Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (278 Records)
This research looks at Tel Abu Shusha in the Jezreel Valley of Israel, an understudied site in a strategically important Levantine area with potential evidence of Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman settlements. Surface survey was completed in nine square kilometers around the Tel, resulting in ceramic density data as well as over 2,500 mapped surface features in GIS, such as quarries, wine presses, and architecture. Additionally, four magnetic susceptibility grids were taken in this area, each one...
Adapting to Changing Resources: A Petrographic Analysis of Iron I Pottery from Tel Miqne-Ekron (2018)
The arrival of foreigners to the southern Levant at the beginning of the Iron Age (1200-1000 BCE) has been recognized in the material culture, as have changes in this material culture over time. These developments, resulting from interaction with the local population, have been interpreted as assimilation, acculturation, creolization, and most recently entanglement. In this poster, we examine these transformations through the lens of technological, i.e. those aspects of pottery manufacture that...
The Afterlife of a Desert Estate: The Qasr Complex at al-Ḥumayma, Southern Jordan at the Turn of the Second Millennium AD (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1992 to 2002, the Humayma Excavation Project investigated a fairly modest palatial structure dubbed Field F103 at the site of al-Ḥumayma in southern Jordan. Early on, the excavators recognized that this structure should be identified as the qasr and mosque complex described in Arabic historical sources as having...
Agricultural Landscapes of the Mesopotamian-Zagros Borderlands (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Diyala River Region in northern Iraq has long served as a strategic political, economic, and cultural borderland between the Mesopotamian alluvium and the Zagros Mountains. The region is also environmentally complex, encompassing a steep gradient of agroecological zones ranging from irrigated alluvial...
Agriculture in the “Land of Hatti”: The Politics and Ecology of Farming in Late Bronze Age Central Anatolia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hittite empire is the first supraregional polity documented in the history of central Anatolia. The core of the Hittite polity, the “Land of Hatti”, extended on a landscape which could be regarded as particularly challenging to the establishment of a reliable and productive centralized agricultural system. The traditional Anatolian farming system...
An Agroecological Perspective on Crop Domestication in Western Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestication has been discussed inter alia as a syndrome, a case study in niche construction and a reversible process. These perspectives frame new understandings of how management practice shaped domestication processes. For plants, recent experimental work has also been important for clarifying the effect of domestication...
‘All things being equal’? Multiplex Material Networks of the Early Neolithic in the Near East (2018)
Archaeological network research typically relies on material culture similarities over space and time as a proxy for past social networks. In many cases, a range of different types of material culture are subsumed into reconstructed connections between nodes. However, not all forms of material culture are equal. Different types of objects may be caught up in rather different forms of social relationship – crudely put, ‘personal’ items such as jewellery may perhaps have more social and cultural...
Analytical Models for At-Risk Heritage Conservation and 3D GIS (2018)
In the period 2011-2017, scholars from the University of California Merced and Cardiff University recorded the fragile earthen architecture of Çatalhöyük, Turkey employing cutting-edge conservation technologies to monitor the site and gather new data. Our goal was to model and analyze the site decay and plan conservation interventions. Tools and methods for this initiative include blending site monitoring data and digital documentation data from environmental data loggers, terrestrial laser...
Animal Bones from Hazor, Israel and a Cautionary Tale of Interpreting Past Ritual (2018)
Within recent years, feasting and other forms of ritual consumption have become more frequently identified in the archaeozoological record of the ancient Near East. Reasons for more frequent identification of ritual sacrifices and feasts vary, but two driving forces certainly are archaeological context, bones found in or near special architecture, and the cultural milieu formed by the region’s ancient textual record. In contrast, I have a skeptical tale to tell of ritual production and...
The Animal Provisioning System for a Late Bronze Age Temple at Hazor, Israel (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tel site of Hazor, Israel is one of the largest such occupational mounds in the southern Levant. Excavated in the 1950s, 1960s, and continuously since the 1990s, archaeologists have uncovered monumental public buildings. One such building, now identified as one of several Late Bronze Age temples,...
Animals at the Periphery: Investigating Urban Subsistence at Iron Age Sam’al (Zincirli Höyük, Turkey) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Zincirli Höyük, the ancient city of Sam’al, provides nuanced archaeological testimony to the complex interactions between imperial ambition and local concern in the Iron Age of Southern Anatolia (ca. 850–600 BCE). During this period, Syro-Hittite...
Animals Do Speak but Are We Listening? Perspectivism, Slow Zooarchaeology, and Contemplating Animal Domestication (2023)
This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I argue that animals do in fact speak to us and discuss several ways in which this framework can be approached. Through consideration of perspectivism as well as methodological approaches designed to disrupt zooarchaeological work as usual, I attempt to take animals seriously by listening to...
Anthropomorphic Figures in Arabian Rock Art (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art is vastly abundant in Arabia, and there are large concentrations of panels in key localities. Hail, Najran and Tabuk are the most prominent ones. These three localities house thousands of panels, which can be multi-period, and were done in various styles and engraving techniques. Anthropomorphic figures can give us an insight into these past...
Application of Metric Sex Estimation Standards at Tell Abraq: A Study of the Humerus (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Estimating sex in commingled assemblages may have an increased reliance on metric methods. These metric methods are often based on known collections that differ in geographical location and historical time period from the commingled collections to which they may be applied. In this presentation, we detail the testing of...
Approaches to Lithic Technology: How Archaeological Practice Influences Interpretation of Past Lifeways through the Lens of Kharaneh IV (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural affiliation and change in the Epipaleolithic (EP) period of Southwest Asia has historically been marked through microlithic stone tool technologies, where stone tool manufacturing is focused on the production of a large number of small bladelets then retouched into various microlith types. While researchers...
Aquatic Neanderthals and Paleolithic Seafaring: Myth or Reality? Examples from the Mediterranean (2018)
It long has been assumed that most of the world’s islands, especially remote ones, were first visited or colonized by fully modern humans. With few exceptions, these events occurred late, during the Neolithic or later, with an implied assumption that most islands could not support hunters and gatherers. We know that this scenario is no longer viable, with examples from Australia and southeastern Asia, such as Flores and Sulawesi, suggesting considerable antiquity extending prior to the...
Archaeology and Genetics in the South Caucasus (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology and genetics research all too often live separate lives within anthropology departments. Although the potential for corroboration and perspective-shift seems vast, the two disciplines require fluency in specialized technical registers that adds...
Archaeology and the Politics of Erasure in the Middle East (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a discipline initially tasked with understanding non-Western histories and heritage, archaeology has functioned mainly as a technology of forgetting rather than remembering when it came to indigenous material cultures. The role of archaeology in colonizing African and South American cultures is widely explored,...
Archaeology’s Empire of Sectarianism (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social historians demonstrate the historical contingency of sectarianism, which may be defined as a process and discourse that entwines religious sects and identities with political ones, on the ground and in state arrangements (Makdisi 2000). Despite this contingency, academic, government, and public circles...
*Archival Photogrammetry: Repurposing Excavation Photographs to 3-D Model Previous Excavations in Faynan, Jordan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using photography to thoroughly document the excavation process is a common and long-standing practice on most archaeological excavations. Moreover, since the advent of digital photography, the number of photos captured of an excavation has generally increased. The Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (directed by Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar) has...
Assessing Change over Time at Kharaneh IV through the Chaîne Opératoire (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The multicomponent Epipaleolithic site of Kharaneh IV, located in the Azraq Basin of eastern Jordan, documents over 1,000 years of occupation by hunter-gatherer groups during the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. Multiple lines of geomorphological, faunal, and archaeobotanical evidence indicate that the environs around the...
Assessing Inequality At Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Anatolia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We use a wide variety of data sets in order to explore inequality at Neolithic Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia. Our goal is to shed light not just on variations in wealth but also on other forms of potential social differentiation in this immense early farming settlement. We assess architectural, mortuary, artifactual, and ecofactual data with an eye to both...
Assessing Plant Use in the Early Upper Paleolithic: Macrobotanical Results From Mughr el-Hamamah, Jordan (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 Mughr el-Hamamah (MHM) cave site, located on the Jordan Valley’s eastern flanks, contains a prehistoric layer associated with Early Ahmarian artifacts. AMS 14C dates bracket the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) occupation between ca. 45 and 39 ka cal BP and are comparable in age to Ahmarian-associated layers...
Assessing the Correlation between Bone Artifacts and Body Part Profiles: A Case Study from the Central Anatolian Site of Kaman-Kalehöyük (2018)
This paper investigates the production of bone artifacts during the Bronze Age (ca. 3000-1200 BCE) at the central Anatolian site of Kaman-Kalehöyük. At this time, small agrarian societies transformed into more complex polities and states, which gave way to a more centralized and specialized market economy. These transformations in sociopolitical and economic organization resulted in other changes as well. For example, animal exploitation patterns began to reflect a more regulated economy to meet...
Assessing Variability in Refitted Lithic Reduction Sequences at Boker Tachtit (Israel) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distinguishing cultural relatedness from independent convergence in lithic technological behavior requires high-resolution behavioral data. Arguably, the best source of such high-resolution data comes from refitted reduction sequences because these sequences illustrate the procedural steps taken by individuals to produce stone tools. But much remains to be...