West Asia (Geographic Keyword)
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Manot Cave is a unique relict karst cave located in the western Galilee, Israel. The cave was inhabited from the Late Middle Paleolithic through the Early Upper Paleolithic periods until its main entrance collapsed some 30 thousand years ago. The cave consists of an elongated main hall and two side chambers. The topography of the main hall is composed of a long steep talus (ca. 30 m long) inclining from the original entrance of the cave to the center; a leveled area at the lowermost point of the...
De-centering the Fertile Crescent: Multiple Pathways to Food Production (2015)
Southwest Asia is one of the earliest and most documented centres of agricultural origins. With the expansion of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological datasets within this region it is now more possible to unravel the evidence on a broader regional scale revealing a more complex picture with multiple centers and pathways of plant and animal domestication. Through a comparison of recent evidence this paper examines the multiple pathways towards domestication and the transition to agricultural...
Delazian: An Open-Air Upper Paleolithic Site in Central Iran (2015)
For a long time, most Paleolithic research in Iran was focused on the caves and rock shelters of Zagros Mountains. Only in recent years has this focus shifted to other parts of the country, leading to the discovery and study of many Paleolithic sites. Delazian is one such newly-discovered site with an assemblage of lithic artifacts indicating the presence of Paleolithic societies in central Iran during more hospitable periods of climate. In 2009, a systematic survey was conducted at this...
Diet and Mobility in Roman and Byzantine Turkey (2017)
Isotope analyses (C, N, Sr) have been conducted on human skeletal remains (n=150) from the Roman and Byzantine periods (ca. 133 BC – ca. 1453) from the sites of Hierapolis and Ephesos (Turkey) to characterize and compare their diet and mobility. In addition we undertook a large-scale strontium isotope-mapping project in the region, modern plant and snail samples are also used to characterize the local bioavailable strontium values in southwestern Turkey. Hierapolis and Ephesos were both major...
Digital History and Digital Storytelling: the Future of Geospatial Technologies in the Study of the Past (2017)
Geospatial technologies are revolutionizing the practice of the Digital Humanities, and these developments have direct relevance to the practice of archaeology. The most recent "spatial turn" among digital humanists can be attributed to the emergence of tools like ArcGIS that facilitate such investigations as well as an interdisciplinary convergence upon theoretical models that conceive of socially-constructed space. This paper will briefly review the current state-of-the-art in the sub-field...
Dining Out in the Desert: Results From Protein Residue Analysis at the Azraq Oasis, Jordan (2017)
Excavations at Shishan Marsh 1 (SM-1) have provided evidence of a unique ecosystem, along with faunal remains and over 10,000 artifacts made from local flint dating to approximately 250,000 years ago. Forty-six of these artifacts were selected for residue analysis from stratified, in-situ deposits. Extractions from these lithic tools were tested for possible protein residues using the technique of cross-over immunoelectrophoresis (CIEP). The SM-1 artifact extractions were run against eight...
Documenting an Iron Age Townscape at Busayra (Jordan) using Geophysical Survey Techniques (2016)
Located in southwest Jordan, Busayra has long been suspected of being the capital of the Iron Age polity of Edom. British excavations in the 1970s revealed monumental buildings, fortifications, and domestic residences on Busayra’s acropolis that confirms the settlement’s stature as an administrative center. Despite this impressive evidence, little else is known about the town’s design. In order to further investigate Busayra’s sub-surface features, the authors conducted a geophysical survey...
Drones in the desert: Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle (UAV) survey in the Black Desert, Jordan (2017)
Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and photogrammetry provide a precise tool for high resolution surveys of arid landscapes. In 2016, as part of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project, we undertook a large survey (32 km2) in the remote Black Desert of eastern Jordan. Although excavation has been ongoing in the survey area for several years, many extant Neolithic structures have not been properly mapped or identified because of the large number of structures and the large scale of the area. For...
Dung through the Microscope: a Close-up View of Sample Origin (2017)
In the 1980s, Naomi Miller’s seminal publications detailing the use and identification of dung fuel within archaeobotanical samples at Malyan provided archaeobotanists with an alternate explanation for the source of plant remains preserved archaeologically, allowing for considerations of ancient fuel use and pasturing practices. Since then, archaeobotanists have generally relied upon wood to weed seed ratios or the composition of weed assemblages to support the use of dung fuel within flotation...
Early Holocene taphonomy of Nachcharini Cave, Lebanon (2017)
Nachcharini Cave represents evidence from the early Holocene Levant, spanning the transition from hunting to herding in this region. It is located in an alpine environment, rare for Levantine sites at 2100 metres above sea level. The archaeofauna shows a clear predominance of wild sheep remains over wild goat, presenting a possible source for early domesticates. Taphonomic analysis of remains from the Natufian, PPNA, and PPNB periods at Nachcharini show significant differences in formation...
Early Human Control over Ungulate Taxa in the southern Levant (2017)
An expanding catalog of faunal assemblages spanning the Late Epipaleolithic through Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) periods in the southern Levant points to growing human control over taxa that eventually become domesticated (wild goat, wild pig and wild cattle). This change in human-animal relationships occurs several centuries if not millennia before evidence for full-fledged management and domestication are visible in the archaeo-zoological record. We explore this shift by referencing data from...
Early Upper Palaeolithic Shell beads and shellfish from Manot Cave, Israel (2017)
The Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) cave site of Manot, western Galilee, Israel yielded remains of the Ahmarian and Levantine Aurignacian technocomplexes. The malacofauna assemblages from the two technocomplexes were analyzed (NISP=1180). Dozens of ornamental shells, mostly deriving from the Aurignacian assemblages, include perforated Nassarius gibbosulus, Columbella rustica and Antalis spp. as well as two cowrie beads found in association with human bones. The comparison of the Manot assemblage...
The Early Upper Paleolithic Radiocarbon Chronology and its synchronization in the Levant (2017)
The timing of Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) traditions in the Levant bears significance for understanding modern human dispersals. Despite intensive research, the Levantine EUP chronology has not been resolved because most chronometric dates come from old excavations and outdated analytical methods. Here we report dates from Manot Cave, Israel, which constitute the largest series of EUP radiocarbon dates (n=55) from current excavations and state-of-the-art analytical methods. A new strategy in...
Ecology, ceremony, and animal bones from southern Mesopotamia (2015)
Diane Gifford-Gonzalez has written numerous zooarchaeological papers that wonderfully balance attention to both the ecosystemic and the cultural influences that shape how humans interact with animals. In a 2008 essay exploring zooarchaeology’s potential contributions to the study of daily life, she wrote that pastoralists’ herd management strategies are constructed in the contexts not only of regional ecosystems and animal biologies, but also of human economies, ideologies and politics. At the...
Economic Strategies of Provincial Elites in Ayyubid Southern Jordan (2017)
The late 12th and 13th centuries AD in the southern Levant are a period of increasing political centralization, ending the political instability caused by the fragmentation of the ‘Abbasid Empire in the 10th century AD. While the 11th and early 12th centuries are marked by near-constant shifts in political sovereignty, by the 13th century control was contested only between the Ayyubid rulers of Cairo and Damascus. A third center — Karak, in central Jordan — was, however, able to achieve...
Edges of Teamwork in Archaeology:Network Approaches to Excavation Histories (2016)
Network science has begun to transform how we view systems of people and objects in the archaeological past, but also provides new insight into how archaeologists collaborate to create the archaeological record. Using two longterm excavations as case studies-- Catalhoyuk in Turkey and the Temple of the Winged Lions in Petra, Jordan-- I demonstrate how network approaches help to visualize and measure teamwork on these archaeological sites. I identify how a person's position in formal site...
The emergence, development and regional differences of the mixed farming of rice and millet in the upper and middle Huaihe River, China (2017)
In this research, flotation and starch analyses were conducted on samples from eight archaeological sites in the upper and middle HRV. The results indicate that the mixed farming of rice and millet first appeared in the later phase of the middle Neolithic in the regions of the Peiligang Culture, then developed quite rapidly in the late Neolithic (6.8–5.0 ka BP), finally becoming the main subsistence economy at the end of the Neolithic in the upper HRV. However, there are obvious differences in...
Emergency care training workshops for Syrian museum collections (2015)
Amidst the atrocities of Syria’s civil war, Syrian curators, heritage professionals, and activists courageously risk their lives to protect the country’s cultural heritage. Working in areas outside of the Assad regime’s control, these individuals have managed to safeguard collections salvaged from damaged museums, religious institutions, and looted sites. This paper discusses a workshop, held in Turkey, which brought together museum curators, heritage professionals, and other members of civil...
Emergent Spirituality: The Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Ossuaries of Peqi’in (Upper Galilee, Israel) (2015)
The creative and diverse mortuary practices of the Chalcolithic period in the Southern Levant demonstrated a profound departure from the single-person, intramural interments of the earlier Neolithic periods. During the Chalcolithic, formalized structures and subterranean chambers were constructed for corpse depositions that were more complex in nature. Of particular interest, many of these structures exhibit innovative tendencies that allude to portraiture. Iconographic motifs are not...
The Entanglement of Nature and Culture in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of Central Anatolia: The Transition of Çatalhöyük East to West (2017)
Prehistoric communities need to be seen as firmly embedded in their ecosystem and landscape where the nature is a very real factor in the decision making processes. The human-environmental relationship is complex and non-linear, which different societies shape it in variable ways. Responses to nature are always of social character made of a number of intertwined explicit and implicit elements. They ultimately have far reaching consequences for the condition of any group including a survival in...
Entheseal changes as a reflection of activity patterns at 1st century BC./A.D. Petra (2016)
The residents of the Nabataean capital city of Petra (Jordan) remain an enigmatic element of Near Eastern history. Most research has focused on the site’s architecture rather than the inhabitants living amongst the city’s spectacular structures. Excavations of 1st century B.C./A.D. tombs from Petra’s North Ridge in 2012 and 2014 recovered a sizeable sample (N=113) of Petra’s non-elite inhabitants. This project explores entheses to understand physical activity levels and patterns within this...
The environmental context of the Middle Pleistocene occupation at the Shishan Marsh, Azraq, Jordan (2017)
The Greater Azraq Oasis Area occupies a hyper-arid area of the Syro-Arabian Desert. Geomorphological and paleoecological evidence suggests that at times during the Pleistocene the region experienced moister conditions than at present. This particular study centers on the environment surrounding the Middle Pleistocene hominin occupation dated approximately 250,000 BP. Archaeological and archaeozoological remains from this occupation have provided significant information about the wide range of...
Establishing identities in the Protoneolithic: History making at Göbekli Tepe in the late 10th millennium calBC (2015)
Processes of early sedentism are associated with the agglomeration of complex hunter-gatherer populations within the ‘confines’ of spatially limited permanent settlement systems, possibly with ‘fixed’ territorial claims, and with an economy based on stored harvests of wild cereals and pulses, and broad-spectrum hunting. Against this background, the emergence of social hierarchies and identities has long been an area of discussion among archaeologists. Be this as it may, we still find it...
Evidence for Climate Change During the 3rd – 5th Century CE: The microvertebrate evidence from Tel Huqoq, Israel (2015)
The 3rd-5th century CE Levant is known as a time period in which climatic conditions of the southern region were wetter than today. The climatic system of the northern Levant differs from the south, which raises the question of whether or not there was climate change in the north. At present there is no paleoecological data within the northern Galilee. Thus, obtaining paleoecological data is vital for understanding how climate may have affected the local social and economic sphere. The...
Evidence for Dung Burning in the Archaeobotanical Record of Central Asia (2017)
In the early 1980s Naomi Miller changed the way paleoethnobotanists in several parts of the world approached the interpretation of their data. With her research into whether the ancient seed eaters of southwest Asia were human or herbivore, she opened an ongoing debate over what impact the burning of animal dung had on archaeobotanical assemblages and how researchers can differentiate between human and animal food remains. As the number of systematic paleoethnobotanical studies across Central...