Republic of Tajikistan (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
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Most archaeologists would agree that ancient irrigation systems preserve important information about the technology, economy, and social organization of past societies. However, considering that archaeologists generally lack training in hydraulics, it is often difficult for us to extract much information from an ancient irrigation system beyond basic description and chronology. Thanks to the recent development in drone technology and flow modeling techniques we now have the option of generating...
Abandoned Cities in the Steppe: Roles and Perception of Early Modern Religious and Military Centers in Nomadic Mongolia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Towns and cities have been an integral part of the Mongolian nomadic society for more than a millennium, and abandoned urban sites from various periods dot the land, inscribing memories of lost empires and long-gone alliances into the cultural landscape. The relation between sedentary urban and mobile pastoralist lifeways has constituted a key...
Abu Shusha: Integrating and Correlating Surface Features with Magnetic Susceptibility (2018)
This research looks at Tel Abu Shusha in the Jezreel Valley of Israel, an understudied site in a strategically important Levantine area with potential evidence of Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman settlements. Surface survey was completed in nine square kilometers around the Tel, resulting in ceramic density data as well as over 2,500 mapped surface features in GIS, such as quarries, wine presses, and architecture. Additionally, four magnetic susceptibility grids were taken in this area, each one...
Acheulean Hominins and Out of Africa Dispersals: Challenges and Advances (2018)
The dispersal of Acheulean hominins outside of Africa is one of the most important research areas in human evolutionary studies, having been the topic of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists for many decades. Yet, precise knowledge about the timing and geographic movement of archaic hominins across Eurasia is still in its infancy. The aim of this presentation is to discuss what we currently know about the distribution of Acheulean hominins, and to report on new field work findings in southern...
Adapting to Changing Resources: A Petrographic Analysis of Iron I Pottery from Tel Miqne-Ekron (2018)
The arrival of foreigners to the southern Levant at the beginning of the Iron Age (1200-1000 BCE) has been recognized in the material culture, as have changes in this material culture over time. These developments, resulting from interaction with the local population, have been interpreted as assimilation, acculturation, creolization, and most recently entanglement. In this poster, we examine these transformations through the lens of technological, i.e. those aspects of pottery manufacture that...
Afanasievo Settlement Archaeology in the Altai Republic (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Afanasievo culture in the Altai Mountains (ca. 3300–2800 BCE) has long captured our attention as the first pastoralists to spread to Inner Asia. Known almost exclusively through osteological remains and material culture from mortuary contexts, settlement data have remained scarce for characterizing the subsistence...
The Afghanistan Cultural Heritage Education Program: A Collaborative, International Education Model (2018)
The Afghanistan Cultural Heritage Education Program (ACHEP) is a collaborative project administered by the United States National Park Service and implemented by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Arizona and the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Kabul University. This international outreach effort engages Afghanistan’s educators, students, and professionals in educational programs and activities to preserve and protect the country’s rich cultural heritage and to...
The Afterlife of a Desert Estate: The Qasr Complex at al-Ḥumayma, Southern Jordan at the Turn of the Second Millennium AD (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1992 to 2002, the Humayma Excavation Project investigated a fairly modest palatial structure dubbed Field F103 at the site of al-Ḥumayma in southern Jordan. Early on, the excavators recognized that this structure should be identified as the qasr and mosque complex described in Arabic historical sources as having...
Agricultural Landscapes of the Mesopotamian-Zagros Borderlands (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Diyala River Region in northern Iraq has long served as a strategic political, economic, and cultural borderland between the Mesopotamian alluvium and the Zagros Mountains. The region is also environmentally complex, encompassing a steep gradient of agroecological zones ranging from irrigated alluvial...
Agricultural Practices of the Qin People from the Warring States Period to the Qin Dynasty: A Case from the Matengkong Site in Guanzhong Basin, China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeological studies, the Qin people have often been the subject of research. The areas of investigation about the Qin include their origin, structure of tombs, funeral rites and interment processes, and cities and settlements. Although there are some studies on the Qin...
Agriculture development in the Bronze Age Hexi Corridor-archaeobtanic evidence from Xichengyi site (2017)
The combination of crops and weeds found in the site reflects a typical rainfed agriculture dominated by foxtail millet and broomcorn millet. Under the external cultural influences, wheat and barley started to be cultivated. Since late Machang culture and, through the agricultural development during the "Transitional type" period, were widely cultivated during the period of Siba culture, when marijuna appeared in the crop assemblages. The integrated study of archaeobotanical and...
Agriculture in the “Land of Hatti”: The Politics and Ecology of Farming in Late Bronze Age Central Anatolia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hittite empire is the first supraregional polity documented in the history of central Anatolia. The core of the Hittite polity, the “Land of Hatti”, extended on a landscape which could be regarded as particularly challenging to the establishment of a reliable and productive centralized agricultural system. The traditional Anatolian farming system...
An Agroecological Perspective on Crop Domestication in Western Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestication has been discussed inter alia as a syndrome, a case study in niche construction and a reversible process. These perspectives frame new understandings of how management practice shaped domestication processes. For plants, recent experimental work has also been important for clarifying the effect of domestication...
‘All things being equal’? Multiplex Material Networks of the Early Neolithic in the Near East (2018)
Archaeological network research typically relies on material culture similarities over space and time as a proxy for past social networks. In many cases, a range of different types of material culture are subsumed into reconstructed connections between nodes. However, not all forms of material culture are equal. Different types of objects may be caught up in rather different forms of social relationship – crudely put, ‘personal’ items such as jewellery may perhaps have more social and cultural...
Analysis of Ancient Chinese Pottery Utilizing X-Ray Fluorescence and Diffuse Reflectance Infrared Fourier Transform Spectroscopy (2017)
Field studies were performed at the Yangguanzhai Neolithic site near Xi’an, China, using an Olympus Delta Premium portable XRF spectrometer and an Agilent ExoScan FTIR spectrometer. 932 ceramic sherds collected from nine locations across the site were selected and classified based on color (red, tan and brown), decorations (painted, rope impression - cord or thread, and plain), and time period (Miaodigou and Banpo IV). Each sherd was broken, so that the analysis could be performed on a clean...
Analysis of the Faunal Remains at Shangjing city site, Inner Mongolia (2013 excavation) (2017)
The Shangjing city site is located on the boundary between agricultural and herding subsistence economies in the Western Liao River Basin, eastern Inner Mongolia. The site was used as the Upper capital in the Liao Dynasty (A.D 916 - A.D. 1125) and the Northern capital city in the Jin Dynasty (A.D. 1115 - A.D. 1234). In 2013, several burials in the Liao and Jin Periods were unearthed, and more than 36,000 faunal remains, including bones and teeth, were collected systematically. Although Liao and...
Analytical Models for At-Risk Heritage Conservation and 3D GIS (2018)
In the period 2011-2017, scholars from the University of California Merced and Cardiff University recorded the fragile earthen architecture of Çatalhöyük, Turkey employing cutting-edge conservation technologies to monitor the site and gather new data. Our goal was to model and analyze the site decay and plan conservation interventions. Tools and methods for this initiative include blending site monitoring data and digital documentation data from environmental data loggers, terrestrial laser...
Ancient DNA analysis of early Neolithic cattle from Houtaomuga site, Northern China (2017)
The Houtaomuga site is located on the east bank of Xinhuangpao Lake, in Da'an County, Jilin Province, Northeast China. According to the archaeological excavations, the Houtaomuga site can be divided into seven phases from the early Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (8000-2050 BP). Although many Bos skeletal remains were found in the phases Houtaomuga III (6300-5500 cal. BP) and Houtaomuga IV (5000 cal. BP), it was very difficult to identify to the species level. In this study, ancient DNA...
Ancient DNA of a nomadic population provides evidence of the genetic structure of the royal ancient Mongols (2017)
The genetic diversity of the ancient Mongols, especially the Gold family of Genghis Khan remains unclear. Gangga site was a nomadic site dated to the 8th to 10th centuries AD in the HulunBuir grassland, northeast China. This site belonged to the Shiwei population, believed to be the direct ancestors of the ancient Mongols. Nine graves at the Gangga site were excavated with log coffins, which were considered the characteristic burial custom of the royal ancient Mongols, included the Gold family...
Ancient DNA Studies of Domesticated Cattle in Northern China (2017)
This study aims to use ancient DNA techniques to characterize the genetic features of ancient domesticated cattle in order to trace the origin and spread of cattle in ancient China from eight Late Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in Northern China. DNA was successfully extracted from ancient cattle bone or tooth samples in dedicated ancient DNA labs following vigorous protocols for contamination controls. This study was focused on amplifying mitochondrial D-loop using standard PCR techniques....
Ancient genomics of Neolithic to Bronze Age Baikal hunter-gatherers (2017)
Genome-wide data from hunter-gatherer populations of the Upper Paleolithic to Neolithic has provided unprecedented insight into the human evolutionary and demographic trajectory. However such datasets have hitherto been largely confined to Western Eurasia. The sole representative of Inner Asian past populations post-dating the split between paleolithic Europeans and Asians, as well as paleolithic Siberians and East Asians, are the Mal'ta and Afontova Gora individuals, the Ancient North East...
Ancient Residues Indicate Prehistoric Subsistence and Culinary Practices in the Korean Peninsula during the Middle Holocene (2017)
This study attempts to understand ancient human subsistence using isotope analysis on the organic residues extracted from the archaeological potsherds collected from prehistoric coastal shell midden sites in the southern part of the Korean peninsula. In Korean archaeology, shell middens are useful for isotope analysis because they provide suitable condition in terms of organic preservation. To date, the subsistence of these prehistoric coastal and island dwellers remains poorly known. However,...
Animal Bones from Hazor, Israel and a Cautionary Tale of Interpreting Past Ritual (2018)
Within recent years, feasting and other forms of ritual consumption have become more frequently identified in the archaeozoological record of the ancient Near East. Reasons for more frequent identification of ritual sacrifices and feasts vary, but two driving forces certainly are archaeological context, bones found in or near special architecture, and the cultural milieu formed by the region’s ancient textual record. In contrast, I have a skeptical tale to tell of ritual production and...
The Animal Provisioning System for a Late Bronze Age Temple at Hazor, Israel (2024)
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. The tel site of Hazor, Israel is one of the largest such occupational mounds in the southern Levant. Excavated in the 1950s, 1960s, and continuously since the 1990s, archaeologists have uncovered monumental public buildings. One such building, now identified as one of several Late Bronze Age temples,...
Animal utilization and animal rituals of the Okhotsk culture: with special reference to their period and regional differences (2017)
In the animal utilization and animal rituals of the Okhotsk culture, chronological and regional differences can be observed. Significant differences can be seen between the northern and eastern regions of Hokkaido in terms of the volume of archaeological artifacts recovered relating to both domestic animals (dogs, pigs) and wild animals. In northern Hokkaido, there are conspicuous differences in the use of a variety of fishes and types of sea urchins between the early period (Towada) and the...