Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
526-550 (923 Records)
H85 is the largest pit discovered in the north-central area of Yangguanzhai. In 2014 the archaeological team took sherd samples from the 12 layers excavated up to that point. Where possible, the team took one sherd from each of the colors grey, red, and beige as well as both fine, levigated texture and coarse, tempered texture from each layer. Thin sections of these sherds were produced and examined under the microscope to determine the choice of temper and other steps in the preparation of the...
Microscopic Leftovers: Exploratory Starch Grain Analysis on Ceramic Vessels from the Shangshan Culture, China. (2017)
This paper will outline trends observed in pottery technology and dietary practices of the early Holocene Shangshan Culture (11,400 to 8400 cal. B.P.) in the lower Yangtze Valley, China. The Shangshan people produced some of the earliest known fine ware, and it is hypothesized that communities engaged in the low-level production of rice, which began the process of domesticating this crucial cereal. To date, the nature of pottery use and rice consumption at Shangshan sites remains partially...
Microstratigraphic Investigation of Nomadic Pastoral Campsites in Eastern Mongolia (2017)
Since the origins of domestication, pastoral societies have been an exceptional example of adaptation and resilience. In recent years, studies focusing on herbivore faecal remains have shown the importance of these remains and their implication for identifying socio-economic activities. Here we present a multi-proxy examination of these deposits for an accurate identification of herds penning. We use micromorphology of soil sediments and stable isotopes analysis combined with archaeology and...
A Middle Yangshao Cemetery of the Yangguanzhai Settlement (2017)
In order to better understand the moated settlement of Yangguanzhai (ca. 5300-4800 B.P.) in the Wei River Valley of China, the archaeological team surveyed east of the moated area in 2015. A large number of pit burials with side chambers were found. The cemetery is so far the first known adult cemetery of this period (Miaodigou Phase of Yangshao Culture). Based on C14 dating and funerary goods, the cemetery is contemporaneous with the Yangguanzhai settlement. This discovery provides important...
Migration and Isolation in the Okhotsk Tradition of Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands (2017)
Northern people are known for epic migrations such as the Pleistocene colonization of Eurasian Arctic and Movement into North America as well as multiple migration episdoes across the North American Arctic in the late Holocene. In this paper we look at the subarctic Sea of Okhotsk region and patterns of mobility within the Okhotsk tradition from 500-1300 C.E. Using lead (Pb) and strontium (Sr) isotopes, we reveal unexpected differences in lifetime stationary residence vs. relocation of...
Millets and Rice on the Move: Adaptive Strategies in the Past and Future (2017)
A growing tradition of archaeobotanical research, one that was pioneered by Steven Weber, is allowing us to form a picture of how millets and rice spread into Southeast Asia. Although rice continues to play an important role in the diet in this area, the use of millet has been slowly forgotten. These two different crops have been alternatively seen as a "cultural package" that coincided with the spread of farmer populations from Southern China, or adaptations to different ecological or climatic...
The Mind of an Artisan in Early China: A Museum Collection Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Craft and Technology: Knowledge of the Ancient Chinese Artisans" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study aims to investigate the different ways artisans in early China (up to the 3rd century) learned their crafts, in order to better understand how certain types of artifacts such as pottery and bronze were made, and how new styles and designs emerged. In early China, craftsmanship was usually inherited through...
Mineral Resources and Metallurgical Technologies along the Southern Silk Road (2018)
China's southwest region has vast terrain and diverse landscape with rich mineral resources. From the bronze age to the iron age, this area existed two very obvious metallurgical technology systems, "Central Plains" and "non-Central Plains". The coexistence of two systems is not only the result of "sinification" , but also the result of the circulation of metallurgical resource and transmission of technology as social response in the mountainous environment in southwest China.
Mineralogical make-up of casting moulds and its archaeological implications for bronze making techniques in ancient China (2017)
In order to understand how bronze vessels were produced and the knowledge involved we cannot limit our study to simply the bronze vessels themselves. Thus, the analysis on bronze mold production plays a key role to our understanding of bronze vessel production. The focus in this study will be on the 155 mold fragments currently housed at the Royal Ontario Museum, originally from Anyang dated to the Shang dynasty. Petrographic analysis was utilized for this research on raw materials and how the...
Mittelalterliche Keramik in zeitgenössischen Darstellungen (1991)
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...
Mobility, Land Use, and Technological Organization at the Site of Yangshang, Gansu, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The excavation in Yangshang site generated a high-resolution record in the West Loess Plateau of China, and demonstrated that ancient human occupied this region at least since MIS7. In looking for evidence of possible changes in the mobility, land use, and organization of lithic technology that may have been concurrent with the paleoenvironment changes...
Modeling the Early Settlement of Yap, Western Caroline Islands (2018)
In recent decades, increased research on the early human settlement of islands in western Micronesia (northwest tropical Pacific) has resulted in a relatively clear picture of the Palau and the Mariana Islands being settled between ca. 3200-2800 years cal BP. Despite an increased understanding of when the two major archipelagos were settled, human arrival in Yap, a group of four small islands situated between the two other islands groups, remains unclear. New radiocarbon dates from the southern...
Modeling the Spread of Crops across Eurasia (2017)
Understanding the routes and the timing of the spread of western Eurasia domesticates to Asia and of Asian domesticates to Europe and the Near East has become an increasing focus of research. To date, however, we have had little understanding of the types of constraints that farmers may have faced as they moved these domesticates into the challenging environments of Central Asia. The spread of many of these domesticates also took place during a time of marked climatic change. Although it has...
Modelling Communities: Social Transformation of Early Kaushi, Taiwan (2017)
This paper presents the modelling of different communities within two sites, Saqacengalj and Aumagan, which exemplifies the early developments of the Kaushi people. In the light of Ingold’s ‘wayfaring theory’ (Ingold, 2012), this research argues that interpersonal relationships are not entirely based on social identities, and social relations should also be investigated, regardless of their hierarchical status, but through intimate human interaction. Therefore, this research models human...
Modes of Labor Organization and Variations of Pastoral Economies across East Asia during the Second Millennium BCE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been considerable recent momentum in documenting pastoral communities in the past who engaged with multi-resource subsistence strategies, including both husbandry and cultivation. This paper explores the potential conceptual conflict between cultivation and pastoral activities in the context of labour budget and surplus accumulation....
Molecular taphonomy of biominerals in the Western Pacific (2017)
Molecular and microarchaeological artifacts of human subsistence are recorded in the bones, tissues and residues of the skeleton. These artifacts provide substantial correlative evidence for macroscopic and sedimentary data of dietary plant and animal use in the archaeological record. Within the depositional context however, many factors in the local environment disturb or degrade these signatures, reducing or eliminating their usefulness in diet reconstruction. The islands of the tropical...
Mollusk Foraging and Gendered Labor in Seventeenth-Century Guam, Mariana Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Environments in Archaeology: Ancient Life, Lore, and Landscapes" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological investigation of gendered labor in traditional households in the Mariana Islands is still in a nascent stage of development. Archaeological field school excavations by the University of Guam Micronesian Area Research Center and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa yielded a rich assemblage of...
Mongol Trappings: Analysis of Archaeological Leather from Northern Mongolia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study, we examined leather excavated from the Mongol period (1206-1368) cemetery of Dood Tsakhir located in Khuvsgul province, Mongolia. This cemetery had been looted in the recent past, yet there was quite good preservation. Leather fragments from clothing, footwear, and tools were recovered and analyzed using ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass...
Monuments in Bronze Age Mongolian Kinscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tim Ingold’s (1993) work “The Temporality of the Landscape” introduced us to the concept of taskscapes, in which an array of tasks, overlapping and interlocking, work to create a specific place in the larger landscape. I am now introducing another innovative “scape,” one used...
Monuments, boundaries, and chiefly competition in the development of the Tongan state (2017)
The principal Tongan island of Tongatapu was the epicentre of a hierarchical and geographically integrated society which some archaeologists contend reached the level of archaic state by AD 1300–1400. Dynastic chiefs affirmed their power and rights to land through monumental construction and a dispersed settlement pattern that fully occupied their inherited territories with lower-ranking members of their kin-based corporate groups. Recent archaeological survey, aided by LiDAR, reveals the...
Movement of People and Its Cultural Reconstructions: Spatial Construction and Cultural Fluidity in Paiwan, Taiwan (2017)
Cultural cognition is figurative, metaphorical, analogical, and participatory in nature. Spatial constructions, presented as figurative patterns, are regarded in this paper as the imagery conceptualization processes. These processes map or encode spatial cognition and relative cultural aspects dwelling in people’s minds onto new lands through daily human activities and physically spatial constitutions when people move. Therefore, analyzing spatial constructions of a social group during...
Moving on from Movius: Recent Research in Pleistocene Archaeology in Myanmar (2017)
For many archaeologists, Myanmar is known as the place where Hallam Movius proposed the Movius Line as a result of his fieldwork in the 1930s. Movius proposed this line as a major cultural boundary of the Palaeolithic era, with bifacial technology present in the west and north, but absent to the south and east. His line continues to have a major influence on contemporary discussions of human evolution in the Eastern Hemisphere. Motivated by debates about the line, and other questions about the...
Moving within the ‘A‘ā: The Influence of Liminality in the Hinterlands of Manukā, Ka‘ū, Hawai‘i Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated at the transition between windward and leeward sides of the island of Hawai‘i, Manukā is a tapestry of environmental and sociopolitical gradients perpetually reconfigured by the lava flows from Mauna Loa. As a geographically liminal region, place-names describe it as where "the trade winds of Ka‘ū give way to the gentle breezes of Kona." The...
Multi-Proxy Analysis of Sea Lion Hunting in the Northwestern Pacific (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around the Pacific Rim sea lions have served as a valuable food source for coastal communities throughout the Holocene and as a globally valued product in the expanding Eurasian and American colonial and imperial trade networks of the past few centuries. In this talk I discuss the hunting of both Japanese and Steller sea lions in the northwestern Pacific....
A Multi-proxy Investigation of Settlement on Pingelap Atoll, Pohnpei State, Federated States of Micronesia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pacific atolls are generally regarded as challenging places to live. In addition to being far from other land masses, most have low biodiversity, limited access to freshwater, and are susceptible to extreme weather. However, settlers established residence on atolls in the Micronesian region as early as 2,000 years ago. This paper presents the first major...