variable in explaining social and artefactual change. However, one aspect which has not been explicitly acknowledged is how archaeological demography is intrinsically concerned with women. In this paper I explain the importance of women to the demographic regimes of small-scale societies and discuss...
The Wood Age? The significance of wood usage in Pre-lron Age North-Western Europe (1982)
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...
Words for domestic animals used as metaphors in coastal naming (2017)
Place-names are important sources to understand and reimagine past conceptions of the landscape. Toponyms map animal lives on to the landscape. In some cases, however, words for animals – wild as well as domestic – are used as metaphors. In some names denoting sunken rocks along the Norwegian coast, e.g. Sugga (’sow’), Oksa (‘bull’), Hesten (’horse’), Porthunden (‘watchdog’), the words either refer to the shape or sound of the locations, or to some special circumstances, e.g. dangerous rocks in...
Working for the Dead: The Role of Gravediggers and Their Impact on Burial Practices as Evidence in Transylvanian, Hungarian-Szekler Communities (AD 1050–1800) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Parker-Pearson’s (1999) oft cited phrase, “the dead do not bury themselves,” has led to decades of broad investigation surrounding the created social perception of an individual in different contexts and at different scales (family, military, celebrity). However, little research exists on the last individual to physically place the dead. Gravediggers have...
Working for the Palace, Working for the House:how households became a neighborhood in late 3rd Millennium BC Tell Asmar (ancient Eshnunna), Iraq (2017)
To test the value of the neighborhood concept in archaeological practice, this paper relies on a model of socioeconomically diverse, urban Mesopotamian neighborhoods and tests the model by analyzing households within a neighborhood at Tell Asmar, Iraq. Tell Asmar became one of several major urban settlements in the Diyala River region, with occupation of the site extending back into late prehistory. The dataset comprises a subset of archaeological evidence recovered from the Tell Asmar Northern...
Working on the Margins of the Modern World and Within Archaeology: The Historical Archaeology of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentith-Century Ireland (2017)
In Ireland, historical, post-medieval, or modern world archaeology as a discipline is located on the margins. The time period and material comprising our research is argued by many to be relevant only to the pursuits of historians and folk studies. In this paper I discuss the importance and relevance of a discipline on the margins and the study of Ireland’s impoverished class during the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This marks one of the most dynamic periods in Ireland’s...
The World of the Living and the World of the Dead - A Bronze Age Monumental Landscape in Central Mongolia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age landscape in Mongolia is characterized by valleys with regularly arranged groups of monuments which are believed to represent the focus of a community. Depending on the ecology of the area the distance between such site clusters varies. This even distribution is punctuated by large concentrations of...
World prehistories and the development of a global archaeological narrative (2017)
The origins of prehistoric archaeology as a discipline lie in the New Learning of the 16th and 17th centuries and derive from a number of sources: antiquarian researches in northwest Europe; European exploration and the encounter with non-European peoples; and speculative accounts of human origins and development. It was only in the 19th century that these strands first began to be woven together to create a global narrative of human prehistory. Such a narrative raises a number of problematic...
Worn Down: Dental Attrition and Dietary Differences at an Early Medieval Settlement in Central Europe (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval diets may have differed in preparation rather than composition, with certain classes, genders, or age groups eating more abrasive and/or more cariogenic preparations of the same foods (Beranová 2007; Esclassan et al. 2015). This study is a bioarchaeological examination of dental attrition at the 9-11th century site complex of Libice nad Cidlinou in...
Woven Traces: Evidence of Basketry from Masis Blur (Armenia) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evidence of woven materials such as baskets, mats, cordage, string, and rope rarely preserve in archaeological contexts, but when these plant-based artifacts do preserve, they provide important insight into the social, technological, and environmental practices involved in the creation and use of such objects. At many...
You Are How You Eat: Changes in Dining Style and Society at Late Bronze I Alalakh (2017)
Ceramics are intimately tied to both foodways and normative behavior within a culture. The appearance of a new shape or the long-term persistence of an old shape must be contextualized by first investigating the use to which the vessel was put, a use that can be inferred through multiple lines of evidence and explored using a variety of approaches. Recent excavations at Alalakh have illuminated the site’s Late Bronze I period, especially the troubled 17th-16th century BC transition from the...
Your Horse Is a Donkey! Identifying Domesticated Equids Using ZooMS (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses (Equus caballus) and donkeys (Equus asinus) play essential roles in human culture and economy. Unlike most other domesticates, horses and donkeys can produce hybrids. Mules, offspring of female horses and male donkeys, have been found in archaeological contexts across the Old World. Written sources describe the choice of horse, donkey, or mule as...
Zooarchaeological Analysis of Sar El-Jisr Faunal Assemblage (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project analyzes zooarchaeological remains from the late third to early second millennium mortuary complex at Sar El-Jisr, Bahrain. The assemblage is a legacy collection and its analysis will expand on previous research of the Dilmun burial complex, and furthers our understanding of Dilmun as a sociopolitical entity. These implications are relevant at...
A Zooarchaeological Application of Adaptive Cycling and Risk Mitigation at Tell el-Hesi, Israel (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human societies do not operate as a stagnated phenomenon but instead experience stacked cycles of adaptation, resilience, and possibly collapse. Identifying and teasing these cycles in the archaeological record can be difficult and have often been applied to hunter-gatherer case studies. This research attempts to apply an adaptive cycling model...
Zooarchaeological Investigation of Late Pleistocene Subsistence Adaptations in Iran (2017)
Economic decisions of Late Pleistocene foragers bore heavily on the nature, timing, and intensity of the adoption of agriculture in different parts of Eurasia. Decades of intensive research in the Levant and Anatolia have made significant contributions to our understanding of Late Pleistocene economic strategies in the western parts of the Near East. A recent surge of interest by Iranian researchers and internationally collaborative teams in Paleolithic archaeology of Iran has renewed attention...