Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (278 Records)
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...
Reassessing Herd Management Strategies in the Early Bronze Age of Southern Israel-Palestine: Preliminary Insights from Tell el-Hesi (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. Current discussions of herd management strategies employed in the Early Bronze Age III (EB III) in southern Israel-Palestine are often painted with a generalized brush. However, emergent data from the early urban EB III site of Tell el-Hesi, Israel, suggests a site-level perspective is required,...
Reconstructing Land-Use Histories in Ecologically Transitional Mesopotamian Landscapes (2018)
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...
Reconstructing Violence: A Multiscalar Approach to Cranial Trauma (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. When analyzing traumatic injury in highly commingled and fragmentary collections, interpreting violence can be particularly challenging as reconstructing the full extent of fractures in an individual is not possible, and not all traumatic injuries are indicative of violence. In these cases, cranial trauma can be the most...
A Reevaluation of Cribra Orbitalia at Early Bronze Age Bab adh-Dhra’ (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Individuals at Early Bronze Age Bab adh-Dhra’ (located in modern Jordan) lived in densely populated, walled towns, which led to increased physiological stress. Cribra orbitalia, likely resulting from nutritional deficiency, was used as a measure of such stress. A new method of assessing cribra orbitalia using a Bone Porous Lesion Evaluation (BoPLE) form...
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)
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...
The Relationship between Isotopic Evidence of Childhood Diet and Childhood Rickets in a Nineteenth-Century Jordanian Bedouin Population (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Tell Hisban offers a unique perspective on the history of metabolic disease among nineteenth-century Middle Eastern Bedouin populations. Compared to regional samples from the same period, Hisban has a high rate of childhood metabolic disease, including rickets. Many infants at the site died with active rickets, and analysis of interglobular...
Representation and Distribution of Fragmented Elements from Human Skeletons in Umm an-Nar Tombs: Impact of Secondary Mortuary Practices (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Umm an-Nar (2700–2000 BCE) skeletons in the United Arab Emirates remain challenging to investigate due to secondary mortuary practices resulting in commingling, fragmentation, and cremation. Tombs contain multiple chambers, but little work has been done to examine whether certain skeletal elements may have been intentionally moved into particular chambers...
Rethinking Caprines-As-Capital: Pastoralism and the Low-Power States of Early Mesopotamia (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. In ancient Mesopotamia, animal husbandry was intimately bound up with the process of state making. The twin institutional powers of palace and temple managed enormous herds of sheep and goats. But were these animals mere wealth-on-the-hoof, staple goods supporting a classic system of staple finance? Or were they something else, operating...
Revealing the Local: A Look Inwards at the Archaeology of Southeastern Arabia (2018)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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...
The Sebittu Project: A Report on the 2023 Pilot Season (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The preliminary season of the Sebittu Project on the Erbil Plain of Iraqi Kurdistan was conducted over four weeks this summer. The project includes seven Neo-Assyrian sites on the plain with the goal of documenting the agrarian economy during the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 900-600 BC) in northern Iraq, the heartland of the Assyrian empire. The initial...
Sedimentary Ancient DNA Metabarcoding for the Recognition of Human Plant Use at Aghitu-3 Cave, 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. 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)
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...
Settlement Patterns, Water Accessibility, and Circulation in the Azraq Watershed during the Neolithic Colonization (Seventh–Sixth Millennium BCE) (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. The end of the neolithization process (seventh–sixth millennium cal BCE) was a period of settlement peak in the arid margins of the Fertile Crescent. In northeastern Jordan, the combination of a long sequence of Neolithic occupation and several decades of field investigation provide the opportunity of...
Settling the Score: A Comparative Mesowear Analysis Using Qualitative and Quantitative Methods on Capra aegagrus Teeth (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of mesowear on ungulate teeth is a useful tool for reconstructing environmental conditions. The method has seen several improvements over the past decade, resulting in its increased applicability to a greater number of species and dental elements as well as the development of fine-tuned digital measuring techniques. Recent mesowear studies have...
Shacks and Scraps: Understanding Middle Epipaleolithic Site Structure in the Southern Levant through Taphonomic Analysis of Faunal Refuse (2019)
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...
Shaped, Molded, and Buried: Differential Access to Ceramics in Early Bronze Age I Bab adh-Dhra’, Jordan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New ways of looking at old evidence can help develop a better understanding of the relationship between early urbanism and social differentiation in the ancient Near East. In the Southern Levant during the Early Bronze Age I (c. 3700-3000 BCE), the site of Bab adh-Dhra’ was a center for mortuary activities for EBA communities. Bab adh-Dhra’ is an important...
Shaping Global History Narratives of the Southern Levant: Lessons Learned from Tall Hisban and the Madaba Plains Region in Jordan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Southern Levant region is critical to our understanding of the nature of globalization and connectivity in prehistoric as well as historical era contexts. This presentation will explore the challenges in shaping WST and global history...
Shells at Death – The Use of Shells in Neolithic Mortuary Contexts (2019)
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....