Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Macdonald. Ahmad Thaher. Lisa Maher. Theresa Barket.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The multi-component Epipalaeolithic site of Kharaneh IV, located in the Azraq Basin of eastern Jordan, documents ~1,000 years of occupation by hunter-gatherer groups late in the Last Glacial Maximum. Multiple lines of geomorphological, faunal, and archaeobotanical evidence indicate that the environs around the site were well-watered, lushly vegetated, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Maher. Danielle Macdonald. AJ White. Jordan Brown.

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. In the Azraq Basin of Jordan, dramatic landscape changes from wetlands to desert resulted in shifts in settlement and land use over time suggesting that, like today, water availability was crucial for past populations. Changing environmental conditions throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beth Alpert Nakhai.

In 2014, inspired by the work on gender-based violence in field settings done by anthropologists Clancy, Nelson, Rutherford, and Hinde, I began investigating field safety for archaeologists working in the Middle East and North Africa, the region in which I work. At that time, I was a trustee of the American Schools of Oriental Research – and I chair its Initiative on the Status of Women. I began by quantifying problems (Survey on Field Safety: Middle East, North Africa, and The Mediterranean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paige Paulsen.

The tumulus fields – landscapes heavily modified by monumental burial mounds – of Central Anatolia provide an opening to investigate how the tumuli reflect and create places of collective memory, territorial identity, and the social order. This project takes the Iron Age tumuli of the Kanak Su Basin in Yozgat, Turkey as a case study and uses a GIS approach based on available evidence: their location from archaeological surveys, and a small number of excavated mounds. This paper investigates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mesfer Alqahtani.

The theme of the poster will address archaeological phenomena in the north of Saudi Arabia. The archaeological phenomena are stone-built structures that can be seen by satellite images. These stone-built structures have various types, and one of them is the circle type. The poster will show the method of creating predictive models of stone circles by using the Geographic Information System (GIS). To create these models, two zones from the north of Saudi Arabia should be selected: study zone and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tayla Hanson. Emma Kissel. Charlotte Nash.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents research on glass bangle fragments believed to be from the Al Hasa oasis in Saudi Arabia, donated to the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH). Glass bangles were manufactured and widely traded across the Middle East and South Asia, but there has not yet been a comprehensive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Jefferys.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present information on a subsection of glass beads from a diverse collection of artifacts that are presumed to be from the Al Hasa Oasis region in Saudi Arabia and donated to the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH). Although glass beads and objects are a commonly studied artifact in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Buffington.

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 development of pastoralism still features a number of gaps in the archaeological record. Principally, herders invest in the maintenance of a resource base capable of supporting their herds. While pursuing these resources through both intensive and extensive land management strategies, they impact vegetation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nerissa Russell.

Dogs often occupy a spiritually ambiguous position in human-animal relations. Domestic but not livestock, they typically share human space and diet more than most herd animals. They are more likely to be considered persons, with souls – a trait they share with wild animals. Here I examine the spiritual status of dogs in early Near Eastern herding societies, as livestock-keeping spread through the region and it became possible to situate dogs in relation to other domestic animals as well as wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitry Yegorov. Steven Rosen. Ofer Marder.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent examination of the lithic collection from the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (MPPNB) site of Yiftahel (10,100-9,250 BP cal.) has revealed a relatively large number of flint artifacts showing traces of intentional heating. Heat treatment of siliceous stones is a worldwide phenomenon that was mainly used during the initial stages of chaîne opértoire for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Taylor. Cheryl Anderson. Debra Martin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates the use of heritable nonmetric traits as a means for assessing population variation and biological relatedness within an archaeological sample using the human skeletal tomb assemblage from the Bronze Age site of Tell Abraq (2100-2000BC). A total of 410 individuals representing all ages and both sexes were interred in the tomb. An...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andreas Nymark. Amir Beshkani. Peter Bye-Jensen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intensification of fieldwork in the Zagros Mountains over the past two decades have provided crucial new insights into the region, revealing a much more complex patchwork of MP lithic industrial variability than hitherto appreciated. We present a series of new case studies on the high-altitude MP rockshelter of Houmian in the Iranian Zagros. Posited to be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Creekmore.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Upper Mesopotamia the Middle Bronze Age (2000 – 1600 B.C.E.) marked the regrowth of cities following the decline or collapse of cities at the end of the Early Bronze Age. Researchers question the degree of continuity in urban space across these periods and some have suggested that Middle Bronze Age cities were "hollow," containing relatively small built-up...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Alonso Eguiluz. Rosa Maria Albert. Michael B. Toffolo. Liv Nilsson Stutz. Aaron Stutz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rich archaeological record of the Mughr-el Hamamah (MHM) site in Jordan is key to understanding the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in the Levant. However, important postdepositional processes due to pastoral activities during the twentieth century have affected the archaeological deposits and need to be taken into account. The archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Kroot.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shift from primarily foraging to predominantly farming economies that occurs during the early Neolithic of southwest Asia is commonly seen as a transition not merely in subsistence practices but economic relations as well. Many researchers argue that new forms of households emerge by the end of this time period, which serve as both residential and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt. Arkadiusz Marciniak.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have divergent options as to how many people lived at different Neolithic villages. Near Eastern Neolithic settlements have been historically interpreted as being occupied by thousands of people. This interpretation is founded on several observations: that excavations at settlements often reveal the remains of the densely packed mud-brick...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt. Arkadiusz Marciniak.

This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some researchers hold that Near East Neolithic agricultural villages were composed of thousands of people and that these villages existed as an evolutionary starting point on the path to rapid population growth and urbanism. Revaluating the settlement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Irvine.

This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope analyses contributing to archaeological research in Anatolia was a relatively late bloomer, beginning in the early 2000s and only gathering pace in the last 5-10 years. Currently research into dietary habits, subsistence practices, and mobility has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Gresky. Lee Clare.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (ca. 9500–8000 BC) site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey has seen the emergence of some major hypotheses based on results from ongoing fieldwork. Perhaps the most significant new insight...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Ames. April Nowell.

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 Azraq Basin is a 12,000 km2 internal drainage system at the eastern margin of the Levant. The center of the basin, which we refer to as the Greater Azraq Oasis Area (GAOA), is characterized by a mudflat flanked by two historical wetlands. Desiccation of these wetlands in the early 1990s and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Everhart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Levantine Epipaleolithic (ca. 23,000—11,500 cal BP) saw an explosion of behavioral innovation and diversification in hunter-gatherer groups. One of these new behaviors was the development and spread of repetitively used and reused burial grounds or cemeteries. The Middle Epipaleolithic site of ‘Uyun al-Hammam in the Wadi Ziqlab area of Northern Jordan...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro. Elic Weitzel.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using predictions derived from the ideal free distribution, we test the hypothesis that the forager to farmer transition in the southern Levant emerged from a context of increased population packing. By constructing population size estimates derived from radiocarbon date frequencies and modeling...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Codlin. Lisa Yeomans. Beatrice Demarchi.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeogastronomy: Grocery Lists as Seen from a Multidimensional Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wetlands provide a huge abundance and diversity of foods from aquatic plants and animals, many of which don't survive archaeologically. Those that do, such as the bones and eggs of aquatic birds, are often underutilized in archaeological interpretations due to the difficulty of their recovery and taxonomic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John High. Jesse Casana.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With this research, I hope to digitally reproduce the high-resolution U-2 photographs by specially processing my photographs of the imagery using photogrammetic methods, such as Agisoft Metashape to produce 3D surface models. With these models, I will deduce what implications the structures and features visible in the imagery and models have in association...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Hopwood.

This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates,” the filtered beer pours into collection vats and from there into serving jars and beakers for the happy drinkers. Or so the Hymn to Ninkasi suggests. By the time the poet impressed those words into clay, beer had been brewed for generations with the practiced gestures and...