Neolithic (Other Keyword)
151-175 (386 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shift from primarily foraging to predominantly farming economies that occurs during the early Neolithic of southwest Asia is commonly seen as a transition not merely in subsistence practices but economic relations as well. Many researchers argue that new forms of households emerge by the end of this time period, which serve as both residential and...
Household Cordage in the Ancient Ozette Longhouses, a Mudslide-Covered Village on Northwest Coast of North America (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rarely can you characterize all the cordage and knots in use within an ancient household. At Ozette Village, three centuries ago, a large mudslide flattened, covered, and preserved large cedar plank long-houses. Thousands of cordage and wood/fiber artifacts were preserved and recovered in situ, in use and stored by the ancient extended...
Households in Middle Neolithic Northeastern China: A Study on Shangchaoyanggou Site Applying An Intensive Collection Method (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The remains of around 40 households within the Shangchaoyanggou site in northeastern China have been collected and analyzed in order to reconstruct the social and economic activities of different households during the middle Neolithic Hongshan period. In the Shangchaoyanggou site, as well as many other Hongshan sites, the original Neolithic cultural layers are...
How Many People Lived in Early Villages? Reconsidering Neolithic Demography at Çatalhöyük (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have divergent options as to how many people lived at different Neolithic villages. Near Eastern Neolithic settlements have been historically interpreted as being occupied by thousands of people. This interpretation is founded on several observations: that excavations at settlements often reveal the remains of the densely packed mud-brick...
How Many People Lived in the World’s Earliest Villages? Reconsidering Community Size and Population Pressure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some researchers hold that Near East Neolithic agricultural villages were composed of thousands of people and that these villages existed as an evolutionary starting point on the path to rapid population growth and urbanism. Revaluating the settlement of...
How to Avoid Getting Stuck: Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Anarchy in Southern California (2024)
This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Precolonial California was home to some of the highest degrees of linguistic and cultural diversity seen in human history. This rich variability provides an excellent example for scholars to compare historical trajectories to understand how different societies developed along different...
Human Adaptation and Natural Resource Usage in Prehistoric Southern Ryukyu islands, Southwestern Japan (2017)
This study aims to discuss about the strategy of prehistoric human adaptation to the island environment, especially focus on the natural resource usage. I introduce the case of southern part of Ryukyu islands—the southwestern part of Japan archipelago, where the first long-term human settlement had occurred about 4,300 years ago. Prehistoric people in southern Ryukyu islands had a unique material culture (absence of pottery, use of giant clam shell adzes), which was dissimilar to the surrounding...
Human Agency and Theory in West Africa: Understanding Early Forest Agriculture Dynamics during the Neolithic (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the fact that the need to study early indigenous agricultural systems in Africa has long been recognized and reaffirmed in recent archaeological discussions, African agricultural practices are still being modeled using concepts, terminologies, questions, lines of evidence, and methods derived from research elsewhere in...
Human Behavior or Environmental Change: Zooarchaeological Research on Shell Midden Sites at Guanglu Island, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The zooarchaeological research on Xiaozhushan, Menhou and Wujiacun shell midden sites, which are located in Guanglu island, provides empirical materials to understand the transformation of animal resources acquisition patterns from fishing-hunting economy to livestock way. This paper analyses the reasons for the appearance of...
Human Body Parts from the Monumental Special Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) Göbekli Tepe, Southeast Türkiye (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (ca. 9500–8000 BC) site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey has seen the emergence of some major hypotheses based on results from ongoing fieldwork. Perhaps the most significant new insight...
Human mobility during the Greek Neolithic: A multi-isotope analysis of the burials from Alepotrypa Cave (2016)
This study measures strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) isotope ratios in human and domesticated animal teeth from Alepotrypa Cave, a cave that was used for both shelter and burial of the dead from the Early to the Final Neolithic period (6000 – 3200 BC) in southern Greece. Previous radiogenic isotope research on archaeological material in Greece indicates that there are significant differences in 87Sr/86Sr ranges in the Aegean due to the complex geology (Nafplioti 2011;...
The Human-Mediated Evolution of Cattle and Its Impact on Cattle-Based Agriculture in the Neolithic of the Polish Lowlands (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cattle were the most important domesticated animal in the Neolithic of the Polish lowlands. The paper will explore the character of human-mediated evolution of cattle following rapid development of Neolithic groups in the region, the need of adaptation to new ecological niches and the strain caused by climate change and human induced environmental pressure. It...
Hunting vs. Herding: The Eastern and Central Tibetan Plateau’s Earliest Inhabitants (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of when and how humans settled high altitude (>3000 m.a.s.l.) regions of the Tibetan Plateau has been greatly extended in the past decade. In this paper, we shift the focus from plants to animal resources, and explore the diversity of animal-based subsistence strategies...
The Ideal Free Distribution, Population Packing, and the Forager to Producer Transition in the Southern Levant (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using predictions derived from the ideal free distribution, we test the hypothesis that the forager to farmer transition in the southern Levant emerged from a context of increased population packing. By constructing population size estimates derived from radiocarbon date frequencies and modeling...
Identification of Adhesive on Bone-Handled Microblades from the Houtaomuga Site in Northeast China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the emergence and progress of composite tools in the Upper Paleolithic, the adhesive became one of the most widely used materials by early human societies. However, the precise composition identification of adhesive in archaeological remains is a real analytical challenge, because the adhesive mainly consists of organic materials that are susceptible to...
Identification of Post-Marital Residence Patterns in Prehistory: A Case from the European Neolithic (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this contribution is to test hypotheses about the correlation of post-marital residence with several material patterns observed in the archaeological record, namely household floor area, the spatial arrangements of households and type of subsistence. These associations, which were previously revealed in the anthropological literature, are...
Identifying Animal Management Practices Using Oxygen Isotopes in Neolithic Croatia (2018)
Transhumance is a typical Mediterranean adaptation for securing adequate forage and water for domesticates by seasonally bringing animals to new pasture. However the antiquity of this adaptation is unclear. We present new oxygen isotope data from the Dalmatian coast, Croatia, to test the hypothesis that Neolithic herds were seasonally transhumant. Incremental sampling of ancient animal teeth produced data that are compared with modern isotope data of water showing altitudinal variation to assess...
Identifying Animal Management Strategies in Pre-domestication Contexts (2023)
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. The concept of domestication highlights a form of human intervention in animal reproduction that is at the extreme in a continuum of human-animal relations. Despite the extreme nature of this category of interaction, domestication remains difficult to distinguish archaeologically and...
Identifying the Gaps: Prospects and Limitations of Using Pottery Collections As Archaeobotanical Data in Korea’s Neolithic (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neolithic (ca. 6000–1500 BCE) is a formative period of Korea’s prehistory that sees the beginning of plant cultivation. Although archaeobotanical research on Korea’s Neolithic began more than two decades ago, rapid development coupled with an almost total reliance on rushed rescue excavations has resulted in major...
Implications for Submerged Prehistoric Archaeology: Coastal Geomorphological Mechanisms on the Local Scale in the San Pasquale Valley, Bova Marina, Reggio Calabria (2018)
Marine reconnaissance off the coast of San Pasquale, Calabria in southern Italy revealed a dense offshore terrestrial peat deposit dating to the mid Holocene. Subsequent radiocarbon dating of samples revealed a conflict with regional relative sea level curves and local patterns of terrestrial uplift. As such, initial analysis suggests that these deposits result from a local hyperpycnal flood event and are not subaerial drowned deposits resulting from Holocene coastal evolution and rapid marine...
The Importance of Identifying Specific Obsidian Subsources on Sardinia to Interpreting Long-Distance Trade in the Neolithic Central Mediterranean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the Central Mediterranean island of Sardinia, studies have shown that the usage of obsidian from specific subsources changed over time. Human selection may have been based on their accessibility, physical properties of the raw material, and the size and quantity available. In addition, socioeconomic factors, lithic...
In and out of contact: comparing communication between sites with ceramic technology in prehistoric southern Vietnam (2016)
Contact and communication between communities in the past can be identified through the comparison of material culture. Systematic studies of ceramic technological components including morphology, fabric and decoration have indicated that certain sites were exposed to networks of interaction more consistently than others. In a comparison between An Son and Rach Nui, both located in southern Vietnam with dates and evidence of occupation during the Neolithic period, from approximately 4000-3000...
In the Reed Buckets There Is Sweet Beer: An Archaeology of Beer, Brewing, and Women in Mesopotamia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood: A Global Archaeology of Beer" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates,” the filtered beer pours into collection vats and from there into serving jars and beakers for the happy drinkers. Or so the Hymn to Ninkasi suggests. By the time the poet impressed those words into clay, beer had been brewed for generations with the practiced gestures and...
Inclusions and Innovations in Late Neolithic Pottery from the Southern Levant (2015)
Discussions of variation over time in early Near Eastern pottery production often focus on linking changes in form or surface treatment to shifts in how pots were being used, either as a functional cooking or storage container or, in some cases, as a symbolic object. More rarely, compositional characteristics (clay, temper) are examined and these too have been considered in terms of vessel use. Some tempers, for example, are thought to be beneficial for the production of cooking pots because of...
An Integrated phytolith and geochemical approach to understanding activity areas and the choice of building materials in Neolithic sites using ethnographic analysis. (2015)
The Neolithic in southwest Asia is an important period in human history which saw the advent of sedentism, agriculture, and ultimately the rise of complex societies. It is also, however, one of the most poorly understood. This is partly due to problems associated with site recognition and partly because of the lack of preservation of many forms of evidence, particularly biological. As a result, many Neolithic sites are comprised of a series of structures, the construction and function of which...