Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Geographic Keyword)

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 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 Originally modelled as a down-the-line exchange system from the desert to the settled zone, analyses of previously unpublished materials synthesized with newer materials indicate that the flint tabular scraper production and distribution system was a complex mixture of local desert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 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 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...

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 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 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 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 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....