Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lan (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (446 Records)
This paper examines the history of medieval (circa 500-1600 CE) agricultural infrastructure—assemblages of soils, irrigation wells, and processing facilities—in the semi-arid conditions of the Raichur Doab, Southern India. Despite some investiture from ruling elites and temples, the material evidence for agro-infrastructural development suggests that it was not merely a project of state or institutional design. Rather, its development might more productively be characterized as a process of...
Harappan Necropolis of Rakhigarhi, India: Archaeology and Bioanthropology (2018)
The number of Harappan cemeteries so far systematically surveyed is far less than that of contemporary settlements. Necropolis site at Rakhigarhi (India) was reported earlier but in small scale investigation. Our investigation for the last three seasons (2013 to 2016) was thus designed for improving this lacuna. We first classified each burial and analyzed statistically. The Harappan people practiced rather humble burial custom, but few were found differently and these burials look more...
Have you had rice today? The costs of consumption in Early Modern South India (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Rice and other water and labor-intensive foods form the core of elite South Indian cuisines, the food of both gods and high-status individuals. Rice is synonymous with food in several South Indian languages and yet rice-based cuisines were (and are) not universally available. In the semi-arid interior, the costs...
The Hazards of High Resolution? Social Change, Site Structure and New Chronometric Concerns from Indor, North India (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do high resolution chronologies change our interpretations of the archaeological record? What impact can and should they have on our analysis and our understandings of site-structure, social process and the narratives by which we account for our evidence? This paper provides one case study of considering the hazards and prospects of high resolution...
Health and nutritional stress in Pericolonial Ifugao, Philippines (2017)
The Ifugao of the highland Philippines responded to Spanish colonial incursions in adjacent lowland towns in the early 1600s by consolidating their political, social, and economic resources. This period saw the introduction of wet-rice agriculture and subsequent expansion of irrigated terraced agriculture in the region. These social and economic changes suggest an increased reliance on rice and a decreased dependence on a broad-spectrum diet. It is hypothesized that changes in diet and larger...
Health and Stress of Neolithic Yangshao Culture Skeletal Population from Wanggou Site, Zhengzhou (2017)
The Wanggou site, located in the Lower Yellow River valley, is a large Yangshao culture cemetery, dating to 7000-5000 BP. Two hundred and eleven skeletons were examined for variations from normal morphology, including non-metric traits, to characterized pathology of the Neolithic Age residents of Central China. This paper examined skeletal evidence of bone disease, trauma and musculo-skeletal stress markers (MSM) of ancient residents. A prevalence of spina bifida, spondylolysis, lumbarization,...
Heath and Stress of Ancient People on the Shanbei Loess Slope in China: The Social and Environmental Impact (2017)
This paper investigates the impact of social and environmental changes on the health of people living during the Warring States period (ca. 5th – 13th Century B.C.) on the Shanbei Loess Slope, a marginal area that connects the Guanzhong Plain and the Shanbei Plateau. Two human skeletal assemblages representing two different cultural settings, but with a longstanding history of conflict, were selected: (1) Zhaitouhe cemetery (n=73) (Xirong Culture, the minority) and (2) Shijiahe cemetery (n=33)...
Here we go again: a new series of AMS dates from the Kkho Wong Prachan Valley, central Thailand (2017)
A new series of AMS dates from the Khao Wong Prachan Valley (KWPV) in central Thailand addresses several key questions in the region, including the dating of the initial settlement of the valley, the duration of the pre-metal period, the first appearance of copper-base artifacts, the beginning of large-scale crucible-based copper smelting and production at the site of Non Pa Wai, the shift to a different copper production technology used at Nil Kham Haeng, and, the occupation span of the...
Hidden in Plain Sight: Reconstructing Landscapes of Urbanism in Northwest India (2018)
Archaeologists cannot understand the urban process based on investigations at urban centers alone. In the Beas River Landscape and Settlement Survey, Wright contributed greatly to understanding of landscapes in South Asia’s Indus civilization (2600-1900 B.C.), revealing necessity and value of integrating settlement data into broader analyses of urbanism. Research on the Indus civilization’s settlement distributions highlights the presence of an array of archaeological sites spread across a...
High Precision Mapping of Human Behavior in Ethnographic Contexts, a New Tool for Ethnoarchaeology (2017)
Ethnoarchaeological studies attempt to link human behavior to the material residues they produce for the purpose of developing archaeological method and theory. Traditional studies in spatial ethnoarchaeology, however, have focused on the mapping of material remains, but the spatial distribution of the behaviors that produced them, the thing that interests us most, has gone largely undocumented and for good reason. Until recently, it was not technically possible to map people in space in a way...
"Hindutva's Rediscovery/Appropriation of its Ancient Past (2017)
Religious proponents are increasingly challenging academic research on India and its religious past. Book burnings, petitions, and even riots, have resulted when religious adherents have felt maligned by the scholarship of academic archaeologists and historians. In my presentation, I will introduce and clarify the complicated history and major debates regarding key archaeological finds in South Asia. In particular, I will discuss debates regarding the history of the "Aryan" and the ...
Historical Archaeology In India: Issues And Changing Perspectives (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Understanding India and its culture was a colonial enterprise that was initiated in 18th and 19th centuries. The notions concerning identities which were constructed during the colonial times have considerably influenced the interpretations of archaeological remains in several contexts, including the recently introduced DNA studies that...
Hokkado, Japan as an Island System in East Asian Pre-Colonial History (2017)
Hokkaido, Japan is an island separate from the East Asian mainland and Honshu yet closely linked culturally to the rest of the Japanese archipelago. Hokkaido was never isolated entirely from the East Asian mainland either. This paper reviews several key events that relate to Hokkaido as an island with a distinct cultural history. As the contemporary home of an indigenous population, the Ainu, Hokkaido has played, and can continue to play, an important role in our understanding of cultural...
Holocene Vegetation Cycles, Land-use and Human Adaptations to Desertification in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia (2017)
Since the retreat of the Pleistocene some 11,700 years ago, the landscape and vegetation of the Mongolian Gobi Desert has been profoundly changing, punctuated by the appearance of lakes, wetlands, and finally aridification. Vegetation communities have responded to these changes according to temperature shifts and northward to southward movements of the edges of East Asian monsoonal systems. Human groups have lived, foraged, and traveled through the landscape of the Gobi for millennia, adapting...
Honshu’s Pre-Agricultural Landscapes: Perspectives from Mt. Fuji and Toyama Bay (2017)
Pre-agricultural Japan experienced significant changes in its cultural and natural landscapes over some 30 millennia of human habitation and modification (ca. 34,000 to 2,300 calendar years BP). As an extensive period witnessing fundamental environmental and cultural changes, the pre-agricultural era was dynamic, with sub-periods of relative stability punctuated by episodes of rapid change in lifestyle, material culture, and environmental and cultural setting. This research compares and...
The house in East and Southeast Asia (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...
Household Change and Social Complexity in Prehistoric Korea (2017)
Household archaeology has made important contributions to the study of large-scale social transformations through the remains of the everyday. This paper examines the role of households, themselves, in the social changes that occurred during the Early and Middle Mumun Pottery Periods (ca. 1500-500 B.C.) in Korea. During this time, incipient social inequality developed alongside another significant change—households that were previously composed of multiple families became single-family units....
Houses (and Gardens?) at Angkor (2017)
Household archaeology and a focus on residential spaces is an emerging field in Southeast Asia. At Angkor, this approach has great potential for exploring the resiliency of non-elite members of society through changes in environmental and socio-political processes. In this paper we present results from the ongoing analyses of a 2015 excavation of a house mound within the Angkor Wat enclosure. Using a variety of techniques including macro- and micro-botanical analyses, geoarchaeology, soil...
How the Han Empire managed the large-scale iron production: a study report of iron smelting sites in Shandong province and Henan province (2017)
This paper is mainly about a study report of several iron smelting sites in Shandong and Henan province. By analyzing archaeometallurgical remains from large-scale iron production sites, this presentation tries to clarify issues under-addressed in previous excavation reports and shed new light on the iron technology, production organization, and the management of Iron Offices of the Han Empire that led to the developmental peak of iron industry in Chinese history.
Human activity accelerating the rapid desertification of the Mu Us Sandy Lands, North China-Evidence from Micro-charcoal Assemblages (2017)
Over the past several thousand years, the arid and semiarid regions of China have experienced a series of asynchronous desertification events in its semiarid sandy and desert areas, but the precise identification of the driving forces of such events has remained elusive. Identified are two rapid desertification events (RDEs) at ~4.6 ± 0.2 ka BP and ~3.3 ± 0.2 ka BP from the JJ Profile, located in the eastern Mu Us Sandy Lands. These RDEs appear to have occurred immediately following periods...
Human Adaptation and Natural Resource Usage in Prehistoric Southern Ryukyu islands, Southwestern Japan (2017)
This study aims to discuss about the strategy of prehistoric human adaptation to the island environment, especially focus on the natural resource usage. I introduce the case of southern part of Ryukyu islands—the southwestern part of Japan archipelago, where the first long-term human settlement had occurred about 4,300 years ago. Prehistoric people in southern Ryukyu islands had a unique material culture (absence of pottery, use of giant clam shell adzes), which was dissimilar to the surrounding...
Human occupation during the penultimate glaciation in China’s Western Loess Plateau: The technological evolution and adaptive variability of the Yanghsang (2017)
The newly excavated Yangshang site generated a high-resolution record in China's Western Loess Plateau which demonstrated that ancient humans occupied this region since MIS-7. Nearly 1700 stone artifacts and more than 330 animal remains were unearthed in 2013. Although the site was dominated by the quartz based core/flake tradition, same as most lower Paleolithic sites in Northern China, the core reduction analysis and raw material economic study among the long term cultural sediments indicate...
Hunters in transition: Mesolithic societies of temperate Eurasia and their transition to farming (1986)
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...
Ideas of Immortality and the Clay Buddha Image from Yibin, Sichuan, China (2017)
In 2012, the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Archaeology excavated a group of cliff tombs in Nanxi County, Yibin; grave M12 at this site revealed a clay Buddha image. This paper argues that this is the base of an object dating between the late Eastern Han and the Shu Han period (AD 25-263) that is similar to the bases of money trees molded in the shape of a seated Buddha or Queen Mother of the West. The image thus likely developed from the image of the Queen Mother of the West as seen at the...
Identification of Adhesive on Bone-Handled Microblades from the Houtaomuga Site in Northeast China (2017)
With the emergence and development of composite tools in the Upper Paleolithic, adhesives became one of the most widely used materials by early human societies. Of particular interest is to know which animal/plant species were being exploited for glue manufacturing. The Houtaomuga site, located in northeast China, provides favorable materials for the identification of organic residues; and a few bone-handled microblades were collected from this site. In this study, we scraped micro adhesive...