Asia: Central Asia (Geographic Keyword)
101-105 (105 Records)
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...
Where are the women warriors? The evidence for gender equality on the Mongolian Steppe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women in pastoral nomadic steppe cultures had a higher social status and fluid gender roles than their counterparts in sedentary agricultural regions. Central Asian women (Mongol and Qidan) are historically documented to have made diplomatic, economic, and military decisions in proxy for male relatives. Mortuary evidence for women warriors is inferred from...
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...