Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

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. Archaeologists, as with historians, search for patterning, commonalities and order as we seek to explain past human settlement systems. As landscape archaeologists our attempt to reconstruct settlement systems involves connecting the remains of human behavior,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josie Newbold.

Many studies have discussed the first century BC to first century AD Nabataean rock-cut monuments in the Nabataean city of Petra, Jordan. These surveys provide information about proposed chronologies for the façade tombs and limited data about burial customs of the Nabataeans themselves. One neglected topic is the Nabataean tomb placement in relation to the structural geology of the Petra region. During the 2014 field season of the BYU Ad-Deir Monument and Plateau project, it was discovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Earley-Spadoni.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), two distinct fortified landscape styles had developed in western Asia: fortifications surrounding grand urban complexes and the "fortified regional network" (FRN), a rural, regional system comprising fortresses, forts, towers, and other structures situated along roads and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Savanna Buehlman-Barbeau.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Susiana Plain of southwestern Iran has a long history of archaeological investigation, perhaps most notably at sites such as Chogha Mish and Susa. Scholars have demonstrated the Susiana Plain as a place of interregional connection and distinctive material tradition. However, though interest in the broader region surrounding Susiana persists,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Price.

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. Livestock are widely recognized as fundamental features of the political economies of ancient Near Eastern states. Animals served as “wealth on the hoof,” the strategic resources of urban institutions seeking to expand aspects of the subsistence economic to finance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Rosen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Originally modelled as a down-the-line exchange system from the desert to the settled zone, analyses of previously unpublished materials synthesized with newer materials indicate that the flint tabular scraper production and distribution system was a complex mixture of local desert consumption and long distance trade of objects that changed in function, role,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Hopwood.

This is an abstract from the "Raise Your Glass to the Past: An Exploration of the Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why study an archaeology of beer? Beyond the modern popularity of craft beer, this beverage is a deeply ancient and meaningful form of material culture. It is also a powerful tool to put faces onto the past, and to make the ancient peoples we study both relevant and enticing to our students and the larger public....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shay Bar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tel Esur is situated in Israel’s Sharon Plain, near Nahal ‘Iron (Wadi 'Arah), 10 km southwest of Megiddo. I will present the results from the main excavation areas and insights into our community project: Area B: Middle Bronze Age (henceforth MBA) IIa fortification system with a 3-m-thick city wall and a pyramidal tower. Abutting the wall were storage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Lingle. Nicola Lercari. Arianna Campiani. Manuel Duenas Garcia. Anaïs Guillem.

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is a well-established survey technique in archaeology, architecture, and earth science, which is able to deliver high-fidelity data of surfaces and structures as well as ultra-precise measurements of the morphology of stratigraphic layers. Analyzing and comparing terrestrial laser scanning point clouds captured over time, conservators utilize of an unprecedented amount of quantitative information on the rate of decay of archaeological and built heritage to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brady Liss. Matthew Howland. Thomas E. Levy.

Satellite imagery and remote sensing have secured a place in the archaeological toolbox, but the scale of satellite derived data often results in large datasets with individual image tiles consisting of many gigabytes. Consequently, performing complex analyses on satellite data can be computationally intensive to a prohibitive degree. Google Earth Engine (GEE), an in-development, cloud-based platform for visualizing/analyzing satellite imagery, affords a solution for researchers with limited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Buffington. Smiti Nathan. Mary Lawrence Young.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists use charcoal assemblages principally to reconstruct chronologies and past vegetative landscapes, especially when sampled from long-used refuse features, though human decision-making plays a role in the construction of these assemblages. In this paper, we will gather together a dataset reflecting an unpublished dataset from three sites in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Pittman.

Production of textiles rose to an industrial level in the late Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia. Iconographic sources found in glyptic art provide a detailed visual description of aspects of this industry. Gender differentiation is clearly institutionalize, with women preparing the thread and skeins while males are engaged in the actual weaving. This paper presents a close analysis of a single motif in the glyptic iconography, offering an explanation of what has previously been identified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Bisson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Acheulo-Yabrudian (A-Y) is the final manifestation of the Lower Paleolithic of the Levant. This paper reports on numerous A-Y tool fragments discovered among the small finds collected during the Jelinek excavation of Tabun Cave, Israel. Tabun is the longest stratified Paleolithic sequence in the Eastern Mediterranean and includes all three facies of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

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. Decades before anthropologists advocated for multispecies anthropology and ethnography, Richard Redding was charting a new path for a multispecies approach to anthropological archaeology. His research reveals an implicit awareness of the complexity of human-animal relationships that is a hallmark of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Price.

How do animal morphologies change during domestication? How do different parts of the skeleton adapt to human management? In this poster, I take a quantitative approach to domestication by comparing biometrical data from two species of mammals that were domesticated in the Middle East around the same time (ca. 8000 BC): pigs (Sus scrofa) and sheep (Ovis aries). Both pigs and sheep were domesticated by Pre-Pottery Neolithic B communities in northern Syria/southern Anatolia, but these species...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alireza Khounani.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Trade and Exchange" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been plainly demonstrated that market systems are socially embedded, a quality that fosters the movement of information, commodities, and people. Before the industrial period, long-distance trade required the presence of commercial agents at both the distribution centers and at the destinations for sale. The kin-based structure of merchant...