Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
326-350 (413 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in southwest China, Sanxingdui is well-known for its outstanding and unique bronzes as well as gold, jade, and other high-value artifacts. However, the origin and circulation of these precious resources have not been disclosed. The author believes that the strategic location contributed greatly to the prosperity of Sanxingdui. It was...
Resource, Transportation and the Political Landscape of the Chinese Bronze Age (2018)
The political landscape of the Chinese Bronze Age was characterized by controlling the key resource situated in the distant regions from the Luoyang Basin. The study of key natural resources and their transportation networks should therefore be an important facet of research into state formation during the Chinese Bronze Age. The extraction and transportation of key resource, and its relationship with the cultural landscape addresses the basic political framework of the states in Early China....
Rethinking Caprines-As-Capital: Pastoralism and the Low-Power States of Early Mesopotamia (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. In ancient Mesopotamia, animal husbandry was intimately bound up with the process of state making. The twin institutional powers of palace and temple managed enormous herds of sheep and goats. But were these animals mere wealth-on-the-hoof, staple goods supporting a classic system of staple finance? Or were they something else, operating...
Rethinking Prehistoric Hillforts in the Eastern Adriatic from a Human Behavioral Ecology Perspective (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia and stretching for kilometers inland and along the shores of the Eastern Adriatic are massive drystone ramparts and enclosures that litter hilltops. These structures are known as hillforts, are poorly understood, and are colloquially assumed to date to the Iron Age, as there is scant settlement evidence in the area dating to...
Revealing the Local: A Look Inwards at the Archaeology of Southeastern Arabia (2018)
Rita Wright’s valuable contributions to the archaeology of urbanism and holistic, multi-scalar approaches to settlement patterns is well-attested in her survey work along the Beas River Valley. This paper picks up these themes in a different region of the interconnected Bronze Age world that has been the focus of her research—ancient Oman. Known as Magan in Mesopotamian texts, a considerable amount of research has been conducted on Bronze Age Oman by focusing on its external connections to...
Ritual Performances in and around Caves in Bronze Age Sardinia (2018)
This paper understands performance as an embodied, site-specific and temporary event. It consequently emphasizes the diversity of ritual performances identifiable archaeologically, not only in the context of different types of cave and rock-shelter, but also between these and other types of site in the landscape. In doing so, the paper evaluates the liminality of these places and ritual performances, which were – to varying degrees – separated spatially, temporally and symbolically from the rest...
Rock Art and Archaeology in the Mongolian Altai, Part 1 (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. Petroglyph research and archaeology provide different avenues into the past. Commonly viewed as distinct disciplines, they have looked ill-suited to integration (Jacobson 2023). This specific task, however, was a focus of a National Endowment for the Humanities-supported field project conducted by East Tennessee State...
Rock Art, Warfare and Long Distance Trade (2017)
For most of the twentieth century the Bronze Age rock art in Southern Scandinavia has been seen as a manifestation of an agrarian ‘cultic’ ideology in the landscape. In this context the dominant ship image and the armed humans have been perceived as abstract religious icons, not as active symbols relating to real praxis in the landscape. Whilst violence and war related social and ritual traits indeed are common features in the Scandinavian rock art from the Bronze Age and the violence on the...
Rogue utopians or bumpkins on the margin? Bronze Age mortuary customs in the marshlands of the Great Hungarian Plain (2016)
Many archaeologists argue that the emergence of a social elite in the Bronze Age of the Great Hungarian Plain is due to the parallel appearance of a specialized trade network they were able to control. This poster focuses on the burial customs at the Békés 103 site, a Bronze Age cemetery in Eastern Hungary. This area saw growth in population, the intensification of farming, and increases in metal production during the Bronze Age, but the settlements lack any evidence for social hierarchy. Do...
The Role of Groundwater and Sinkholes on Bronze and Iron Age Settlement Patterns in Sistan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have leaned heavily on fluctuations in the channels of the Helmand River to explain the rise of Shahr-i Sokhta and the Helmand Civilization during the third millennium in the Sistan basin between Afghanistan and Iran, the subsequent abandonment of the region, and the return of complex settlement in the mid-first millennium BCE. Recent...
The Role of Pastoralists and ‘Operational Complexity’ in Shaping the Materiality of Trans-Eurasian Exchange (2018)
For decades, descriptions of prehistoric Eurasian pastoral societies would present ceramic typologies as material evidence for macro scale economic, social, and ideological cohesion – and trans-Eurasian interaction. However, recent investigations that focus more on human-environment interactions and domestic economies reveal a more dynamic and varied past in micro-regions of Eurasia. Pastoral strategies dating to the 3rd-2nd millennium BCE were regionally diverse, and societies were engaged in...
Running with the Mules: Integrating Zooarchaeological, Archaeological and Textural Evidence to Reconstruct the Exploitation of Equids in Southwest Asia (2018)
The equid had a vital role in animal economy in Southwest Asia, whether as a wild animal providing primary/secondary products to prehistoric communities, or as a domestic source of energy which supported war affairs and trade during historic periods. Reconstructing the dynamics of humans and the four-equid species, which were present in the region, is a complicated endeavor due to the paucity of skeletal evidence in faunal assemblages; the difficulties in distinguishing morphological traits to...
The Salcombe Bronze Age Wreck (2013)
Evidence for a submerged middle Bronze Age site close to Salcombe in South Devon was first discovered in 1977 and worked on by Keith Muckelroy prior to his untimely death in 1980. In 2004 the South West Maritime Archaeology group discovered more Bronze Age material close to the 1977 finds and work by the group in conjunction with the British Museum, Bournemouth University and the University of Oxford and led to the discovery of over 320 Bronze Age finds which includes tools and weapons, metal...
Salutary Failures: Bronze Age Metallurgists in China and Their Faulty Seams (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Creativity and imagination are subjects which do not often appear in the archaeology of craft. Though archaeologists study innovation in relation to a craft’s technological developments and discoveries, we approach such novelties as progress bound rather than creative pursuits. Craft workers are, after all, toiling for other people in...
Scientific Analysis of Metals from the Yinsuodao Site, Yunnan Province (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. Up to now, the Yinsuodao site is one of the earliest Bronze Age sites known in Yunnan Province. This work will present the results of metallographic and lead isotope analyses of a number of metals discovered at this site. The metallographic studies suggest that the metal technology at Yinsuodao represents...
Seaways to Complexity. Sociopolitical Strategies in Northwestern Scandinavia in the Early Bronze Age (2018)
Along the northwestern coast of Scandinavia the reliance and utilisation of the sea set the stage for a more advanced sociopolitical organization. The technological innovations prompted by the Late Neolithic (i.e. ship technology), turned the sea into a connective arena of interaction and trade. This is seen with the widespread distribution of finely crafted Jutish flint daggers from Late Neolithic I, followed by a steady increase of metal, burial mounds, and settlement sites in Late Neolithic...
Settlement Construction and Craft Production: Recent Discoveries at the Panlongcheng Site (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 Panlongcheng site was the largest urban settlement in the middle Yangtze River during the Xia and early Shang period (1500–1300 BC). In recent years, the joint archaeological expedition has carried out archaeological excavation at the Yangjianwan North and Wangjiazui locus of the Panlongcheng site. The new discoveries in the two loci reveal the...
Settlement Persistence in Northwestern Mongolia: Archaeological and Paleoenvironmental Insights from the Long-Term Occupation Site ZK513 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mongolian Bronze Age (2500–700 BCE) was a period of greater social interaction and important transformations (e.g., the adoption of domestic livestock herding and intensification to widespread mobile, mounted pastoralism) that prompted social inequality and the formation of the first nomadic states. What is known...
Settlement Strategies and Environmental Features in the Sardinian Bronze Age: a Remote Sensing Approach. (2015)
In this paper, we provide a remote sensing approach for the analysis of the settlement patterns of the Nuragic civilization, using data from Landsat 7 ETM+ in a sample area of Sardinia (Gallura). By evaluating archaeological and geological data through remote sensing imagery, we outline a territorial characterization to identify patterns in the settlement choices of the Bronze Age communities, through the use of Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Statistical Analysis. The applied method...
Shang Soundscapes (2018)
Shang (c. 1600 – 1046 BCE) elites were expert manipulators of soundscape. The intimacy of the relationship between music and authority during Bronze Age China has been well established, bronze bells having served as crucial markers of status and political prestige. Before the codification of the ritual orchestra, however, and beyond the performance of "music" per se, soundscapes were defined by factors such as climate and local ecological context, by animals, by the noise of human activity at...
Shaped, Molded, and Buried: Differential Access to Ceramics in Early Bronze Age I Bab adh-Dhra’, Jordan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New ways of looking at old evidence can help develop a better understanding of the relationship between early urbanism and social differentiation in the ancient Near East. In the Southern Levant during the Early Bronze Age I (c. 3700-3000 BCE), the site of Bab adh-Dhra’ was a center for mortuary activities for EBA communities. Bab adh-Dhra’ is an important...
Shifting Human-Environmental Interactions in the Late Prehistoric Periods of Southern Caucasia (2015)
The Caucasus Mountain range is an exceptionally dynamic landscape whose diverse topographic, tectonic, hydrological, climatic, and pedological dimensions provided the backdrop to equally vibrant social transitions from the Neolithic through the Iron Age. The past two decades of intensive excavations and radiocarbon dates in the South Caucasus (particularly Armenia and Georgia) have resulted in important refinements to material culture sequences from the first farmers to the earliest political...
Site Hierarchy and Ceramic Display: Regional Variation in Bronze Age Ceramic Assemblages in the Eastern Carpathian Basin (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tell settlements have played a key role in the study of Middle Bronze Age (2000–1500 BC) societies in the Carpathian Basin since the end of the nineteenth century. Researchers primarily use data from these sites and cemeteries in discussions over relative and absolute chronologies, questions of variability in material culture, the extent of interaction...
Social Connections Near and Far: The Role of Local and Exotic Goods in the Emergence of Complexity on Cyprus during the Prehistoric Bronze Age (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The presence of international goods has long been a signifier of social complexity on Cyprus, but the accumulation of local goods and interregional imports may be equally as important for understanding the formation of hierarchical social networks during the Prehistoric Bronze Age (2400–1700 cal BC). This period marks...
Social Structure Indicated by the Distribution of Bronze Resources in the Sanxingdui Culture (ca. 3200–3000 BP), Southwest China (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. Bronze was one the most precious resources for the Sanxingdui culture in southwest China, and the distribution of bronze resources reflected the social structure of Sanxingdui culture. This paper investigates the latest artifacts excavated from the eight burial pits at the Sanxingdui sacrificial site, and through cross-pit match of artifacts,...