Mediterranean (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (218 Records)
The Balearic Islands are the westernmost island group in the Mediterranean. Of the four main islands of the group, Mallorca and Menorca were home to an indigenous Iron Age culture known as the Talayotic people. Their story is considered a minor one by many historians in the grand narrative of Mediterranean domination by Carthage and then Rome. Nevertheless, the archaeology of these two islands has revealed fascinating evidence of the scope and effects of ancient colonialism by these two powers....
Inferring Social Change from Archaeological Survey Data: Monte Bonifato and Calatubo as a Case Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological survey at Monte Bonifato and Calatubo, two prominent sites in western Sicily, has facilitated a comparative study of the two sites via artifacts recovered from surface contexts. Settlement patterns, land-use, pottery production methods, and artifact-class densities are discussed, demonstrating the variety and scale of social...
Insights into the Late Upper Paleolithic of the Northern Adriatic from Ljubićeva Cave, Istria (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of past and recent systematic research on the late Upper Paleolithic carried out in Ljubićeva Cave near Marčana, Croatia. The first excavations of the site occurred between 2008 and 2011 and yielded late Upper Paleolithic as well as Neolithic and Bronze Age discoveries. Since 2019, systematic...
Insular Resilience at the Edge of Empire: The Early Medieval Kastra of Kalymnos, Greece (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of the shifts following the Arab defeat of the seventh-century Roman Empire generally pass over the Aegean islands that bear the marks of warfare and societal upheaval in their landscapes. The island of Kalymnos has untapped potential to inform an understanding of Roman-Arab warfare in the periphery. This report discusses the several phases of the...
Integrating Grapevine Palaeogenomics with Archaeobotanical Methods to Explore the History of Winemaking (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genomic analyses of archaeological seeds and other plant remains are playing an increasingly important role in unravelling domestication histories. In some cases, these findings are revising longstanding interpretations developed from archaeobotanical methods, and questions remain on how archaeological and genomic methods...
An Integrative Approach to Cave, Open-Air and Underwater Mousterian Sites of Dalmatia (Croatia) (2018)
Paleolithic sites situated in the Hrvatsko zagorje region of north-western Croatia (Krapina, Vindija) are well known because they contain important finds of fossil human remains associated with both faunal remains and lithic industry. However, in recent years, work on Mousterian sites in Dalmatia (south Croatia) has intensified. It focuses on three types of sites, (caves, open-air, and an underwater site) as well as on a systematic survey of the region. This poster briefly presents one of each...
Investigating Copper Ingot Production in the Bronze Age Mediterranean Using 3D Technologies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 1960 excavation of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC) shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya, on the southwestern coast of Turkey, revealed a ca. 1.2 ton cargo of copper ingots and tools. The metal cargo is defined by its great diversity, yet the ingot assemblage is predominantly Cypriot in origin while the tool metal derives from sources across the Mediterranean...
Investigating Imperialism on Early Hellenistic Cyprus: Excavations at Pyla-Vigla, 2019 and 2022 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2008, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) has been excavating the site of Pyla-Vigla, located on a small plateau near Larnaca, Cyprus. Early small-scale excavations (2008, 2009, 2012, 2018) revealed what appears to be an early Hellenistic (330-250 BCE) fortification. In the early Hellenistic period, Cyprus was undergoing a massive...
Is There Evidence For Jewish Pirates Archaeologically? (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. While piracy is a modern phenomenon as much as an ancient one, piratical theory has been relatively opaque until recent years. Smugglers, buccaneers, and freebooter's fluidity and capriciousness is not reflected in the black-and-white morality of a quintessential pirate. Using modern pirate theory, this paper looks at the...
Jadeitite Axes in the Aegean and Anatolia–The Emergence of a New Network (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The largest known jadeite source in the Aegean is located on the Cycladic island of Syros. During sampling, several patinated flakes and preforms of considerable age were identified, demonstrating, for the first time, the presence of several knapping places around the large jadeite boulders. In order to...
Journal study of the AJA and BASOR, 2015-2020 (2021)
Data on the gendered production of knowledge in Mediterranean archaeology collected for the book chapter "Gender and Power in the Practice of Mediterranean Archaeology" by Grace Erny and Dimitri Nakassis. In order to understand better the effects of sexism on knowledge production in the archaeology of the Mediterranean and Near East, we carried out a small pilot study on the six most recent years (2015-2020) of publications in two flagship journals: the American Journal of Archaeology (AJA),...
Landscapes of Acquisition and Mobility: Sourcing Raw Lithic Materials and Their Distribution in Central Cyprus (2018)
Making use of several long-term survey projects in central Cyprus, the connection between chert sources, find spots and sites are analyzed using chemical and spatial analyses to examine the relationship between mobility and community structure. The Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) of some 150 samples shows that distinct types of chert were preferred, primarily Lefkara translucents. Spatial analyses investigate the associations between particular chert outcrops, small lithic scatters and larger...
Late Antiquity Revealed: Assessing Urban Change at Roman Nedinum in Northern Dalmatia, Croatia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2015, the Nadin-Gradina Archaeological Project (NGAP) began as a collaborative effort between the University of Zadar and University of Maine to unravel the long-term record of urban change in the Ravni Kotari region of northern Dalmatia, with a primary focus on the Nadin-Gradina archaeological site. Since its inception, the NGAP has confirmed a 2,500-year...
The Late Introduction of Metals in Southern Italy: Studies from Sicily and Calabria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Metallurgy arrived quite late in Calabria, Sicily and Malta compared other regions, including the same Italian peninsula. Current hypotheses include an allogenous origin of metallurgy, brought by Aegean merchants, and an indigenous origin due to the presence of mines. The delicate state of many metals has prevented destructive analyses, but it has been...
Least Cost Path Analysis of Maritime Routes in the Ancient Aegean (2018)
The Least Cost Path analysis in ArcGIS has been a critical tool in archaeological reconstructions of movement and connectivity, but until recently these analyses have been limited to land travel. From the Neolithic onwards, sea travel was an equally important mode of transportation in the Aegean and wider Mediterranean. In this study, I utilized the Least Cost Path tool in ArcGIS to model sea travel in the Aegean. Bathymetric data and speed and direction of local wind and currents were inputs in...
'Least Talked About Among Men?': the verbal and spatial rhetoric of women's roles in Classical Athens (ca.450-350BCE) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I argue that comparing views derived from texts and material culture highlights the conscious manipulation of both media by their creators in order to communicate specific messages. I suggest that an awareness of this kind of manipulation has a vital role to play, not only in the interpretation of textual...
Life and Death in Medieval San Giuliano (Lazio Province, Italy) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The medieval period in northern Lazio saw significant restructuring of social and economic relationships through *incastellamento, the process by which people chose or were forced to move onto fortified hilltops. Here, I present results from four seasons of mapping,...
Like a Lion, as a Man: Seals and Poetry in Minoan Crete (2018)
This paper investigates how parallels were drawn between lions and human in Bronze Age Crete, and how this parallelism potentially developed concurrently through material culture worn on the human body and oral narrative. I argue that the unique qualities of seal stones, namely their close association with human identity and their physical location on the human body, positioned them to be potent venues for asserting parallels between man and beast. I begin in the late Early Bronze Age, with a...
Lithic Raw Material Procurement and Mobility in a Geological Diversed Environmental Setting in Prehistoric Eastern Sicily (2018)
The geological constitution of Sicily is enough complex as the characteristics of the geological units are consequences of the tectonic compression that happened between the beginning of Miocene and the beginning of the Pliocene. Three structural units are basically distinguished: 1. To the north, in the western side (towards Palermo) there is prevalence of carbonatic reliefs while in the oriental side (Nebrodi Mounts and Peloritani Mounts) there are metamorphic and terrigenous deposits 2. the...
Littoral Society and the Heterotopic Fabric of Early Medieval ports (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ports have long been recognized as nodes within grand skeins of connectivity, the thresholds over which goods and ideas move into a wider hinterland. But how, and to what extent, do ports function as their own world, and what can we say about littoral society and the contextual relationship of sea-adjacent peoples...
Livestock Economy and the Emergence of Urbanism in Central Italy during the Iron Age and Archaic Period (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses subsistence specialization, livestock mobility, and husbandry strategies at Gabii during the eighth–fifth centuries BCE, a time of transition to state-level, urbanized political systems. The site of Gabii is one of several emerging cities in the Lower Tiber Valley that grew along a similar trajectory, expanding from dispersed hut...
The Living Archive of Çatalhöyük (LAC): Providing Big Data Laboratories as Open Environments for Archaeological Research (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology data are stored in ways that reflect the strategies of research while conventional data repositories tend to freeze the original databases within their initial storage logic. In contrast, the interpretation of primary evidence changes during a project's lifecycle, and it becomes difficult for later researchers with different research questions,...
Local Actions and Long-Distance Interactions: Challenging the Paradigm for the Emergence of Social Complexity on Cyprus during the Bronze Age (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complex social networks or social complexity emerges from the actions and interactions of people as they pass information, goods and services. During the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, particularly on the island of Cyprus, it has been hypothesized that two actions and interactions are particularly important for...
A Long Walk from Town: Early 19th Century Landuse in the Territory of Bova (2018)
In the early 1800s the majority of Bova's citizens live in their hilltop town while holding small plots of land in multiple locations, some quite a distance from the town itself. Archival records from notaries, diaries, and cadastral holdings paint a picture of an independent community of low income citizens plying their trades and rather detached from the larger economic systems around them. Despite the abundance of natural resources available in the landscape, the community was not fully...
Long-distance trade in Late Antique Italy: Evidence from the Bova Marina Archaeological Project (2018)
It is well known that the state plays a major role in generating and structuring economic flows in complex societies. What happens, though, when a state's ability to do this is severely reduced? One example to consider is the Roman/Byzantine state in Late Antiquity. Using survey evidence from the Bova Marina Archaeological Project, changes in the presence of long-distance imports in the ceramic assemblage show a drastic shrinkage of the scope of trade, while other economic changes were less...