Asia: Central Asia (Geographic Keyword)

51-75 (86 Records)

Legacy Data and Ceramic Chronologies: The Case of the Gorgan Plain, Northeastern Iran (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Olson.

After the passage of the Iranian Antiquities Law of 1930, the Gorgan Plain in northeastern Iran was seen as one of the most promising regions in the Old World for archaeological research. Despite decades of pioneering field and laboratory research, northeastern Iran still lacks a regionally integrated ceramic chronology for significant stretches of its archaeological history, particularly the 3rd millennium BCE. While individual sequences from important sites such as Tureng Tepe and Shah Tepe...


Making the Exotic from the Familiar: The Source and Production of Carnelian Beads during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Mongolia (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Asa Cameron. Bukhchuluun Dashzeveg. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Mongolia, communities across the region adopted mobile pastoralism and horse-riding technology. In conjunction with these changes in subsistence and mobility patterns, innovative funerary practices emerged that incorporated monumental construction and new mortuary offerings. Included in these grave...


Melting Ice, High-Altitude Hunting, and Horse Use in the Mongolian Altai (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor. Isaac Hart. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Tumurbaatar Tuvshinjargal. Nicholas Jarman.

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around the globe, a rapidly warming climate is exposing organic materials preserved in permanent snow and ice features. In western Mongolia, artifacts melting from ice features in the Altai mountains demonstrate a millennia-long record of the use of high-altitude zones for hunting of...


Mobility and Highland Medieval Urbanism of the Nomadic Qarakhanids (9th-11th c. CE, Uzbekistan) (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Merkle. Michael Frachetti.

This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent discoveries of a series of highland urban sites (located over 2000m elevation) in the Pamir foothills of Uzbekistan inspire a full reconsideration of the political and economic organization of the Qarakhanid Khaganate and their relationship to both lowland and highland cities. The Qarakhanids controlled...


Mobility and Migration as Ecological Processes in Ancient Eurasia (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti.

New research in the field of aDNA has re-invigorated debates about migrations across Eurasia in prehistory. Emerging data in this field demands that we interrogate how mobility and migration from an ecological and demographic perspective, since these factors influence our interpretation of the still emerging genetic data. In this paper I present the archaeological conditions of the Eurasian steppe ca. 3000-2000 BCE applied to a spatial model with the goal of generating a more complex...


Modelling the Skeleton of Future Bioarchaeological Research in Georgia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Coupal.

This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, the Republic of Georgia has fostered a growing interest for archaeological research in the Southern Caucasus region. This trend has been stimulated both by a strong local contingent of archaeologists, of two generations and of two different systems,...


Mongol Period Urban Sites and Their Hinterland in Comparison: Karakorum and Khar Khul Khaany Balgas (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Susanne Reichert.

This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With its sparse population and few forest coverage, Mongolia is ideally suited for a wide array of surveying methods and as a consequence for landscape archaeological approaches. The proposed paper particularly looks into power and authority as expressed within the landscape. Two valleys in Mongolia will be...


Mortuary Practices, Production and Exchanges in the Borderland: A Case Study from the Bukhara Oasis (Uzbekistan) (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Shujing Wang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates potteries excavated from the Late Iron Age kurgan burials (i.e., burials with an aboveground mound) at the fringes of the Bukhara oasis in present-day central Uzbekistan. Connecting the intensively farmed river oasis and the desert steppe, the border of Bukhara oasis as a frontier zone was also an arena in which complex social and...


New Insights on Mobile Pastoralist's Household Ritual Activity: Early Observations from the Excavation of a Mongol period Ephemeral Dwelling in northern Mongolia.  (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only William Gardner. Jargalan Burentogtokh.

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conversations on ritual practice along the Mongolian steppe are often dominated by discussions of monumental architecture that is typified by large stone mounds referred to as "khirigsuurs" or "Deer Stone" steles. Conversely, the idea that ritual space and practice can be considered at the small-scale household has been mostly...


Nomadic Cities and Network Modularity: Scalar Analysis in Ancient Urbanism and Social Connectivity (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti. Farhad Maksudov.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of small to mid-sized cities (Tashbulak and Tugunbulak) built by the Qarakhanids (ninth–twelfth century CE) at high elevation illustrates that urban centers used by nomadic khanates may have operated under a unique model of “modular” urbanism, which we define as a hybridized form of urban development and nomadic...


Objects of Action and the Practice of Empire in Xiongnu Inner Asia (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Miller.

Material remains of communities and peoples enmeshed in imperial regimes are most often assessed as representations of incorporation into empires. Yet many of the objects in consideration were not so much passive material declarations as they were tools for active demonstrations. Authority, regional and local, derived from membership in exclusive imperial echelons; membership that required more than mere badges of identity but performances of imperially-derived authority. This paper addresses...


Paleodietary Analysis of Xiongnu Individuals in Zuunkhangai, Mongolia (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Parrish. Jean-Luc Houle. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Matthew Fuka.

The archaeology of the Xiongnu period has grown considerably over the last decade, yet debate still surrounds Xiongnu subsistence practices and the timing for the rise, expansion, and ‘collapse’ of the Xiongnu polity. The problem, in part, has to do with discrepancies between dates that come from the same sites. Some dates have been reported to be earlier when the samples came from human remains. These discrepancies have been attributed to the ‘reservoir effect’. In order to investigate this, we...


Pastoralist Intensification and Dietary Dynamics in the Mongolian Steppe: Multi-isotope Analyses of Human and Faunal Collagen (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Makarewicz. Iain Kendall.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The initial spread of pastoralism into the Mongolian steppe during the third millennium cal BC marked a major transformation in human subsistence. Dairying was practiced by early pastoralist groups, evidenced by the identification of milk proteins preserved in human dental calculus. However, we have a poor understanding of how the focused...


Perceptions of Disability and Care in Early Islamic Central Asia (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Elissa Bullion. Sean Greer.

This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we apply an index of care approach to a case study of an individual with progressive pseudorheumatoid dysplasia from an early Islamic cemetery at the site of Tashbulak in southeastern Uzbekistan. Joint degeneration and progressive impingement of nerves would have severely limited individual TBK...


Pit-House Complexes: A New Form of Rural Domestic Architecture in Hellenistic and Post-Hellenistic Central Asia (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Silvia.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To date studies of ancient Central Asian rural architecture are marked by an imbalance with much attention focused on the estates of elite landowners and less effective nods to non-elite pithouse structures. Recent excavations at Bashtepa in the Bukhara Oasis of Uzbekistan (2021) have revealed an intermediary form of domestic...


Place Making and Ephemerality (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Wright.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At first the two ideas of this paper’s title can seem contradictory, but as three separate words they come together. What is the valency between the hypothesised solidity of an archaeological place and the stream of events that go into making it, transforming it, and erasing it? The ephemeral nature of the archaeological sites created...


Preliminary Findings from the Cemetery at the Medieval Ilibalyk Site in Southeast Kazakhstan (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hansen. Greg Pratt. Steven Gilbert. Dmitry Voyakin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ilibalyk (Usharal) site in southeastern Kazakhstan is the location of an ongoing excavation of a medieval (13th-14th centuries CE) Christian cemetery and settlement. Ilibalyk was located along the trans-continental trade networks often called the Silk Roads. Many trade goods from across Eurasia have been found in association with burials at Ilibalyk....


Preliminary Results of Skeletal Analysis from the Early Muslim Period Cemetery of Bukhara (Uzbekistan) (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Monroe. Sören Stark. Sirodj Mirzaakhmedov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bukhara (in modern Uzbekistan) was a center of learning, power, and innovation during the “Lost Enlightenment” of the late first and early second millennium CE in Central Asia. At the same time, the metropolis faced crises familiar to city-dwellers today, such as controversial land use policies and outbreaks of infectious disease. In the summer of 2022,...


Reconstructing Production Technology of Medieval Lead-Glazed Ceramics from Central Asian Silk Road Sites (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Klesner. Pamela Vandiver.

This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Central Asia has long been the connecting bridge facilitating the long-distance trade of goods across Eurasia. While Central Asian communities have served as trading centers, they were also producers of specialty goods and centers of technological innovation themselves. In this study we examine the technological...


Regional Production and Trade of Glazed Ceramics in Medieval Central Asia along the Silk Road (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Klesner. Brandi MacDonald. Pamela Vandiver.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analyses by NAA and LA-ICP-MS of 106 ceramics excavated from archaeological sites in southern Kazakhstan has demonstrated local production of lead-glazed ceramics during the Early and Middle Islamic periods in Central Asia. The sherds, including both glazed (n=39) and unglazed ceramics (n=67), were excavated from seven medieval sites dated from the 9th to 15th...


Review on Archaeological Studies of Sogdian Tombs in China (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Yusheng Li.

This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will examine Chinese scholars’ archaeological studies toward sinicized Sogdian tombs and relevant discoveries in China during the past 20 years and try to seek its logic, in the meantime, and also its disadvantage and possible breakthrough in the future.


The Role of Pastoralists and ‘Operational Complexity’ in Shaping the Materiality of Trans-Eurasian Exchange (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Dupuy.

For decades, descriptions of prehistoric Eurasian pastoral societies would present ceramic typologies as material evidence for macro scale economic, social, and ideological cohesion – and trans-Eurasian interaction. However, recent investigations that focus more on human-environment interactions and domestic economies reveal a more dynamic and varied past in micro-regions of Eurasia. Pastoral strategies dating to the 3rd-2nd millennium BCE were regionally diverse, and societies were engaged in...


Sacred Colors and Nomadic Design: The Hand-Formed Slip-Painted Pottery of the Medieval (Eighth–Twelfth Century CE) Central Asian Highlands (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Merkle.

This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses how social identity, as reflected in networks represented through pottery decoration, served as a means of mediating and buffering against the social uncertainties generated by shifting political and religious landscapes of medieval Central Asia. My project examines the decoration and...


Shamanic Images in Rock Art in Siberia: Global Theory and Regional Peculiarities (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrzej Rozwadowski.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Siberia is the home of unique images of shamans, some of which show specific associations with rock surface features, notably fissures. In my previous research, I analyzed one such image from the Minusinsk Basin; namely, from the site of Ilinskaya Pisanitsa (Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2017). In...


Spatial Dynamics of Urbanization at the Onset of the First Turk Empire (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Annie Chan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contours of medieval urban transformation astride the Tarim-Tian Shan mid-latitudes are to a large extent viewed through the lens of religious iconography and Chinese political history. Thus, research is often directed at finds evincing the materiality of interregional cultural forms that demarcate routes of transmission conforming to...