Neolithic (Other Keyword)
226-250 (386 Records)
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...
Mountains of Manure: Assessing the Botanical Potential of South Indian Neolithic Ashmounds (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neolithic of southern India is notable for features known as Ashmounds, large accumulations of fired and often vitrified cattle dung. First described in the late nineteenth century, the dung-based composition of these impressive features was clearly established by the mid-twentieth century. To date, however, no...
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...
Multivocal Approaches to Sustainability in the Rejuvenation of the Archaeological Tell Site, Vésztő-Mágor (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Too often the conservation, visualization, and management of archaeological sites are afterthoughts of excavations. Heritage preservation and presentation are only considered after the trowels leave, with site managers working within the confines of what they’ve been given and the public viewing what is left . Excavation decisions – whether knowingly or...
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...
The Neolithic Bird Hunters of the Mongolian Gobi Desert (2024)
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. Archaeological surveys in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia have begun to reveal new information about the landscape distribution and seasonal movements of mobile populations in this semi-arid steppe environment on the eve of the late Holocene adoption of pastoralism. However, until recently we’ve had little information about...
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...
Neolithic Landscapes of Southern Germany: Insights from Regional Survey (2017)
Landscape archaeology in Central Europe has historically built on a foundation of high-resolution excavations of village structures. In this poster, we combine results of systematic plowzone survey carried out by two research groups to explore and reflect on the contributions of regional survey for understanding Neolithic land use in southern Germany. Surveys were conducted in two areas with contrasting archaeological records and geographic characteristics. On the southeastern Swabian Alb...
Neolithic Pastoralist Practices at Masis Blur, Armenia’s Ararat Valley (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Neolithic settlements appeared across the Southern Caucasus in the early sixth millennium BCE. Ongoing excavations, along with zooarchaeological and isotopic research, are clarifying how these communities used the landscape and managed livestock in the context of mixed farming. In this paper we present new zooarchaeological data from recent...
Neolithic Pigs and People along China's Fertile Arc: Regional Expression and Domestication (2018)
The foothills of mountain chains along river catchments, or "Hilly Flanks", have repeatedly been shown to be key to understanding the origins of agriculture throughout Eurasia. During the Neolithic, sites in the northern part of China’s Fertile Arc (see Ren et al. 2016)—showing the the earliest evidence of the cultivation of Chinese Millets—are situated along China's own "Hilly Flanks". In contrast, southern sites along the Arc cultivating rice, are located in a diverse array of landforms...
Neolithic Resource Use and Adaptation in the Eastern Gobi Desert: A Functional Analysis of Axes and Adzes (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flaked and ground stone axes and adzes first appeared in the eastern Gobi Desert at 8.0 cal BP and were incorporated into the technological package. At the same time, changes in local ecological conditions reflect a transition from continuous grass/shrub-steppe across the Mongolian Plateau to the development of dispersed patches of dune-field...
Neolithic Spread Models, Agricultural Islands and Pivotal Parameters: Impressions Gleaned from Simulating the Spread of Agriculture in the West Mediterranean (2016)
The significance of the spread of agriculture cannot be overstated and for this reason strong disagreement continues to arise over the processes responsible for the shift from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic. Four influential models have been proposed for the spread of agriculture in the west Mediterranean and can be applied to the circumstances of the Impresso-Cardial spread: the Wave of Advance Model, the Capillary Model, the Maritime Pioneer Colonization Model and the Dual Model. All four...
The Neolithic Stone beads of Nahal Hemar Cave, Israel (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) site of Nahal Hemar Cave in the Judean Desert yielded, among others, many beads made of wood, plaster, shell and stone. The study of 35 stone beads recovered at the site highlights three main inter-related aspects: a broad range of raw materials used, the workmanship of bead production according to their types, and the...
Neolithic Tales from the Eastern Mediterranean Basin: A Graduate Student’s Experience under Dr. Alan H. Simmons at the University of Nevada Las Vegas in the 1990s (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 Las Vegas Valley in southern Nevada experienced unprecedented growth in the 1990's. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) was not immune to this progress and as a result began to attract the attention of top researchers, professors, and graduate students out...
Neolithic to Bronze Age Human Impact on Island Landscapes and Faunal Communities: Exploring the Wild/Domestic Dichotomy (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper synthesizes zooarchaeological and stable isotope evidence from the eastern and western Mediterranean to consider the influence of humans on island landscapes and ecosystems from the earliest Neolithic through the Bronze Age. How did the importation of new faunal species, whether...
The Neolithic transition in Europe: Archaeology versus Genetics (2017)
There are two mechanisms of Neolithic spread: demic diffusion (dispersal of populations) and cultural diffusion (acculturation of hunter-gathterers). Archaeological data imply that demic diffusion was more important than cultural diffusion in determining the spread rate of the Neolihtic in Europe. But those results are very uncertain. We now use ancient genetic data in addition to archaeological data, and estimate the relative importance of demic and cultural diffusion. We find that demic...
The Neolithic Transition in Northern Iroquoia (2015)
While details remain debated, the general outline of the emergence of semi-permanent sedentary domestic architecture in Northern Iroquoia is well understood. Communities comprised of bark longhouses came to be associated with subsistence maize horticulture over the course of the last millennium prior to European contact. Various factors triggered periodic community relocations throughout Northern Iroquoia, migratory events that were usually short-distance but occasionally involved long-distance...
Neolithic Voyagers: Why Colonize the Mediterranean Islands—The Example from Cyprus (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The "Neolithic Revolution" in the Near East and Anatolia is the oldest known in the world. This transformative economic and social event occurred in several mainland locations, and conventional wisdom was that it did not spread to the adjacent Mediterranean islands until relatively late, essentially being a "Neolithic footnote." Cyprus has the oldest...
Neolithic vs. Late Stone Age: The Neolithic Revolution in the Horn of Africa Reconsidered (2015)
This poster assesses the applicability of the term "Neolithic" to describe the beginning of sedentism and agriculture in Ethiopia, and whether we can compare it to similar periods in other regions. The use of the term "Neolithic" has been criticized in recent years (Finlayson 2011; Zeder 2009) both for the implication that the period was one of revolution and its associated package of characteristics. This designation originally derived from the definition of the term as including the birth of...
Nephrite Jade Mapping in Southeast Asian Prehistory: Petrological and Mineralogical Study of Stone Artifacts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On-site and laboratory geochemical analyses have been carried out on jade and jade-like artifacts including unfinished pieces in the mainland of Southeast Asia by p-XRF and SEM-EDS respectively. In Vietnam, the results from more than 100 analyses show that the lingling-Os and double animal-headed...
Networks through Time: Filling in the Gaps (2015)
The Middle Neolithic circular ditched enclosure of Goseck in Central Germany was built and used during the Stichbandkeramik period. Subsequently, during the Gatersleben period, another ditched feature was constructed, which intersected the earlier enclosure. However, between these two periods, in the intervening century, during the Rössen period, the site was not in use. This temporal gap has been glossed over in narratives of the site that stress continuity. This paper will examine the...