Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
226-250 (413 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complex social networks or social complexity emerges from the actions and interactions of people as they pass information, goods and services. During the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, particularly on the island of Cyprus, it has been hypothesized that two actions and interactions are particularly important for...
Local and Regional Economics in Northeast China (2015)
Food production and other forms of economic activity manifest at both local and regional scales. In some instances population density within one community may lead to stress at the local scale. The region can, however, mitigate local stresses through regional exchange between small polities. In the same way that household exchange mitigates the risk of a single community, inter-community exchange mitigates risk for many communities regionally. This paper will explore both regional and local...
Local Communities in the Northeastern Frontier of the Central Plain during the late second and early first millennium BC (2015)
This paper will discuss how local communities in the northeastern frontier of China used metal artifacts and mortuary practice to articulate identity and delineate their cultural and political affiliations among themselves in the region and with polities in the Central Plain during the late second and early first millennium BC, which was a period that witnessed the rise and expansion of state powers in the Central Plain, namely, the Shang and Zhou. Previous studies examined material culture from...
Looking for Light in Ancient Egyptian Nocturnal Rituals (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the modern abundance of artificial light, it is often assumed that ancient cultures had the means and desire to illuminate the night. The paucity of artificial lighting devices from ancient Egypt challenges this assumption and has led scholars to conclude that the evidence must be there, but earlier...
Machine Learning for Chronology Building in Regional-Scale Synthesis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chronlogical control is essential for regional-scale research in order to establish contemporaneity or temporal sequences among spatially distributed assemblages. Archaeology has benefitted from advances in radiometric dating methods, as well as statistical protocols for combining dates to achive greater precision age...
Making the Exotic from the Familiar: The Source and Production of Carnelian Beads during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in 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. During the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Mongolia, communities across the region adopted mobile pastoralism and horse-riding technology. In conjunction with these changes in subsistence and mobility patterns, innovative funerary practices emerged that incorporated monumental construction and new mortuary offerings. Included in these grave...
Many Communities, Many Foods: The Economic and Political Implications of Diversified Cropping Strategies before, during, and after Urbanism in Northwest India ca. 3200–1500 BC (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate crises are raising questions about how we feed everyone in our highly urbanized modern society. Anthropological research has demonstrated that economic, political, and environmental landscapes are intricately interwoven and intersect with the diverse choices of people across all scales of society. Nowhere is this...
The Maritime Mode of Production: The Role of Seafaring in Bronze Age Societies (2018)
As exemplified by Viking and Bronze Age societies in northern Europe, we model the political dynamics of raiding, trading, and slaving as a maritime mode of production (MMP). It includes political strategies to control trade by owning boats and financing excursions, thus permitting chiefs to channel wealth flows and establish decentralized, expansive political networks. Such political institutions often form at edges of world systems, where chieftains support mobile warriors, who were...
Marshlands and Early Mesopotamian Urban Form (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta were for millennia among the largest wetland systems in Eurasia. The Gulf coast, the river delta, and marshes extended further north ca. 8000–2000 BCE than they do today. As a result, the world’s earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia may have emerged 6,000–5,000 years ago within or on the edge of wetland and...
Material Assemblage and Social Changes in Central Tibet, the Second and the First Millennium B.C. (2018)
Compared to the relatively well-researched area of Eastern Tibet Plateau, the archaeology of Central Tibet has long been neglected. This paper offers a review of academic debates concerning the site of Qugong and analyzed the newly found materials in Bangga and Changguogou site. Based on the available materials and 14C dating data, I here propose a primary chronological framework in Central Tibet and revealed the cultural affiliations of Central Tibet with Central Asia, as well as the cultural...
Material Properties, Sensory Experience, and Production Techniques in Early Chinese Bronze Casting (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Craft and Technology: Knowledge of the Ancient Chinese Artisans" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extraordinary bronze ritual vessels of Shang- and Zhou-period China were produced by casting in multi-part ceramic molds. Laboratory analysis of casting-mold fragments has found that these molds were made from an unusual ceramic material—a paste that was quartz-rich, clay-poor, highly porous, and therefore quite unlike...
Meat or Grains: Compound Specific Carbon Isotope Analysis along the Northern Edge of the Tibetan Plateau (2018)
Various foothills, oases and valleys along the north edge of the Tibetan Plateau played important roles in the process of food globalization in prehistory. These are the key corridors that brought southwest Asian animals along with the western grains into China and Chinese cereals to the West. Recent research demonstrates that broomcorn and foxtail millet (both C4 plants) were the key staple food in this region during the third and second millennium BC, but it remains unclear to what degree...
Mental topographies of ancient Mesopotamia: textual perspectives on learned and lived highland-lowland interactions (2015)
Textual sources from southern Iraq’s early historical periods constitute a surprisingly rich body of material for exploring highland-lowland interactions in ancient southwest Asia. Cuneiform inscriptions typically convey only one perspective on these interactions, namely, that of the elite inhabitants of city-states and territorial polities of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium. However, these decidedly one-sided representations were hardly monolithic, and in this paper I explore the various...
Metal and vitreous production technologies at the Early Bronze Age Resuloğlu (Central Anatolia, Turkey) (2018)
Modern day Çorum is the homeland of the Hatti people, the culture that later formed the Hittite Empire. Resuloğlu, dated to the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2500–2100 BC), is one of the few Hatti sites being systematically excavated. The site, located on a hilltop near the Delice River, consists of a cemetery area and settlement that spreads over two opposing–once connected–ridges with numerous extraordinary metal and vitreous artifacts. The settlement exemplifies well the self-sustaining pre-Hittite...
Metallic Motivations? Using GIS to Determine the Role of Metal and Mineral Resources in Changing Settlement Location Preferences between the Bronze and Iron Ages in Evora, Portugal (2200 BCE–400 CE) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bronze Age settlements in the Evora district of Portugal are typically located in rocky terrain with an apparent preference for locations in the highlands. During the Iron Age we see a shift of this settlement pattern, as highland sites are abandoned and new settlements appear at lower altitudes. Was the initial selection of highland sites influenced by the...
The Metallurgical Cycle and Human Responses to Material Fatigue (2018)
Innovations in metallurgy had and continue to have significant and transformative effects on society. From mineral exploration and mining to primary metal production, manufacturing, and consumption across a range of social contexts, metallurgy influenced a wide range of distinctly human conditions. However, while metals are particularly transmutable, they also rapidly corrode back into increasingly stable mineral compounds in processes that people tried to mitigate and often unsuccessfully...
A Metallurgical Study of Early Bronzes from Northern Vietnam: Some Thoughts on Methodology, Local Practices and Inter-regional Interaction (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of the metallurgical analysis of 43 fragments of bronze artifacts recovered from Bronze Age sites in northern Vietnam. It represents the largest systematic study undertaken so far of early north Vietnamese bronzes using a range of archeo-metallurgical techniques. The artifacts, which are...
Metallurgy in the Arc: Technological Choice and Resource Management Strategy during the Late Shang Period (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. The concept of the Arc, proposed in 1980s by Tong Enzheng and further developed by J. Rawson in the last 10 years, refers to the vast landscape stretching from northeast to southwest China. Its unique geography incorporates both pastoralism and agriculture, vital to the communication between the Eurasian Steppe to the Central Plains of China in...
Micromorphology of Earthen Architecture at Palaikastro, Crete (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent geoarchaeological studies of earthen architecture have demonstrated the social and environmental information that may be gained from combined macroscopic, microscopic, and elemental analyses of mudbricks and degraded building materials. Micromorphology can elucidate construction...
Microstratigraphic and Geochemical Contributions to the Study of the Burial Practices and Taphonomy of the Mycenaean Shaft Grave of the ‘Griffin Warrior’, Pylos, Greece (2018)
Results of a microstratigraphic and geochemical approach are presented here in reference to study of the Mycenaean ‘Griffin Warrior’ shaft grave at ancient Pylos. Soil and sediment micromorphology are used to address questions concerning the preparation of the tomb, the mode of corpse deposition, and taphonomy of the burial. Processes and activities such as the preparation and configuration of the floor and other earthen constructions inside the tomb are considered, as well as the rapidity of...
Middle Bronze Age Animal Economies: Transitions at Pecica Santul Mare (Romania) (2015)
The Bronze Age is a period of fundamental social and technological changes in Europe, including the emergence of more complex political and economic systems. Pecica "Şanțul Mare," a large tell located in the Carpathian Basin (Romania), provides an ideal case study of economic reorganization throughout the course of the Middle Bronze Age (MBA), when it came to rise as a regional center. The Middle Bronze Age was an era of more centralized control over animal production and specialized horse...
Migrant and Diaspora Communities in Ancient Kutch and Saurashtra (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two categories of archaeological sites have been identified in the third and second millennia CE Saurashtra, viz. Indus and Local Chalcolithic, a distinction based on architecture, artifacts, nature, and the location of settlements. So far, the constructed narrative has been framed in...
The Mind of an Artisan in Early China: A Museum Collection Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Craft and Technology: Knowledge of the Ancient Chinese Artisans" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study aims to investigate the different ways artisans in early China (up to the 3rd century) learned their crafts, in order to better understand how certain types of artifacts such as pottery and bronze were made, and how new styles and designs emerged. In early China, craftsmanship was usually inherited through...
Minoans at Aghios Nikolaos? Preliminary Results of the Khavania Topographical and Architectural Mapping Project (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of the Khavania Topographical and Architectural Mapping Project (2019), whose primary objective was to document all natural and anthropogenic features at the coastal site of Khavania, East Crete. Exploration of the eastern and southern shores of the Mirabello Bay has produced abundant evidence for cultural...
Mix, Mold, Fire! An Exploration of the Chaine Operatoire through the Eyes of an Apprentice Potter (2018)
Pottery manufacturing in Early Bronze Age (EBA) Anatolia witnessed a host of technical innovations that transformed what had been a small-scale domestic activity into a specialist craft. At the proto-urban village of Seyitömer Höyük, dedicated pottery workshops appeared in the EBIII period (ca. 2250-2200 BCE), along with a suite of technical innovations, such as pottery molds, clay mixing pits, and clusters of pottery kilns. These advances allowed potters to manufacture more vessels with less...