Europe: Eastern Europe (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (112 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cal Poly Humboldt has established a relationship with the Museum of Bitola to conduct research in the Pelagonia region of Macedonia. The museum and Cal Poly Humboldt conducted an initial reconnaissance of several locations and established a research location in Crnobuki. The acropolis adjacent to the town is the location of an ancient Macedonian garrison...
Cross-Craft Interactions in the Central European Bronze Age (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeometric data obtained for various raw materials used by Central European communities in the Bronze Age (ca. 2300-800 BC) allow us to study technological interactions in the past realized mostly within usually small and densely settled sites. In this study, cross-craft contact zones between the selected activities are crucial. They are likely to...
Dark Heritage in Tallinn: Dissonant Narratives of Mass Violence (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will examine several museums and heritage initiatives connected to Nazi and/or Soviet violence in and around Tallinn, Estonia, through the lens of “dark” and “contested” heritage, as well as “competitive victimhood” and “securitization of the past.” It will analyze the narratives of victimhood, perpetration, and suffering that are...
Death and the City: Funerary Practices and Social Transformations during the Archaic Period in Greek Poleis and Beyond (2024)
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 abundance in textual sources and richness of its archaeological record make Athens one of the most studied Greek cities during Classical Antiquity. However, research has focused principally on Athens, leaving much of the periphery of the Classical world largely unexplored. Scholars have mostly...
Demographic Modeling Using the Mortuary Record (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains are the most direct line of archaeological evidence of people in the past. The mortuary record, however, is the product of the complex interplay between social practices and taphonomic processes. To understand its formation and consequences for...
Demography and Social Organization of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Populations: An Evolutionary Perspective (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the broad issue of population estimates as proxies and drivers of the evolution of social structures taking the example of the Cucuteni-Tripolye cultural complex (CTCC) covering a territory from the Eastern Carpathians to the Dnieper region...
Digital Deforestation: DTM Generation with Agisoft Photoscan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Towards a Standardization of Photogrammetric Methods in Archaeology: A Conversation about 'Best Practices' in An Emerging Methodology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applying digital photogrammetry to archaeological sites is a well-known approach. Also fairly common is photogrammetry’s combination with low-altitude aerial photography (LAAP) in order to generate three-dimensional data and produce GIS outputs such as...
Documenting Damage to Cultural Property in Ukraine (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current events have demonstrated that the archaeological sites, museums, and historic structures that compose the cultural landscape of Ukraine are suffering in the current conflict. In this poster, we summarize the recent collaborative efforts of the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab (CHML), Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI), and University of...
Dogs of Death: An Evaluation of Canid Remains from a Mortuary Eneolithic Cave Site in Ukraine (2018)
Burials of dog skulls and full dog skeletons have been uncovered at several Eneolithic Tripolye (5100-2900 cal BC) sites suggesting that dogs held a special symbolic role for the Tripolye compared to other domestic fauna. To evaluate human-dog relationships in Tripolye culture and funerary context, we examined dogs from a single mortuary site (Site 17) located in Verteba Cave (3951-2620 cal BC), Ternopil Oblast, Western Ukraine. Symbolic representations of canids have been observed on some...
The Dogs of War: A Bronze Age Initiation Ritual in the Russian Steppes (2018)
At the Srubnaya-culture settlement of Krasnosamarskoe in the Russian steppes, dated 1900–1700 BCE, a ritual occurred in which the participants consumed sacrificed dogs, primarily, and a few wolves, violating normal food practices found at other sites, during the winter. At least 64 winter-killed canids, 19% MNI/37% NISP, were roasted, fileted, and apparently were eaten. More than 99% were dogs. Their heads were chopped into small standardized segments with practiced blows of an axe on multiple...
A Dynamic Past: The Prehistoric Interactions on the Plain Project (2018)
The collaborative, American-Hungarian Prehistoric Interactions on the Plain Project explores the past through the reconstruction of interactions. Investigations on interactions as an active mode of social investment and social construction challenges normative concepts of "culture" by modeling socio-cultural boundaries as a dynamic and negotiated process, as opposed to a static categorically assigned social unit. Moreover, our research contextualizes regional developments as the result of...
Early Romani Archaeologies (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Roma people, whose ancestors and language come from India, form a major community in all countries of Europe and are often referred to as “Europe’s largest minority.” Greece is distinctly central in Romani history, as Greek profoundly impacted the Romani language, and it was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that settlements in the Peloponnese,...
Environmental Change’s Impact on Settlement Development during the Late Neolithic at the Site of Csökmő-Káposztás-domb (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Körös region of the Great Hungarian Plain, the Late Neolithic (ca. 5000–4500 BC) tell site of Csökmő-Káposztás-domb features an ancient paleomeander that weaves through the site. Magnetometry and systematic surface collection have identified a contemporaneous Late Neolithic settlement surrounding the tell, spanning almost 130 ha. Many Late Neolithic...
European and North American Mountain Archaeology and the Concept of Transhumance Applied to the Prehistory of Colorado’s Southern Rocky and Poland’s Tatra Mountains (2018)
Significant advancements have been made in mountain archaeology throughout the world in recent decades. A central and rapidly expanding research theme has been that of seasonal transhumance, movement of human groups between lower to higher mountain-foothills-piedmont environmental zones in order exploit annual economic resource variability. Emerging European mountain records suggest human transhumance, based in seasonal variability of both economic plants, migratory game species, and, much...
Every Year Is Getting Shorter, Never Seem to Find the Time: Evidence for a Fourth-Millennium Gap in Southeastern Europe (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prior to the surge in radiocarbon dating over the last 15 years, the culture chronologies of Southeastern Europe were organized neatly in sequential centuries-long blocks for the fifth and fourth millennia. Recent research, however, has completely upended the traditional chronologies. With increased research and scholarship on the Copper Age / Chalcolithic...
Evidence of Maritime Trade at the Bulgarian Black Sea Site of Apollonia Pontica (7th-3rd centuries BC) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will highlight the evidence for trade networks and the distribution of goods at the ancient port city of Apollonia Pontica along Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast. Founded in the 7th century BC by Milesians from western Ionia fleeing an incursion by their Lydian neighbors, Apollonia -- with its two excellent ports and easy access to the...
From Mounds and Museums: Building a Bioarchaeology of the Early Bronze Age in the Apuseni Region of Transylvania (2018)
The Apuseni Mountains of southwest Transylvania, Romania, are amongst the richest gold and copper procurement zones in the world. Metals from this region helped fuel the rise of inequality across Europe during Late Prehistory, and the area is also home to a rich mortuary record, with archaeological survey identifying over one hundred mounded tomb cemeteries belonging to Bronze Age communities. However, none of these cemeteries have been fully excavated and only a small sample of skeletons has...
Gendered Trouble: Reconsidering the Role of Females in the Masculinized Spaces of Violence in an Early Bronze Age Population (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mierzanowice Culture (~2400–1600 BCE) communities in the Central European Early Bronze Age buried their dead in a formalized and gendered manner, in which males and females typically assumed mirror-opposite orientations in their respective graves. Furthermore, the archetypal "warrior" grave—whether simply an...
GSTs and Foodscapes: Unfolding Homo sapiens’ Diet When Venturing the Eurasian Steppe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The surfaces of lithic artifacts, namely of ground stone tools (GSTs), are a rich repository of structured use-related biogenic residues (SU-RBR) such as starch, revealing the mechanical processing of starch-rich organs, naturally biodegradable and therefore vulnerable. The recovery of SU-RBR on the surfaces of...
Hammer on Vampires: Reconceptualization of So-Called Deviant Funerary Practices of Early Medieval Slavs (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Life and Death in Medieval Central Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Slavic “deviant” funerary practices and dealings with certain dead—including decapitations, mutilations, or crushing cadavers with stones—have been of interest for mortuary archaeologists for many years. The explanation that researchers turned to most often was the one describing these practices as apotropaic in nature, as means of subduing the...
Health and Mortuary Treatment in Early Bronze Age Transylvania (2018)
Copper and gold resources from Southwestern Transylvania played a critical role in the emergence of inequality in European Late Prehistory. Communities in this metal-rich landscape, however, remain poorly understood. Though the highly visible tombs in the Apuseni Mountains where these communities buried some of their dead have been known to local archaeologists for decades, very little is known about the backdrop of health and disease in the region. Here, we present one of the first...
History of Research at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro, 1954–2016 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Late Middle Paleolithic in the Western Balkans: Results from Recent Excavations at Crvena Stijena, Montenegro" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rockshelter of Crvena Stijena has been well-known for over 60 years as one of the most important prehistoric archaeological sites in the Balkan Peninsula. Discovered in 1954, its excavations in the ensuing decade by renowned Yugoslavian prehistorians revealed a...
The Histria Multiscalar Archaeological Project (2018–2022): Multidisciplinary Research and Consilience at the Mouth of the Danube (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 reports on the results of the first four seasons of excavation of the Histria Multiscalar Archaeological Project (HMAP) at the Greek and Roman site of Histria, on the Black Sea coast of Romanian Dobrogea south of the Danube delta. Histria was one of the earliest Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast and played a fundamental role in cultural...
How the Skeletal Remains of Romanian Reflect the Culture and Daily Life of the Medieval Period (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medieval Romania’s history is riddled with gaps caused by destructive invasions against the Ottoman Empire, among others. With a fractured and understudied history, bioarchaeology emerges as a potent tool to unveil the concealed facets of this era, ranging from dietary habits and religious inclinations to vocational pursuits, physical traumas, and burial...
I Would Walk 500 Miles: Survey of Copper Age Settlements in Eastern Hungary (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Copper Age (c. 4500-2800) of the Great Hungarian Plain was a period in which the widespread adoption of metallurgy and a series of large-scale population shifts substantially transformed the social landscape. However, research has primarily focused on the large cemeteries (e.g. Tiszapolgár-Basatanya), while the settlements and social structure of the...