Europe: Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)
201-225 (306 Records)
Wessex, a region of southern England, has been the subject of more study than almost any other region of the UK. While much excavation has focused on the Iron Age little work has focused on the role of warfare at that time. Discussions of warfare have led to antithetical conclusions by researchers utilizing the same material with much of the disagreement stemming from fundamentally different interpretations of equivocal evidence and assumptions about life in the period. Some of this is...
New Research at Enval: A Middle Magdalenian Site in the Massif Central of France (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present new research at Enval, a Middle Magdalenian rock shelter site in the Massif Central of France. Lithic materials previously recovered indicate far ranging contacts in multiple directions. Artifacts from our 2018 excavations reflect intensive use of local raw materials, suggesting that use of allochthonous materials was not simply a response to...
New Revelations on Mediterranean Bronze Age Iberia through Network Inference (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Valencian Bronze Age, located in the modern-day province of Valencia, Spain is an overlooked player in Mediterranean prehistory. The inhabitants are the indigenous peoples and precursors to the Iberians, so famously cited by the Romans, yet so little cited despite being demonstrably connected to the trends of...
New Stones, New Uses: Sillimanite Ground Stone Tools from Central Iberia (5000–2500 BCE) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ground stone tools can indicate important patterns in food production, craftwork, and farming practices in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Iberia due to their varied use. As Iberian communities adopted sedentary practices and social inequalities emerged, they began to create tools made from new raw materials, indicating a changing relationship with their...
Non-adult Dis/ability and Care in Early Medieval Britain (2018)
A child who is unwell or physically impaired naturally causes concern and anxiety for his or her parents/carers. For many in today’s modern society, accessible medical care means that the challenges associated with caring for a sick or disabled child can be overcome or, at least, minimized. But how did parents/carers respond and adapt to the demands of ill-health and physical impairment in children during the early medieval period? In seeking to address this question, this paper will explore...
Nossa Senhora do Freixo, Portugal: A Late Antiquity Roman Basilica and the Continued Reuse of Sacred Space (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Late Antiquity Roman Basilica of Nossa Senhora do Freixo, Portugal, provide insight into the surprising significance of this hinterland community within the southern Iberian Peninsula. Recent excavations have revealed architectural components and compositional trappings associated with a center of regional affluence. Imported utilitarian...
On the Margin, Marginal Too? A Western Outpost of Paleolithic Cantabrian Cave Art (NW Iberia) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Franco-Cantabrian group of cave art ranks among the best known examples of Paleolithic symbolic behavior. For more than a century no decorated cave was reported beyond the Nalón Valley in the center of Asturias, until the carvings and paintings from Cova Eirós were discovered. At more than 100 km from the Nalón,...
Origins of Parietal Art: Evidence from the Archaeological Record (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interpretation of drawings and engravings rely on our unique ability to internally process visual information and identify recognizable patterns. This same ability processes imaginary patterns, such as animals and faces of people in geological formations, clouds, and stars. The phenomenon of identifying imaginary patterns, referred to as “pareidolia,”...
Osteological Analysis of Two Contemporary Tombs from the San Giuliano Necropolis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Etruscan Centralization to Medieval Marginalization: Shifts in Settlement and Mortuary Traditions at San Giuliano, Italy" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will describe and compare the skeletal remains recovered from two small Etruscan chamber tombs from the San Giuliano archeological complex in the Marturanum Park in the Lazio region of Italy. Both tombs, G13-001 and G12-060, are dated to the sixth century...
"Our Past is Not the Other"—Anthropological Archaeology and Academic Peripheries in Central Europe (2018)
As an archaeologist who practices and teaches holistic anthropology and has long been fascinated by the rich prehistory of Central Europe, I am shy about sharing my anthropological tendencies with German colleagues. When I do, I am often greeted with surprise, confusion, and a polite suggestion that I should be in Papua New Guinea or other places where German anthropologists engage with people who are perceived as different from contemporary Europeans. In Central Europe, archaeology is...
An Overview of the Mousterian and Final Epigravettian at Arma Veirana (Liguria, Northwestern Italy) (2019)
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. This paper presents preliminary results of the first four years of archaeological investigation at the cave site of Arma Veirana, located near Erli (Savona), in western Liguria. The site has yielded in situ Middle and Upper Paleolithic deposits containing a variety of artifacts. One of the project’s principal goals to...
A Paleogenomic Investigation of Historical Human Skeletal Remains from Rapparee Cove, North Devon, UK (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1997, human bones were discovered ashore at Rapparee Cove in North Devon, United Kingdom. Since then, much news coverage and public speculation has suggested that the remains belong either to French soldiers or enslaved African-descended rebels from St. Lucia who had drowned when the London had shipwrecked off the coast two centuries earlier in 1796. A...
Paleolithic Art and Ritual: An Exploration on Human Activity inside Caves in Southwestern Europe (2018)
Caves provide a privileged context for the study of Prehistoric ritual activity. Inside them, we enjoy the unique possibility of directly observing and analyzing spatial features that have hardly changed (and in some cases have not changed at all) since the Paleolithic. However, the poor preservation of the archaeological evidence during the earliest years of the research, and particularly the enormous cultural gap between the Paleolithic codes and systems of beliefs and the modern observers...
Paleolithic Occupations at Riparo Bombrini (Liguria, Italy): Understanding the Spatial Organization of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of Liguria: Recent Research and Insights" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Riparo Bombrini (Liguria, Italy) offers a unique setting to compare the spatial organization of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens occupations in a single archaeological site. The disappearance of Neanderthals is one of the greatest debates in prehistory since the period of their decline corresponds to the...
Peering into the Glass and What Can It Tell about the Iron Age and the Romans in Northwest Portugal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous analyses of glass sherds from the Cividade de Bagunte, Vila do Conde, Portugal, indicate those glass fragments might have been produced in the Syro-Palestinian region. This paper discusses the results of glass samples from several hillfort settlements and sites connected with the Roman town of Bracara Augusta, Braga, Portugal, analyzed using...
The Penumbra of Castro Archaeology: Evidence and Questions (2018)
The archaeology and socio-cultural practices of Iron Age hilltop fortified settlements (castros) in Northwest Portugal and Galicia present usual and unusual specific problems. From the recognition of the uniqueness of castro cultural practices in the late nineteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth century, castro archaeology has suffered from the inadequate methodologies of earlier excavations, poor temporal controls, a parochial stance toward entertaining unanswered questions, and...
Peopling the Landscape: The Pollen Record and Nomadic Pastoralism in Iron Age Ireland (2018)
The people of the Irish Iron Age are often referred to as ‘invisible’ due to their seeming absence from the archaeological record. Ceramics, so often associated with domestic activities, are not a part of the Iron Age material culture. Burials and domestic settlements dating to the Iron Age exist, but they are the exception to the generally sparse archaeological record. In the absence of sufficient material culture and settlement patterns, other means of studying the people of the Iron Age must...
Peopling the Paleolithic: Demographic Approaches to Earliest Prehistory (2023)
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. With its sparse and often fragmentary human fossil record, comparatively limited range of material culture, and almost total absence of structural evidence, reconstructing local and regional population levels in the Paleolithic is especially difficult. Focusing...
Performing Feasts and the Use of Animals in Ritual Contexts in Iron Age Ireland (2018)
Activities at large ceremonial complexes are interpreted as regional community endeavors that form group identities and reify social and political structures. Imposing monuments such as Dún Ailinne, Navan Fort, and Rathcrogan have provided tantalizing glimpses into ritual and ceremonial performances of the Irish Iron Age (500 BC-AD 500). Communal feasting has been suggested to be a key practice at these sites during the later periods of use. At feasts, social structure and identity are...
Physical Effects of Social Status in Early Medieval Thuringia: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Health and Disease among Individuals from the Merovingian Cemetery of Großvargula, Germany (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Merovingian society (450–751 CE) was strongly stratified with differences in social standing being written in law and affecting many aspects of life, such as occupation and access to material, nutritional, and medical resources. How did these status differences become embodied in Early Medieval Thuringia? This study explores the cumulative effect of...
“Picking at the Scabs of Ancient Wounds”: The Derry Excavations Collection (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “Derry Excavations Collection” (DEC) is a legacy collection recovered during a series of late 1970s salvage excavations conducted by archaeologist Brian Lacey in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland. This project focuses on a subset of artifacts associated with a seventeenth-century “town ditch”...
Pilgrimage Centers as Persistent Places: Spiritual Magnetism, Affects, and Atmospheres (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pilgrimage centers and shrines are persistent places due in large part to spiritual magnetism, defined as the power of a place of pilgrimage to attract devotees. Most scholars, following James Prestons’ original treatment of the term, believe spiritual magnetism comes from and is conferred by humans based on cultural,...
Pitchstone in Prehistory: New Insights into the Mesolithic and Neolithic use of Pitchstone in Scotland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pitchstone is a glassy volcanic rock similar to obsidian but in Europe, its geological occurrence and its use as a raw material for prehistoric chipped-stone assemblages are much more restricted. In northern Britain where good quality flint is scarce, pitchstone circulated widely in the Neolithic with artifacts made from this...
Plus ça Change: Archaeology and Incarceration (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spike Island Male Convict Depot opened in 1847 at the height of the Great Famine in Ireland as part of the colonial government’s response to the rise in ‘criminality’ that accompanied mass starvation. The site has a global reach, not just because it was an embarkation point in the transportation of convicts around...
Postmortem Rituals: Skeletal Manipulation of a Late Antiquity Burial in Portugal (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Freixo Archaeology Project was initiated in 2015 to investigate the nature of Roman Imperial occupation in the Iberian Peninsula with an interest in the symbolic and ideological reuse of sacred space. Freixo is located within the Municipality of Redondo in southeastern Portugal, where a sixteenth-century Christian church overlays an ancient Roman...