Neolithic (Other Keyword)
176-200 (327 Records)
The intensity of extraction activities at Neolithic quarries and mines in Central Europe has fueled debate about the scale and organization of chert and flint extraction and exchange during this period. However, most studies of stone consumption and exchange in the region have been based on lowland settlement assemblages at some distance from stone sources. This paper presents results of a regional project combining survey, remote sensing, analysis of private collections, and test excavation to...
Lithic Raw Material Procurement and Mobility in a Geological Diversed Environmental Setting in Prehistoric Eastern Sicily (2018)
The geological constitution of Sicily is enough complex as the characteristics of the geological units are consequences of the tectonic compression that happened between the beginning of Miocene and the beginning of the Pliocene. Three structural units are basically distinguished: 1. To the north, in the western side (towards Palermo) there is prevalence of carbonatic reliefs while in the oriental side (Nebrodi Mounts and Peloritani Mounts) there are metamorphic and terrigenous deposits 2. the...
Lithic technology transfer and the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the South Caucasus (2015)
Recently, several discoveries in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan have shed new light on the processes involved in the development of food production economy in the South Caucasus. If a series of excavations using modern techniques have provided an improved chronological and cultural framework for this complex phenomenon, several interrogations remain. What is the role of the hunter-gatherer population in the domestication process? Is the presence of Neolithic cultures in this area the result of...
The Living Archive of Çatalhöyük (LAC): Providing Big Data Laboratories as Open Environments for Archaeological Research (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology data are stored in ways that reflect the strategies of research while conventional data repositories tend to freeze the original databases within their initial storage logic. In contrast, the interpretation of primary evidence changes during a project's lifecycle, and it becomes difficult for later researchers with different research questions,...
Living in the Marginal Land of Agriculture: The Adaptive Changes and Risks in the Ecotone of North China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ecotones are characterized by diverse resources which would attract hunter-gatherers and early practitioners of food production, but they also have a disadvantage that the resource boundary easily changes with climatic fluctuation. Long-term climatic changes, as well as annual seasonality, would produce significant...
The Local Environmental Context for Settlement and Abandonment of the Wetland Site Haimenkou, Yunnan, China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Haimenkou is a wetland site with exceptional preservation and represents one of the earliest Neolithic occupations in Southwest China at ca. 3600 cal BP. The site is located on the margin of the alpine Jianhu Lake (ca. 2,200 m asl). A coring survey along the lakeshore reveals nearly 10 m fluctuation of the water level and complex intercalations of...
The Location for the Origin of Domesticated Sorghum in Africa: A Brief Review of Some Cultures in the Sahara, Nile, and Sahel (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent analyses have established the location for the origin of domesticated sorghum occurring in the far eastern Sahel of Sudan during the fourth millennium BC associated with the Late Neolithic Butana Group. For over a half century, sorghum domestication has been hypothesized as occurring somewhere in the Sahelian...
Long distance networks in Neolithic Europe (2016)
In Neolithic Europe, certain artefacts made of high-quality stone were distributed over considerable distances. For example, Jade axe heads, which originate from the Alps, were found between 5300 and 3700 BC in small numbers all over Central and Western Europe as far as Brittany, Scandinavia and the British Isles, i.e. up to 1700 km from their original quarries. Likewise, between 4500 and 2200 BC single daggers, arrowheads and other artefacts made of flint that came from Northern Italy have been...
Long-Distance Human Migration in Late Neolithic China: Isotopic Evidence from Qingliangsi Cemetery (2018)
Around 2200BC, Qingliangsi is a large settlement to the north of the Yellow River with wealth accumulation and social stratification. The location of the site close to rich salt resources made the location a draw for emergent elites during the late Neolithic. Among the most significant lines of evidence of emergent stratification are remains of human sacrifice found in the Qingliangsi cemetery. Our carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotope analyses of human remains excavated from Qiangliangsi show...
Looking into the Dark: Investigating Four Holocene Shelter Sites in Southwest Ethiopia (2015)
Preliminary excavations from the Gamo Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Research project in southwest Ethiopia include three caves and one rockshelter, located on the western escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. The analyses of these four mid-altitude (average 2135 meters) sites will add to our understanding of the cultural, ecological, and technological transitions occurring within the last 6000 years. The cave and rockshelter sites indicate the use of a classic Later Stone Age lithic...
Maize Adaptation to Changing Environments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. All organisms must contend with rapidly changing environments in the face of climate change in order to ensure the survival of the population (Hoffmann and Sgrò 2011). Domesticated plants, with a 10,000 year history of adapting to new environments, provide an excellent model for understanding genetic responses to...
Making Plant Foods in the Early Neolithic: Microbotanical Evidence from Shangshan Pottery (2018)
The Lower Yangtze Valley of China is renowned for the origin of rice agriculture. Previous research based on archaeobotanical analysis and genetic data indicates that the evolution from wild rice to domestic rice was a continuous process that occurred between 11,000 - 6,000 BP. The Shangshan culture (11,400 BP – 86,00) has revealed the earliest evidence of rice cultivation in the region and abundant pottery vessels. These vessels are diverse in form but their functions still remain unclear. By...
Manufacture of Late Neolithic Pottery from the Southern Balkans: An Integrative Approach (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout their life, from manufacture to final discard, ceramic vessels participated in different human activities within Neolithic communities throughout the Balkans. As a result, vessels, potters, and users are involved in a relational interaction leading to a continuous negotiation of various aspects of the Neolithic world. The outcome of this relation is...
Material Geographies of Multi-Family Neolithic Households (2018)
This paper explores how people within Neolithic villages were potentially connected to co-resident multi-family households, and considers the potential material footprint of multi-family households within Neolithic villages. As seen from ethnographic cases, in some cases residential buildings of House Societies had a range of functions including as dwelling locations, origin-places, council houses, or meeting-houses. Echoing other research this paper decouples the social unit of the House from a...
Micro-History and Macro Evolution: Material Geographies of Multi-Family Neolithic Households (2017)
The Near Eastern foraging to farming transition was characterized by the emergence of more powerful nuclear family and multi family households. It remains unclear, however, how this longer-term evolutionary transition was connected to small-scale daily household decision-making. Focusing on the archaeology sites of Tell Halula and Çatalhöyük, I explore archaeological evidence for the development of Neolithic multi-family households, and how they may have been connected to seasonal collective...
Microstratigraphic study of the Neolithic Alepotrypa Cave, Mani, Greece (2016)
Alepotrypa cave is one of the few examples of deep caves being intensively occupied throughout its extension during the Neolithic of Greece. The study of the microstructure and the microstratigraphy of the sediment revealed that the front entrance chambers consist of occupational deposits characterized by constructed clay surfaces and occupational debris. In addition to the several burials, frequent reorganization of the space in the form or fillings, leveling and resurfacing has resulted to...
Migration, Diffusion, and Trade: Potting in Neolithic NW China (2015)
Painted pottery traditions in Neolithic Northwest China emerged through diverse processes of human migration, technical transmission, style imitation, and material exchange. Starting around 6000 years BP, Yangshao farming communities expanded incrementally farther upstream along the Upper Yellow River drainage and westward along the Hexi Corridor. The painted pottery tradition introduced by Yangshao immigrants developed into different chronological and regional styles in Northwest China over the...
Modeling the Influx of Agriculture: An Agent-Based Model Exploring Agricultural Spread Scenarios in the Western Mediterranean (2015)
During the sixth millennium BC agropastoral subsistence spread rapidly across Mediterranean Europe. The results of the currently available radiocarbon chronology suggest that this transition may have occurred in less than 1,000 years. The swift proliferation of new types of material culture and new modes of subsistence has led researchers to hypothesize that the appearance of agriculture in the west Mediterranean was the result of a migration of farmers, the adoption of agriculture by indigenous...
A Multiscale landscape Approach to the Production of Polished Stone Tools in Neolithic Shetland (2017)
The Shetland Archipelago at the very north of Scotland contains one of the best preserved Neolithic stone tool quarries in Western Europe. Recent fieldwork by the North Roe Felsite Project (NRFP) has considerably advanced our knowledge of this quarry landscape and the production of polished stone axes and Shetland knives. THe NRFP has explored the landscape dynamics of this activity on a range of scales; from regional geological survey and workshop prediction using multispectral satellite...
Navigating the Neolithic of the North Western Approaches (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dynamics behind the development of the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland has been a topic of debate for over one hundred years. At its heart lie a series of different conceptions as to the nature of connectivity across the seaways of North West Europ. Neolithic practices in Britain are evidenced c. 1000 years later than their arrival in north-west...
Neolithic Development on Jeju Island: Adaptation in a Broad Northeast Asian Perspective (2017)
Jeju Island, locating southwest from the mainland of Korea, documents the earliest Neolithic culture in Korea. The Neolithic period in Jeju can be divided into six phases (Incipient, Initial, Early, Middle, Late, Final). The Gosan-ri type pottery of the Incipient phase has been only identified in Jeju. From the Initial to Final phases, the applique, Youngseon-dong type, Bonggye-ri type, and double-rimmed types of pottery have been found in Jeju, parallel to the Neolithic development along the...
Neolithic Dietary Practices: Comparison of Stable Isotopes and Dental Microwear (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct Middle and Late Neolithic dietary practices in Central Europe with the help of complementary evidence of stable isotope and dental microwear analysis. From a total of 171 individuals, carbon and nitrogen isotopic values were measured in bone collagen from 146 humans and 64 animals, and 113 individuals were included in...
Neolithic Group Sizes – Further Thoughts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dominant paradigm concerning group size is frequently couched in terms of the "social brain hypothesis" (Dunbar 1998). On the other hand ethnographic evidence (Hill et al. 2014) posits much higher interaction rates amongst individuals than those based solely upon...
The Neolithic House, from Anatolia to Central Europe (2015)
It is accepted with good reason that the appearance of the Neolithic in Europe results from a phenomenon of diffusion, notably demic, from the Near East and more particularly Anatolia. At first sight, there are considerable differences between the Near Eastern houses, which are often small and stone-built with white plaster floors, and the large wood and and earth houses of Central Europe. In fact a more detailed analysis of the situation in intermediate regions, especially the north-west...
The Neolithic House: Ruth Tringham’s Interdisciplinary Approaches to (Re)Constructing Prehistoric Village Life in Southeast Europe and Anatolia (2015)
People create themselves through the houses they build. Ruth Tringham’s archaeological as well as anthropological inquiry has identified houses as active material culture entangled with both material and immaterial social values and rules. Architecture is the material expression of culture, both enabling and constraining the relationship between people and their actions. In archaeology, we receive the final phase of the use-life of a house, yet abundant evidence exists for its making and...