Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only McClean Pink. Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpreting the use of material culture in mortuary contexts provides an intimate view of social identity of both the deceased and mourners in ancient societies. However, the material remains of mortuary practices throughout the Nabataean Kingdom in Jordan have not been systematically investigated. Comparing the material culture between contemporary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Belcher.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the third millennium BCE, one of the earliest civilizations emerged in South Asia, the Indus Valley Tradition/Civilization. It had a trade network that spread throughout the Persian and Arabian Gulf, including sites on the Omani coast. This paper will compare two sites, Balakot on the Makran coast of Pakistan associated with the Indus Valley...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecelia Chisdock. Susan Sheridan.

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. Throughout much of bioarchaeology’s history, the remains of juveniles (nonadults) have seen a lack of study. Reasoning ranged from their perceived lack of importance in ancient societies, the complexities of growth and development, and the more fragile nature of their bones. Similarly, commingled remains are less often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. Niloofar Bagheri-Jebelli.

Extensive archaeological field work and multidisciplinary research in recent decades shows that communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers during the tenth millenium BC built the earliest presently known monumental structures during the PPNA (ca. 9600–8800 BC) at the ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe and nearby PPNB settlement sites in present-day Urfa province, southeastern Turkey. However, the earliest evidence of agriculture dates to a later period (early PPNB, ca. 8750 BC, terminus post quem)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theo Kassebaum.

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of the herd is often deployed when discussing systems of animal management in the ancient past, sometimes explicitly but most often implicitly. Due to the nature of the archaeological record, zooarchaeological assemblages often compress multiple generations of livestock into a single dataset....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Reuven Yeshurun.

In zooarchaeology, Contextual Taphonomy means the integration of the stratigraphic and contextual data with zooarchaeological and taphonomic data, to clarify the 'life history' of a faunal sub-assemblage in a given context. The approach uses animal remains to explain variability among site features by looking into the differential taphonomic histories of the bones, most importantly in the post-discard stage. Archaeofaunal remains are normally ubiquitous in foragers’ camps and their histories are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her career Debra Martin has utilized an innovative, multidisciplinary, and theoretical approach to bioarchaeology. One of her most significant contributions to archaeology has been her pioneering work on violence, utilizing social theory and current methodologies in order to interpret the skeletal evidence. Her...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Scott.

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. British archaeologist Crystal Bennett (1918–1987) is considered one of the formidable British female archaeologists of the Middle East, conducting investigations across Jordan and beyond from 1957 to 1983. As Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s student at the University of London in the early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elham Ghasidian. Saman Heydari-Guran.

Located in western Eurasia, at the crossroads of human migrations out of Africa during the Pleistocene, the Iranian Plateau stands at the centre of models of anatomically modern human dispersals out of Africa. This paper aims to understand the cultural diversity among the first modern human populations in the area, and the implications of this diversity to evolutionary and ecological models of human dispersal through the Iranian Plateau, by re-examining four key UP lithic assemblages from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Edwards. Megan Perry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Tell Hisban in Jordan was seasonally occupied by nomadic agropastoral tribes for over a thousand years. In the latter half of the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire instituted the Tanzimat, a series of reforms intended to solidify control over the region, including a new system of private land ownership. This new land law conflicted with traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Larra Diboyan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Azerbaijan government committed Cultural Genocide against Armenian sites in disputed territories before their most recent 2020 dispute. To fit the nationalistic narrative, Azerbaijan has been destroying or usurping important sites and churches and reshaping the landscape to erase any memory of Armenians. With the use of Armenian and Azerbaijani data,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hanna Erftenbeck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Bronze Age (EB IB-III, 3300–2500 BCE) in the southern Levant is marked by significant social, political, and economic changes, as people aggregated into large, often fortified settlements for the first time in the region. These new sites differ in size, environmental setting, and in the degree of social differentiation and political organization....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Johnson. Hannah Lau. Lara Fabian. Jeyhun Eminli.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mortuary site Nәsiri Kolat in the Lerik region of Azerbaijan was occupied from the Antik through the Middle Islamic Periods (11th-16th centuries), a fact further supported when the site is considered with the midden site Şәğolhoni. Ceramic analysis from these sites permit us to better understand how people in the Lerik region interacted with more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Petra Creamer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of mortuary material in archaeology has always related to subjects of identity, beliefs, and resources. Furthermore, it is one of our prime resources for understanding non-elite individuals in the premodern world, especially in societies where historical sources revolve around the ruling elites. This is certainly the case in the ancient Assyrian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitra Panahipour.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Deh Luran archaeological landscape was home to some of the earliest prehistoric investigations and ethnoarchaeological observations in the broader region of the Zagros Mountains and Mesopotamian plains during the 1960s. Early archaeological surveys and excavations resulted in significant discoveries of settlement spanning from approximately 8th millennium B.C....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emanuel Moss. Christopher H. Roosevelt.

Digital methods in archaeology have led to new ways of recording, analyzing, and presenting archaeological sites and materials, but these new methods are adopted within the context of previously existing practices of archaeological work. Some digital recording methods in excavation build upon and sometimes displace long-standing analog methods with proven results. Digital representations of cultural materials present novel interpretive affordances compared to analog representations that, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Assaad Seif.

The Salalah Doctrine regarding the management of archaeological world heritage sites seeks to recognize the differences between archaeological sites, standing monuments and landscapes. Consequently, new and adapted management approaches to the Archaeological sites that present distinct management challenges are needed. The ICAHM doctrine proposed strategies for sustainable conservation and preservation still need to be addressed critically and contextually to ascertain their applicability. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Guagnin. Angela Perri.

The UNESCO world heritage sites of Shuwaymis and Jubbah, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, are extremely rich in early Holocene rock art. Hunting scenes illustrate dog-assisted hunting strategies from the 7th and possibly the 8th millennium BC, predating the spread of pastoralism. The engravings represent the earliest evidence for dogs on the Arabian Peninsula. Though the depicted dogs are reminiscent of the modern Canaan dog, it is unclear if they were brought to the Arabian Peninsula from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Highcock.

Nearly seventy years of excavations at Kültepe have yielded a remarkable assemblage of material reflecting the rich and fluid daily lives of the Anatolians, Assyrians, and others who inhabited such a dynamic and cosmopolitan city. A diverse category of objects, metal dress pins, has been recovered from burials at Kültepe and other Middle Bronze Age Anatolian sites, providing tangible connections to the ancient people who wore them. Previous scholarship has focused on the style and origin of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yorke Rowan. Austin Chad Hill.

In this paper we discuss preliminary results of UAV-survey in one area (c. 32 sq. km.) along the Wadi al-Qattafi, Jordan as part of the larger Eastern Badia Archaeological Project. Excavation and survey in this area of the Black Desert revealed hundreds, or possibly thousands, of unmapped and unrecorded structures that required a new approach to their accurate identification and documentation. With the exception of the large desert ‘kites’ (hunting traps), most stone structures are too small to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Smiti Nathan.

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age (ca. 3100 – 1250 BCE) in southeast Arabia is a period of major social and economic changes. In general, several aspects of the southeastern Arabian Bronze Age diverge from patterns occurring in neighboring areas, making it an interesting focal point of study. In terms of subsistence strategies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chantel White. Michael Wallace. Angela Lamb. Meredith S. Chesson.

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. Archaeologists such as Chesson (2019) have suggested the need for a more nuanced characterization of Early Bronze Age urbanism in the Southern Levant, one that embraces local variations as part of a regional EBA ideological package. Local agricultural economies would...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Erb-Satullo.

In the study of technological transformations, there is often much discussion of how innovations are conditioned by earlier systems of technical knowledge. Identification of transitional features is often challenging, however, particularly for questions about the origins of iron smelting and its relationship with copper-base metallurgy. This paper discusses some unusual technological features in iron metallurgical debris (circa 8th-6th c. BC) from a fortified hilltop site in the Caucasus,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Ur.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “early states” of ancient Mesopotamia are factoids and straw men. Mesopotamia appears in textbooks as the prime example of the world’s earliest pristine states, and the flourishing of recent scholarship on the variability of other centralized large polities has often been via the juxtaposition of that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Augusta McMahon.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past urbanism is usually reconstructed as a positive development, with cities presented as locations of economic efficiency, technological innovation, and productive social networks. But past cities also presented challenges, as sources of disease, inequalities, and high mortality. At Tell Brak (NE Syria/northern Mesopotamia), urban growth...