Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Luurtsema. Kara Larson. Alicia Ventresca Miller. Henry Wright.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in southwest Iran and occupied since the fourth millennium BCE, Tepe Farukhabad is a prime example of an Early Uruk town. Numerous faunal remains were recovered from excavations in the 1960s, including those from wild animals, such as gazelle and horses, as well as from domesticated sheep, goats, and cows. Interestingly, between the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uri Berger. Gonen Sharon.

Excavation in the Shamir Dolmen Field (comprising over 400 dolmens), on the northern Israeli basaltic terrains, was carried out following the discovery of enigmatic rock art engravings on the ceiling of one of the largest dolmens ever recorded in the Levant. Excavation of this dolmen, covered by a basalt capstone weighing some 50 tons, revealed a secondary multi-burial (of both adults and children) rarely described in a dolmen context in Israel. Engraved into the rock ceiling above the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agata Calabrese.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will employ GIS in exploring the experiential aspects of the burial process in Early Bronze Age North Mesopotamia, with a particular attention to funerary soundscapes. To investigate the potential impact of vocal and musical sound, a 10 m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) was developed, and the "System for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katelyn DiBenedetto. Levi Keach.

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of Dr. Alan Simmons’ career, his work has challenged us to reconsider the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) time and time again. His early work on subsistence among the PPNB peoples of the Negev helped researchers to consider a PPNB without farming or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Grap.

Situated in Israel’s Jezreel Valley, Tel Shimron holds the remains of occupations from the Early Bronze Age through to the 20th century. It is one of the largest tels in the region, but had not been excavated before this summer. The Tel Shimron Excavation project aims to investigate tel stratigraphy and better understand regional dynamics with the Galilean Hills and the Mediterranean agricultural economy. We began in 2016 by conducting geophysical surveys over much of the tel to investigate the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Beller. Mark Collard. Amer al-Soulimann.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Azraq Basin is an important physiogeographic feature and hydrological catchment area in the eastern desert of Jordan. At its heart are the Azraq wetlands, an ecologically fragile oasis complex characterized by the spring-fed historic Druze Marsh and rehabilitated Shishan Marsh. Archaeological investigation over the past 70 years has discovered multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Beller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations at Shishan Marsh 1 in the Azraq Basin, Jordan have uncovered several artifact-bearing layers that date to the late Middle Pleistocene (300-220kya; 130-120kya). A paleoecological assessment of sediments from this period indicates predominantly arid and warm conditions in the region, similar to those of the present. Hominins living under these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Felicia De Pena.

Flintknappers during the Levantine Epipaleolithic were proficient at microlith production, these skills were learned and passed down from one flintknapping generation to another as no one is born with the innate ability to flintknap. By utilizing practice theory and a chaîne opératoire approach to the Epipaleolithic chipped stone tool reduction sequences of narrow-nosed cores at Kharaneh IV, I strive to identify how individuals learned to flintknap, from raw material acquisition to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Egbers.

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology grapples with the materiality of past subjects’ perception and organization of space, as drawn from objects, landscapes, architecture, and pictorial or textual representations. Generally what emerges from these data is a dominant or normative conceptualization of space. However, space is not merely the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hopwood.

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. Due to the generosity of Dr. Bradley Parker I had the opportunity to analyse the Ubaid Period burials from Kenan Tepe, Turkey. These burials provide a glimpse into the social dynamics and ritual practice of Kenan Tepe’s Ubaid Period community. The burials are divided into two groups: infants buried in courtyards...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fatemeh Ghaheri.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neo-Assyrian Empire as one of the major empires in the Ancient Near East emerged soon after late Bronze Age collapses. It ruled Mesopotamia from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to western parts of Iran and to Persian Gulf during the first millennium B.C. in a cold period in theHolocene Epoch. For my thesis, I am focusing on their plant cultivation,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

This paper explores how people within Neolithic villages were potentially connected to co-resident multi-family households, and considers the potential material footprint of multi-family households within Neolithic villages. As seen from ethnographic cases, in some cases residential buildings of House Societies had a range of functions including as dwelling locations, origin-places, council houses, or meeting-houses. Echoing other research this paper decouples the social unit of the House from a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Larson.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Khirbet Summeily is an Iron Age II site located northwest of Tell el-Hesi in Southern Israel. Excavations have revealed a large, singular structure with an adjoining ritual space dated to the Iron Age IIA (ca. 1000–870 BCE). Recent interpretations suggest the site was integrated into a regional economic and political system and functioned as a potential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gonca Dardeniz Arikan. Tayfun Yildirim.

Modern day Çorum is the homeland of the Hatti people, the culture that later formed the Hittite Empire. Resuloğlu, dated to the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2500–2100 BC), is one of the few Hatti sites being systematically excavated. The site, located on a hilltop near the Delice River, consists of a cemetery area and settlement that spreads over two opposing–once connected–ridges with numerous extraordinary metal and vitreous artifacts. The settlement exemplifies well the self-sustaining pre-Hittite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil Glauberman. Boris Gasparyan.

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last two decades, international-Armenian projects have greatly expanded and refined the Middle Paleolithic (MP) record in the Armenian Highlands. Here, we preliminarily synthesize current chronometric, lithic, and faunal evidence. Our goal is to develop some hypotheses on hominin land use, subsistence, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Donner. Laura Harrison.

Pottery manufacturing in Early Bronze Age (EBA) Anatolia witnessed a host of technical innovations that transformed what had been a small-scale domestic activity into a specialist craft. At the proto-urban village of Seyitömer Höyük, dedicated pottery workshops appeared in the EBIII period (ca. 2250-2200 BCE), along with a suite of technical innovations, such as pottery molds, clay mixing pits, and clusters of pottery kilns. These advances allowed potters to manufacture more vessels with less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Donner. Laura Harrison.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While fascination with archaeology is commonplace among children, family media content often focuses on problematic narratives of treasure hunting. This presents a need for archaeologists to reach out to young audiences with a more balanced narrative - one that conveys the value of heritage resources and counteracts the damaging perception of archaeologists as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Dunning Thierstein. Sabah Jasim. Eisa Yousif. Ellinor Dunning.

Mleiha in the center of the Emirate of Sharjah (UAE) presents a long archaeological history in which the natural environment plays an important role. The management of this site is complex and serves as a good practice example for the Salalah Doctrine. Our presentation will develop the challenges of management of archaeological sites in their special natural context involving the management of water resources, game and agriculture in an environment situated between the desert and the high...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bulent Arikan.

Agent-based modeling of land use not only illustrates how ancient production mechanisms evolve, but such models also have the power to reconstruct changes in spatio-temporal changes in the dynamics of surface processes in relation with the changes in climatic conditions and varying type and intensity of human land use. Early Bronze Age-I at Arslantepe represents a time period when the paleoclimatic dynamics changed towards more arid conditions while the economy of the site shifted from intensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ioana Dumitru. Joseph W. Lehner. Michael Harrower.

With over 5000 years of production history, Oman was a major ancient source of copper, participating in a trade network that supplied a large part of the ancient world, the extent of which has yet to be fully mapped. As part of the Archaeological Water Histories of Oman (ArWHO) Project, we have been working since 2012 in the Ad-Dhahirah Governorate of Oman to clarify the structure of ancient copper production networks. Methodologically, our investigations employ satellite imagery analysis to map...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Cromartie.

This poster investigates how Bronze and Iron Age communities around Mount Aragats, in central Armenia, managed their grassland environment through their subsistence strategies. I suggest that these distinct social and political societies not only participated in constructing a landscape of domestic cereal grains, such as barley and wheat, but also were participants in the ecology of this open mountain steppe environment dominated by Poaceae, Chenopodiaceae, and Artemisia. I investigate how the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Ristvet.

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. Archaeological research on empires has focused on centers and periphery, with much less emphasis on the interstices of empires. During the first century of the common era, the polities of the Southern Caucasus were located between the competing empires of Arsacid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nigel Goring-Morris. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dominant paradigm concerning group size is frequently couched in terms of the "social brain hypothesis" (Dunbar 1998). On the other hand ethnographic evidence (Hill et al. 2014) posits much higher interaction rates amongst individuals than those based solely upon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Cooper.

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Las Vegas Valley in southern Nevada experienced unprecedented growth in the 1990's. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) was not immune to this progress and as a result began to attract the attention of top researchers, professors, and graduate students out...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Barket. Felicia De Peña. Ahmad Thaher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the ongoing research on the Neolithic of the Southern Levant, flaked-stone assemblages continue to play a key role in interpretations of social organization and interaction. Despite the prominence of research on lithic assemblages during the Neolithic, few comprehensive studies come from the large settlements with long, continuous occupation spans (2,000...