Europe: Western Europe (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan. Ramón Fábregas Valcarce.

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. In this paper, we aim to analyze a collection of singular artifacts recovered from various sites in the Iberian Peninsula, spanning from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (approximately 5600–1800 BCE). Our primary focus will be on investigating the patterns of circulation and exchange of polished axes and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Williams. Kendra Weinrich.

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. This project investigates lived experience in early medieval Germany by examining degenerative joint disease (DJD) in human skeletal remains from Altenerding, Germany. A 2008 excavation at the Petersbergl site unearthed 128 burials from a 9th century cemetery associated with the Carolingian court...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo De Lombera-Hermida. Geoffrey Clark. Xosé Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez. Ramón Fábregas-Valcarce.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northwest Iberia is a Paleozoic territory almost void of flint outcrops. The arrival of Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic groups, used to flintknapping, to a new lithological region implied a reorganization of their technological basis. The analysis of four lithic assemblages, ranging from the Aurignacian to the Final Magdalenian/Azilian, allows us to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Büster.

Personal possessions are inherent in the construction and maintenance of social identity. In some prehistoric cosmologies, artefacts may even have been integral to an individual’s personhood. As such, they can become culturally and ritually charged objects within a community. What happens then to this social remnant of an individual when they die? Objects that are on the one hand redundant but on the other too problematic to be casually discarded. In the increasingly materialist and consumerist...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Thacker.

This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic debitage attributes are critical for interpreting the open-air Upper Paleolithic archaeological site of Olival Grande in central Portugal. Fabric analysis, intrasite spatial patterning, and weathered surface features of artifacts indicate manifold site burial mechanisms and significant postdepositional processes at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julian Richards. Nicole Beale. Gareth Beale. Katie Green.

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (www.debs.ac.uk) is an Historic England-funded project based at the Archaeology Data Service and Digital Creativity Labs in the University of York, UK. We are collaborating with community groups to develop new tools and resources for burial space research, recording...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Bowyer-Kazadi.

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. This paper will look at the religious phenomenon of anchoritism, popular in Western Europe during the medieval period and how we, in the twenty-first century can engage with it. The medieval anchorites (men) and anchoresses (women) lived in isolation in their anchorhold (cell) in order to live the life of a solitary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Javier Sánchez-Martínez. Nolan Ferrar. João Cascalheira. Rafael Mora.

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. Expedient technologies are linked to low-cost behaviors, aimed at producing stone artifacts with low technical complexity and minimal temporal requirements. Traditionally, these have been associated with assemblages characterized by simple production systems mainly geared toward obtaining flakes. In recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Sparks-Stokes. Susan E. Allen. Alan P. Sullivan III.

This study assesses the utility of archaeobotanical measures to recognize differential site formation processes, drawing on the Bronze and Iron Age hill fort site of Zagorë, in northern Albania, as a case study. The blanket sampling strategy for collection of flotation samples applied by the Projeki Arkeologjik I Shkodres (PASH) (2010-2014) during the site’s excavation provides a complete record of archaeobotanical changes across the depth of each excavation unit. The use of small mesh sizes for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheng Liu. Nada Khreisheh. Dietrich Stout. Justin Pargeter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the extensive literature focusing on Acheulean bifaces, especially the sources and meaning of their morphological variability, many aspects of this topic remain elusive. Archaeologists cite many factors that contribute to the considerable variation of biface morphology, including knapper skill levels and mental templates. Here we present results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Sophia Adams. Kerry Sayle. Katharine Steinke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many of the central questions of archaeology engage directly with themes relating to movement, mobility, and migration. The two most common isotope systems that have been exploited for this purpose are strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and oxygen (δ18O), with sulfur isotopes (δ34S) being a much more recent addition to the isotopic arsenal for investigating residence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diego Lombao. Juan Morales. Andreu Ollé. Marina Mosquera.

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. During the second half of Middle Pleistocene in Europe significant changes occurred, including the emergence of Neanderthal anatomical features and behavioral shifts documented in the archaeological record, such as fire use, Levallois technology, and development of complex hunting strategies. These changes could reflect...

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

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on the Paleolithic in the Mediterranean Region" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherers relied strongly on lithic raw materials, which make them a key aspect to understand mobility, land use, and other important cultural aspects. Identifying changes in raw material provisioning through time is key to understand how different groups adapted and reorganized their culture. This is especially true...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugene Morin. Jacqueline Meier. Khalid El Guennouni. Anne-Marie Moigne. Loic Lebreton.

This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Europe, medium- to large-sized herbivores are widely considered to have formed the bulk of the human diet during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. In contrast, small fast prey taxa were allegedly rarely exploited. Here, we report new data for a number of leporid assemblages from Southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maurizio Forte.

Duke University started in 2014 a multidisciplinary archaeological research project involving the use of advanced digital technologies and focused on the Etruscan and Roman site of Vulci (Italy). Vulci, (10th–3rd c. BCE), in the Province of Viterbo, Italy, was one of the largest and most important cities of ancient Etruria and one of the biggest cities in the 1st millennium BCE in the Italian peninsula. The project integrates the use of multispectral cameras by drones/UAV, georadar, digital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir. Morten Ramstad.

This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the settlement of Iceland there has always been a dependence on marine resources. Furthermore, studies have shown marine resources were being utilized far inland, indicating exchange networks from the start of the settlement period. However, there is a research bias within Icelandic archaeology, which has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Franklin. Frédéric Surmely. Sandrine Costamagno. Maureen Hays. Lauren Woelkers.

We present the discovery of a new Middle Magdalenian site at Enval, a rock shelter site in the Massif Central of France. Radiocarbon dates indicate a tight chronology at 17,000 years ago. The site is significant for several reasons. Faunal elements indicate the site is largely intact and not a palimpsest. Faunal studies also indicate the site was occupied during the winter. This is important because it demonstrates that late Pleistocene humans occupied the Massif Central during harsh conditions....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Casaly.

Archaeologists often characterize the Bronze Age by a pronounced expansion in long-distance interaction, which resulted in contact, whether direct or indirect, between disparate geographical areas. The centrality of this notion to the definition of the Bronze Age has resulted in numerous studies addressing such large-scale exchange of material culture and/or ideology. When incorporated into such studies, Britain and Ireland are often lumped together under the moniker of "the British Isles." This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Tourigny.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Public pet cemeteries represent a relatively recent phenomenon in western European/North American societies. First appearing in the late 19th century in England, France and the United States, their numbers quickly expanded across these and other countries as people commemorated their non-human friends in new ways. The locations and organisation of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colleen Zori.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chip Stanish once told me that a good archaeologist should be able to be thrown out of a plane anywhere in the world and find something interesting to say about the material record there. Inspired by many years under Chip’s tutelage and drawing on my earlier work in the Andes, I here present data from my current research at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Nabity. Jacopo Baggio. Jacob Freeman.

Humans, like any other organism, must continuously adapt to or modify their surrounding environment to maximize their fitness. One of the main sources of environmental variation that humans must cope with is climate variation. Adjustment to climate variation may include increasing investments in infrastructure (social, technological, cognitive), which acts as a buffer, filtering out the effects of higher frequency climate variation on the ability of individuals and populations to consume energy,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Gibson.

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. Díseart Molanín castle was constructed by a leading lineage of the O’Dea clan in the late 15th century in north central Co. Clare, Ireland. The clan occupied a territory within a composite chiefdom that had been dismembered and incorporated into a primitive state in the 12th century AD, led by the O’Briens. The O’Deas hung on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramon Valcarce. Alia Vazquez-Martinez. Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on the open-air rock art of Galicia has been going on for more than a century. During this time, one aspect that has experienced much change is the recording of the carved panels, starting with techniques that involved direct contact with the rock’s surface and resulted in a more or less adequate rendering of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Johnston.

This is an abstract from the "On the Periphery or the Leading Edge? Research in Prehistoric Ireland" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The notion that, historically, Ireland was a homogeneous society situated on the edge of Europe and passively receiving cultural influences has long been implicit in the larger context of European archaeology. And yet Irish society and culture were neither passive nor homogeneous at any point in the island’s history....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Seuru. Liliana Perez. Ariane Burke.

This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study we propose the use of agent-based modelling (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) to test the impact of predator-prey relationships on the distribution of prehistoric human populations. Our research goal is to establish a dynamic model of the distribution of large herbivores that constituted the main food source for...