Europe: Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning.

This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on literature from peace and conflict studies as well as social justice movements, I consider the role and responsibilities of archaeologists as we grapple not only with our positionality in the present, including our roles as citizens and scholars, but the manner in which we mobilize the past in aid of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Goeller.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a preliminary faunal analysis from the deserted medieval village site in Ballintober, Co. Roscommon, in Ireland. Studies on faunal materials from medieval villages during the Anglo-Norman conquest and colonialism of Ireland are currently few, but they are crucial to better understand human-animal interaction in this period of social and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Zaneri.

From 900 to 1300 AD, Italy underwent sweeping cultural changes – the rise of market economies, increased trade and commerce, and new forms of governance. Typically, the elite are cast as the drivers of these shifts, yet it was rural labor that produced the goods (particularly foodstuffs) traded in the cities, collected in the form of rent and taxes, and transformed into capital. This paper examines the impact of rural landscape strategies during the development of the medieval city-state of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yann Ardagna. Emeline Sperandio. Bruno Bizot.

Following an evaluation between 2004-2006, it appeared that more than 200 anthropological series had been assembled following excavations led in Provence Alpes Côtes d’Azur (PACA) region. These extremely scattered series had not all been subjected to a precise inventory, were disparately curated or even lost. Therefore, most of these collections were not or no longer accessible to scientists. Faced with this question concerning the heritage preservation, different regional actors invested in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annelou Van Gijn. Jeroen ter Brugge. Diederik Pomstra. Annemieke Verbaas. Lasse van den Dikkenberg.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public participation in archaeological projects is becoming ever more essential, and experimental archaeology is an excellent way of reaching out and creating a scientific community in which both the general public and archaeological scientists can learn from each other. At Masamuda near Rotterdam (Netherlands), local volunteers have established an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Klembara.

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of Upper Paleolithic burials in Europe have illuminated several aspects of Upper Paleolithic lifeways, from health and diet, to status and social organization. These studies, while recognizing the rarity of Upper Paleolithic burials, interpret the Upper Paleolithic burial...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sean Hanrahan.

A key question in economic history is the degree to which preindustrial economies could generate sustained increases in per capita productivity. Previous studies suggest that, in many preindustrial contexts, growth was primarily a consequence of agglomeration. Here, we examine evidence for three different socioeconomic rates that are available from the archaeological record for Roman Britain. We find that all three measures show increasing returns to scale with settlement population, with a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nolan Ferar. Jonathan Haws. João Cascalheira.

This is an abstract from the "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Expediency, in the sense of applying low-cost, informal technological solutions, characterizes a great deal of hominin technological behavior over time. The degree to which expedient technological behaviors are culturally-laden versus culturally-void remains an open question—one with important implications for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aylar Abdolahzadeh. George Leader. Tamara Dogandzic. Li Li. Harold Dibble.

Archaeologists have long studied the effects of raw material variation on different aspects of lithic technology, primarily focusing on raw material availability and nodule size and shape. This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment designed to compare different rock types (obsidian, flint, basalt, quartzite, and silcrete) and assess their effects on flake production. The experiment utilizes a mechanical robot that applies force to pre-shaped cores, controlling for known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan-Alette Dublin.

This study employs archaeological and documentary evidence to examine adaptive reuse and social memory at the site of the medieval monastery of Psalmodi in Gard, France. During the late twelfth century, the abbey church was partially rebuilt, enclosing the footprint of an earlier church and maintaining early public space while transforming and enlarging monastic space. The reconstruction occurred shortly after a century of turmoil that saw the takeover of the monastery by a rival and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudine Gravel-Miguel. Julien Riel-Salvatore. Fabio Negrino. Emanuela Cristiani. Roberto Maggi.

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. In 2022, our team started work at the Arma dello Stefanin to document the stratigraphy that had been unearthed in the 1960s and 1980s. In this presentation, we will summarize the results of our attempts to date the stratigraphy of the site to place it within its proper temporal context. This is the second conference...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fraser Sturt. Duncan Garrow.

Researchers across the breadth of academia, from oceanographers to political scientists and archaeologists, have all begun to redress the critique of ‘sea-blindness’ leveled at modern society in recent years. The result has been a re-positioning of activity on the water within our accounts of human lives and thought processes – add water and stir. The results have been inspirational, controversial, and at times utterly inoperable beyond the broadest of heuristic devices, when it comes to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Campana. Pam Crabtree. Susan Johnston. Zenobie Garrett.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dún Ailinne is an Iron Age (ca. 600 BCE-400 CE) site in Country Kildare, Ireland. It is considered as one of the Irish "royal" sites. These sites are mentioned in the early medieval literature and are large sites surrounded by an inverted bank and ditch and containing monumental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex DeGeorgey.

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 Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is dedicated to identifying and honoring missing US service personnel, particularly from World War II and other conflicts. Recent search and recovery efforts conducted by Alta Archaeological Consulting (ALTA), through the DPAA Partnerships and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Montserrat Sanz Borràs. Joan Daura. Dan Cabanes. Natalia Eguez. Ángel Carrancho.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Controlling the use of fire was a technological milestone in human evolution. The beginnings of the control of fire remain controversial because preserved hearths containing a combination of combustion residues are easily altered and their identification in the archaeological record can be hindered by taphonomic biases. Excavations at the Gruta da Aroeira...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Crowley-Champoux.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Ireland, one of the defining features of the transition from the Iron Age to the Early Medieval period, during the first centuries AD, is the development of a dairying economy. The concern for dairy as a commodity had social and political consequences for Early Medieval society; with status reflected in quantities of dairy cattle and social obligations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Milena Carvalho. Lukas Friedl. Michael Benedetti. João Cascalheira. Jonathan Haws.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Research into the Late Pleistocene of Europe" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Portuguese Estremadura (central Portugal), is an understudied region in Paleolithic research with several key Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites that have provided important information on human lifeways in westernmost Europe during the Late Pleistocene. One of these is Lapa do Picareiro, a rare type of site on the Iberian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelien Tafani. Andrea Vianello. Robert H. Tykot. Emanuela Gualdi.

This contribution aims at gaining on the life history of individuals buried in northeastern Italy between the fifth and the seventh centuries AD. Elemental analysis of human and animal remains provides data on the evolution of diet and mobility at a time of significant social changes. Our research strategy, based on a preliminary histological study on teeth and bones and on serial sampling, gives us the opportunity to observe these variations at the level of the individual. Thus, this research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Scott. Finola O'Carroll. Laura Corrway.

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. The Dominican friary in Trim, Co. Meath, Ireland was established in AD 1263 by Geoffrey de Geneville, then Lord of Trim. Located just outside the town wall, the Black Friary was an important institution during the late medieval period, as indicated by its large size and double cloister as well as its use for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human-environmental relations, mediated by builders and householders, are visible in the framework of vernacular buildings. The builder’s selection in material is mediated by geography and ecology, as well as land management practices, law, and social custom. In West Suffolk, England, there are hundreds of timber-framed buildings constructed between 1450...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Brandl. Daniel Modl.

Since 2009, the Neolithic chert quarrying site in the Rein Basin in Styria (Austria) has been the focus of a multidisciplinary research project. A mining area for tabular chert, approximately 10 hectares in size, was established at this locale in the course of a series of archaeological excavations, core soundings and a geophysical prospection. At Rein, tabular chert occurs in residual loams and mined in up to four meter deep shafts. According to this evidence, the site is only the second...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ines Sastre Prats. Brais Currás Refojos.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a researcher raised on a political-economy archaeological tradition, the assertion that the origin of inequality is not the relevant point in anthropological research is a shake. But after a careful reading of *The Dawn of Everything*, we are still persuaded that social relations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vince Van Thienen.

For some time the study of migration with ceramics was considered unreliable or unuseful after the ethnic discourse applied by cultural historians. The idea of 'pots=people' was heavily criticized, and rightly so: for similarities in style can result from mobility in people, goods and ideas. Yet, discarding the ceramic evidence altogether is not the solution. With a proper understanding of the limitations and issues, and ideally supplemented with other datasets, the distribution of ceramics and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breiter.

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates the social context of timber reuse in late medieval and early modern timber-framed buildings. The data for this survey are centered around the town of Bury St. Edmunds, a market town in western Suffolk surrounded by rural farmsteads and villages. In the mid-sixteenth century there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Cearley. Andrew Bair. Samuel Connell.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Gaelic Social Order through Castle Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geophysical surveys have become a common feature in archaeological investigations in Ireland and the United Kingdom. The collection of data sets tend to be carried out rapidly and in many cases results can be immediate, however the interpretation of this data is not necessarily consistent nor are the formative processes of...