Europe: Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (306 Records)
This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherers are mobile because their resources shift based on season or by ecological zone. This mobility means that their built environments are ephemeral and their mark on the land is light. Many of the traces of structures or land modifications are therefore invisible within the archaeological...
Burial at the Black Friary in Trim, Ireland: 700 Years of Friary-Town Relations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lord of Trim, Geoffrey de Geneville, established a Dominican friary to the north of the town in AD 1263. Ongoing excavations at the Black Friary since 2010 have documented a sequence of burials that date from the 13th through the early 20th centuries. Despite this continuity in the use of the...
The Calamitous Fourteenth Century and Its Influence on the People: A Case Study from Ypres, Belgium (2024)
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. During the fourteenth century in Europe, challenges like climate change, crop failures, and the plague affected the people significantly. Such events bore great consequences for people’s health and their everyday lives forcing them to adapt. The inhabitants of Ypres, present-day Belgium, were no exception. During the...
Can we define a British Iron Age? (2018)
The Iron Age in Britain has traditionally been seen as a period of hierarchical, warrior-based, Celtic societies, characterised by hillforts, defended settlements and elaborate weaponry. The dominant interpretive models have emanated from Wessex – that area of central southern England where the largest and most impressive hillforts are found. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have increasingly recognised the marked regional differences inherent in Iron Age societies across different...
Castle Ballintober, County Roscommon, Ireland: The Castles in Communities Project (2019)
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. The Castles in Communities program at Ballintober Castle in County Roscommon, Ireland has been studying the construction sequence of the castle and the newly discovered deserted medieval village in the hinterlands. As we work with the community of Ballintober we are faced with a conundrum of how best to present our results as...
Castle Ballintober, Roscommon, Ireland: Nothing but Tractors and Cows (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Medieval colonization of Ireland by the Anglo Normans was characterized by the imposition of English infrastructures upon the Gaelic Irish landscape. Indeed, our work beyond the Pale at Ballintober Castle, County Roscommon, sees a shift from the seasonally pastoral nature of...
Castles in Communities Ireland Field Program (2018)
[HOW CAN I REQUEST AFTER HOURS POSTER SESSION -- MYSELF ALONG WITH 2 or 3 other posters from this Ireland project would like to join] The 200 pound pig slowly turns on the spit for hours while a few feet away students from California trowel through excavations at Ballintober Castle. A marquee is set up as villagers busily prepare for Heritage Weekend, which they pushed up to mid July to accommodate the field school and 70 people staying in the village. In the next few days there will be story...
Castros and Cordage: Recognizing Contextual Evidence of Iron Age Practice at São Martinho (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Castro settlements, prominent from the Late Chalcolithic through the Iron Age in western Iberia, are often described as hillforts or defensive hilltop villages. The delineation of sites as castros often influences archaeological interpretations, bolstering focus on the strategic advantages of the...
Certainty about Uncertainty: Lessons Learned from Modeling Human Land Use and Decision Making (2018)
A cornerstone of William Lovis’ career has been the investigation of human land use dynamics, with strong emphasis on methodological rigor and statistical analysis. He has led a generation of students to consider these issues in the Great Lakes and beyond. The modeling of past human decision making is useful as a heuristic for exploring goals and motivations, about which there is certainly a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Instead, modeling past behavior is inherently an exercise in balancing...
Chalchihuites*: Jade Histories of Value and Matter in the Early Modern World (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A well-known passage in the Florentine Codex offers a natural history of *chalchihuitl: its revelation to a few “knowledgeable ones” by the vapor it exudes from underground when viewed against the sun’s first rays; its varieties of green, luminosity, and hardness; the lapidary methods that bring out its brightness and...
Changing Rural Production Strategies during Urbanization in Medieval Lucca (2024)
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 later Middle Ages saw significant changes in the ways that humans exploited their natural environments, fueled by rising populations in cities and the development of commercial industries. This has been studied historically, often through the lens of urban elites, but it is less clear how these changes occurred...
Changing Times, Changing Ways? Evidence for Metallurgy at the Cividade de Bagunte (2018)
The Iberian Peninsula has been a rich source of metallic ores for millennia, and the quest for control of those resources has profoundly impacted the history of the Peninsula. Iberia has followed a unique trajectory in the development of metallurgy, with a case for the independent invention of copper smelting in the southwest, and small-scale production of bronze and other metals across the Peninsula until Roman occupation. The advent of Roman imperial control of labour and mines constituted a...
The Chatelaine, Gender, and Diagnostic Artifact Use (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chatelaines suspend multiple items to be employed for such purposes as grooming, tools, or keys and have been widely used from before the Roman occupation of England to well after the Ninth Century. Additionally, they have been used to determine gender identity within Anglo-Saxon Burials. By examining the chatelaine’s use as a diagnostic measure of gender...
Childhood Diet, Mobility, and Weaning in the Early Medieval Kingdom of Lindissi (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lindissi is an early medieval Kingdom that encompassed the majority of North Lincolnshire, U.K. It was independently ruled until roughly the early 7th century when it underwent many years of sociopolitical change before finally being absorbed by Mercia. Here we examine bulk tooth enamel δ13C and δ18O isotopic signatures from six sites in the region to...
Choosing Building Materials: Multi-scalar Construction of Identities and Heritage Following Disaster (2018)
Scholars and communities have been discussing ownership of the past for the last few decades, and they have explored ways in which social and political movements empowered communities to reclaim ownership of their heritage. These communities use archaeology and material culture to construct their heritage. However, few scholars have discussed how communities are constructing heritage with respect to disasters and social upheaval. This paper explores the multi-scalar construction of heritage and...
The Cividade de Bagunte and the Problems of Castro Architecture (2018)
It is generally accepted that the Castro Culture in northwestern Portugal exhibits a fairly consistent architectural tradition, characterized by the presence of certain construction techniques, structural forms, and organizational schemes. Despite this consensus, there is a pressing need for further research on the topic. Publications dedicated to the study of castro architecture are few, and they have mostly taken a broad approach that focuses on apparent commonalities between sites from across...
The Cividade de Bagunte Archaeological Project (2018)
The Cividade de Bagunte is the most publicized archaeological site of the Municipality of Vila do Conde and is classified as a Portuguese National Monument. Located on a mound with great visibility over the territories to the north and south of the Ave River, approximately 30km north of Oporto city, it called the attention and interest of various archaeologists such as Ricardo Severo and Martins Sarmento, in the end of the 19th century, and F. Russell Cortez in the 1940s. F. Russell Cortez...
Cividade de Bagunte: Learning Behaviors from Reconstruction and Excavation (2021)
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. The work of excavation and reconstruction of the Cividade de Bagunte’s Iron Age extant structures has revealed traces of earlier structures and refuse pits that provide new evidence and challenge previous interpretations. Similarly, the work of reconstruction and conservation has confronted us with ethical and practical dilemmas....
Climate Change and Rural Livelihood in Calabria, Italy (2024)
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. Understanding how human activity, climate systems, ecosystems, and earth surface processes interact to change the capacity for different human livelihoods over time is crucial to finding livable strategies for coping with...
Collective Labor, Communal Lives: Social Dynamics of 19th-Century Rural Life in Northwest Co. Mayo, Ireland (2018)
Nineteenth-century tenant families on the Bingham Estate and throughout rural Ireland resided in cottage clusters known as clachans, nucleated groups of farmhouses, where land-holding was communal and often had considerable ties of kinship. These settlements were intimately associated with rundale farming, a system of cooperative or collective agriculture. This system was a sophisticated response to specific ecological conditions. Lands within infields, outfields, and commonage were allocated so...
Complementing and Complicating: Integrating Isotopic and Phenotypic Evidence at the Early Medieval Cemetery of Five Mile Lane (2024)
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. Isotopic and phenotypic methods are frequently employed in studies of migration and population affinity in the past; however, they are rarely integrated due to differences in scales. This paper presents a case study for the complementary use of multi-isotope (87Sr/86Sr, δ18O, δ34S, δ13C, and δ15N) analysis and...
Concern for the Living, Care for the Dead: Non-adult Burial at the Early Christian cemetery of St Patrick’s Chapel, Pembrokeshire (2018)
Recent excavations below the ruins of a 13th–16th AD century chapel dedicated to St Patrick, at Whitesands Bay, Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales revealed ninety well-preserved burials dating to the 7th–11th century AD. There was an unusually high concentration of non-adults buried at the site, including a number of foetuses and infants. Some of these young individuals received elaborate burial forms, including the use of quartz-topped burials and cross-inscribed grave markers. It is necessary to...
Conserving a Castle: The Connection between Archeology and Preservation in Making History Accessible (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nestled in the hidden heartlands of Roscommon, Ireland is Ballintober Castle. Ballintober Castle and its surrounding deserted village are the site of an archeological field school, Castles in Communities. As the field school progresses into its fifth year, castle conservation becomes more important for continuing archeological work and maintaining the cultural...
Continuity and Discontinuity: Ritual from the Iron Age to the Early Medieval Period in Ireland (2024)
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. While religion in Ireland is conventionally divided into the pre-Christian Iron Age and the Christian Early Medieval period, it seems obvious that the actual transition was far more complex. The details and focus of ritual shifted in certain ways to incorporate the new beliefs, and these can be...
The Copper Age in Apennine Central Italy and the San Martino Site at Torano di Borgorose (Rieti, Italy) (2018)
Excavations at the San Martino site (Torano di Borgorose, Rieti, Italy) have uncovered the remains of a Copper Age settlement, with evidence of a daub structure and possible hearth. The present contribution reports the results of investigations here and situates these results within the broader context of the mountainous interior areas of central Italy, including parts of the Lazio region and especially neighboring Abruzzo. The quantity of data available from Copper Age sites in this...