Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
26-50 (413 Records)
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 Shang Dynasty-era site of Taijiasi was excavated from 2014 to 2017. Excavations revealed many remains of bronze casting and bone-tool manufacture. This paper focuses on the arrangement of the two different kinds of handicraft. Along with analysis of other house and sacrificial remains, archaeologists can investigate the...
Artifact Density and Population Density in Bronze Age China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A common method of estimating population is to multiply a settlement area by an occupational density. Empirical studies show that occupational density generally increases with settlement size but estimating occupational density when structural remains are not...
Assessing Connections between the Spoked Wheel and Bronze Age Elite Social Identities (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The wheel may be the greatest, and most enduring, technological innovation in human history. Certainly, the wheel transformed the potential and efficacy of transportation technologies, trade and exchange systems, not to mention human mobility. The innovation of the wheel produced...
Assessing the Correlation between Bone Artifacts and Body Part Profiles: A Case Study from the Central Anatolian Site of Kaman-Kalehöyük (2018)
This paper investigates the production of bone artifacts during the Bronze Age (ca. 3000-1200 BCE) at the central Anatolian site of Kaman-Kalehöyük. At this time, small agrarian societies transformed into more complex polities and states, which gave way to a more centralized and specialized market economy. These transformations in sociopolitical and economic organization resulted in other changes as well. For example, animal exploitation patterns began to reflect a more regulated economy to meet...
Back to the Earth: Construction and Closure of a Late Shang Dynasty Structure. (2017)
Excavations at the locus of Tongle Huayuen in the Late Shang Dynast (ca. 1250-1046 B.C.E.) capital site of Yinxu, near the modern city of Anyang, uncovered the remains of a small aboveground earthen structure (2015ALNF1). The recovery of wall and ceiling remains, much of which displayed considerable fire-reddening, from refuse pits associated with building foundations provided the opportunity to examine non-elite, non-palatial architecture in greater detail than has generally been possible at...
Banqueting with Tutankhamun: A Case Study in Determining the Function and Meaning of an Unprovenanced Artifact (2018)
A striking example of the sophistication of the vitreous materials industry at the time it was produced, a faience bead depicting Tutankhamun drinking from a white lotus chalice possesses tremendous symbolic meaning that reflects the mores of the ancient Egyptian culture of the time. Although a published piece from the Eton College Collection, this is the first time extensive research has been performed on this unprovenanced artifact bought on the antiquities market in the late 1800s. Production...
Bappir: The Ancient Mesopotamian Brewer's Best Friend (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bappir (Sumerian: "beer bread") was a ubiquitous ingredient in ancient Mesopotamian beer brewing for millennia. However, little is known about exactly what bappir was or how it was used. Nevertheless, the scant evidence available from contemporary texts, such as the second-millennium BCE "Hymn to Ninkasi," have...
Becoming Cypriot: Identity Formation, Negotiation and Renegotiation on Bronze Age Cyprus (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. Work on Cypriot identity has a long history, beginning with the identification of the first Cypriots during the Neolithic. This presentation continues on in the direction begun by Alan Simmons at Ais Giorkis of examining physical remains to understand what it meant to...
Beyond Research Design: Digital Resource Management for the Next Generation (2018)
Digital technologies in the field of archaeology have often been promoted as a tool enhancing productivity and efficiency, usually implying that the immediate digital recording of data would allow for the excavation of greater volumes and covering larger areas. Moreover, the strength of Paperless Archaeology comes with the enabling of immediate dissemination of observable data while breaking up the ‘sealed’ relationship between the raw data and the First Interpreter. What remains less...
Beyond the Final Frontier: Time and Materiality in the Peripheralization of Bronze Age Eurasian Steppe Pastoral Societies (2018)
Archaeologists studying prehistoric Eurasian steppe pastoral lifeways often seek inclusion into comparative research of urbanism, craft production, and complexity. Even as these studies contribute valuable information, they also reify their place in the intellectual periphery of archaeological inquiry. This peripheralization is due to several factors. First, the Eurasian steppe is perhaps unwittingly conceptualized as a relatively timeless socio-geographical periphery to "state-level" social...
Beyond the Knossian State: Urban Economy and Society at the East Cretan Site of Palaikastro (2024)
This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In scholarship on the Bronze Age Aegean, there is a robust conjunction of palace, town, and state. If we take the case of Knossos, then the presumed central authority represented by its palatial complex, and its surrounding town covering 100 ha, are generally thought to imply an associated territory under...
Bioarchaeological Analysis of Bronze Age Populations in Xiaohe Cemetery Using Dental Nonmetric Traits (2016)
The archaeological site of Xiaohe cemetery (Cal. 3980 to 3540 years BP), one of the earliest sites in Lop Nur Desert of Xinjiang, China has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to its well-preserved organic materials, such as mummified human remains. However, questions of the regional diversity of populations are still not well understood, as few detailed researches have been undertaken. This study utilizes 17 dental morphological traits to assess the phenetic relationships...
A Bioarchaeological Approach to Contested Mountain Landscapes in Transylvania’s Golden Quadrangle (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we introduce the agenda for the session Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes. Mountains and high altitude areas are ideal spaces where archaeologists can examine the relationship between social action and the environment. As this session will show, the study of human remains must be situated with a...
A Bioarcheological Study of a Trepanation Case with Special Reference to the Medical Care System during the Western Zhou Dynasty China (1045–771 BCE) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Therapeutic craniotomy is a kind of artificial trepanation used for treating head injuries. In this study, a skull with signs of trauma and trepanation from a young adult female who lived 3,000 years ago was assessed in the context of medical care systems and a policy of benevolence during the time. A blunt force assault on the left temporal bone induced a...
The Black Sea as a Fluid Frontier: Connectivity, Integration, and Disarticulation from the Fourth to First Millennium BCE (2017)
Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly attention to the Black Sea, a region often considered peripheral to better known "cores" of cultural activity, such as the Mediterranean, Europe, the Near East, and even the Caucasus. Challenging conventional views of the Black Sea as largely disarticulated prior to the arrival of Greek colonists in the 7th Century BCE, this paper argues that ongoing, informal networks of interaction existed across the region during the previous millennia,...
Bone calcination of different age groups in cremations from Bronze Age Hungary (2017)
Bronze Age Hungary saw the advancement of trade which may have been a cause of the movement from egalitarian societies to more complex societies with increasing social inequality. Social inequality between regions in Hungary may be reflected in variation among funeral customs. Excavations from Békés 103, a Bronze Age cemetery in south-eastern Hungary, have uncovered 68 burials, most of which are cremations. This study focuses on color analysis (identified by Munsell Soil Color Charts) of the...
Bone Color as a Tool to Interpret Differing Cremation Patterns in 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...
Borderland Processes and the Question of BMAC in NE Iran (2018)
How frontiers and borders are conceptualized in archaeology is critically influenced by the approaches and perspectives in culture contact research. Absence of written documents from Bronze Age Central Asia severely limits the application of such theories. The nature of the Bronze Age civilization of Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia, and its dispersion to neighboring NE Iran has been a long-lasting question in study of Prehistoric Western Asia. This paper aims to...
Bronze Age Crucibles in China: A Unique Technological Tradition and its Cultural Implications (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. Most studies of early metallurgy in China have focused on style, manufacturing techniques and alloy compositions of bronze artefacts. In rare circumstances, other sections of the bronze production Chaîne opératoire such mining, smelting and metal processing are considered. This research concentrates on early bronze...
Bronze Age Economic Transitions in Western Mongolia (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. Although the late Holocene saw tremendous changes in foodways across the eastern Eurasian steppe, poor preservation of organic and faunal remains make it challenging to trace important changes like the introduction of pastoralism during the Bronze Age and beyond. Here we present preliminary results from two archaeological...
Bronze Age Economy and Rituals at Krasnosamarskoe in the Russian Steppes (2017)
The final report of the Samara Valley Project (SVP), a U.S.-Russian archaeological investigation conducted between 1995 and 2002 in the Samara Oblast in central Russia, was published in June 2016. The SVP explored the changing organization and subsistence resources of pastoral steppe economies from the Eneolithic (4500BC) through the Late Bronze Age (1900-1200BC) across the steppe and river valley landscape in the middle Volga region. Particular attention focuses on the role of agriculture...
Bronze Age Transitions in Their Own Words: Central Asian Interfaces (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Loanword analysis is a unique contribution of historical linguistics to our understanding of prehistoric cultural interfaces. As language reflects the lives of its speakers, the substantiation of loanwords draws on the composite evidence from linguistic as well as archaeology and...
The Bronze and Iron Age Sites Saridjar and Karim Berdy, Tajikistan (2017)
The Late Bronze Age site of Saridjar was discovered during a survey of the northern Yakhsu valley in 2010. Excavations in 2012, in 2013, 2015 and in 2016 prove that we are dealing with a 200 x 200 m large settlement with at least three construction phases. The proportion of the hand-made ceramics in all levels varies between 80 and 90%. Only occasionally wheel-made ware appears. Andronovo pottery of the Federovo phase is present in small numbers. At Karimberdy nearly all the pottery was...
Bronze and Iron Age Urban Ecology in the Galilee (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromammal remains have proven to be successful proxies for conducting zooarchaeological research and reconstructing paleoenvironmental conditions in the Levant. Their success as a palaeoecological proxy is due to their sensitivity to climatic change, specific ecological niche, and low rate of human interaction. While there is abundant research on...
Bronzes, Mortuary Ritual and the Rise of Political Power in the NE Frontier of Ancient China: A case study of Upper Xiajiadian Burials (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Early Chinese Borderland Cultures and Archaeological Materials" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study focuses on manipulation of bronzes of different styles, and mortuary rituals overall, during in the emergence of political power in the northeastern frontier of ancient China. Data are presented on three richly furnished burials M101 at Nanshan’gen and M8501 and M9601 at Xiaoheishigou of the...