Asia: Central Asia (Geographic Keyword)

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...

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...

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...

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....

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,...

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...

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...

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fitzhugh. Richard Kortum.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Petroglyph research and archaeology provide different avenues into the past. Commonly viewed as distinct disciplines, they have looked ill-suited to integration (Jacobson 2023). This specific task, however, was a focus of a National Endowment for the Humanities-supported field project conducted by East Tennessee State...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Kortum. William Fitzhugh.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ongoing Khoton Lake project documents several hundred archaeological sites and environmental conditions spanning the past 8,000 years. Forty excavated sites ranging from pre-Neolithic to the Bronze, Iron, Turkic, and medieval periods occur as dwellings, ritual, mortuary, ceremonial, and special-purpose places. In many...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitchell Allen. John Whitney. Silvio Pezzopane.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have leaned heavily on fluctuations in the channels of the Helmand River to explain the rise of Shahr-i Sokhta and the Helmand Civilization during the third millennium in the Sistan basin between Afghanistan and Iran, the subsequent abandonment of the region, and the return of complex settlement in the mid-first millennium BCE. Recent...

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...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Égüez. Oula Seitsonen. Sarah Pleuger. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Jean-Luc Houle.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mongolian Bronze Age (2500–700 BCE) was a period of greater social interaction and important transformations (e.g., the adoption of domestic livestock herding and intensification to widespread mobile, mounted pastoralism) that prompted social inequality and the formation of the first nomadic states. What is known...

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...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Chang.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Miller.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Theories surrounding the rise of complex polities have long hinged upon large urban centers, fixed infrastructure, and the centrality of agricultural economies, leaving any societies without these as incapable of creating stable large-scales collectives that one could call a state. Taking the case of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chuenyan Ng.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitchell Allen. William Trousdale. Ghulam Rahman Amiri.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rhode.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachele Bianchi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Periodization and the establishment of chronological sequences are integral parts of archaeological discourse. Not only do we use them to diachronically investigate patterns and changes in material culture, but we rely on presumed contemporaneity to discuss interaction and exchange. However, archaeological reconstructions of the past and established...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitchell Allen. William B. Trousdale.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amita Gupta. Vinod Nautiyal.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcella Festa.

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...