Europe: Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheila Koons.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As museum shelves buckle under the weight of virtually forgotten boxes of artifacts, many institutions are questioning the future curation of these historically excavated materials. Much of this material is comprised of Paleolithic artifacts excavated during the infancy of American archaeology abroad. This project was undertaken to evaluate the integrity of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharon DeWitte. Janet Montgomery. Julia Beaumont. Rebecca Redfern.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous bioarchaeological work in medieval London (ca. 1000–1540) has produced evidence of higher survivorship and lower hazards of mortality and, by inference, better health in adults with nonlocal isotopic (lead and strontium) signatures compared to those with local signatures. This may be a medieval example of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janet Kay.

The fifth century in Britain is one of dramatic cultural, social, and economic change, transforming the late-Roman communal landscape into one dominated by Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. These changes have often been attributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire or the arrival of immigrants from the continent. This paper uses ArcGIS, isotopic studies, and multivariate statistics to investigate the relationship between where people came from, where they chose to bury their dead, and what they sent with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Gragson.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pursuit of Basque national identity in the Western Pyrenees Mountains emphasized their linguistic isolation (i.e., last speakers of a non-Indo-European language) and purported ethnic antiquity (i.e., residents since, if not before, the Last Glacial Maximum). This overshadowed inquiry on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Whalen. T. L. Thurston.

Post-Medieval ethnic identities in the British Isles display similarities and differences. Across the landscape of Northern Ireland, where indigenous people were subject to English, Scottish, and Welsh colonization, a sharing of material culture is evident across all groups. For example, English fine earthenwares, locally produced coarse earthenwares and locally made tobacco pipes are equally distributed, regardless of property owners’ ethnicity. This suggests that a culturally blended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jody Joy.

This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two iron firedogs, a tripod for a cauldron, a small amphora of Graeco Italian type, a bronze jug, glass vessels and Samian dishes. These are the objects selected for a catalogue record and for inclusion in the historic museum display of the 30 or so objects discovered in a Late Iron Age burial at Stanfordbury, Bedfordshire in southern England. But what about the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Crowley.

This is an abstract from the "On the Periphery or the Leading Edge? Research in Prehistoric Ireland" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Irish Iron Age (~700 BC – AD 500) has been a point of consternation for archaeologists, with large ceremonial centers but scanty settlement evidence. While, during this period, more densely populated and proto-urban settlements emerged in Britain and the European Continent, settlements in Ireland diminished in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Whitlock.

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. Medieval landscape archaeologists have described the Middle Saxon (650-850 AD) and Late Saxon (850-1100 AD) periods in England as times of increased agricultural production and economic expansion, but archaeobotanical analyses are not often integrated with these studies. Archaeobotanists have developed several methods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rory Connolly. Margarita Jambrina-Enríquez. Antonio V. Herrera-Herrera. Carolina Mallol.

This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of Late Pleistocene Neanderthal habitats is largely based on anthracological and palynological reconstructions set within broader global climatic frameworks. This approach has yielded important environmental information, however, so far it has not been possible to identify fluctuations in climate or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Lacan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The utilization of subterranean spaces by humans is cross-temporal and cross-regional. In turn, and sometimes simultaneously, caves have been employed around the world as seasonal or permanent shelters, storage rooms, workshops, burial chambers, and as containers for artistic and ritual actions. In southern France, these last endeavors have been the focus of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Veselka. Tessi Loeffelman. Joris Brattinga. Guido Van den Eynde. Christophe Snoeck.

This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urnfield cemetery of Tilburg-Udenhoutseweg was excavated in 2020 yielding a total of 230 cremation graves dating to the Late Bronze-Iron Age. The cremation graves were distributed over the entire cemetery as part of burial monuments, in clusters, or as individual graves. Osteological analyses of all the cremation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David González-Álvarez.

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I envision Landscape Archaeology as a scientific program, comprising interdisciplinary methods and theories, that rigorously analyzes the long-term processes of landscape formation. This approach integrates archaeological, paleoenvironmental, and ethnographic datasets to produce socially relevant knowledge about human behavior,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

Movement is fundamental to bodily perception and to the formation of the archaeological record. Histories of movement shape our perceptual apparatus and generate embodied knowledge. This recursive constitution of bodies, movements, and materials simultaneously defines the challenge and opportunity of phenomenological approaches within sensory archaeology. Explicitly or not, most researchers use their own bodily experiences of movement as analogies for making inferences about the material and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celia Goncalves. Claudia Umbelino. Joao Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work presents "The Muge Shellmiddens Project: a new portal for the last hunter-gatherers of the Tagus Valley, Portugal" that focuses on the requalification and valorization of the archaeological and paleoanthropological heritage of the Mesolithic complex of Muge (Tagus Valley, Portugal), classified as Portuguese National Monument since 2011. It is a new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Kerry Sayle. Katharine Steinke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past 10 years sulfur isotope analysis (δ34S) has become increasingly employed to investigate the movement and mobility of prehistoric people and animals. While the questions can focus on the same type of “one-off” movements often considered when using strontium and oxygen analyses to study human migrations or pastoral economies, the combination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chateau de Balleroy located in the Calvados region of Normandy, France, played an important role in launching the career of Francois Mansart, popularizer of the Mansard roof. Historic architectural features, subsurface archaeological features, and graffiti were documented using drones and multispectral imagery. The analysis of these data enhances our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Crystal El Safadi. Fraser Sturt.

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dynamics behind the development of the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland has been a topic of debate for over one hundred years. At its heart lie a series of different conceptions as to the nature of connectivity across the seaways of North West Europ. Neolithic practices in Britain are evidenced c. 1000 years later than their arrival in north-west...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Pettitt.

We know that Neanderthals used the mouths of caves for habitation, and on occasion buried their dead in such contexts. The behavioural repertoire was recently extended to include the assembly of a circle of stones deep in a cave in France. But can any evidence be taken to imply specifically 'ritual' behaviour? I build here on ongoing collaborative research on the emergence of art, and on wider Neanderthal activities in caves and their environs to address the question as to whether 'ritual' use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucía Cobo Sánchez. João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Escoural Cave (Portugal) represents a key window into Neanderthal-carnivore interactions during the Middle Paleolithic. Excavations in the 60’s and 90’s unearthed abundant archaeological findings, including Neolithic burial grounds, cave art and Upper and Middle Paleolithic remains. The Middle Paleolithic layers are characterized by abundant quartz...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Baquedano. Juan Luis Arsuaga. César Laplana. Belén Márquez. Rosa Huguet.

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 the Des-Cubierta Cave, in the Central System Range of the Iberian Peninsula, 35 crania of large herbivores (Bison priscus, Bos primigenius, Cervus elaphus, and Stephanorhinus hemitoechus) were recovered in an area where the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milena Carvalho. M. Grace Ellis. Michael Benedetti. Jonathan Haws.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Iberia, potentially the last place where Neanderthals survived, the demographic breakdown of small, loosely connected populations seems to have been a significant driver for their demise. Human responses to the climatic fluctuations of the Late Pleistocene, particularly Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3, could be an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Schwendler. Charles Egeland. Jing Deng. Minjeong Kim. Christopher Nicholson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Magdalenian (ca. 20,000 to 14,000 cal BP) of western and central Europe witnessed both a rapid expansion of Upper Paleolithic human populations after the Last Glacial Maximum and the creation and circulation of an unprecedented abundance and diversity of portable decorated items. The materials, design details, and chrono-spatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kerr.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Buildings archaeology somewhat lags behind the broader discipline of archaeology in its adoption and creation of new theoretical propositions possibly due to the misconception that the built environment lies solely in the remit of architectural historians rather than archaeologists. It is not, however, sitting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vitale Sparacello. Stefano Rossi. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Irene Dori. Alessandra Varalli.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in the Prehistory of Liguria and Neighboring Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Epigravettian "necropolis" at Arene Candide Cave (Finale Ligure), excavated in the 1940s, yielded a large Late Upper Paleolithic skeletal series consisting of 10 primary burials and six clusters of bones in secondary deposition, accumulated during two distinct phases separated by a few centuries (AMS dates spanning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marine Frouin. Jean-Luc Schwenninger. Tom Higham.

The southwest of France is well-known for the wealth and number of sites attributed to the Middle Paleolithic. The archaeological sequences reflect an apparent heterogeneity of Neanderthal behaviors, based on the apparent variability of the lithic technological systems adopted by human groups over time. This has led to a range of different interpretations of the archaeological evidence. What is apparent is that a reliable chronology is key if we are to understand Middle Paleolithic lithic...