Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
201-225 (413 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite roads and railways around the world being based on the widths of their bodies, non-human animals are now systematically excluded from much of modern western life. In some of the most human-populated areas, animals are forbidden from indoor spaces and from many private outdoor spaces. However, these carefully curated and restrictive relationships we...
The introduction of metallurgy in Sicily: preliminary data using a pXRF (2016)
Several artifacts representing the oldest metals known in Sicily (Copper to Middle Bronze Age) together with many from the Late Bronze Age have been analyzed using a portable XRF to determine their composition. These are nearly all of the early metal artifacts existing in Sicilian museums. Multiple spot analyses have been performed and averages obtained to alleviate potential heterogeneities on the surface of metals, ensuring consistency and validity of the data. Among the materials, there were...
Investigating Copper Ingot Production in the Bronze Age Mediterranean Using 3D Technologies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 1960 excavation of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC) shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya, on the southwestern coast of Turkey, revealed a ca. 1.2 ton cargo of copper ingots and tools. The metal cargo is defined by its great diversity, yet the ingot assemblage is predominantly Cypriot in origin while the tool metal derives from sources across the Mediterranean...
Investigating Geological Sources and Sociotechnical Dimensions of Mica Pottery Inclusions from Late Bronze Age (LBA, 1500–1100 BC) Fortresses in Northern Armenia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For 25 years, the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies project (Project ArAGATS) has focused on the origins, regional-scale organization, and sociopolitical dynamics among LBA hillforts in northern Armenia. This paper presents preliminary results from a pilot study of mica...
Investigating the Dietary Economy of Ancient Margiana: Ongoing Archaeobotanical Research at Togolok 1 (2300–1700 BC) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research in Central Asia has expanded greatly in the last two decades, changing much about our understanding of past subsistence strategies and lifeways throughout the broader region. Archaeobotany is a crucial tool for gaining insight into the way that human/plant relationships shape and structure society. The...
Investigating the Methods and Practice of Ritual Horse Sacrifice and Butchery in Late Bronze Age Mongolia. (2017)
Although archaeological data link late Bronze Age cultures with the emergence of mobile herding in eastern Eurasia, the practices and social function of domestic horse sacrifice remain poorly understood. We investigated slaughter and butchery evidence from 18 sacrificial horse burials from the Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, a late Bronze Age Mongolian culture linked with the first emergence of horse herding and transport in the eastern Steppe. Using digital microscopy, we analyzed each...
Investigating Wood Acquisition Strategies from Archaeological Charcoal: Implications for the Bronze Age Site of Pecica Şanţul Mare (2015)
The Bronze Age site Pecica Şanţul Mare is an important fortified tell settlement in Arad County, Romania. Situated along the river Mureş, Pecica lies within a unique resource zone between the ore rich region of the Western Carpathian Mountains and Carpathian Basin. While metal production and regional connectivity are associated with the site, it is poorly known how wood fuel for metal work was acquired. Archaeological charcoal remains are often used to reconstruct local woodland compositions of...
The Invisibility of Experience: Accessing Ancient Sensory Frameworks (2018)
While archaeological analyses that focus on the experiential and sensorial past are becoming more common, scholars continue to discuss and dispute what knowledge of the past is accessible. Without moving beyond the material remains and into the realm of the self-reflexive researcher (Hamilakis 2013: 119), this paper will demonstrate that archaeologists do not need to stray too far from their traditional methods to uncover rich evidence of past sensory lives. By drawing from the field of art...
Is the fortification always about fortress? The case of Middle Bronze Age fortified settlements in Northern Eurasia (2015)
There are 22 fortified settlements of the Middle Bronze Age discovered in Russia for last 40 years through the methods of aerial photography analysis and field excavations. All together they are known as Sintashta archeological culture of Southern Urals. The typical Sintashta settlement is usually enclosure consists of 1-4 meters deep ditch and the wall built of dirt and clay. However, the current analysis of the settlement patterning using GIS suggests that people chose the place of living...
Isotopic Analyses of Diet in Late Prehistoric Southwestern Transylvania (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southwestern Transylvania houses a rich prehistoric archaeological record, as well as abundant natural resources, including salt, tin, and some of the richest copper and gold deposits in Europe. The Mureș River, which connected prehistoric communities in Eastern and Central Europe, also flows through the region. Despite its status as an economic and...
An Israeli (real COOL) Dolmen (2018)
Excavation in the Shamir Dolmen Field (comprising over 400 dolmens), on the northern Israeli basaltic terrains, was carried out following the discovery of enigmatic rock art engravings on the ceiling of one of the largest dolmens ever recorded in the Levant. Excavation of this dolmen, covered by a basalt capstone weighing some 50 tons, revealed a secondary multi-burial (of both adults and children) rarely described in a dolmen context in Israel. Engraved into the rock ceiling above the...
Kinship and Cattle in Harappan Gujarat (2018)
Pastoralism, the production and management of livestock, was integral to the lifeways practiced by the peoples of the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 BC), South Asia’s first experiment with urban society. The integration of Gujarat (India) into the interregional flows of people, goods, and ideas that knit together the Indus Civilization, for example, is associated with the widespread adoption of pastoralism in a region that was formerly characterized by small-scale horticulturalist-hunting...
Kura-Araxes Herding Practices in Early Bronze Age Armenia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I present an analysis of Early Bronze Age (EBA) faunal remains from field investigations conducted between 1998 and 2018 in the Tsaghkahovit plain of northern Armenia by the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS). The vast majority of Project ArAGATS’s EBA fauna...
Lamenting the Dead: The Acoustic Element in Bronze Age Funerary Rituals in Syro-Mesopotamia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will employ GIS in exploring the experiential aspects of the burial process in Early Bronze Age North Mesopotamia, with a particular attention to funerary soundscapes. To investigate the potential impact of vocal and musical sound, a 10 m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) was developed, and the "System for...
Landscape and Plant Use in High Albania: New Results from the Late Neolithic to Iron Age at Gajtan and Zagorës (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2013 – 2015, the Projekti Arkeologjik i Shkodrës (PASH) conducted a regional surface survey and targeted excavation at several settlement and tumulus sites in the Shkodër province of northern Albania. Two of these settlement sites, Gajtan and Zagorës, are fortified hilltop sites that preserved intact deposits with well-preserved macrobotanical remains...
The Landscape of China’s Participation in the Bronze Age Eurasian Network (2018)
In the last decade, much has been learned about the network of interactions in Bronze Age Eurasia, and the importance of the steppe pastoralists in the creation of this network. However, the mechanisms that enabled societies in ancient China (both those bordering on and distant from the steppe) to participate in the Bronze Age Eurasian arena are still poorly understood. Based on the latest archaeological discoveries in China, this article focuses on the participation of four regions of ancient...
Landscapes of the Dead: Using GIS to Model Social Relationships in a Large Bronze Age Cemetery (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geographic Information System (GIS) technology is an important tool for examining social relationships in large horizontally stratified cemeteries. This study applies GIS-based cluster analysis to identify multiscalar patterning at the Middle Bronze Age Maros cemetery at Ostojićevo, Serbia. Three successive scalar clusters were identified: (i) primary...
Late Bronze Age in the North Caucasus – Shaping a new culture for a new millennium (2017)
After more than one millennium of mobile pastoral lifeways, the mid-2nd millennium BC witnessed the reappearance of village-based life in an area stretching from the Black Sea, across Caucasia to Anatolia and North Western Iran. Its manifestation is the emergence of stone-built dwellings clustered in small or middle-sized settlements. Concurrently, the transformation of the 3rd millennium BC mobile pastoralism into combined mountain agriculture allowed retaining a pastoral economy in spite of a...
The Late Introduction of Metals in Southern Italy: Studies from Sicily and Calabria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Metallurgy arrived quite late in Calabria, Sicily and Malta compared other regions, including the same Italian peninsula. Current hypotheses include an allogenous origin of metallurgy, brought by Aegean merchants, and an indigenous origin due to the presence of mines. The delicate state of many metals has prevented destructive analyses, but it has been...
Least Cost Path Analysis of Maritime Routes in the Ancient Aegean (2018)
The Least Cost Path analysis in ArcGIS has been a critical tool in archaeological reconstructions of movement and connectivity, but until recently these analyses have been limited to land travel. From the Neolithic onwards, sea travel was an equally important mode of transportation in the Aegean and wider Mediterranean. In this study, I utilized the Least Cost Path tool in ArcGIS to model sea travel in the Aegean. Bathymetric data and speed and direction of local wind and currents were inputs in...
Legacy Data and Ceramic Chronologies: The Case of the Gorgan Plain, Northeastern Iran (2018)
After the passage of the Iranian Antiquities Law of 1930, the Gorgan Plain in northeastern Iran was seen as one of the most promising regions in the Old World for archaeological research. Despite decades of pioneering field and laboratory research, northeastern Iran still lacks a regionally integrated ceramic chronology for significant stretches of its archaeological history, particularly the 3rd millennium BCE. While individual sequences from important sites such as Tureng Tepe and Shah Tepe...
Life within Death: Contextualizing Burial Practice at Kenan Tepe, Turkey, from the Ubaid Period to the Early Bronze Age (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kenan Tepe, Turkey, is a multi-period archaeological site that was occupied during the Ubaid period (5000–4000 BCE), the Late Chalcolithic (3360–3020 BCE), and early Bronze Age (3000–2800 BCE) (Parker and Cobb 2012). During each of these periods residents of Kenan Tepe conducted distinct burial practices. These burials included the remains of individuals...
Like a Lion, as a Man: Seals and Poetry in Minoan Crete (2018)
This paper investigates how parallels were drawn between lions and human in Bronze Age Crete, and how this parallelism potentially developed concurrently through material culture worn on the human body and oral narrative. I argue that the unique qualities of seal stones, namely their close association with human identity and their physical location on the human body, positioned them to be potent venues for asserting parallels between man and beast. I begin in the late Early Bronze Age, with a...
Linking Multiple Scales in Time and Space: Small Worlds and World-Systems Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This contribution proposes that world-systems analysis could benefit from greater consideration of a local-scale, or “small world,” perspective. These maritime and terrestrial small worlds, defined by face-to-face interaction and often...
Little Bronze Things: What They Do and How They Do It in the Early Bronze Age in NW China (2018)
Small bronze objects, some tools, others ornaments, and yet others of undetermined function, are the earliest known Bronze objects in China. Many of these objects are found in sites from Northwest China that date to the early part of the second millennium BC. Their manufacture seems to have been conducted locally on a small scale in this region, and yet the transformation of matter that their production entailed played a role in large scale transformations of society – ultimately culminating...