Europe: Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Wren. Ariane Burke.

During the Last Glacial Maximum the population of Western Europe contracted its range as the climate became less hospitable and more unpredictable. Mobility decisions must have been a key part of human adaptation during this time but are notoriously difficult to extract from archaeological data. Agent-based modelling offers one way to explore human mobility heuristically, producing test implications that can be tested using the archaeological record. We use a model of habitat suitability derived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social and political ideologies are entangled in the management and control of the ecological landscape. When relations between social institutions shift, it impacts how people interact with their local environment. In this paper, I explore how these relationships are visible within the fabric of a building. During the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Millán-Pascual.

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this contribution we combine landscape archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past to critically rethink the material, social, and ideological effects of the industrial forestry developed by the dictatorship in Spain. This case is a particularly relevant example to reflect on how the transformation of the landscape is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Maxwell. Kristina Killgrove. Robert H. Tykot.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the end of the Great Germanic Migrations in AD 568, Langobards from Pannonia entered and occupied 2/3 of the Italian peninsula. It is unclear how large these migrations were, as historical documents exaggerate mass movements; however, conservative estimates suggest they made up 8% of the Italian population. This research identified migrants in two 7th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Haws.

This is an abstract from the "Peninsular Southern Europe Refugia during the Middle Paleolithic" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iberian Peninsula has long been regarded as a glacial refugium for humans, as well as temperate, Eurosiberian flora and fauna. The well-documented Cantabrian region served as an "active" and densely populated refugium during the LGM and Late Pleniglacial. In southern Iberia, the Mediterranean-type biota found refugia...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Lees. Tom Dawson. Sally Foster. Joanna Hambly. Marcy Rockman.

This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In June 2018 interdisciplinary scholars from Scotland and the US convened in Edinburgh to consider action in the face of inevitable loss of coastal and carved stone heritage from accelerated processes related to climate change. The project, "Learning from Loss," was funded by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adelle Bricking. Oliver Davis. Richard Madgwick.

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 Iron Age in Wales is understudied compared to other regions in Britain largely due to the lack of osteological evidence. A study by Rowan Whimster in 1981 found only eight burial records in the entire country, leading to the assumption that Iron Age peoples in Wales conducted "archaeologically invisible" funerary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Nowell.

The Gravettian (ca. 28,000-21,000 BP), has been referred to as the "Golden Age" of the European Upper Paleolithic. Innovations in technology, increased sedentism and the development of larger regional centers, the oldest known ceramics, some of the earliest evidence for loom-woven textiles, and the emergence of so-called "Venus" figurines all characteristic of this period. The Gravettian is also well known for its often spectacular single, double and triple burials of sub-adults including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caterina R. De Vera. Antonio V. Herrera-Herrera. Carla Hernández-Gaspar. Acarelys M. Cabrera-Rodríguez. 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. Cueva Pintada de Gáldar is a pre-european archaeological complex in Gran Canaria that was discovered in 1873 and nowadays is an Archaeological Park and Museum. It comprises a hillslope with numerous dwellings, some of them partially carved into the hill, and "Cueva Pintada", a ritual cave at the core of the settlement. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marta Sánchez De La Torre. Xavier Mangado. François-Xavier Le Bourdonnec. Bernard Gratuze. Mathieu Langlais.

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. Montlleó open-air-site (Prats i Sansor, Catalonia) is located in one of the largest high-attitude valleys in the Pyrenees, the Cerdanya Valley, in SW Europe, at 1,144 masl. The site is in a natural road to cross the Pyrenees in the eastern part. The site, discovered in 1998 and excavated since the 2000 by a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Zori. Davide Zori.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavation and analysis of material culture is one way that scholars in the present endeavor to understand the people of the past. At the same time, we must consider that these people had encounters with their own archaeological history, made manifest in material objects, tombs, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo De Lombera-Hermida. Tania Mosquera Castro. Xose Rodríguez-Álvarez.

This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The NW of the Iberian Peninsula is defined by the scarcity of flint and the predominance of acid soils that prevent the preservation of organic remains. These are the main handicaps affecting Paleolithic research. The lithic assemblages of the Galician Upper Paleolithic sites are defined by the hegemonic use of local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joana Belmiro. Jovan Galfi. Xavier Terradas. Nuno Bicho. João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherers relied strongly on lithic raw materials, making them essential to characterize mobility and land-use, raw material provisioning, technology, social organization, exchange, and the functioning of social networks. As such, the characterization of hunter-gatherer lifeways is often the result of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

The English Reformation had a swift impact on the people of the rural landscape. The movement away from the Catholic church altered the relationship that people had to the physical manifestation of church authority. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Church landholdings were sold off to private owners, and the architectural core was repurposed for secular use. Most of the research on the Dissolution focuses on how the new landowners reused the land, or converted churches into manor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Almeida.

This is an abstract from the "The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is generally accepted that Iron Age folk left the sodden lands in the valleys of large rivers and choose to settle on high ground, in locations with natural defenses, but very often near water sources. Agropastoral interests likely were part of the decision, but so were proximity to the mouth of major rivers and to the sea....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paulina Meléndez Olivera.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In post-medieval England (1500s–1800s), the rise in industrialization and urbanization provides an opportunity to analyze a potential glimpse of how adult male individuals lived daily life in England. This study looks at the potential etiological factors, types of trauma observed and found in the three selected dataset cemeteries of the Chichester Skeletal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Naudinot. Michel Le Goffic. Elena Man-Estier. Patrick Paillet.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Succeeding the Magdalenian, the Azilian is one of the last techno-complexes of the Western Europe Upper Paleolithic. This period is characterized by major socio-cultural changes illustrated by techno-economic but also symbolic changes. One of the most famous elements of this process is the abandonment of naturalistic figurative art on portable pieces or on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Bever.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most common forms of divination in early modern Europe was magical treasure hunting. In an era before banks, locks, and police were common, people often buried or hid valuables, and sometimes knowledge of the location was lost. Some people later stumbled upon these caches accidentally, but others sought them out. Some treasure hunters...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lukas Goldmann. Friedrich Lueth. Rainer Komp.

This is an abstract from the "Monumental Surveys: New Insights from Landscape-Scale Geophysics" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hallstatt period hilltop settlement at Mont Lassois and its environs have been the focus of archaeological interest ever since the discovery of the famous princely grave of the "Dame de Vix" in 1953. Several excavations as well as aerial and geophysical prospections have since explored the sites on top and around the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Van Dyke.

This is an abstract from the "The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I explore the attractant qualities of water, metal, and stone as they have intertwined with human memory-making over three millennia in northwest Iberia. During the Bronze and Iron Ages, the confluence of the Rios Sar and Ulla may have been an important liminal space, as people consigned weapons and other metal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Brighton.

Cultural resilience or collapse has been the focus for the study of prehistoric and proto-historic societies. Little, if any work in historical archaeology, or the archaeology of the modern world, has linked the impact of traumatic natural events and social, economic, and political structures to how cultural groups respond. In this paper, cultural resilience theory is employed to discuss the capacity of a culture to maintain and transform its world-view, cultural identity, and critical cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Moses.

During the Archaic period (8th-6th cent. BCE), Rome underwent rapid urbanization with concomitant social changes. This shift from modest settlement to urban center affected how animals were raised, distributed, and consumed. Namely, large-scale animal sacrifice rituals within the city acted as a new mechanism for distributing meat to the masses, provided by centralized authorities. The increased scale of animal sacrifice in the nascent city would have created new meanings to these rites and led...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Whitlock.

During the early medieval state formation process, England’s political organization transformed from localized tribal groups to large and consolidated kingdoms. Farmers at early medieval settlements experienced a related increase in agricultural production demands, and they introduced improved agricultural technology such as replacing the light ard with the heavier moldboard plow. The midlands counties (commonly referred to as the core of the "Central Province" or "Champion" region) are often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Soares. Rui Mataloto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bronze Age settlements in the Evora district of Portugal are typically located in rocky terrain with an apparent preference for locations in the highlands. During the Iron Age we see a shift of this settlement pattern, as highland sites are abandoned and new settlements appear at lower altitudes. Was the initial selection of highland sites influenced by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Simões. Antonio Herrera Herrera. Carolina Mallol. Vera Aldeias.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeophycology: New (Ethno)Archaeological Approaches to Understand the Contribution of Seaweed to the Subsistence and Social Life of Coastal Populations" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesolithic shell mounds are prominent testaments of the prehistoric coastal adaptations along the Atlantic shores of Europe. In the Iberian Peninsula, postglacial hunter-gatherers largely turned to coastal regions and lived...