Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
251-275 (413 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While fascination with archaeology is commonplace among children, family media content often focuses on problematic narratives of treasure hunting. This presents a need for archaeologists to reach out to young audiences with a more balanced narrative - one that conveys the value of heritage resources and counteracts the damaging perception of archaeologists as...
Mobility and Animal Economy in the Early Nuragic Culture: A Case Study from South-Central Sardinia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origins of Sardinia’s Bronze Age Nuragic Culture remain poorly understood. Few early Nuragic sites have been systemically excavated and published, making it difficult to assess the social, political, and economic processes that took place in the Middle Bronze Age and laid the foundations for the culture’s Late...
Mobility and Migration as Ecological Processes in Ancient Eurasia (2018)
New research in the field of aDNA has re-invigorated debates about migrations across Eurasia in prehistory. Emerging data in this field demands that we interrogate how mobility and migration from an ecological and demographic perspective, since these factors influence our interpretation of the still emerging genetic data. In this paper I present the archaeological conditions of the Eurasian steppe ca. 3000-2000 BCE applied to a spatial model with the goal of generating a more complex...
Modeling Maritime Travel in the Bronze Age Cyclades (Greece) (2017)
In this paper, I model maritime connections in the central Cyclades (Greece) to better understand small world network interactions during the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3100-2000 BCE). Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), I create a cost raster of local and seasonal wind and wave patterns in the Aegean. Based on this, I generate an anisotropic model of the time it takes to sail outward from various settlements. When compared with ethnographic and archaeological evidence about travel times for...
Modeling the Changes in the Surface Processes at Arslantepe (Malatya) during the Early Bronze Age-I (ca. 5000–4750 cal. BP) (2018)
Agent-based modeling of land use not only illustrates how ancient production mechanisms evolve, but such models also have the power to reconstruct changes in spatio-temporal changes in the dynamics of surface processes in relation with the changes in climatic conditions and varying type and intensity of human land use. Early Bronze Age-I at Arslantepe represents a time period when the paleoclimatic dynamics changed towards more arid conditions while the economy of the site shifted from intensive...
Modes of Labor Organization and Variations of Pastoral Economies across East Asia during the Second Millennium BCE (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been considerable recent momentum in documenting pastoral communities in the past who engaged with multi-resource subsistence strategies, including both husbandry and cultivation. This paper explores the potential conceptual conflict between cultivation and pastoral activities in the context of labour budget and surplus accumulation....
The Monumentalization of Ma’at in the Tomb of Amenemhet: The Role of Text and Image in a System Approach to the Interpretation of Middle Kingdom Tombs (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Receiving little scholarly attention to date, most prior work on the tomb of Amenemhet at Beni Hasan has either focused on the translation of the titles and autobiography inscribed in and around the door jamb or on the description of the tomb scenes and accompanying decorations. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of this richly decorated structure,...
Monuments in Bronze Age Mongolian Kinscapes (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. Tim Ingold’s (1993) work “The Temporality of the Landscape” introduced us to the concept of taskscapes, in which an array of tasks, overlapping and interlocking, work to create a specific place in the larger landscape. I am now introducing another innovative “scape,” one used...
Mountain, Steppes, and Barley: GIS Modeling of Human Environmental Interactions In the Armenian Highlands during the Bronze and Iron Ages (2018)
This poster investigates how Bronze and Iron Age communities around Mount Aragats, in central Armenia, managed their grassland environment through their subsistence strategies. I suggest that these distinct social and political societies not only participated in constructing a landscape of domestic cereal grains, such as barley and wheat, but also were participants in the ecology of this open mountain steppe environment dominated by Poaceae, Chenopodiaceae, and Artemisia. I investigate how the...
A Moving Taskscape in the Late Bronze Age Argolid, Greece (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In past pre-industrial societies featuring large-scale building projects, extensive manual labour was invested during the entire chaîne opératoire of construction. This report focuses instead on the cost of multiple labour activities during the 13th century BCE in the Aegean Late Bronze Age. It aims to move “beyond the calculation of average and peak...
A Multi-isotope Approach to Hunter-Gatherer Mobility and Microregional Connectivity in Middle Holocene Cis-Baikal, Southern Siberia (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. Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and oxygen (δ18O) isotopic variability in the environment is commonly used in archaeology to study provenance and mobility in the past. The interpretation of 87Sr/86Sr and δ18O isotopic values in humans, typically measured in dental enamel, relies on a comparison...
A Multiscalar Geospatial Study of Bronze Age Landscapes in the Trans-Urals (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. The Late Bronze Age (2100–1400 BCE) of the Ural-Tobol interfluve saw the emergence and decline of proto-urban fortified settlements occupied by pastoralists and metallurgists. These sites have been interpreted as centers for military defense, ritual-political nodes, strategic centers to protect natural resources or avoid...
Munsell vs. Hounsfield? A methodological comparison in assessing cremation temperatures of human bone (2016)
The identification of the temperature at which bone was burned is an important technique for both archaeological and forensic applications that deal with cremated skeletal material. Known color changes in burned bone can be systematically quantified using a Munsell Soil Color Book and associated with known temperature ranges at which the material was burned. Non-invasive techniques, such as computed tomography (CT) scanning may be able to provide analogous information for archaeological material...
Networks of Social Stability in the Mediterranean Bronze Age (2016)
Certain social systems do not become more complex. They remain stable for considerable periods of time despite constant environmental and cultural change, a fact that remains a puzzle in archaeology. Research by Iberian archaeologists indicates that the Valencian Bronze Age in Mediterranean Spain may be such a case where material homogeneity represents a social system lasting with little change for nearly 700 years (BC 2200-1500). This trend stands in stark contrast to the complex social changes...
A New Approach to the Anyang Hsi-Pei-Kang Late Shang Royal Cemetery: A Social Archaeological Perspective (2018)
This presentation argues that the decision of the locations of the so-called royal tombs of the Anyang Hsi-Pei-Kang cemetery involved various social-strategic concerns. Although badly robbed, the excavations of the tombs yielded rich grave good assemblages, allowing archaeologists to approach to various elements of the theocratic authority of the late Shang kings. The reconstruction of the formation process of the cemetery has been attempted in the hope that the tombs can be assigned to the...
New Identities and Changing Funerary Practices in the Mid–Late 2nd Millennium BC in the Carpathian Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from Middle to Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 – 1300 BC) in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement, and societal organization. While the narratives have somewhat shifted from the traditional model that primarily associated these changes with the arrival of the Tumulus culture population, and...
New Insights into Bronze Age Ceramic Production in Northwestern China: Petrographic Analysis of Qijia and Shajing Materials from the Andersson Collections (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The late Neolithic to late Bronze Age periods (ca. 2300–400 BCE) in what is now northwestern China was a time of significant technological and social change. Based on limited excavation and survey, it has been suggested that major changes took place in subsistence technologies, including a potential shift from sedentary farming to mobile herding, as...
A New Kingdom Domestic Environment at South Karnak: Preliminary Interpretation of Findings at the Mut Precinct and Their Relation to Other New Kingdom Domestic Sites (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2005 and from 2018 to 2020, the Johns Hopkins University Expedition at the Mut Precinct in Luxor (ancient Thebes), Egypt, unearthed New Kingdom domestic material, preliminarily dated to the first half of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The findings included a considerable number of articulated, mainly red painted, mud brick features in close proximity to two column...
A New Method for Monitoring Socio-Economic Changes through Settlement Placement (2018)
There is a recursive relationship between socio-economic institutions and the environment. Decisions about where to place settlements in a landscape were informed by existing economic institutions, but placement of sites in turn effected how social and economic institutions were organized. In this paper, I present a new GIS-based method for quantifying socio-economic organization and change in prehistoric societies. Catchment analyses, as employed in this study, define the availability of...
New Revelations on Mediterranean Bronze Age Iberia through Network Inference (2019)
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. The Valencian Bronze Age, located in the modern-day province of Valencia, Spain is an overlooked player in Mediterranean prehistory. The inhabitants are the indigenous peoples and precursors to the Iberians, so famously cited by the Romans, yet so little cited despite being demonstrably connected to the trends of...
New Solutions to Old Challenges: Methods and Results from Project ArAGATS’ Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey (KVAS) Project, Northwestern Armenia (2015-17) (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. The South Caucasus witnessed multiple long-term shifts in settlement systems, social organization, and sociopolitics from the Paleolithic and the close of the Bronze Age. Throughout this long history, local environments and human landscapes served as important...
No Aryans Needed: Toward explaining the distribution of Burnished Grey Ware Ceramics of the Third Millennium in Northeastern Iran (2015)
The Gorgan Plain in Iran has long been considered to be an important part of the northern frontier of the Ancient Near East. Only recently, however, has this region been considered a center of complex society in its own right during the third millennium BCE. While no society in this frontier zone would achieve literate statehood until much later, there is nevertheless mounting evidence that the societies of northeastern Iran developed incipient urbanism, craft specialization, and organized...
A novel method to hypothesize the movements of archaeological metal: a case study on the bronze metallurgy in the central Eurasian Steppe Belt by the second millennium BC (2015)
Traditionally, archaeometallurgists have been focusing on the provenance of metal which assumes a direct linkage between the chemistry of metal ores and metal objects. On the basis of this assumption, they have attempted to reconstruct the flow of raw material across regions/cultures. However, this approach is potentially flawed, since the recycling of metal would alter the initial composition of objects, making the straightforward comparison of metal and ore chemistry problematic. Rather than...
Obsidian Source Selection in the Early Bronze Age Cyclades (2015)
While the obsidian used by southern Aegean prehistoric communities has long been known to derive primarily from Melos, there has been little investigation regarding the relative importance of the two Melian quarries – Sta Nychia and Dhemenegaki. This study employed portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry to investigate this question and begin to map regional traditions of obsidian source selection during the 3rd millennium BC. The 715 artifacts analyzed derive from 11 Early Bronze I - late...
Olive Oil and Urbanism: Specialized Production in late 4th millennium South-West Asia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Early Bronze Age (3800 – 2000 BCE) southern Levantine agricultural infrastructure developed on a region-wide scale to facilitate the accumulation of surpluses in the newly emerging urban landscape. Olive oil grew to be an important staple and luxury product. This discussion focuses on an EB IB (3300-3050 BCE) olive oil production site in...