Bronze Age (Other Keyword)
251-275 (333 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Kura-Araxes horizon (KA; 3500–2500 BCE), which characterizes the EBA in the South Caucasus, is at the center of an archaeological debate regarding the timing of its development and dispersal into areas of the greater Near East, including eastern Anatolia, northwestern Iran, and the Southern Levant. Increasing...
Rapid climate change and demographic decline at the end of the Irish Bronze Age (2016)
The accumulation of large 14C data-sets over recent decades provides archaeologists with a substantial resource which has only recently begun to be systematically explored. Such data-sets offer the potential to explore temporal variations in the intensity of past human activity at a range of geographical scales, although the ‘reading’ of such data is far from unproblematic. One area of clear potential is the relationship between patterning evident in 14C and palaeoclimate data-sets. In this...
A Re-examination of the Animal Bone Remains from Rojdi, a Sorath Harappan Site in Northwest India (2018)
The later 3rd and early 2nd millennium site of Rojdi in Gujarat, India was excavated under the direction of the Professor Gregory Possehl d over eight field seasons between 1982 and 1995. Rojdi is an agricultural village with substantial stone architecture, most of which dates to the early second millennium (1900-1700 BCE). Significant progress has been made in our understanding of the Sorath Harappan culture, including detailed ceramic studies, analyses of archaeobotanical materials, and...
Reassessing Demography of the Bronze Age Tomb at Tell Abraq (UAE): Using Multiple Bone Elements from a Commingled Context (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A circular stone tomb at the site of Tell Abraq (UAE) on the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf was used as a mortuary feature for approximately 200 years (2200-2000BC) during the Bronze Age. Both adults and children were buried in the 6 meter wide tomb, causing significant admixture or commingling of the remains. This research reassessed the demography of the...
Recent Research on the Settlement Sites of the Dian Culture of Yunnan: excavations at Xueshan and Shangxihe Sites (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. The Dian culture of Yunnan is known for production and use of bronze artifacts exhibiting remarkable artistic and technical features. However, for most of the 20th century our understanding of Dian culture was based mainly on materials from burials around Lake Dian. Meanwhile, little was known about the...
Reconfiguring Normative Funeral Rite in European Prehistory: Second Thoughts on Secondary Manipulation of Human Remains (2018)
Mortuary variability in European prehistory has long been perceived through the lens of Christian worldview from which the discipline of archaeology originally developed. Expectations rooted in this conceptual perspective inevitably shaped the ways that the archaeological record was approached and interpreted. As a case study we consider the Central European Bronze Age, on which we can deconstruct the traditional ‘textbook’ understanding of ancient funerary traditions. During this period,...
Reconfiguring Social Networks: The Emergence of Social Complexity Before and After Urbanism on Cyprus (2018)
Despite the lack of cities, the Prehistoric Bronze Age on Cyprus (2400-1700 cal BC), an island in the Eastern Mediterranean, witnesses high wealth inequality and spatiotemporal variation in the emergence of social complexity or hierarchical social networks. Previous research has shown that social networks are malleable and cycle between egalitarian and hierarchical in different facets of complexity (control of labor, access to resources, participation in trade networks) through the Prehistoric...
Reconsideration of the Relationship between Complex Societies and Dolmen in Northern Part of Korea and Manchuria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dolmen is one of the principal mortuary programs in the Korean Bronze Age (ca. between 1000 and 300 B. C.). A number of dolmens have been discovered almost everywhere in the Korean peninsula as well as Manchuria, China. A great amount of research has been conducted by Korean and Japanese archaeologists concerning this style of burial. Some scholars became...
Reconstructing Land-Use Histories in Ecologically Transitional Mesopotamian Landscapes (2018)
This poster presents results of the Sirwan (Upper Diyala) Regional Project's (Kurdish Region, Iraq) 2017 offsite research in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Off-site investigations of Mesopotamian landscapes provide evidence of land-use practices and inform our understanding of strategies and structures of past agro-economic systems. Thus, the aim of the 2017 season was to employ multiple remote sensing technologies (including magnetic gradiometry and drone-based imaging) to prospect for and...
Redefining Subsistence Practices and Strategies at the Local and Micro-regional Scales in the Context of Late Prehistoric Trans-Eurasian Food Globalization (2015)
The diffusion of metalworking, horse-drawn transport, and use of domesticated plants and animals across the Eurasian steppes and forest-steppes have dominated recent scholarly discussions of second millennium BCE socio-economic development. The term "globalization" is routinely used to characterize these early processes and key horizons of technological development. This paper draws on recent archaeological field research in the Southern Ural Mountains of the Russian Federation to emphasize the...
Reevaluating Early Bronze Age Masculinities: Skeletal and Mortuary Analysis of Transgenderism at Ostojićevo, Serbia (2018)
The Early Bronze Age (EBA) is often characterized as a period of emerging social hierarchies dominated by high status warrior-males. Analysis of human skeletal remains in their mortuary context has the potential to challenge this assumption and inform more nuanced understandings of gender and social status. Individuals (n=285) at the EBA Maros cemetery at Ostojićevo, Serbia (ca. 1900-1500 B.C.E.) exhibit a strong correlation between biological sex and funerary treatment, specifically body...
Regional Archaeology in the Peja and Istog Districts of Kosova (RAPID-Kosova): Results of the 2018 Field Season (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports the results of an initial season of regional archaeological survey in western Kosova, in the districts of Peja and Istog. RAPID-Kosova is the first intensive, systematic survey ever conducted in Kosova, and aims to document settlement and settlement change through time. During June of 2018, we ran three survey teams in three zones covering...
Regional Circulation and Production of Bronze Mirrors in Han Dynasty: Focusing on Guanzhong and Jingzhou Area (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The previous study of Han bronze mirrors was mainly concerned with the diachronic change, such as the overall development in typology and the main component formula. Although there is only one Han bronze mirrors workshop found in North China at present, the regional diversity still deserves further investigation. This paper first presents a comprehensive...
Regional Trade and Political Power in the Carpathian Basin Bronze Age: The Case of Pecica-Şanţul Mare (Romania) (2017)
Pecica Şanţul-Mare (Romania) was a major trade center during the Middle Bronze Age. Its inhabitants participated intensively in regional and extra-regional exchange networks, bringing a range of utilitarian and prestige goods into the Lower Mureş valley. The quantity and diversity of imported items at Pecica far exceeds that of contemporary settlements in the region, with goods often by-passing other Mureş Culture communities along the major trade routes. Pecica also appears to have had...
The Relationships between Smallholders, their Textiles, and their Bone Tools: a Case Study at the Central Anatolian site of Kaman-Kalehӧyük (2016)
Textiles are rarely found in Near Eastern archaeological contexts due to the rarity of suitable environmental conditions for their preservation. Cuneiform texts and limited artifactual evidence have therefore often been the main sources informing archaeologists of the technological processes involved in textile production. Yet, scanty data exist specifically on textile-manufacturing tools made from bone, a readily available raw material, and the smallholders who crafted these tools. This paper...
Resilient Herders: Continuity and Change in Pastoral Household Life in Mongolia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how human societies interacted with environmental changes is a major goal of anthropological archaeology. In this paper, we assess human-environment interactions at the household level in three regions of Mongolia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. We review shifting environmental conditions and the continuities and...
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 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, 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 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...