Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (208 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...
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...
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...
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...
*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 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...
At-Risk World Heritage and the Digital Humanities – An Overview of the UC Office of the President’s Research Catalyst Project (2018)
Recent current events have dramatically highlighted the vulnerability of the world's material cultural heritage. Funded by a University of California (UC) Office of the President’s Research Catalyst grant beginning in 2016, the At-Risk Cultural Heritage and the Digital Humanities project catalyzes a collaborative research effort by four UC campuses (San Diego, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Merced) to use cyber-archaeology and computer graphics to document and safeguard virtually some of the most...
Automated Qanat Detection: Examining the Application of Deep-Learning in Archaeological Remote Sensing (2018)
This paper presents the preliminary results of a collaborative project that seeks to develop a deep learning model for automated detection of qanat shafts on CORONA Satellite Imagery. Increasing quantity of air and space-borne imagery available to archaeologists and advances in computational science has created an emerging interest in automated archaeological detection. Previous studies have applied machine learning algorithms for detection of archaeological sites and off-site features, with...
Back to ‘Ubeidiya: Renewed Excavations at an Early Pleistocene Site in the Levant (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 'Ubeidiya, Central Jordan Valley, Israel, is one of the earliest prehistoric sites outside Africa. Extensive excavations in the second half of the twentieth century yielded important archaeological, paleontological, and geological data, which provided insights into early Pleistocene hominins’ expansion out of Africa. The primary geological descriptions of...
Ban Qala, a Late Chalcolithic Site in the Mountain Region of Kurdistan, Iraq: A Report from the 2017 Excavation Season (2018)
Ban Qala, a site located in the mountainous valley of Qara Dagh, was first identified by Iraqi archaeologists in the 1940s. In 2015, a survey performed by the Qara Dagh Regional Archaeological Project determined the archaeological relevance of the site, which was then chosen as subject of an archaeological investigation. A step trench on the southern slope of the site verified the presence of LC 1-2 (4800/4500-3850 B.C.E.) and LC 3-5 (3850-3100 B.C.E.) occupation levels. This paper will discuss...
Barda in the Transition Stage from Late Antiquity to Islamic Archaeology: Historical and Archaeological Review (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The city of Barda was especially notable due to its political and economic position in the Caucasus in the Middle Ages. In addition to being the capital of the Albanian state, it was the center of the local administration of the Sassanid Empire and later of the Arab Caliphate. Middle Ages sources inform about Barda, calling it the mother of Arran and...
Beating Swords into Plowshares: The Role of Agricultural Colonization in Imperial Histories (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his 2001 monograph, The Mechanics of Empire, Bradley Parker methodically utilized archaeological survey data and historical texts to track the Neo-Assyrian empire’s growth through the agrarian settlement of deportees in newly conquered territories. Parker’s emphasis on agricultural colonization marked an...
Becoming Neolithic or Being a Hunter-Gatherer? Reframing the Origins of Agriculture through a Longue Durée Perspective (2018)
Searching for the origin points of major cultural revolutions and transitions has long been a driver of archaeological research, yet led to research focused on perceived boundaries, rather than continuity. Research into the origins of so-called modern human behavior, the origins of social complexity, the earliest domesticates, among others, all focus on defining moments of change that may be undetectable in the archaeological record. Perhaps some of the most enduring archaeological questions...