Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)

151-175 (208 Records)

Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Experimental Archaeology of Beer and Community (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Ayling. Marie Hopwood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A pint of beer is more than a "simple" beverage. The presence of ethanol resulting from the yeast-based fermentation contributes to making beer a unique form of embodied material culture that has fermented alongside humanity since well before written records. It is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, and is regularly discussed in...


Reassessing Demography of the Bronze Age Tomb at Tell Abraq (UAE): Using Multiple Bone Elements from a Commingled Context (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Barrett. Samantha Mackertich. Kathryn Baustian.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A circular stone tomb at the site of Tell Abraq (UAE) on the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf was used as a mortuary feature for approximately 200 years (2200-2000BC) during the Bronze Age. Both adults and children were buried in the 6 meter wide tomb, causing significant admixture or commingling of the remains. This research reassessed the demography of the...


Reassessing Evidence for Early Iron Production in the Near East (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Work by David Killick and colleagues has documented rich landscapes of iron production sites in sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, iron smelting and smithing sites have proven far more elusive in the Caucasus and the rest of the Near East. This situation has severely hampered our understanding of iron...


Reconstructing Land-Use Histories in Ecologically Transitional Mesopotamian Landscapes (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Elise Jakoby Laugier.

This poster presents results of the Sirwan (Upper Diyala) Regional Project's (Kurdish Region, Iraq) 2017 offsite research in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Off-site investigations of Mesopotamian landscapes provide evidence of land-use practices and inform our understanding of strategies and structures of past agro-economic systems. Thus, the aim of the 2017 season was to employ multiple remote sensing technologies (including magnetic gradiometry and drone-based imaging) to prospect for and...


The Relationship between Humans and Camels in Late Prehistoric Southeastern Arabia: The Problems of Distinguishing between 'Wild' and 'Domestic' Camels Using Zooarchaeological Materials and Methods (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only James Roberts. Lloyd Weeks. Melanie Fillios. Charlotte Cable. Yaaqoub Yousef al-Aali.

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. The dromedary camel (Camelus dromedarius) is a crucial component of the lifeways of humans in arid regions. Delineating the nature of the early relationship between humans and dromedaries is therefore critical to our understanding of the ancient human societies that co-existed with the dromedary in these areas. Many studies...


Revealing the Local: A Look Inwards at the Archaeology of Southeastern Arabia (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Eli Dollarhide.

Rita Wright’s valuable contributions to the archaeology of urbanism and holistic, multi-scalar approaches to settlement patterns is well-attested in her survey work along the Beas River Valley. This paper picks up these themes in a different region of the interconnected Bronze Age world that has been the focus of her research—ancient Oman. Known as Magan in Mesopotamian texts, a considerable amount of research has been conducted on Bronze Age Oman by focusing on its external connections to...


The Road More Traveled: ‘Ain Ghazal and the Peopling of the Black Desert (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Gary Rollefson.

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 late Pleistocene and early Holocene Neolithic connections over the maritime routes from the eastern Mediterranean shores to Cyprus have been fruitfully investigated, and those links clearly involved more than the simple movement of ideas. Another development in the...


A Rock Art Depiction of a Desert Kite Hunting Drive Trap (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Rosen. Lior Schwimer. Roy Galili. Naomi Porat. Nadel Dani.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A recently discovered petroglyph panel in the Har Tzuriaz region of the southern Negev, Israel, depicts a typical desert kite, a form of drive trap used for millennia to hunt gazelle. The depiction closely approximates an actual desert kite located less than a kilometer away, but not in direct line of sight....


Rock Art, Animals, and Desert Landscapes: A Case Study from the Black Desert of Jordan (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathalie Brusgaard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1st millennium BC and the early 1st millennium AD, nomadic groups inhabited the Black Desert of northern Arabia. These desert societies are elusive, having left behind few material remains and archaeological research having been scarce. What we know about them has been based almost solely on the inscriptions they carved into the basalt rocks. Yet...


Rocks through the Ages: A 360° Geometric Morphometric Approach to Middle Pleistocene Bifacial Technological Variability in Central Armenia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayson Gill. Daniel Adler. Keith Wilkinson. Ana Barun. Boris Gasparyan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study applies a three-dimensional landmark-based geometric morphometric (GM) technique to evaluate chronological variation in Acheulian bifacial technology during the Middle Pleistocene of Armenia. This analysis utilizes 360° documentation of biface shape to supplement more commonly used single-surface and outline GM approaches. Furthermore, traditional...


Running with the Mules: Integrating Zooarchaeological, Archaeological and Textural Evidence to Reconstruct the Exploitation of Equids in Southwest Asia (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Lubna Omar.

The equid had a vital role in animal economy in Southwest Asia, whether as a wild animal providing primary/secondary products to prehistoric communities, or as a domestic source of energy which supported war affairs and trade during historic periods. Reconstructing the dynamics of humans and the four-equid species, which were present in the region, is a complicated endeavor due to the paucity of skeletal evidence in faunal assemblages; the difficulties in distinguishing morphological traits to...


Sacrificing and Eating Dogs in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Haskel Greenfield. Justin Lev-Tov. Ann Killebrew. Annie Brown.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Walter Klippel and his former student Lynn Snyder published finds of butchered dog bones from the Dark Age site of Kavousi in Crete. Other researchers, both before and after that published work, noted such finds elsewhere in Greece as well as in Cyprus, and dating to a wide range of post-Neolithic periods. Butchered dog bones are also known from several Philistine sites in Israel. Here, we consider present a detailed discussion of a butchered, apparently...


Sedimentary Ancient DNA Metabarcoding for the Recognition of Human Plant Use at Aghitu-3 Cave, Armenia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Kandel. Boris Gasparyan. Angela Bruch. Anneke ter Schure. Sanne Boessenkool.

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. Our knowledge of plants used by Upper Paleolithic humans is limited by the survival of identifiable plant parts. In this study, we present the results of ancient DNA studies of cave sediments from Aghitu-3 Cave in the Armenian Highlands. The cave contains a detailed record of human settlement and environmental...


Seeds of Complexity: An Archaeobotanical Study of Incipient Social Complexity at Late Chalcolithic Çadır Höyük, Turkey (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Madelynn Von Baeyer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Chalcolithic (LC: 4250–3000 B.C.E.) is an understudied period of Anatolian prehistory even though the roots of Anatolian social complexity lie in this period. Çadır Höyük, a mounded site on the north central Anatolian plateau has yielded over 460 m2 of excavated LC remains. This period witnessed rapid cultural and environmental change providing an...


Shacks and Scraps: Understanding Middle Epipaleolithic Site Structure in the Southern Levant through Taphonomic Analysis of Faunal Refuse (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Mason Seymore. Reuven Yeshurun. Ruth Shahack-Gross. Dani Nadel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explored the spatial organization of the Middle Epipaleolithic site of Neve David (Mt. Carmel, Israel) through macro and micro contextual taphonomy of ungulate bones. The Epipaleolithic (23,000-11,500 cal BP) of the southern Levant is renowned for its cultural diversity, culminating with the complex hunter-gather Natufian culture. Emerging research from...


Shells at Death – The Use of Shells in Neolithic Mortuary Contexts (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Heeli Schechter. A. Nigel Goring-Morris. Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shells constituted a cultural resource for human groups throughout history. As such, they were used and incorporated in different aspects of life – and death. In this study we examine the use of shells in mortuary contexts, focusing on the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) cultic/mortuary site of Kfar HaHoresh....


Signs of Animal Masters and Associated Rituals in the ancient Near East (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Stein.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What evidence is there for the existence of Animal Masters and their rituals in the ancient Near East? This paper ranges from Mesolithic/Epi-Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic times (ca. 15,000-4000 B.C.) and spans the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. It surveys the iconography and material...


Signs of Shared Identity: Neolithic Incised Stones in Cyprus and Beyond (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew McCarthy.

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. Enigmatic incised stones dating to the Aceramic and early Ceramic Neolithic periods indicate an element of persistent shared material culture between Cyprus and the Levant in spite of cultural trajectories and material culture assemblages that were beginning to diverge...


Society Against the State in Prehistoric Cyprus? Exploring the Politics of Village Life (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Grossman. Tate Paulette.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite decades of critique, the study of early state formation remains bound up with an evolutionist narrative that situates the state as the natural endpoint of sociopolitical development. It is clear, however, that alternative political projects and trajectories were not only possible but common in the human past. Particular attention has been drawn to...


Sometimes at the Crossroads: Preliminary Results from New Fieldwork on the Southeast Ararat Plain of Armenia (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Cobb.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ararat Plain, part of the upper Araxes River valley system in the South Caucasus mountains, represents the largest expanse of arable land in Armenia today. At the southeastern edge of this plain, the Vedi River valley, a tributary to the Araxes, connects the agricultural zones of the plain with the resource-rich mountains and Lake Sevan to the east. The...


A Space for Living and Dying: The Life-History of Kharaneh IV Structures (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Macdonald. Lisa Maher.

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The built environment delineates space for daily actions and important moments. Separating the occupants from the external world, walls can create barriers between the outside or can build communities within them. Recent excavations of two structures at Kharaneh IV, an Epipalaeolithic site in Eastern...


A Specialized City: Fatimid-Era Agriculture at Ashkelon (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Forste. Deirdre Fulton.

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 ancient city of Ashkelon was a major economic port in the Near East during the Early Islamic period (ca. 636–1200 CE). Located on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Israel, it was a cosmopolitan city, an administrative center, and a stronghold in the coastal...


Spinning through Time: Comparing Spindle Whorl Assemblages from the Southern Levant (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Blair Heidkamp.

Spindle whorls, a flywheel attached to a shaft used for the production of thread, are one of the only artifacts related to the textile industry which survives in the archaeological record. At the crossroads between Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the southern Levant is at the intersection of cultural and technological change, particularly throughout the chronological scope of my study: the Pottery Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze I periods. There has yet to be a comprehensive study of...


Stable Isotope Analysis Applied to the Reconstruction of Paleoenvironment and Landscape Use during the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic at Üçağızlı I and II, South-Central Turkey (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayla Worthey.

Stable isotope analysis of δ13C and δ18O in herbivore tooth enamel from the archaeological sites of Üçağızlı I and II in south-central Turkey is used to explore human responses to environmental change during MIS 3 in the eastern Mediterranean. Although changes through time in local ambient moisture are associated with changes in the local animal communities, they generally do not correlate with proxies for site occupation intensity, and thus do not indicate depopulation or shorter site stays...


The Stone Bridge: Obsidian Circulation and the Friction of Persistent Frontiers (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Jose Saramago’s classic "The Stone Raft", the Iberian peninsula breaks free from Europe to float unmoored into the Atlantic, etching into continental geology what David Anthony has termed a "persistent frontier": a fault line demarcating durable cultural, ethnic, and...