Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
51-75 (413 Records)
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. Bioarchaeological analysis of human remains excavated by Project ArAGATS in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia has allowed for a unique view onto Bronze Age life and has offered a glimpse into the lived experience of populations constituting early complex polities....
Burning questions about preservation: an investigation of cremated bone crystallinity in a Bronze Age cemetery (2017)
The elemental and isotopic analysis of human skeletal remains has greatly added to our understanding of diet, mobility, and social variability in prehistoric societies. For studies of this nature, it is critical to evaluate the preservation of the skeletal material prior to analysis to make sure that taphonomic processes have not affected the original chemical signatures. Calcined bone (usually produced from cremation burial practices) is generally avoided for chemical analysis due to heat...
Can You Predict the Pot? Using Morphometric Variability to Predict Potting Techniques (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While geometric morphometrics (GMM) roots are in biology, there has been an increase of studies applying GMM to archaeological material in recent years. Archaeologists have utilized morphometrics to determine the level of craft specialization at prehistoric sites, test the symmetry of stone tools, classify ceramic sherds, examine the level of...
Carnelian Beads from the Site of Kish, Iraq: Differentiating Indus and Non-Indus Carnelian Beads Using Technological, Morphological, and Chemical Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carnelian beads from the site of Kish, Iraq, include a wide range of bead types, including locally produced short cylindrical beads and long biconical beads that are thought to have been produced in the Indus region of South Asia. Beads from different excavation contexts can...
Cattle Production and Strategic Meat Distribution in Egypt and Nubia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Reddings‘s (1992) model developed at the site of Kom el-Hisn offered a means of understanding strategies by which ancient societies could strategically raise animals for the purpose of provisioning communities in multiple locations. This model proved useful for understanding meat provisioning...
Cave of Wonder: A Sacred Topos of Maritime Identities on Kalymnos (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caves often occupied prominent locations as visible landmarks or as nodal points in exchange networks and mobility routes. The paper discusses coastal sacred caves, which through the transportation of diverse material culture, provided the backdrop where maritime identities were played out. The study investigates the Late Minoan occupation phase of...
Centralized Urban Planning and Economic Segregation: A Case Study Based on Wealth Inequality at Tell Asmar and Khafajah in Mesopotamia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a possible correlation between central planning and economic segregation in ancient urbanized cities. A pre-planned and constructed urban residential area may have fostered an aggregate of inhabitants who had similar traits, such as ethnicity, class, wealth, occupation and religion. Different clusters of people may be discerned between...
Ceramic Production at the Stone-Walled Citadel of Shimao: Initial Results of Petrographic Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 10 years, excavations at the early Bronze Age site of Shimao (2300–1800 BC), in northern Shaanxi Province, have transformed our understanding of the archaeology of early China. What was previously seen as an area that was peripheral to the development of early dynastic centers is now being heralded by...
Ceramics production and trade across the Great Hungarian Plain: Chemical analysis of Bronze Age ceramics from Békés 103 in Eastern Hungary (2016)
The Bronze Age in Europe is noted for an increase in foreign interaction and trade, yet some areas show few signs of receiving non-local goods. Using chemical analysis of Bronze Age ceramic pastes from the cemetery of Békés 103 and nearby clay sources, this poster seeks to investigate trade networks and exchange between the people of the site and other areas of the Great Hungarian Plain. Using LA-ICP-MS, we examine the extent of trade and the degree to which the community participated in the...
Ceramics production and trade in Western Anatolia: A reexamination of the ceramic mould-making process at Seyitömer Höyük in Kütahya, Turkey (2017)
During the Early Bronze Age at Seyitömer Höyük, ceramics began to be standardized in their shape and size through the use of a mould-making process. Evidence from the archaeological record suggests that this innovative technique was incorporated at the site due to the increase in trade and demand for ceramics from other settlements in Anatolia, from nearby Küllüoba to faraway Troy. The early use of a mould-making process established Seyitömer Höyük’s pivotal role as a ceramic hub and trading...
Ceramics provenience: chemical analysis of ceramics and clays in Eastern Hungary via LA-ICP-MS (2017)
This project explores the provenience of ceramics found at the Bronze Age Békés 103 cemetery. By answering the question of where these ceramics came from, it is possible to hypothesize which Bronze Age communities used the cemetery. To do this, clays were collected throughout Eastern Hungary for chemical analysis. Clay is often found along river banks, but many modern rivers may have been polluted. Instead, paleo-meanders of modern rivers were chosen as collection sites; these were identified...
Changing Landscapes: Settlement Strategies, Cultural Dynamics, and Material Evidence on Kos, Dodecanese, during the Final Neolithic and the Bronze Age (2018)
Landscape as a concept incorporates not simply the geographic and environmental characteristics of an area, but also the cultural and symbolic value vested in places. Understanding the relationship of these factors, which are often closely linked, to past societies remains a challenge in archaeology. In this paper, we attempt to reconstruct the Final Neolithic (FN) through Bronze Age landscape on the island of Kos, Dodecanese, and investigate its cultural meaning to the prehistoric peoples. We...
Changing Social Spatiality in Mounded Funerary Landscapes (2017)
Funerary landscapes, as places where all fractions of society meet to honour the rituals of social and identity-building importance, can be used to attain an insight into group-specific attitudes towards spatiality. These attitudes allowed for people's engagement with various elements of their environment as a means of deliberate creation of lasting ritual landscapes. However, social spatiality in funerary contexts is not static, but subject to changes in the group's perception of both their...
Chronology and Social Process in Bronze Age Spain (2017)
This research presents an evaluation of the use of morphometrics of ceramic vessels for organizing site chronologies and social interaction. The object of morphometric analysis is to study how changes in artifact shape covary with time and space. This particular method is tested against Bronze Age ceramics from the Valencian region in Spain along the Western Mediterranean. The characteristic stylistic homogeneity of these ceramics has proven especially resistant to chronological fine-tuning...
Cities, Towns, and Villages in the Diverse Environments of the Indus Civilization (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urban phase of South Asia’s Indus Civilization (ca. 2600–1900 BC) does not offer simple parallels to other contemporary complex societies. This paper will present new insights into Indus settlement networks and the diversity of Indus urbanism. There were apparently only four large-scale (80+ ha) Indus settlements, which were...
Climate, Vulcanism, and Agricultural Terrace Construction in Late Bronze Age Crete (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Environmental change during the Bronze Age (3000 to 1100 BC) on Crete had a strong impact on the viability of agriculture and subsequent development of land land management technologies. In particular the development of terraced agricultural systems increased the capacity of slope agriculture, allowing cultivation to keep pace with population growth. In...
Climatic Narratives across Eurasia: A Comparative Study of the 4.2k Event in Western and Eastern Asia (2018)
In the last two decades, climatic narratives have returned as a central issue in archaeological discourse. The field has been flooded with publications on paleoclimatic reconstructions and we believe it is time for a critical evaluation – both as means of seeking better science, and for building better archaeological narratives. Climate history is composed by an overlapping meshwork of long-standing trends, punctuated events and short-term phases, with impacts ranging from the local to the...
Coastal Erosion Management in Archaeology: Turning Challenges into Opportunities (2018)
Coastal erosion is a known problem in cultural heritage management, particularly in the Mediterranean, which lends itself exceptionally well to studies of maritime trade and connectivity. The loss of coastal land to erosion presents a serious obstacle to our understanding of the archaeological coastscape, due to the unpredictable rate in which it exposes and damages archaeological features. The exposure and subsequent disappearance of material culture is seldom accompanied by systematic...
Collective Memory and the Mycenaeans: The Argolid, Messenia, and the Mani Compared (2016)
The concept of collective memory has received some attention in archaeology, but has not been systematically applied to processes of state formation and sociopolitical change. In this paper I model the evolution of collective memory systems in Greece from the Neolithic to Iron Age, with a focus on Mycenaean regions. The Argolid, Messenia, and the Mani – using The Diros Project’s excavations of a Mycenaean “ossuary” at Ksagounaki as a primary example – vary in terms of how collective memories...
A Commons Approach to Violence and Inequity: Public goods, Enchaining, and the Reconstitution of the Shang Kingdom under Wu Ding (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 Chinese archaeology the question of how large-scale political collectives came into being is usually understood under the rubric of “state formation.” In addition to the issue of the potential reification of an anachronism in the state concept, early complex polities are generally imagined in terms of...
Community Resilience and Connection on the Middle Nile: The Es-Selim R4 Archaeology Project in Sudan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The community archaeology project at the Kerma settlement site of Es-Selim R4 (ESR4) seeks to investigate how environmental, social, and political change intersect to affect a provincial population center over 1000 years. The site is located in the Northern Dongola Reach, where the floodplain was braided with Nile palaeochannels, supporting a network of...
A Computational Approach to Bone Histology Analysis in Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Bronze Age in Transylvania exhibits two different mortuary traditions, one associated with the Yamnaya migration in the lowlands and the other associated with the local Transylvanian groups in the highlands. A key question for archaeologists has been how these traditions differ in respect to primary and secondary inhumation. The tempo of funerary...
Conceptualizing Eurasian Steppe Space, Place and Movement (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 scholarly contributions by David Anthony have added significantly to current understandings of prehistory in the Eurasian steppes. Drawing on multiple lines of evidence, ranging from historical sources, archaeological data, genetics and linguistics, he has developed...
The Consequences of Cultural Encounters on Late Bronze Age Transylvania Cuisine and Subsistence Economies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition to the Late Bronze Age in Transylvania around 1500 BCE coincided with the arrival of the Noua cultural group from the Eurasian Steppe. These new migrant communities arrived in a Transylvanian landscape that had been occupied by the Wietenberg cultural group for over 500 years. For nearly 150 years, communities with both the Noua and Wietenberg...
Considering Pb Mixing in Lead Isotope Analysis (LIA) of Tin Artifacts (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. LIA of tin metal must consider the U-Th-Pb characteristics of cassiterite ore. The initial Pb content of cassiterite is <1 ppm and Th is <0.005 ppm. However, it contains as much as 50 ppm U. Therefore, 206 Pb and 207 Pb accumulate over time, potentially allowing the definition of an isochron....