Europe: Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Sterling.

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classics is undergoing a very public and painful reckoning with its use by white nationalists. Prehistoric archaeologists working in Europe have largely stayed out of the fray, perhaps due to many practitioners seeing our research subjects as “pre-racial” or our work as otherwise unrelated to these discussions. However, if we look at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meagan Conway.

This is an abstract from the "Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The national demographic ramifications of the Irish potato famine in the late nineteenth century are well documented; however, there is an absence of full understanding of the continuum of its social and psychological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natasha Singh. Ewa Dutkiewicz. Sibylle Wolf. Nicholas Conard.

This is an abstract from the "Examining Spatial-Temporal Variation in the Lithic Technology of the Early Upper Paleolithic" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers have often called the Swabian Aurignacian the Ivory Age, and in fact, this term is entirely fitting due to the great number and diversity of ivory artifacts. These artifacts include a wide variety of both tools and symbolic artifacts including beads, figurines and flutes. Here we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Donaruma. Ian Kuijt.

19th century Irish emigrates from coastal settings, including the islands of western Ireland, traveled to America to establish better lives for themselves, their relatives, and their future offspring, often in new and very challenging urban settings. These islanders left their homes, the seascapes that framed their lives, and entered into a new placelessness. To Irish islanders living and working in America, crafts such making fishing nets, provided a point of entry into the emotional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Fernandes. Vincent Delvigne. Jean-Paul Raynal.

This is an abstract from the "Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies about characterization and sourcing of the various siliceous materials (flint, chert, silcrete, and hydrothermal silicite) used by prehistoric foragers became progressively routine. However, simply locating the stratigraphic origin of a rock is insufficient as it may have been collected from varied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Stroud. Amy Bogaard. Michael Charles. Helena Hamerow.

This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Farming practice changed in Medieval England, allowing a dramatic increase in cereal production. Historical documents describe 13th century agricultural practices as open-field collective farming including three-field crop rotation and use of the heavy plough. Our research investigates how and when such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Shakour.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have explored disasters throughout the discipline’s history, and these calamitous events range from volcanic eruptions, floods, earthquakes and more. The material footprint of the Irish famine presents a challenge to archaeologists investigating disasters. Further, famine-era sites are from the nineteenth century, a time not protected under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Palmiotto. William Chadwick.

This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recovery of past service members from historic military sites is a specialized archaeological niche with substantial forensic influences. It receives distinct notice by governments around the world as they recognize the importance of closure for their nations and families of those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alvaro Montenegro. Boel Bessemer-Clark. Ashley Green. Johan Ling.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here we describe the implementation of a realistic representation of paddling propulsion on a deterministic ocean voyaging computer model. Due to lack of quantified information on the impact of environmental parameters such as winds and currents on paddling, in a previous version of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Klembara.

Amongst many other facets of human life, the practice of burying the dead demarcates and changes a space, it becomes imbued and entwined with the identity of the deceased. The physical act of placing a body into the ground is a place-making practice, a performative act, and, in the process, the place becomes gendered. This has been true since the origins of burial practices in the human lineage, dating to at least the early Upper Paleolithic, and perhaps earlier. This paper is a preliminary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Elgart. Heather Walsh-Haney.

This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) recently formed a partnership with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). In June 2019, FGCU participated in its first mission, the investigation of a World War II aircraft crash in Germany. For FGCU, this was the culmination of several initial endeavors. It was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudine Gravel-Miguel. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Jamie Hodgkins. Caley Orr. Fabio Negrino.

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. During the 2017 excavation season at Arma Veirana, a cave site located in the Italian pre-Alps, a Final Epigravettian burial was discovered. Careful excavation of the feature has uncovered an important number of grave goods comprised of over 80 perforated marine shells. The majority of these ornaments were made from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Creager.

The individual is often overlooked in reconstructions of ritual activity, particularly within constructed spaces, where the repetitious nature of ritual obscures the signature of individual variance. Ritual actions are attributed to a group, or community, even burials are not the action or pure representation of an individual. The identification of the individual within a ritual practice highlights the variance accepted within a culture. In this case study of Early Anglo-Saxon Britain,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bailey Young. Isabelle Catteddu.

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When the first "modern" monograph of a Merovingian settlement site excavation, Brebieres, near Douai, was published in 1974, it re-inforced the then common impression among historians of a little-developed and unstable rural hamlets, inhabited by impoverished peasants with crude technologies—in striking...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Grogan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass is a common find on early medieval Irish sites, having been found in association with native Irish settlement-enclosures, monastic centers, and Viking towns. Evidence for secondary production (the recycling and reworking of existing glass to form new objects) has been identified for each of these site types. No evidence for primary production (making...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manon Géraud. Florian Téreygeol. Florent Hautefeuille.

"Commingeoise", a Late Medieval domestic ware of southern France, is a very current but problematic diagnostic artifact, as it has thus far been poorly defined. The chronology of its production is first of all not precisely established. Furthermore, a simple macroscopic description has historically been used to identify this ceramic type. A more rigorous characterization is necessary in order to clearly define Commingeoise. Finally, although dispersed throughout a large and relatively...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Webster.

Archaeologists have long struggled with assigning specific artifacts to particular ethnic identity categories. This paper uses the artifacts of the nineteenth-century rural Irish poor to argue that identity is best considered intersectionally, in which questions of ethnic or national identity are combined with class, gender, religion, and other identity categories. This intersectionality becomes increasingly important for archaeologists to consider with the rise of globalization, in which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barra ODonnabhain. Jonny Geber.

Mid-19th century Irish identities divided along lines of class, religion and gender but it could be argued that all were constructed in an atmosphere of the negative characterization of the island and its inhabitants by the British elite. Race and low "moral character" were blamed for the endemic poverty of the island. The Irish poor were portrayed as a "race apart" whose inherent failings were at least partly to blame for the mortality they suffered during the Great Famine of 1845–1852. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La Tène: a chronology that lives beyond the site, beyond regional and national boundaries; a term that conjures images of swirling ambiguous imagery, fine metalwork and shining pots. In Britain the term describes artifacts of apparently comparative date, in particular brooches. La Tène I brooches have strong affinities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Shaffer Foster.

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1996, historian Lisa Bitel published "Land of Women: Sex and Gender in Early Ireland," a critical study of medieval gender, which remains influential over 20 years later. While more recent historical and literary research is available, there have been relatively few archaeological investigations of gender...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Creager.

This is an abstract from the "Small Things Unforgotten" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Keys are made to open locks: they are practical and necessary, so why were they deposited in Anglo-Saxon female burials? Anglo-Saxon female identity has been tied to domesticity and family, which has been interpreted based on grave goods. Recent reevaluations of 10th c AD Scandinavian culture has revealed a more complicated gender role for women than previously...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Clark.

Open-air Middle Paleolithic sites in France are characterized by dense piles of lithic material surrounded by low density "empty" areas. Spatial analysis can be used to segregate lithics artifacts based on whether they are located in the high or low density zones. This analysis is supported by the spatial tracking of refitting sets. The results indicate that high density zones likely correspond with knapping locations and low density areas contain lithics selected from the knapped material for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jess Beck.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iberian Copper Age (c.3200-2250 BC) witnesses a suite of interrelated changes, including expansion of exchange networks, intensification of agriculture, increases in population density, and greater investment in site infrastructure. Accordingly, it is noteworthy that third millennium collective mortuary practices hark back...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Hicks.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk introduces recent research for the current exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford looking at the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe through the lens of a contemporary archaeology of the Calais landscape, with special attention to the site of the Calais "Jungle." The talk explores: (1) the material, visual and digital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deanna Keegan.

The Burren is a region located in southwest Ireland containing the highest concentration of wedge tombs in the county showing a significance of place in the Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age. Contemporary to wedge tombs are large complex systems of settlement enclosures, farm fields, and other ritual monuments, which can be seen at sites across the Burren, such as Roughan Hill, Coolnatullagh, and Carran Plateau. Excavations at these sites have provided cohesive radiocarbon dates within the...