Mediterranean (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Robb.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dirk Rieke-Zapp. Elisabeth Trinkl.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brady Liss. Thomas Levy. James Day.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meisha Hunter Burkett. Allan Ceen. Mattia Crespi. Augusto Mazzoni.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Margaret Scarry. Margaret Mook. Donald Haggis.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Don Butler. Zachary Dunseth. Yotam Tepper. Guy Bar-Oz. Ruth Shahack-Gross.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Curtis.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Linderholm.

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. Ever since the Etruscans disappeared, their origins have been heavily discussed and debated and several hypotheses have been put forward that utilizes their language and culture as a source. Recently DNA have been use to try and solve this mystery. Modern DNA in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Gallagher.

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. This paper discusses the evidence for Etruscan and Roman roads in the territory of San Giuliano and evolving strategies for control of the surrounding landscape. Road survey conducted as part of the San Giuliano Archaeological Project (SGARP) has problematized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Gaggioli.

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Factors of earthquakes in archaeology are often relegated to disaster and collapse narratives. Causality runs from the “natural” extreme to its human impacts. Following political ecology and Science and Technology Studies literatures and using the case of Helike, Greece, from the third millennium BCE to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Snitker.

Humans have intentionally set fires for millennia to transform the arrangement and diversity of resources within their landscapes, often altering the relationship between fire and ecosystems at multiple scales. Although scholars regularly identify human-altered fire regimes through paleoecological studies, archaeological research has not yet fully incorporated the spatial, temporal, and cultural dimensions of human-caused fire into discussions of the development of agricultural landscapes. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Moots. Margaret Antonio. Ziyue Gao. Jonathan Pritchard.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From shipwrecks to monuments, coins to mosaics, the Aeneid to the Satyricon, classicists, archeologists, and historians draw on a range of media to study ancient Rome. As a new media to study the past, ancient genomes provide direct insight into the demographic histories of Rome’s inhabitants. This talk highlights our team’s interdisciplinary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zuzana Chovanec.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over that last 30 years, organic residue analysis has transitioned from the occasional experimental project to a key component of scientific archaeological investigations. Methodologies have advanced, frequencies of studies have increased, and the range of investigated substances and characterized biochemicals expanded. Still, in some circles, the great...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brett Kaufman.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Popular government, or “democracy,” spread from Lebanon to the rest of the Mediterranean in the early first millennium BC. This form of state-level, consensus-based sociopolitical organization emerged as a face-to-face practice where members or citizens witnessed and participated in communal debates and decisions. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler. Gwen Martin-Apostolatos. Wayne Lorenz. Jessica Bernstetter. Amie Green.

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. Substantial urban development is linked to the first century CE in Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as throughout the Bay of Naples. An important component of this development included the construction of the Aqua Augusta, or Serino Aqueduct as it is known today. The associated lead pipe network supplied pressured water for private...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler. Gwendolyn Martin-Apostolatos. Wayne Lorenz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drinkable water and the strategies used to get it are at the heart of every sustainable society, and Roman Pompeii is no exception. Pompeii’s remarkable water distribution system shapes the very character of the city from its network of water towers to its overflowing fountains. By the 1st century CE the Aqua Augusta, or Serino Aqueduct as it is known today,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

Sennacherib’s destruction of Tel Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC was accomplished using state-of-the-art technologies and tactics. We know through the Lachish reliefs once located at Nineveh and now housed at the British Museum, that the Assyrians used a siege ramp to conquer the city. Unfortunately, the ramp was partially destroyed by archaeologists in the 1930’s and comparatively little is known about its original dimensions and use in the siege. Computational technologies including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Osterholtz.

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Work on Cypriot identity has a long history, beginning with the identification of the first Cypriots during the Neolithic. This presentation continues on in the direction begun by Alan Simmons at Ais Giorkis of examining physical remains to understand what it meant to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Wallrodt. Denitsa Nenova.

Digital technologies in the field of archaeology have often been promoted as a tool enhancing productivity and efficiency, usually implying that the immediate digital recording of data would allow for the excavation of greater volumes and covering larger areas. Moreover, the strength of Paperless Archaeology comes with the enabling of immediate dissemination of observable data while breaking up the ‘sealed’ relationship between the raw data and the First Interpreter. What remains less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morag Kersel.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Big data in the form of aerial imagery gathered from drones, satellites, and archival spy images provide an historical time line of change over time of archaeological landscapes. The images of sites negatively affected by agriculture, development, looting, and urban growth are compelling and convincing in their documentation of destruction....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Schumacher. Susan M. Mentzer. Cynthianne Debono Spiteri. Mihriban Özbasaran.

Suspected fecal matter from the Aceramic Neolithic site of Aşıklı Höyük was analyzed using biomolecular and micromorphological approaches to study behavioral and environmental processes. Aşıklı Höyük provides the earliest evidence for sedentism and domestication in Central Anatolia. The main goal of this study is to identify the origin of suspected fecal deposits to gain a better understanding of the use of space and waste management strategies in this early Neolithic settlement. Suspected fecal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Blake. Robert Schon. Rossella Giglio.

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sicilian Channel receives global attention as a major migratory route for undocumented people entering Europe clandestinely, a tragic nexus of transnational displacement and desperation. While the plight of massively overloaded and unseaworthy boats of people justifiably receives media attention, there is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Margaret Scarry. W. Flint Dibble.

Excavations at the Archaic (7th-6th centuries B.C.) city of Azoria on Crete demonstrate the value of intensive environmental archaeology for understanding an historical Greek context. Texts document the important role of food and dining to ancient religion and politics; however, ancient authors presented a normative picture and excluded details they assumed were common knowledge. Studying plant and animal remains can "ground-truth" ancient sources on foodways and provide contextual nuances not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Hruby.

While fingerprint impressions have been used archaeologically to approach a range of cultural questions, the methodologies developed to date tend to be labor intensive, statistically unsophisticated, or require large numbers of complete prints. Recently, numerous quantitative print attributes that correlate with sex in modern populations have been discovered, almost always from two-dimensional data. It is probable that there are additional, yet-unrecognized features that correlate with producer...