Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (278 Records)
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. Solak-1 is an Upper Paleolithic open-air site located in central Armenia discovered by the Kotayk Survey Project. An obsidian-rich lithic assemblage totaling about 2,500 artifacts was recovered from six stratified horizons and subjected to techno-typological attribute analysis. Core reduction appears predominantly...
Paleoenvironmental Signatures of a Persistent Place at Kharaneh IV, Jordan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Water in the Desert: Human Resilience in the Azraq Basin and Eastern Desert of Jordan" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental data are pertinent to understanding the processes that form persistent places. This paper presents new physical and chemical geoarchaeological data, including faunal C and O isotopes, sediment composition, and geological survey data, from Kharaneh IV, a large Early...
The Paleolithic Archaeology of Shirak Province (Armenia) (2023)
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. Within Shirak Province in the Republic of Armenia, the open-air site complex at Aghvorik is currently the most prominent site. The Paleolithic sites of Shirak are geomorphologically associated with the Ashotsk Plateau in the north, the Shirak Depression and northwestern slopes of Mt. Aragats in the south, and the...
Pastoral Societies, Holocene Climate and Technology: Perspectives from Iron Age Southern Jordan (Session 4400) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did pastoral societies evolve into more complex social organizations in what is today a hyper-arid desert zone? This paper examines the Iron Age (ca 1200 - 500 BC) data from southern Jordan that indicates relatively little climate change from today, yet the rise of complex pastoral nomadic societies.
Pastoral Territoriality as a Dynamic Coupled Human-Natural System (2018)
Despite research indicating that contemporary pastoral societies are more dynamic than previously assumed, there is a tendency to view South Arabian pastoralists as timeless heirs of a stable, ancient system or along a historical continuum of response to exogenous factors like the development of civilization, introduction of camels, or global climate change. In research triggered by NGS support, we proposal a new conceptual model for pastoral mobility regulated by dynamic feedback loops in...
Pastoralist Spacetimes and Political Life in the Past: Exploring the Value of Living and Dead Animals Archaeologically (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropological approaches to value assert that creating and contesting value is at the heart of politics. Herd animals offer a complex window into this basic theoretical insight—they are simultaneously producers of and objects of value and their value cannot be easily reduced to the categories of economic or symbolic value. Analyzing...
Patterns of Land-Use and Political Administration Beyond the Core Areas of the Sasanian Empire (2018)
The landscapes of the Sasanian Empire have long been viewed as massive and state-sponsored development projects, in particular in politically and economically core zones. Despite these unparalleled understandings, our knowledge of peripheries and their connection with the sociopolitical organization of the time have still remained as some of the key gaps in the studies of late antiquity. To address these questions, I examine the settlement expansion, water management systems and agricultural...
Persistence in Pastoralist Practices During the Uruk Period at Tepe Farukhabad (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Uruk period (4100 - 3100 BCE) was a transformative time in Southwest Asia, marked by the precursors of writing, the rise of urbanization, and an intensification in cross-cultural interactions. Subsistence strategies were shifting as well, as hunting declined relative to herding and animals such as sheep and goats became favored for both their primary...
Phoenician Iron Smithing and Cult at Tel Akko, Israel (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations (2010 - 2018) directed by A. E. Killebrew and M. Artzy at Tel Akko, a major eastern Mediterranean Phoenician maritime center and emporium, have uncovered an unprecedented quantity of iron smithing slags, hearths and cultic artifacts, all dating to the sixth - fourth centuries BCE. This assemblage includes fragments of figurines and masks, a...
Photogrammetry, Spatial Patterning, and Site Formation of the Hominin-Bearing Layers at the Lower Paleolithic Site of Dmanisi, Georgia (2018)
The Lower Paleolithic site of Dmanisi, Georgia, is well known for its rich archaeological and paleontological deposits, which include bones from at least five individuals attributed to Homo erectus. Taphonomic analyses show that carnivores contributed greatly to the accumulation of faunal material, while contributions by hominins were present, but uncommon. Recent excavations in the hominin-bearing layers of Block 2 at Dmanisi have revealed a complex underlying basalt formation that likely...
Phytoliths, Geochemistry and Ethnography: A Multi-method Approach for Interpreting the Neolithic Sites of WF16 and ‘Ain Ghazal (2018)
Understanding Neolithic sites in southwest Asia is often difficult because of the lack of preservation of organic remains and the effects of various taphonomic processes that alter the original record. It is, therefore, critical that we maximise the information that can be acquired from these sites. Here, we use an ethnographic approach to test the potential of using plant phytoliths and geochemistry to aid our interpretation of southwest Asian Neolithic sites. We sampled two Neolithic...
Picking Up the Pieces: The Continued Influence and Impact of Redding's “Breaking the Mold” on Animal Domestication (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. Richard Redding’s work on “breaking the mold” on how we explain the development of food production is emblematic of the major contributions he made to zooarchaeological thinking: his creativity, curiosity, and willingness to question dearly held beliefs. In this paper, we overview some of Redding’s many...
Plant and Animal Remains from Old Babylonian Ur (2018)
Archaeologists have been examining the great cities of ancient southern Mesopotamia for well over a century now, but as yet we have limited understanding of their subsistence economies. For decades researchers more or less ignored the wealth of faunal and botanical remains in and around ancient Mesopotamian architecture. Over the course of the twentieth century researchers began to recover animal bones and teeth, but as few digs dry-screened or floated their soils the resulting assemblages...
The Politics of Archaeology: Reflections on the Early Decades of the 21st Century (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 2003, Bradley Parker co-organized a workshop at the University of Utah exploring the politics of archaeology, with emphasis on the Middle East. Both at the workshop and in the resulting edited volume, Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: The Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East, contributors...
Post-Charring Bacterial Degradation of Archaeological Lentils by Bacterial Degradation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to common knowledge, the preservation of stable isotope values in archaeological seeds requires that they be charred at low temperatures, because charring reorganizes sugar and protein polypeptides into stable Maillard reaction products. Charred seeds are understood to be resistant to diagenetic...
Potential Refugia in the Levant During the Pleistocene and Their Use by Hominins (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interest in the possibility that refugia have played an important role in human evolution has grown in recent years. A refugium is a relatively small area in which a population may be able to survive during a period of unfavorable conditions. Here, we report preliminary results of a study that is seeking to identify refugia in the Levant that were occupied...
Predomestic Animal Management and the Social Context of Animal Exploitation in SW 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. More than a century of faunal work seeking evidence for the origins of domestic livestock in SW Asia has shed considerable light on the timing, locations and processes of animal domestication. The early stages in the shift from hunting to herding, however, remain difficult to identify and as a result both the mechanisms and...
Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Plant Food Use in the Northern Zagros: New Evidence from Carbonized Plant Macro-remains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on plant remains over the past two decades increasingly point to the importance of plant foods in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer subsistence. In this paper I will present recent results of archaeobotanical research on carbonized plant macro-remains from late-Middle, Upper Paleolithic and...
Preparing the Surface (PRESUR): The Forgotten Step of “Seasoning” Food Processing-Ground Stone Tools and Its Implications for Use-wear Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Southwest Asia ground stone tools used in food processing, like mortars and querns, started proliferating at the end of the Paleolithic. Recently these tools have received increased attention with researchers attempting to establish what food these tools were used to process through microscopic use-wear and residue analysis. However, there is an aspect...
A Probabilistic Approach to Study Diachronic Patterns in Human Behavior: A Case Study from the Paleolithic Sequence at Jebel Faya, UAE (2018)
Jebel Faya is a key Paleolithic site in Arabia. The site provides important data on the history of human occupation of desert environments during the Late Pleistocene. One central question is if the observed diachronic pattern of occupation is largely driven by climatic change, as often assumed, or if other factors such as adaptation processes play significant roles. Based on the assumption that survival in the often unpredictable environments of SE Arabia requires increased behavioral...
The Production and Use of Chipped Stone Tools during the Metal Ages in the Southern Levant – Evidence from Abu Snesleh (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Bronze Age (MBA, c. 2000–1500 BCE) in the southern Levant (modern day Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and southern Syria) is characterized by a re-urbanization, and extended use and specialized production of metal objects which obviated the use of chipped stone tools, of which production has long been considered to have significantly declined after the...
Ptghavan-4: A Middle Paleolithic Open-Air Site in the Debed River Gorge, Armenia (2023)
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. The recently excavated site of Ptghavan-4 in the Armenian Highlands provides rare data on Middle Paleolithic hominin behaviors during the early Upper Pleistocene. The site contains a dense accumulation of lithic artifacts that are Middle Paleolithic in character within a pedogenically modified aeolian deposit, which...
Quaternary Vegetation and Climate in the Lesser Caucasus, an Update (2023)
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. The numerous archaeological discoveries in the Lesser Caucasus document the crucial role that this territory had for humans more than 2 Ma. In particular, the scientific debate has highlighted its strategic position for phases of migration “out of Africa,” and expansion to the Eurasian continent. The role of climate...
Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Experimental Archaeology of Beer and Community (2019)
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)
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...