Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
176-200 (413 Records)
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...
Herbivore Dung Biomarkers: A Reference Collection for the Archaeology of Pastoral Domestic Spaces in Western and Central Mongolia (2021)
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...
Heritable Nonmetric Traits: A Study of a Bronze Age Tomb at Tell Abraq, UAE (2021)
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...
Hidden in Plain Sight: Reconstructing Landscapes of Urbanism in Northwest India (2018)
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...
High-Altitude Hunting and the Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism in Eastern Eurasia (2021)
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...
High-Density Urban Living at Middle Bronze Age Kurd Qaburstan, Iraq (2019)
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...
A Hippo Hip and and an Olive Pit (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How Richard Redding's identification of a hippopotamus hip bone catalyzed a rethinking of the Heit el-Ghurab site of 4th Dynasty (ca. 2500 BCE) settlement at the Giza Pyramids, and how central authorities mobilized and organized labor for building pyramids.
House Rules: Cultural Transmission and Egyptian Senet Games (2016)
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...
How Were Stones Used in a Bronze Age Society? A Case in the Middle Yangtze River (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Numerous previous archaeological discoveries and studies have shown that rulers from the Central Plains during the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1050 BC) were motivated to systematically construct settlements and operate in the Jianghan Area of the Middle Yangtze River drainage at least in part in order to control metal resources in the middle and lower...
Howdy Neighbour – Transgressing Borders and Peering over the Fence to Examine the Application of Isotopic Analyses to Bioarchaeology in Anatolia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope analyses contributing to archaeological research in Anatolia was a relatively late bloomer, beginning in the early 2000s and only gathering pace in the last 5-10 years. Currently research into dietary habits, subsistence practices, and mobility has...
Human-Environment Interactions: The Role of Foragers in the Development of Mobile Pastoralism in Mongolia's Desert-Steppe (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. This paper presents a research design to investigate the role of foragers in the evolution of pastoralism in Mongolia’s desert-steppe. Past efforts to understand the origins of herding have been stymied by the "steppe and sown" dichotomy that perpetuates long held stereotypes of farmers and...
Hunter-Gatherer Violence in the Middle Holocene Baikal Region: A Probable Massacre at Shamanka II (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violence was uncommon among the Middle Holocene hunter-gatherers of Siberia’s Baikal region (<5%), and lethal violence even less so (~1%). At the site of Shamanka II, however, 11 (or 85%) of 13 interred Early Bronze Age (EBA; 4970⎼3470 cal. BP) individuals exhibit evidence of...
Hunting the Helmet: Social and Practical Aspects of Building a Boar’s Tusk Helmet (2018)
From the earliest occurrence of the boar's tusk helmet from Grave Circle B at Mycenae (ca. 1650BCE) to the latest from a sub-Minoan tomb from the North Cemetery at Knossos (ca. 1000BCE) presents a span of 650 years of reverence for this important accessory of Bronze Age warriorhood. Depictions and copies of this helmet in other cultures, including in the Hittite, Egyptian, and even later Roman cultures, demonstrate its pervasive and deeply respected meaning. Helmets of this kind were known to...
Identification of Turquoises from Different Mining Areas using Lead and Strontium Isotope Composition (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. The Hekou Turquoise Mining Site in Shaanxi Province can provide significant clues to the provenance of turquoise in early China. In this study, we analyzed turquoise ore samples from other turquoise mines near Hekou Mining Site in eastern Qinling Mountains and established an origin...
Identifying pre-incineration state from heat-induced fracture and warping patterns found on human cremains in a Hungarian Bronze Age cemetery (2017)
Attempts to determine the status of human remains prior to their final deposition are complicated in the analysis of cremains. Forensic and archaeological studies, however, have advocated for the interpretation of heat-induced fracture and warping patterns as indicators of the pre-incineration state of the body and of the characteristics of the funeral fire. The purpose of this research is to examine the possible internal social structures of a Bronze Age population in the Körös region of...
Identifying the "Why" Of Ancient Engineering Choices: Materials Performance and the Production of Ceramic Bronze-Casting Molds in Zhou-Period China (2018)
Bronze ritual vessels from Shang- and Zhou-period China display a combination of features—complex, three-dimensional forms; exquisitely fine surface detail; and monumental size—that was achieved by casting in multi-part ceramic molds. The ceramic material used to form these casting molds is soft, powdery, and silica rich, making it altogether different from pottery clays in both its physical qualities and its production sequence. Why was such a material chosen? Which specific materials...
Illuminating Complex Mortuary Rituals in a Cemetery from Bronze Age Eastern Hungary (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology Project (BAKOTA) has excavated 84 burials from a Bronze Age cemetery (Békés 103) located in the Lower Körös Basin in Eastern Hungary. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the cemetery was used for several hundred years, with the most active phase between 1600 and 1280 cal BC, a time that has been associated with the...
Im(mobile) Pastoralists of the Central Steppes? Ethnohistory vs. Archaeology (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. Due to the heavy influence of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century ethnography, many researchers still consider the Late Bronze Age (LBA) (2100–1300 BC) populations of the Trans-Ural steppe/forest-steppe to be nomadic pastoralists—a situation where most or all of human population is involved in periodic movements between...
Improved Representation of Paddled Propulsion in a Deterministic Ocean Voyaging Model: Bronze Age Scandinavian Example (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here we describe the implementation of a realistic representation of paddling propulsion on a deterministic ocean voyaging computer model. Due to lack of quantified information on the impact of environmental parameters such as winds and currents on paddling, in a previous version of the...
In-Visible Periphery of Old World "Collapse": Recognizing choice and circumstance in the archaeological record of mobile pastoralists (2015)
As in many regions of the Old World, the end of the Bronze Age in southern Central Asia is marked by a prolonged period of social "collapse" toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC, during which the size, arrangement, and apparent sphere of influence of agriculturally-based population centers changed. Discussions of this period focus primarily on the loss of visible markers of social hierarchy and inter-regional trade networks, but as our collective knowledge of mobile pastoralists in Eurasian...
The Influence of Pastoral Cultivation Strategies and Novel Cuisines on Newly Introduced Crops in Central Asia during the Bronze and Iron Ages (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When crops are spread into new landscapes, communities, and their associated subsistence practices and culinary preferences, the crops undergo substantial selective pressure. This pressure can come in the form of new environmental constraints, such as a different growing season, or cultural pressure from differences in preferred taste, productivity, or...
Inscribing Behaviors on Oracle Turtle Plastrons: A New Method to Analyze Tributary Networks of Late Shang China (c. 1250 BCE–1046 BCE) (2018)
Processed from turtle shells and bovid scapulae, oracle bones were massively exploited by the ruling house of the late Shang Dynasty for divination. As opposed to traditional scholarship that holds primary interest in inscriptions engraved on these bones, I consider late Shang divination in entirety as a technological process that proceeds from the preparation and delivery of bone material via tributary networks all the way to bones’ after-use discard into pits. By switching the attention to the...
Integrating Grapevine Palaeogenomics with Archaeobotanical Methods to Explore the History of Winemaking (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genomic analyses of archaeological seeds and other plant remains are playing an increasingly important role in unravelling domestication histories. In some cases, these findings are revising longstanding interpretations developed from archaeobotanical methods, and questions remain on how archaeological and genomic methods...
The Interaction of Aesthetics and Technology between East and West, from the Perspective of Glass Beads from Xinjiang, China (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. Xinjiang is located in the crossroads of the Silk Road and connected the Central Asia, South Asia and central China. During the 2nd to 1st millennia BC, glass beads were transferred from the West Asia and South Asia to central China through the Tianshan corridor and southern edge oasis...
Interpreting the Diffusion of Bronze Mirrors in Ancient China across Time Using the S-Shaped Curve (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The s-shaped curve in the social network context is a model proposed to reveal dynamic changes over time among members in a network when accepting a new idea/product. The s-shaped curve has been mainly used in social sciences to model the diffusion of objects or ideas using current empirical data. However, it is rarely applied to archaeology because such...