Union of Myanmar (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
76-100 (649 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, international archaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) has been typically site-focused and ‘origins’ oriented (e.g., agriculture, metalworking). Theoretical framing has been inductive, frequently emphasizing the role of migration in culture change. More recently, interest in the...
Ceramic Production at the Stone-Walled Citadel of Shimao: Initial Results of Petrographic Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 10 years, excavations at the early Bronze Age site of Shimao (2300–1800 BC), in northern Shaanxi Province, have transformed our understanding of the archaeology of early China. What was previously seen as an area that was peripheral to the development of early dynastic centers is now being heralded by...
Ceramic Technology beyond the Rim: Reconstructing (and Firing) a Late Neolithic Chinese Kiln (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The past several decades have seen a shift in the focus of ceramic studies in Neolithic China from ceramic products toward ceramic production, as scholars have pushed beyond typological analyses to investigate the people who made, handled, and used these wares. Despite this turn toward process, comparatively little attention is given to the many...
Ceramic, Lithic, and Settlement Variability of the Incipient Jomon Sites on Tanegashima Island, Japan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although conventional thinking has associated the advent of pottery with farming, sedentism, and groundstones, more recent research suggests that emergence contexts vary. Case studies on intra-regional variability are required to better understand the timing and behavioral context of the adoption of pottery. In this study, we provide the case of the first...
Cereals in Southeast Asian Prehistory (2017)
Rice is the most important crop in Southeast Asia today. The evidence is that rice was equally important in Southeast Asia’s past. From the Neolithic period to the Middle Ages, rice has been discussed as food, a ritual item, a farming system, a culinary tradition, a tradable commodity and the basis of power. However, was it always the staple crop in Southeast Asia? The archaeobotanical studies conducted in Central Thailand by Weber revealed that in some instances and places, millet was more...
The Challenge of the Grid: A Conceptual Frontier in Angkor? (2018)
For a quarter of a century, the concepts of an open city and a low density urban megalopolis have largely broadened our understanding of Angkor (Cambodia), which was based on the morpho-chronological vision of a succession of perfectly geometric walled cities. As the researches progressed, the identification of the elements that make up the archaeological landscape of the Great Angkor has been developed, mixing temples, palaces, settlements, reservoirs, road networks, hydraulic systems and...
Changes in Land Use and Landscape in Twentieth-Century Chengdu Plain Survey Area (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Chengdu Plain Archaeology Survey (2004–2011): Highlights from the Final Report" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Various available aerial imagery from the 1960s through 2000s allow for examination of changing ground surface conditions in the Chengdu Plain in recent decades. Surface conditions impact accessibility, visibility, and preservation of archaeological evidence of ancient human activity in the area. They...
Changing Angkorian Stoneware Production Modes: Bang Kong Kiln and Thnal Mrech Kiln (2018)
Stoneware ceramic production began in the 9th century CE in the Angkorian core region, and its cross-draft kiln technology, paste types, and vessel forms changed during its multi-century tradition. This paper compares kiln morphology, ceramic technology and vessel form from two Angkorian kiln sites: the 9th-11th century Bang Kong site, and the 10th-12th century Thnal Mrech. The sites are located in discrete geological regions: one in the Phnom Kulen hills (Thnal Mrech), and the other on the...
Changing landscapes of the Paleolithic/Neolithic transition in Taiwan (2017)
Toward understanding the Paleolithic/Neolithic transition in Taiwan, a paleo-terrain approach allows reconstruction of the ancient landforms and habitats of where people lived. Those ancient contexts help for us to situate the activities of people using their landscapes in different ways at intervals of 7000, 6000, 5000, and 4000 years ago. This approach needs to account for significant change in tectonic movement of land masses, slope erosion and re-deposition patterns, fluctuating sea level,...
Changing Perspectives for the Palaeolithic Research of the Japanese Archipelago (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Apart from sporadic finds of human bones and artifacts, systematic research on the Palaeolithic began in Japan with the Iwajuku excavation in 1949. In spite of the relatively short history of 70 years, and the negative impact of the "Fujimura Scandal" of 2000, which resulted in nullification of...
The Character of Carbonized Rice in Hunan Archaeological Site (2018)
Based on the comprehensive analysis of grain shape and embryos of carbonized rice from archaeological sites, the author draws conclusions as follows: a. There is a difference in shape of spikelet base between cultivated rice and wild rice, but it is difficult to make comparable measurements. Therefore, it is possible to identify rice by using the characteristics of the spikelet base based on one’s experience, but it is difficult to make comparisons between different researchers. b. According to...
Characterization of early imperial lacquerware from the Luozhuang Han tomb, China (2017)
This paper focuses on presenting the characterization of materials from fragmented pieces of an imperial lacquer plate in the Luozhuang Han tomb, which dates to the early Western Han dynasty. Various non-invasive and minimally invasive techniques were performed, including optical and electron microscopy, XRF, Raman spectromicroscopy, FT–IR, XRD and THM-Py–GC/MS. The lacquerware pieces consist of a five-layer structure, which includes (from the top): a red pigmented layer, two lacquer finish...
Characterization of Neolithic Jade Objects from Shimao and Xinhua, Shaanxi Province, China, Using Handheld Portable Techniques (2017)
50 jade objects from the Late Longshan period, excavated from the Shimao (25) and Xinhua (25) Neolithic sites, were characterized mineral groups using handheld X-Ray Fluorescence (hhXRF) and handheld specular reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (hhFTIR). The objects were found to belong to three types of minerals. 22 objects found in Shimao (88%) are nephrite (19 tremolites and 3 actinolites), two are calcite and one antigorite. From Xinhua, 9 objects (36 %) are nephrite...
Chaîne Opératoire in Jade Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since Wu Da-cheng’s Catalogue of Ancient Jades in the Qing Period, research of Chinese jades has largely focused on analyses of their social and ritual significances. In latter half of the 20th century, excavations in Liangzhu, Hongshan, and Xinglongwa culture sites discovered many prehistoric jades. These important discoveries...
Chengdu Plain Archaeological Survey Culture Distributions: Integration and Interpretation of the CPAS Data (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Chengdu Plain Archaeology Survey (2004–2011): Highlights from the Final Report" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chengdu Plain Archaeological Survey generated two complementary datasets that provide evidence of the distribution of archaeological material across the survey region: surface survey data and coring data. These datasets are combined to create “Activity Areas,” archaeological constructs that we argue...
China Vegetation Atlas (2001)
his atlas is another summary result of the publication of "Chinese Vegetation" and other monographs by the vegetation ecology workers in China for more than 40 years. It is a basic map of the country's natural resources and natural conditions. It reflects in detail the distribution, horizontal zonality, and vertical zonal distribution patterns of 11 vegetation types, 54 vegetation types of 796 and subgroups, and reflects more than 2,000 plant dominant species in China. This Atlas consists of...
The Church of Todos los Santos and its associated cemetery in the Spanish colony of San Salvador, Heping Dao, Taiwan (17th century) (2017)
Archaeological excavations in the setting of the former Spanish colony of San Salvador, founded in 1626 in current Hoping Dao, northern Taiwan, have uncovered remains of a European building that can be identified as the Convent or Church of Todos los Santos, founded while the Spanish colony was active and possibly preserved afterwards under Dutch rule. Several burials have also been excavated, which constitutes a formal cemetery associated to the church. The human remains in the cemetery of...
Climate Amelioration and the Rise of the Xiongnu Empire (2017)
Climate has been debated by historians and archaeologists as one possible contributing factor for the emergence and collapse of complex societies. Recently, connections have been proposed between an ameliorating environment, surplus resources, energy, and the rise of Chinggis Khan’s 13th-century Mongol Empire. If favorable climate and increased rangeland productivity do indeed play a critical role in the politics of pastoral nomads, then we should be able to observe this in other cases too. This...
Climate Change (Global and SE Asia) (2018)
We have developed millennial length reconstructions of regional hydroclimate using multiple collections of tree cores from throughout Southeast Asia. Several published records of seasonal hydroclimate from Vietnamese cypress represent the most robust and well-replicated tree ring records from the global tropics, and allow for detailed analyses of the regional hydroclimate for multiple seasons. We demonstrate zonal changes in the mean climate over the past millennium with strong linkages to the...
Climate Change and the Middle Holocene "missing millennia" in the Southeast Asian Archaeological Record (2018)
Archaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia is a relatively recent endeavor, but as the region’s culture history has become more fully known, a gap in evidence called the "missing millennia" has emerged. The gap falls during the middle Holocene c. 6000-4000 BP when few sites have dated deposits. Yet from evidence dating before and after those millennia, important changes must have occurred, including changes in settlement systems, lithics and ceramic technologies, the appearance of cereal...
Climatic Narratives across Eurasia: A Comparative Study of the 4.2k Event in Western and Eastern Asia (2018)
In the last two decades, climatic narratives have returned as a central issue in archaeological discourse. The field has been flooded with publications on paleoclimatic reconstructions and we believe it is time for a critical evaluation – both as means of seeking better science, and for building better archaeological narratives. Climate history is composed by an overlapping meshwork of long-standing trends, punctuated events and short-term phases, with impacts ranging from the local to the...
The Co Loa Settlement: Biography of an Anomalous Place (2017)
In the archaeological study of ancient large-scale settlements, there is considerable debate regarding definitional criteria for categories of "city" and "urban". New field studies from different world areas have enriched our understanding of the variability of past settlement configurations along dimensions of utility, meaning, space, scale, and demography. In northern Vietnam, the remains of monumental constructions of the prehistoric settlement of Co Loa still stand today. Dating to the first...
Coastal Resource Use During the Prehistoric Times in the Amami and Okinawa Archipelagos, Japan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ryukyu archipelago, Japan, is located between Kyushu and Taiwan islands, stretching approximately 1200 km. The Amami and Okinawa archipelagos occupy the central part of the Ryukyu archipelago. Astonishingly, Homo sapiens settled these islands as early as ca. 30,000 years ago. Based...
Collapse, or Drastic Socio-cultural Transformation?: Some Cases from Japanese Prehistory (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper proposes to redefine 'collapse' as a type of human responses to changes that happen to the (variously perceived, experienced and utilized) environment in which we live. It is argued that the phenomena commonly termed as 'collapses', such as the disintegration of settlement systems and the...
A Commensal-Prey Relationship in Early Mainland Southeast Asia? The Case of the Burmese Hare (Lepus peguensis) (2018)
Rabbits and hares are often a central part of human subsistence strategies in both the past and the present. However, the Burmese hare (Lepus peguensis) – the sole member of the family Leporidae indigenous to mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) – is rarely eaten today, and its status in the past is unclear. Although this taxon is currently abundant across a wide geographic range, it has a poor zooarchaeological record during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Identified specimens occur sporadically in...