West Asia (Geographic Keyword)
276-292 (292 Records)
Visibility Graph Analysis, or VGA, is a means of evaluating architectural environments based on a number of properties of intervisibility between points distributed within two-dimensional building plans. Created by Alasdair Turner for modern architects as a way to further space syntax analysis (itself based on patterns of accessibility instead of visibility), archaeologists have slowly been incorporating VGA into their work over the past decade. In this paper I outline the stages involved with...
Wadi Madamagh, Western Highlands of Jordan: Lithic Evidence from the Late Upper Paleolithic and Early Epipaleolithic Occupations (2015)
Wadi Madamagh, a small rockshelter in the Petra region of the Western Highlands of Jordan, contained high-density deposits of the Late Upper Paleolithic and the Early Epipaleolithic periods. It was first excavated in 1956 by D. Kirkbride, who placed two trenches into the site and briefly reported on the lithics, which have since been studied in detail (B.F. Byrd). A small test along one of Kirkbride’s trenches was conducted in 1983 (D. Schyle), and more intensive excavations were pursued in...
The Walking Dead: Osteological and isotopic indicators of mobility from Middle Bronze Age commingled human and faunal burials in Naxcivan, Azerbaijan (2015)
Tracing the mobility patterns of pastoralists and their herds is a critical part of illuminating the lifeways of people who inhabited the southern Caucasus in the past. During the 2014 season, the Naxcivan Archaeological Project excavated several Middle Bronze age kurgans overlooking the Şərur Plain. In these burials humans and animals were interred together, speaking to the significance of the animals in the lifeways of the people inhabiting the area during the Middle Bronze Age. We correlate...
Weapon or Weaving Swords and the Complexities of Gender Construction (2016)
The existence of weaving swords in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant is hinted at in both the textual and archaeological records. Furthermore, weaving swords as grave goods would fit the generally accepted pattern of weaving tools in association with female burials. Yet when swords have been found in graves with positively identified females, the deceased have been described as ‘warrior women’ or the burial reinterpreted so as to disassociate biological sex and gender. In recognizing the use of...
Weaving the Fabric of Society at Çatalhöyük: A Socio-Material Network Approach to the Study of Early Agricultural Settled Life, Social Structure and Differentiation (2017)
The end of the Çatalhöyük Research Project’s (ÇRP) 25-year mandate and the consequent generation of large and unique datasets produced by the collaboration of excavators and the specialists labs provide an extraordinary opportunity to investigate patterns of early agricultural settled life, social structure and differentiation at an intra-site level through a synthetic approach capable of weaving together different data threads. In this study, a relational framework rooted in models of...
Wedded to Privilege? Archaeology and Academic Capital (2017)
If archaeology is by definition strongly attached to certain academic ideals (or "scholastic fallacies"), to a particular secular, rationalist way of looking at the world, and to ever-proliferating specializations that require scarce technological resources and expertise; and if, moreover, academic symbolic and cultural capital is constantly and increasingly measured by membership in the correct status groups and by access to these scarce resources, can academic initiation of, or even...
A Week in the Life of the Mousterian Cows Hunter A Mousterian Hunting Location on the Banks of the Paleo-Hula Lake (2017)
Eight excavation seasons (2007-2014) at the Mousterian site of Nahal Mahanyeem Outlet (NMO) on the banks of the Upper Jordan River offer a glimpse into the life ways of MP people during a hunting expedition in the Upper Galilee. This open-air site, OSL dated to ca. 60ky BP, is interpreted as recording a series of short-term hunting events. The NMO horizons, with their small number of lithic artifacts, unique typological composition and evidence for task specific hunting and butchering...
What does the Paleolithic record of Southeast Arabia tell us about hominin dispersals out of Africa? (2016)
The southern route for human dispersal out of Africa has moved from being a hypothetical idea to being considered a plausible path of human expansion. Fundamental for this development is the intensified field work in Arabia over the past decade. The stratified Paleolithic assemblages from Jebel Faya in the Emirate of Sharjah, U.A.E. play a critical role in this context. Given that Jebel Faya is separated from the African coast of the Red Sea by about 2000 km the question arise what Jebel Faya...
Wheat and barley morphometrics: a new method for quantifying ancient cereal varietals (2016)
Free-threshing wheat (Triticum aestivum and T. durum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) were staple cereal crops in the ancient Near East. Although modern varietals of these species have significant variation in growing times, water requirements, and grain yields, few studies have distinguished varietals in the past. Traditional approaches have used grain seed size and shape to identify different crop varieties. These coarse metrics, including length:breadth and thickness:breadth ratios, give only a...
Where’s the beef? The value of an interdisciplinary approach to PPN features (2015)
The anthropogenic landscape of a prehistoric site is made up of artifacts, structures, and features. However, the three do not receive equal attention. Features--by which we mean stationary but non-structural evidence of human activity--are usually the least analyzed. Inspired by Paul Goldberg’s work on Paleolithic hearths, we hope to bring a new, more inter-disciplinary look at some of these less-studied elements of the anthropogenic landscape. To do so, we will expand the study to a later...
Why colonize? A case study of the early Neolithic Colonization of the island of Cyprus (2017)
Why humans colonize unoccupied lands, such as islands, has always intrigued scholars. Over the past few decades, researchers working on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus have documented both a Late Epipaleolithic occupation and a more substantial early Neolithic colonization episode. The number of such sites remains limited, but is growing with continuing research. For the Neolithic, both Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and PPNB occupations are now well-documented, and are as early as mainland sites....
Why colonize? A case study of the early Neolithic Colonization of the island of Cyprus. (2016)
Why humans colonize unoccupied lands, such as islands, has always intrigued scholars. Over the past few decades, researchers working on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus have documented both a Late Epipaleolithic occupation and a more substantial early Neolithic colonization episode. The number of such sites remains limited, but is growing with continuing research. For the Neolithic, both Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and PPNB occupations are now well-documented, and are as early as mainland...
Wild Meets Domestic at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey (2017)
One of the classic ways the nature/culture dichotomy manifests itself in human interactions with the environment is through the categories of wild and domestic. Some have argued that this distinction is not helpful, and certainly the boundaries are complicated, but it seems most useful to start by asking whether it was meaningful to particular people in the past. Here I will explore whether wild and domestic were relevant concepts to the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük (Central Anatolia), and to some...
The wild side of Cyprus: an integration of archaeobotany and zooarchaeology (2016)
Recent research from both the island and the mainland Near East have changed what we know of the timing and dynamics of the spread of agriculture to Cyprus. The timing of the arrival of the initial explorers and colonists by late Pre-Pottery Neolithic A cultures of the mainland Levant, and the dynamics of cultural developments in subsequent cultural phases is providing further support for the unique Cypriot prehistoric culture. One aspect that has long characterised Cyprus in prehistory is the...
Working for the Palace, Working for the House:how households became a neighborhood in late 3rd Millennium BC Tell Asmar (ancient Eshnunna), Iraq (2017)
To test the value of the neighborhood concept in archaeological practice, this paper relies on a model of socioeconomically diverse, urban Mesopotamian neighborhoods and tests the model by analyzing households within a neighborhood at Tell Asmar, Iraq. Tell Asmar became one of several major urban settlements in the Diyala River region, with occupation of the site extending back into late prehistory. The dataset comprises a subset of archaeological evidence recovered from the Tell Asmar Northern...
You Are How You Eat: Changes in Dining Style and Society at Late Bronze I Alalakh (2017)
Ceramics are intimately tied to both foodways and normative behavior within a culture. The appearance of a new shape or the long-term persistence of an old shape must be contextualized by first investigating the use to which the vessel was put, a use that can be inferred through multiple lines of evidence and explored using a variety of approaches. Recent excavations at Alalakh have illuminated the site’s Late Bronze I period, especially the troubled 17th-16th century BC transition from the...
Zooarchaeological Investigation of Late Pleistocene Subsistence Adaptations in Iran (2017)
Economic decisions of Late Pleistocene foragers bore heavily on the nature, timing, and intensity of the adoption of agriculture in different parts of Eurasia. Decades of intensive research in the Levant and Anatolia have made significant contributions to our understanding of Late Pleistocene economic strategies in the western parts of the Near East. A recent surge of interest by Iranian researchers and internationally collaborative teams in Paleolithic archaeology of Iran has renewed attention...