Republic of Moldova (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (1,134 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The materials discovered at the Grakliani settlement and necropolis (Eastern Georgia) date from different periods and cover the stratigraphy presented below: 1. The Paleolithic Age with an upper Pleistocene paleontological site; 2. Neolithic; 3. Chalcolithic; 4....
The 20th Century Archaeology of the High Mountains: State Projects and the Forces Resisting Them (2018)
The mountains of southern Calabria above 1400 m were used throughout prehistory and history, but except for an attempt to found highland agricultural settlements in the Greek period, they were always used for special purposes rather than as primary centres of habitation. The 20th century saw a massive transformation in land use, with intensive state investment in creating new kinds of mountain landscapes dedicated to special purposes. These purposes included political control, economic...
3D Comparison of Attic Head Vases (2018)
Several hundred attic head vases are known worldwide and stored in museums and collections. In 1929, Beazley has categorized twenty groups based on stylistic properties and historic methodology. Head vases are assembled in several steps, most important for our comparison is the moulding of the head area. Since moulds were used to shape the heads, our initial hypothesis was to perform a quantitative comparison of head shapes based on digital scan data. Comparison of scan data is straight forward...
A 41,500-Year-Old Decorated Ivory Pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland) Reveals the Earliest Punctate Ornament in Central Europe (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It may be a cliché to say that art is a form of symbolic behavior and modern cognition as old as humankind itself. In Europe, recurring evidence of body decoration and artistic expression is associated with the emergence of cultural innovations introduced by Homo sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic. Thus far, the earliest manipulation of animal teeth to be...
7x105 Dimensions of Pottery: Multivariate Analyses of Pottery Assemblages from the Lower Town Site of Mycenae, Greece (2017)
During excavation, it is often safer to record areas separately and later identify associations between strata across a site. Such practice waits until detailed analyses can be conducted and avoids erroneously comparing material from separate depositions. However, the process can lead to more identified strata than are truly present. This project considered relative frequencies of pottery fabrics as a multivariate dataset to characterize and analyze site formation at the Lower Town site of...
About Islands and Islanders: Mobility, Connectivity, and Identity in the Balearic Islands (Mediterranean Sea) during the Bronze Age (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Bronze Age, the archaeological record of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea reveals a conspicuous prevalence of similarities across all the islands within the archipelago. To elucidate the mechanisms underlying this convergence phenomenon within the archaeological record, we developed a study centered on the analysis of mobility and...
Accidental Innovation? Using Isotopic Analysis to Test Possible Iron Production as a By-Product of Advanced Copper Smelting (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Faynan region of Southern Jordan is one of the largest copper ore deposits in the Levant. These ores were exploited throughout history, and during the Iron Age (ca. 1200-800 BCE), copper production in Faynan reached an industrial scale. However, excavations at Khirbat...
Acquedotto Vergine: Stewardship of Ancient Water Infrastructure in the Modern Roman Periferia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Water and Sanitation Management in the Mediterranean " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aquedotto Vergine is the only ancient aqueduct still functioning in Rome. Commissioned under Emperor Augustus, and privately financed by Agrippa as part of a larger urban water infrastructure improvement program, the aqueduct was dedicated on June 9, 19 BCE and supplied water for both public structures and private concessions....
Across and beyond Site Boundaries: Maximizing the Legacy of Submerged Landscape Assessments (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last 20 years have seen a massive increase in offshore development around the UK that has provided archaeologists the opportunity to find and examine new sites from areas of seafloor, in deeper waters and further from the coastline than was previously possible. Through the interpretation of geophysical and geotechnical data...
Active Forgetting: Cemetery Abandonment and Mortuary Politics in Bronze Age Transylvania (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The abandonment of mortuary spaces is an intentional social process. As a political act, the choice to abandon a cemetery is a moment in which communities manipulate memory. Most mortuary studies, however, often overlook the social processes that led to cemetery abandonment. This poster presents the results of Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates from...
Adapting to harsh environment resulting changes in culture that led towards a new perception of the outer world: The birth of the Central European Neolithic (2017)
In the 6th millennium BC, first farmers reached the area between south east and central Europe, soon spreading into central Europe. About the character and identity of these first farmers at the boundary area, a series of new research results is available. At the boundary, harsh environmental conditions made their long well-working subsistence system unstable, as the ‘package’ of farming and mainly sheep and shifted to cattle keeping. Yet, it has hardly been investigated, what reflections of...
Additional statistical and graphical methods for analyzing artifact orientations and site formation processes from total station proveniences (2017)
The orientations in three dimensions of clasts within a deposit are known to be informative on processes that formed that deposit. In archaeological sites, a portion of the clasts in the deposit are introduced by non-geological processes and these are typically systematically recorded with total stations during excavations. By recording a second point on elongated clasts it is possible to quickly and precisely capture their orientation. The statistical and graphical techniques for analyzing...
Adventures of the Mountain Hare: An Ancient DNA Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mountain hares today can be found from Scandinavia to Eastern Russia with isolated populations in Ireland, Scotland and the Alps. While their modern distribution is well understood, the extent of their past range and interactions with humans remains unknown. The primary aim of my research is to assess the natural and human-aided distribution of mountain hares across...
The Afterlife of the Charnel Chapel at Rothwell (Northamptonshire, UK) (2017)
The practice of charnelling human remains has recently been revealed to have been widespread in medieval England, with chapels specially built for this purpose. However, this practice ceased at the time of the early sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, and the charnel chapels were emptied and in some cases demolished. A rare exception is at Rothwell (Northamptonshire, UK), which survived the Reformation intact, apparently because it was closed up at this time with the charnel in situ. The...
Agrarian Landscapes of coastal Croatia: a view from Nadin-Gradina (2017)
Generalized models of Mediterranean agroecosystems often elide the specific historical and political contexts in which food production necessarily takes place. This paper presents new historical-ecological research currently underway at the multi-period settlement site of Nadin-Gradina near the Adriatic coast of southern Croatia, a typically "Mediterranean" landscape that has hosted a dynamic social-political history of repeated invasion, migration, and colonization by a variety of human actors....
The Agricultural Economy of the Iron Age Southern Levant: Contrasting Preliminary Archaeobotanical Data from Tel Abel Beth Maacah and Khirbat al-Balu’a (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The agricultural economy of the Iron Age Southern Levant remains underexplored archaeobotanically, especially at an integrated, regional level. The data that is available suffers from few abundance datasets and is often difficult to access or unpublished. Out of 26 Iron Age sites with available data, only 6 have abundance values and other quantitative...
Agricultural Wealth, Food Storage, and Commensal Politics at Azoria an Archaic City on Crete (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Azoria (630-480 BC) is a small urban center on the island of Crete. Ten seasons of large-scale excavations have shed light on the formation, organization and operation of this Archaic city. At its heart is a massive civic complex with shrines, assembly halls, public dining rooms with associated kitchens and storerooms, a large free-standing storehouse, and an...
Agropastoral Resource Management in the Negev Heartland toward the Close of Late Antiquity (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We report new geoarchaeological evidence for a community-scale response to changing agropastoral economics in the Negev Desert during Late Antiquity (c. fourth–tenth century CE). Sustainable resource management is of central importance among agrarian societies in marginal drylands. In the Negev, the importance of hinterland trash deposits as archives of...
Amber Runs through It: The Centralization of Wealth and Power in Late Prehistoric Lika, Croatia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric cultural and sociopolitical development in the mountainous region of Lika, Croatia is still poorly understood despite over a century of archaeological excavations. Traditional cultural-historical narratives based on grave good typologies suggest that a unified regional culture, the Iapodians, emerged at the end of the...
The ambivalence of caves and rockshelters in medieval Norway (2017)
Caves and rockshelters occur frequently in Norway and they were extensively used as dwelling-sites for humans in most periods of the prehistory. During the transition to the medieval period (AD 550 – 1500), however, archaeological excavations show that their use changed significantly. From then on, they mainly served as offering sites, burial sites and as workshops for metal smiths and stone masons. This change may have been related to a change in the perceptions of caves and rockshelters. One...
AMFOrA: Computer Vision for Macroscopic Ceramic Fabric Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prospect of using computer vision to aid or automate the production of archaeological data is not new to archaeology. Computer vision offers a number of advantages compared to traditional approaches to quantifying archaeological data, including replicability, precision without fatigue, and the ability to expand the size of datasets analyzed. The...
Analysis of Entheses Development and Implications on Labor in Late Medieval Poland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Poland" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of human behavior and habitual muscle use through analysis of entheses, or muscle insertion sites on the skeleton, continue to be an important way of examining labor among people in the past. In this study, we analyze entheses development on the skeletons of individuals from the recently discovered and excavated late medieval site of Gać in...
Analysis of Settlement Patterns in Albania from the Iron Age through Greek and Roman Colonization and Integration (1100 BCE–395 CE) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Illyrians were an Indo-European group of people who inhabited a large expanse of the Balkans. As interactions with the Greeks and, later, the Romans increased, the sociopolitical organization of the Illyrians was undoubtedly affected. In this presentation, I present the results of my thesis research, the goal of which is to better understand how Greek...
Analysis of the Vertebral Pathologies among Individuals from Fourteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Polish Cemeteries: Comparison between the Village and Town Inhabitants in Greater Poland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Poland" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vertebral degenerative changes are one of the most common pathologies found among historical human skeletal remains. They occur naturally with age and/or as a result of activity-related stress or illness. This study examines human remains discovered during the archaeological excavation of cemeteries from the town Dzwonowo (fourteenth–eighteenth...
Analyzing Urban and Industrial Threats to Heritage in Turkey Using Remote Sensing and GIS (2018)
In Akçalar, Turkey, the location of the Neolithic-Chalcolithic Aktopraklık site, urban and industrial development present shocking social, cultural, and economic changes to the community. The local landscape is transforming as towering apartment complexes are quickly expanding into areas previously occupied by sprawling fields of crops. As documented ethnographically, these processes have heightened local awareness of the decline of community heritage values, like neighborliness, agricultural...