Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Buffington. Smiti Nathan.

While trees are often integral to the ecology of certain landscapes, the propagation of specific woody taxa can also reflect significant social aspects imbued on anthropogenic spaces. Following the seminal work of Rita Wright, we are utilizing a comparative approach in this paper. We examined woody vegetation management by early food producing societies in two regions of southern Arabia: southeastern Arabia (modern-day northern Oman) and southwestern Arabia (modern-day southeast Yemen). Despite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dina Bakour.

This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discovered in 1936 and excavated for two years by Daniel Schlumberger, Inspector of the Antiquities Department during the French Mandate (at the time), Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi remains one of the most important early Islamic sites. In this paper, I will introduce the site and its history of archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fatemeh Ghaheri.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The semi-arid region of Northern Mesopotamia has consistently encountered significant climatic variations. Therefore, human societies in the region developed innovations in environmental management and agricultural strategies, given the crucial role of agriculture in economy, trade, and politics all throughout history and in our modern world. Among all the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jirye Kang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research explores the social interaction between Tel Tsaf and northern Mesopotamia through pottery decoration similarities. This ongoing research questions another possible connection between northern Mesopotamia and Tel Tsaf in the central Jordan Valley, representing one of the most southern sites discovered. The Middle Chalcolithic (5600-4500 BC) site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marta Lorenzon.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation combines the findings of two distinct studies focusing on earthen building materials in different border regions, shedding light on the evolution of earthen architectural practices. The first study delves into the geoarchaeological analysis of earthen materials and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mathew Stewart.

Work in the Nefud Desert, Saudi Arabia, has been fundamental for establishing the importance of the Arabian Peninsula for Pleistocene hominin populations and their dispersals out of Africa. Recent palaeontological and archaeological exploration in the Western Nefud Desert has uncovered numerous fossiliferous palaeolake deposits and associated archaeology. Fossil assemblages include taxa with both African and Eurasian affinities and indicate a greater diversity in large mammals than resides in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology has the unique power to deeply investigate mortuary space not only to identify lived experiences from human remains but also to illuminate elements of mortuary ritual. However, these two aspects of bioarchaeology still remain conceptually separated: one is biological and the other socio-cultural, one is scientific and the other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lubna Omar.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper delves into the glaring disparities faced by Middle Eastern archaeologists in disseminating their invaluable knowledge about their own heritage, elucidating how prevailing Western-centric ethical codes fail to redress these issues effectively. A profound asymmetry exists, wherein Middle Eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dramatic demographic growth is a hallmark of the urban process, yet reasons for population growth in emerging urban systems are not well understood. This paper draws on archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to ideology of the house and cultural values to explore why populations increased so dramatically in third millennium Mesopotamia. Additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Brunner.

There has been much debate on what defines an Islamic city (madīna) and what made cities become "Islamic" after the Islamic conquest. These studies have often marginalized the Islamic period, associating street encroachment and overall shifts away from the "classical" model as signs of decline. Scholars have relied on western notions of what defines a city and have used strict urban typological models, which do not conform to the region or period. In addition, these studies have neglected to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Hitchings. Edward Banning.

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, many archaeological surveys have the goal of documenting, as completely as possible, the locations and character of sites, many of which are rare, unobtrusive, or both. Increasingly over the last three decades, archaeologists have used predictive models in a GIS to help them target spaces that are most likely to contain sites of interest, or sites under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reed Goodman. Paul Zimmerman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geoarchaeological sediments represent robust archives of human-environment interactions. Given the growing importance of paleoenvironmental research in anthropology and the absence of critical chrono-stratigraphic and ecological evidence from challenging contexts/regions, opportunities to refine chronological frameworks through novel instrumentation are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro.

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. In his 2002 paper “Breaking the Mold,” Richard Redding wrote that “by focusing on the emergence of tactics of animal use that characterize the Neolithic, we may be missing aspects of the process that are not only interesting but critical to building and testing explanations.” Twenty years later, our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Banning. Kevin Gibbs. Philip Hitchings.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During 2012 and 2013, a survey of Wadi Quseiba's drainage basin in northern Jordan employed Bayesian search methods to find late prehistoric, and especially Neolithic sites that often escape more conventional surveys. This resulted in the discovery of some definite and "candidate" sites, one of which is a Yarmoukian site up to 0.5 ha in size that was the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hammer.

Archaeology has long seen mobile pastoral societies as largely materially "invisible" both in the realms of portable artifacts and of infrastructure projects such as buildings and landscape modification. Recent studies have sought to alter this impression as part of larger trends that seek to ground our understanding of pre-modern pastoralists in concrete faunal, botanical, isotopic, landscape, and historical data, which clearly show the effect that pastoral practices and infrastructure have had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

Stratified occupational remains at mounded sites of third millennium Mesopotamia afford a temporal perspective on houses and institutions, as well as fluctuations in their resources. This paper draws on such data to evaluate the ways that houses and institutions accrued wealth and enhanced inequalities. Evidence for the production, circulation and storage of food and craft goods in early Mesopotamia informs about the kinds of resources used for wealth building, the processes through which goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manasij Pal Chowdhury. Prof. Stuart Campbell. Dr. Michael Buckley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analysis of biomolecules absorbed in unglazed ceramics can provide valuable information about pottery use in antiquity, including detailed information on ancient diet. Such investigation has mostly focused on the analysis of lipids, but recently the more labile proteins have seen increased attention as they are capable of providing more specific information....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peri Johnson. Ömür Harmansah.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological landscapes are not heritage landscapes similar to the picturesque; they are the living heritage of the contemporary inhabitants and stakeholders who live with the past, ecological destruction, and climate change. Our paper is informed by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project (2010–2021) in western central Turkey. At...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Neeley. Geoffrey Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1980s, surveys in Jordan’s Wadi al-Hasa document dozens of Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer sites, some of them tested or partly excavated. To track landscape-scale forager mobility and settlement patterns over time, we examine 26 levels from 13 sites dated to the Middle, Upper and Epipaleolithic using aspects of Barton’s WABI research protocol,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Hopwood.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a unique category of socially charged material culture, beer has origins stretching back to people’s first obsession with wild grain. The deep time prehistory of beer coupled with the unique role of its psychoactive properties makes it a compelling bridge between academic archaeology and the public, allowing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Cromartie. Chéïma Barhoumi. Guillemette Ménot. Erwan Messager. Sébastien Joannin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans today and in the past have to contend with the impacts of wildland fires. In grasslands, these fires occur frequently at annual to decadal scale. In the Kasakh valley, Armenia, recent research has revealed periods of increased fire activity during the Early Bronze and Late Iron Age and decreased activity in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (Cromartie et...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristine Martirosyan - Olshansky. Alan Farahani.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evidence of woven materials such as baskets, mats, cordage, string, and rope rarely preserve in archaeological contexts, but when these plant-based artifacts do preserve, they provide important insight into the social, technological, and environmental practices involved in the creation and use of such objects. At many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Mogauro. Hannah Lau. Daniel Cusimano. Alexis Boutin. Benjamin Porter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project analyzes zooarchaeological remains from the late third to early second millennium mortuary complex at Sar El-Jisr, Bahrain. The assemblage is a legacy collection and its analysis will expand on previous research of the Dilmun burial complex, and furthers our understanding of Dilmun as a sociopolitical entity. These implications are relevant at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kara Larson.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human societies do not operate as a stagnated phenomenon but instead experience stacked cycles of adaptation, resilience, and possibly collapse. Identifying and teasing these cycles in the archaeological record can be difficult and have often been applied to hunter-gatherer case studies. This research attempts to apply an adaptive cycling model...