Bronze Age (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jess Beck. Colin Quinn. Horia Ciugudean.

The Apuseni Mountains of southwest Transylvania, Romania, are amongst the richest gold and copper procurement zones in the world. Metals from this region helped fuel the rise of inequality across Europe during Late Prehistory, and the area is also home to a rich mortuary record, with archaeological survey identifying over one hundred mounded tomb cemeteries belonging to Bronze Age communities. However, none of these cemeteries have been fully excavated and only a small sample of skeletons has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xinyi Liu.

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. Scholarly interest has been growing in an episode of trans-Eurasian exchange of agricultural systems and tangible material goods in late prehistory. The trans-regional movement of a number of artifacts, cereal crops and animals occurred within a series of transformative process that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Curtis. Peter Cobb. Ani Avagyan. Gohar Hovakimyan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This field report recounts our newly realized collaborative children’s educational workshop at the Vedi Fortress in Armenia. In June 2022, the Ararat Plain Southeast Archaeological Project (APSAP) partnered with the National Gallery of Armenia and the Armenian Heritage Development Fund to run our first “From the Field to the Museum” Summer School. Children...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Gidding. Alicia Boswell.

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we seek to emulate two different aspects of Bradley J. Parker’s career: his transition from the Near East to the Andes and his interest in the theoretical underpinnings of frontier communities. We are inspired by his work on frontiers and borderlands in our own work in these regions and use his...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Huifa Yan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Warring States Period has been regarded as an essential period in terms of the transition of political structure. This transition leaves its influence on the forms of burials and tombs. This study aims to provide a new perspective on the political transition by studying the changes of remains of the elite tombs of Chu State during the Warring State Period....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Toussaint.

This is an abstract from the "Women of Violence: Warriors, Aggressors, and Perpetrators of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mierzanowice Culture (~2400–1600 BCE) communities in the Central European Early Bronze Age buried their dead in a formalized and gendered manner, in which males and females typically assumed mirror-opposite orientations in their respective graves. Furthermore, the archetypal "warrior" grave—whether simply an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vagheesh Narasimhan.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper serves as an example of how ancient DNA (aDNA) data can provide new insight into large-scale population transformations of archaeological cultures. The details of population transformation through time in Central and South Asia have been unclear due to the lack of aDNA. To address this gap, we generated genome-wide data from 500 ancient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Kulick. Kevin Fisher. Francesco Berna.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geoarchaeological research conducted in 2019-2020 as part of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) project focused on collecting multiscalar and high-resolution geoarchaeological data from the Late Bronze Age city of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios in south-central Cyprus. The aim of the geoarchaeological project is to determine the uses of space in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute.

More than 8000 years ago, a variety of crop species began to spread across Eurasia, reaching its edges approximately 4000 years later. The chain of mountains that stretches across Central Asia constituted a geographical obstacle that slowed down the dispersal process. Special high altitude adaptive strategies were required not only by humans, but also by plants due to changes in the length of the growing season, climatic conditions, UV intensity, among other factors. Therefore, the mountain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Hanks. Roger Doonan. Nikolai Vinogradov. Elena Kupriyanova.

The combination of social, economic, and political variables that led to greater levels of sedentism and demographic growth in human societies has long been a key topic within the study of world prehistory. Indeed, the comparative study of such dynamics has been at the very core of anthropological archaeology with numerous classic case studies stemming from fieldwork in the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Near East, and China. The Eurasian steppes, a vast region stretching half way around the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pawel Dziechciarz. Dylan Kelly.

In archaeological research both non-invasive and weakly invasive methods are often employed without, or prior to, excavation. Surface collection, geophysical survey and shovel testing are the methods that have been employed at the site of Békés 103. Despite the difficulty imposed by the soil conditions and the nature of the targets themselves (cremation graves), geophysical measurements employing a variety of techniques (gradiometry, soil resistivity and electromagnetics) were applied in tandem...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Horsley.

This is an abstract from the "The Chengdu Plain Archaeology Survey (2004–2011): Highlights from the Final Report" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents a sample of the results of geophysical investigations conducted as part of the Chengdu Plain Archaeological Survey. Magnetometer surveys were undertaken at more than 20 locations to augment the results of surface collection survey and augering, helping to locate buried features as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Very small things, especially ones worn on the body, have unique positions within persons’ lives and across them. They possess their own type of temporal and material persistence, arising not from being large and formidably unmovable, but from an ability to discreetly carry on from one moment and space to another. Given their substance, significations, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul R. Duffy. Györgyi Parditka. Justine Tynan. Ádám Balázs.

The Great Hungarian Plain is densely populated with fortified tell sites dating to the second millennium BC. At the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c.1400 BC), however, these settlements were abandoned. Traditionally, archaeologists argued that locals were run off by invading Tumulus culture groups or suffered an environmental disaster. The lack of non-tell contexts and radiocarbon dates bridging this transition precluded an understanding of what changed after the tells were abandoned, and what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Igor Chechushkov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climatic conditions determine the ways in which local communities live to a great extent. The wind is responsible for the everyday life experience by bringing precipitation, moving dust and fire. The general assumption of the current research is that in the past people chose to live in relatively calm spots of the local landscapes to prevent themselves from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Yao. Zhilong Jiang.

Regions under paddy cultivation often present limits on site detection. In addition to deep plowing and continuous flooding of the fields, which intensify erosion and weathering of cultural remains, paddy fields are constructed and managed through field leveling and canal dredging. These processes raze and displace sites, leaving behind a fragmentary settlement record consisting primarily of sites defined by raised mounds and/or standing architecture. Oft used survey techniques that seek to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yong Jun Kim. Nilesh Jadhav. Eun Jin Woo. Dong Hoon Shin. Vasant Shinde.

The number of Harappan cemeteries so far systematically surveyed is far less than that of contemporary settlements. Necropolis site at Rakhigarhi (India) was reported earlier but in small scale investigation. Our investigation for the last three seasons (2013 to 2016) was thus designed for improving this lacuna. We first classified each burial and analyzed statistically. The Harappan people practiced rather humble burial custom, but few were found differently and these burials look more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie Cobb. Jess Beck. Colin Quinn. Horia Ciugudean.

Copper and gold resources from Southwestern Transylvania played a critical role in the emergence of inequality in European Late Prehistory. Communities in this metal-rich landscape, however, remain poorly understood. Though the highly visible tombs in the Apuseni Mountains where these communities buried some of their dead have been known to local archaeologists for decades, very little is known about the backdrop of health and disease in the region. Here, we present one of the first...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Iride Tomazic. Amy Nicodemus. John O'Shea.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past archaeology rarely played a role in the discussion of anthropogenic pollution. This lack of study is mainly due to the skepticism around the accurate representation of heavy metals in archaeological material as a result of diagenetic processes. In this study, we present preliminary results of a systematic selection of animal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Égüez. Jean-Luc Houle. Oula Seitsonen. Jamsranjav Bayarshaikhan.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lipid biomarkers such as alkanes, fatty acids, and steroids together with their stable carbon and hydrogen isotope ratios are nowadays leading proxies for the identification of past climate variability, human activities, and animal presence in a site. These can be extracted from modern feces, desiccated dung, and soil sediments. When applied to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Taylor. Cheryl Anderson. Debra Martin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates the use of heritable nonmetric traits as a means for assessing population variation and biological relatedness within an archaeological sample using the human skeletal tomb assemblage from the Bronze Age site of Tell Abraq (2100-2000BC). A total of 410 individuals representing all ages and both sexes were interred in the tomb. An...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Petrie. Adam Green. Hector Orengo. Ravindra Singh.

Archaeologists cannot understand the urban process based on investigations at urban centers alone. In the Beas River Landscape and Settlement Survey, Wright contributed greatly to understanding of landscapes in South Asia’s Indus civilization (2600-1900 B.C.), revealing necessity and value of integrating settlement data into broader analyses of urbanism. Research on the Indus civilization’s settlement distributions highlights the presence of an array of archaeological sites spread across a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Isaac Hart.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of herding economies prompted drastic changes to life in eastern Eurasia—situating the cold, arid steppes of Mongolia as a center of the ancient world. Although a growing body of evidence points to an important role for mountain zones in this transition, issues of archaeological preservation have prevented a clear understanding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Creekmore.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Upper Mesopotamia the Middle Bronze Age (2000 – 1600 B.C.E.) marked the regrowth of cities following the decline or collapse of cities at the end of the Early Bronze Age. Researchers question the degree of continuity in urban space across these periods and some have suggested that Middle Bronze Age cities were "hollow," containing relatively small built-up...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Walter Crist.

Egypt has long been the focus of research on ancient board games, as it provides the longest history and greatest variety of games in the ancient world. Despite this, limitations on archaeological interpretation exist because of the unprovenanced nature of the material, as well as a focus on games from tombs of the nobility and pharaohs. Increasingly, evidence from within Egypt in the form of graffiti games on monuments and on ostraca, as well as Egyptian games found in the Levant where...