Asia: Central Asia (Geographic Keyword)
76-86 (86 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iron Age agropastoralists of the Talgar region built a variety of houses including rectangular double-walled mud-walled houses, semi-subterranean pit houses, mud brick platforms, and central circular rooms with multiple plastered floors. In earlier periods of prehistory the description of transition from mobile to sedentary...
Subsistence Economies Among Bronze Age Steppe Communities in the Southeastern Ural Mountains Region, Russia (2018)
The long-standing subsistence model for Bronze Age Steppe Communities in the Southeastern Ural Mountains Region has been defined as a sedentary agro-pastoral strategy with dominant use of livestock. However, based on recent studies, the nature and variability of the subsistence economy, especially wild plant resource exploitation for both humans and livestock, are not well understood. As sedentary pastoral communities, the relationship between increasing livestock productivity and decreasing...
The Thousand-Year Shrine: Ancient Roots of a Modern Holy Place in Afghanistan’s Desert (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ziyarat-i Amiran is a contemporary shrine dedicated to one of the founders of Islam in Afghanistan. Located in the barren Sistan desert of southwest Afghanistan and supported by food, water, and fuel brought in by pilgrims and truck drivers, it seems an unlikely place to support an ongoing religious institution. Documented by the Helmand Sistan Project in...
Tibet Before Pastoralism (2018)
The Tibetan pastoral economic system that has evolved over the last several millennia involves permanent high altitude herd management combined with mutualistic relationships with lower-elevation agricultural communities. How this traditional pastoralist system developed in the middle to late Holocene from a prior foraging lifeway remains something of a puzzle, requiring the domestication of the native high-altitude adapted yak, the establishment of sustained relationships between Tibetan...
Timirud Period Rural Settlement in the Sar-o-Tar Desert, Afghanistan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists generally recreate settlement patterns based on vestigial remains of rural landscapes destroyed by later settlement, agricultural activity, or environmental degradation. The 14th and 15th century Timurid settlement of the Sar-o-Tar plain, east of the lower Helmand River in southwest Afghanistan, is a notable exception. Dry desert conditions...
Trans-Himalayan Material Culture of India: Special Reference to Steatite Bead (2018)
Trans-Himalayan archaeology was always neglected by the historians and Archaeologist. But some recent excavations and my Ph.D field work presented an interesting view of Trans-Himalayan culture. The burial culture of this region dated back to 600-200BCE. I found here the remains of Pyro-technological activities. Steatite bead was first time found in Trans-Himalaya. They are in size from 2 to 4 mm in diameter, 1to3 mm in height, and hole width is about 1 mm. The beads were examined by using SEM...
Understanding Early Societies and Investigating Early Interactions: Origin, Significance and Transmission of the Bronze Plaques from the Tianshan Beilu cemetery, Eastern Xinjiang (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tianshan Beilu cemetery – the largest and earliest Bronze Age funerary context in Eastern Xinjiang, including 705 graves dating to ca. 2000-1300 BCE – has been widely recognized as a key-point in the early interactions system throughout Eurasia – the ‘Prehistoric Silk Road’. However, due to the failure to publish the excavation report, research has been...
Urbanism in Western Medieval Central Asia: Dynastic Jewels and Dynamic Networks (2023)
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 ninth to thirteenth centuries in the western Eurasian steppe and Central Asia were a period of intensive urban growth. Cities such as Bukhara and Marv boasted large populations in the hundreds of thousands, were home to large communities of scientific and religious scholars, and were transformed by large-scale construction, commonly...
Use and Reuse of Burial Space during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Mongolia: A Case Study from Zaraa Uul (2021)
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 second millennium BC, communities in the Gobi-steppe of Mongolia began to build unique burial structures made of stone. The Late Bronze Age builders of these mortuary features employed new forms of surface demarcation and for the first time in this region, individuals were interred in a prone position. At the turn of the...
Using Ethnoarchaeology to Identify Spatial Patterns of Behavior in Domestic Dogs (2018)
Domestic dogs (Canis familaris) are a common presence in nomadic cultures, but archaeology still struggles to identify them in the absence of their faunal remains. What we lack is a means to identify behaviors that manifest themselves in the archaeological record that are in clear association with domestic dogs. One avenue is carnivore modified bone. What experimental studies indicate is that we can isolate patterns of feeding associated with particular carnivores, but what has not been...
Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) and the emergence of nomadic herding in eastern Central Asia (2018)
Identifying the timing and nature of the emergence of pastoral societies in eastern Central Asia is hampered by many key logistical challenges, including the scarcity of early nomadic habitation sites and the small and fragmented nature of related archaeofaunal assemblages. This study presents faunal identifications of animal bones from two recently discovered Bronze Age habitation sites in northern and western Mongolia using ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry)- a technique that uses...