Mediterranean (Geographic Keyword)

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 Robin Rönnlund.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urbanization of human settlements is commonly seen as a relatively linear development beginning in the earliest sedentary communities of the Neolithic and ending with the international megalopolises of the present day. A closer scrutiny of the archaeological record, however, clearly shows that this narrative has little bearing on the factual situation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jody Gordon.

This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2007, a children’s book about Cypriot history entitled “The Island that Everyone Wanted” was published. Despite being aimed at a juvenile audience, this title aptly encapsulates the history of Cyprus, i.e., as an island coveted by...

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 Carl Knappett.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In scholarship on the Bronze Age Aegean, there is a robust conjunction of palace, town, and state. If we take the case of Knossos, then the presumed central authority represented by its palatial complex, and its surrounding town covering 100 ha, are generally thought to imply an associated territory under...

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 Leigh Hayes. Elizabeth Hannigan. Paige Schmitt. Paraskevi Tritsaroli. Anna Karligkioti.

This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Phaleron cemetery dates to the Greek Archaic Period (700–480 BCE), a time of great political and social upheaval. Textual accounts from the Archaic period are limited, making bioarchaeological analysis integral to understanding the lived experiences of everyday ancient Athenians. This project...

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 Timothy Edwards. Miriam Belmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromammal remains have proven to be successful proxies for conducting zooarchaeological research and reconstructing paleoenvironmental conditions in the Levant. Their success as a palaeoecological proxy is due to their sensitivity to climatic change, specific ecological niche, and low rate of human interaction. While there is abundant research on...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Cercone.

This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While geometric morphometrics (GMM) roots are in biology, there has been an increase of studies applying GMM to archaeological material in recent years. Archaeologists have utilized morphometrics to determine the level of craft specialization at prehistoric sites, test the symmetry of stone tools, classify ceramic sherds, examine the level of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen Foxhall Forbes.

Calabria in the first millennium CE does not fit easily into many of the established narratives that are usually applied either to the western or the eastern Mediterranean, nor yet into standard categories of periodisation, which often carry implicit assumptions related to these narratives. Using material, visual, and textual evidence, this poster explores fifth- to ninth-century southern Calabrian political landscapes, particularly the area around Bova Marina, in their broader Mediterranean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Mina.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caves often occupied prominent locations as visible landmarks or as nodal points in exchange networks and mobility routes. The paper discusses coastal sacred caves, which through the transportation of diverse material culture, provided the backdrop where maritime identities were played out. The study investigates the Late Minoan occupation phase of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier Fernanddez-Lopez De Pablo. Elodie Brisset.

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. In this paper we use a Central Place Foraging Model to evaluate the impact of environmental changes on subsistence and mobility strategies in the Mesolithic period in the Western Mediterranean. We focus on the analysis of the of El Collado site because of its position in the interface...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephennie Mulder.

This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present a major new analytical study of an important Islamic period archaeological ceramics assemblage produced during 12 years of excavation of Balis, a medieval Syrian city. With over 1,000 photographs and drawings produced over my 10 years as head ceramicist on the site, this study will be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Salvatore Vitale. Calla McNamee. Toula Marketou. Denitsa Nenova. Jerolyn E. Morrison.

Landscape as a concept incorporates not simply the geographic and environmental characteristics of an area, but also the cultural and symbolic value vested in places. Understanding the relationship of these factors, which are often closely linked, to past societies remains a challenge in archaeology. In this paper, we attempt to reconstruct the Final Neolithic (FN) through Bronze Age landscape on the island of Kos, Dodecanese, and investigate its cultural meaning to the prehistoric peoples. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Kolvet.

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. The diverse ground stone assemblage at Ais Giorkis in western Cyrpus is comprised of tools typically associated with early Neolithic sites. Certain tool categories however, appear to be underrepresented. The dearth of grinding slabs, querns, large mortars, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Fallu. Andreas Lang. Leonidas Vokotopoulos. Florence Gaignerot-Driessen. Antony Brown.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental change during the Bronze Age (3000 to 1100 BC) on Crete had a strong impact on the viability of agriculture and subsequent development of land land management technologies. In particular the development of terraced agricultural systems increased the capacity of slope agriculture, allowing cultivation to keep pace with population growth. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georgia Andreou.

Coastal erosion is a known problem in cultural heritage management, particularly in the Mediterranean, which lends itself exceptionally well to studies of maritime trade and connectivity. The loss of coastal land to erosion presents a serious obstacle to our understanding of the archaeological coastscape, due to the unpredictable rate in which it exposes and damages archaeological features. The exposure and subsequent disappearance of material culture is seldom accompanied by systematic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn Storey.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two of the ancient world’s largest cities were Teotihuacan in Mexico and Rome in Italy. Although their estimated population sizes are wildly divergent—the first of many features to be examined—the actual infrastructure, and thus the possibilities for the enhancement of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katarina Jerbic.

This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Based on a PhD research case study in the Croatian Adriatic, the paper demonstrates a step further into investigating coastal and submerged archaeology. Seabed mapping methods adopted from marine geology, such as side-scan and multi-beam sonar surveys and shallow water sub-bottom profiling are now...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wayne Powell. Ryan Mathur.

This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LIA of tin metal must consider the U-Th-Pb characteristics of cassiterite ore. The initial Pb content of cassiterite is <1 ppm and Th is <0.005 ppm. However, it contains as much as 50 ppm U. Therefore, 206 Pb and 207 Pb accumulate over time, potentially allowing the definition of an isochron....