Iron Age (Other Keyword)

201-225 (231 Records)

Societies against the Chief? re-assessing the value of ‘heterarchy’ as a concept for describing European Iron Age societies (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only David González Álvarez. Tom Moore.

As a reaction against the dominant warrior chiefdom model of European Iron Age society, much of recent scholarship has emphasised the negotiated nature of power in these societies. Such approaches frequently characterise these societies as ‘heterarchical’ yet the dynamics of how communities operated above the level of the household remain relatively under-theorised. This paper reassesses the value of concepts of heterachy for two regions of Europe, southern Britain and North-western Iberia. It...


A Song Dynasty Roof Tile Kiln at Qijiaping: Gender and Pyrotechnology in Medieval China (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Chengrui Zhang. Rowan Flad.

During the 2016 and 2017 excavations at the site of Qijiaping, Guanghe, Gansu, China, the Tao River Archaeological Project excavated a large intact kiln that turned out to be a Song Dynasty roof tile kiln. The kiln is well preserved, and the first of its kind reported in an archaeological excavation in this region. Inside the flues of the kiln were many objects, deliberately disposed of, presumably at the moment when the kiln was put out of commission. Among these objects is a stone phallus in...


Space, Place, and Landscape at Cividade de Bagunte (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Bowers.

The Cividade of Bagunte is located on a prominent hill near the confluence of the Rivers Ave and Este. During the Iron Age, there likely would have been panoramic vistas that stretched well over 15 kilometers on a clear day, though this is mostly unnoticeable at ground level in modern times due to dense foliage. From the few areas that do not have trees and in combination with technology to ‘see’ through the trees, it is clear the site’s viewshed includes several other Iron Age castros, as well...


The Span of ‘Slavery’: Considering Systems of Domination and Labour in the Lake Chad Basin (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott MacEachern.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "The kings of the Sudan sell their people for no reason, and quite apart from any wars…" (Ahmad al-Ya’kūbī). The Lake Chad Basin was one of the anchor points of the trans-Saharan slave trade, through the millennium after al-Ya’kūbī wrote about the rulers of Kanem in the 9th century AD. This region had no equivalent to...


The Square or the Round? Agro-pastoral Household Structure in Southeastern Kazakhstan (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Chang.

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iron Age agropastoralists of the Talgar region built a variety of houses including rectangular double-walled mud-walled houses, semi-subterranean pit houses, mud brick platforms, and central circular rooms with multiple plastered floors. In earlier periods of prehistory the description of transition from mobile to sedentary...


The Stimuli of Technological Inventions (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Abidemi Babalola.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technology transfer is a popular concept in the studies of pyro-technologies globally. This concept has been used uncritically in discourses on the origins and development of sophisticated technologies in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of continuous patronage of this inherently derogatory concept in sub-Saharan African archaeology,...


A Study of the Armor Production System in the Middle Kofun Period (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kazuaki Yoshimura.

This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Possessing complex three-dimensional structures, and created using the most advanced technologies, including technologies introduced from the Korean Peninsula, the armor of the Kofun Period in Japan represents the finest iron technology of that period. It is commonly accepted that armor was produced...


Subsistence Technology in Early Iron Age Botswana (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrianne Daggett. Lu-Marie Fraser.

Analysis of the faunal assemblage from Thabadimasego, an Early Iron Age site in northeastern Botswana, contributes to the growing notion that hunting played a larger-than-expected role in the subsistence pattern of the area’s communities. Beyond understanding what they ate, what do the faunal remains tell us about the subsistence technology of Botswana’s Early Iron Age? Recent studies have focused on metallurgy and ceramic technology, but faunal patterns can provide information on the use of...


The S’Urachi Project: Cultural Encounters and Everyday Life around a Nuraghe in Phoenician and Punic Sardinia (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Van Dommelen. Alfonso Stiglitz.

Nuraghi, the famous dry-stone walled towers of Sardinia, are usually just regarded as prehistoric monuments of the Bronze Age. They continued to be inhabited long after, however, and were transformed into often substantial settlements of later periods. Nuraghi are key sites for the investigation of the colonial encounters and cultural interactions between local Sardinians, Phoenician traders and Punic settlers, because they are the only places that were continuously inhabited before and during...


Taking Things Apart: Reconfiguring Production Practices in South India (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Praveena Gullapalli.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I explore how taking apart the bundle of practices grouped together as ‘metallurgy’ might lead to a better understanding of not only that technology but also of ancient South Indian society. While cross-craft approaches to technologies allow archaeologists to explore potential relationships between production activities...


Technological Transmission between Different Levels of Specialization in Proto-historic NE Asia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sungjoo Lee.

This is an abstract from the "New Evidence, Methods, Theories, and Challenges to Understanding Prehistoric Economies in Korea" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Proto-historic period (300 B.C. - A.D. 300) in Northeast Asia was a critical time when technological innovations and the fundamental changes of craft-specialization in the ceramic production occurred. From the early 3rd century B.C., ancient Chinese states of Yan, Qin, and Han expanded...


Testing Google Earth Engine for Remote Sensing in Archaeology: Case Studies from Faynan, Jordan (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Brady Liss. Matthew Howland. Thomas E. Levy.

Satellite imagery and remote sensing have secured a place in the archaeological toolbox, but the scale of satellite derived data often results in large datasets with individual image tiles consisting of many gigabytes. Consequently, performing complex analyses on satellite data can be computationally intensive to a prohibitive degree. Google Earth Engine (GEE), an in-development, cloud-based platform for visualizing/analyzing satellite imagery, affords a solution for researchers with limited...


Testing Theoretical Approaches for the Composition of Charcoal Assemblages (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Buffington. Smiti Nathan. Mary Lawrence Young.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists use charcoal assemblages principally to reconstruct chronologies and past vegetative landscapes, especially when sampled from long-used refuse features, though human decision-making plays a role in the construction of these assemblages. In this paper, we will gather together a dataset reflecting an unpublished dataset from three sites in the...


Textiles, Tools, and Trepidation: Experiments in Creating Bone and Antler Tools Used in the Production of Textiles (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Klessig.

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tools used in the creation of textiles can be made of numerous materials, including stone, clay, metal, wood, bone, and anther, just to name a few. Numerous experiments in creating tools, such as spindle whorls, loom weights, needles, combs, and weaving battens have been carried...


Toward an Automated Model for Archaeological Site Detection in Eastern Botswana, a Clustering Method (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Forrest Follett. Adam Barnes. Katie Simon. Carla Klehm.

This paper is an effort to create a predictive model for archaeological sites in an area of Eastern Botswana. With a rather arid climate, much of Botswana’s ground surface (and archaeology) is easily visible to airborne and spaceborne sensors. Without sufficient training data for supervised classification, an iterative spectral clustering method was used to group spectrally similar pixels from multispectral imagery into a large number of spectrally distinct but unknown classes. By visually...


Tracing Early Farming Communities in Southern Mozambique by Geophysical Prospection: Current State of Activities, Part 1 (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jörg Linstädter. Nikola Babucic. Sabrina Stempfle. Martina Seifert.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In southern Africa, the appearance of pottery was first recognized in the context of Early Farming Communities (EFC) about 2000 BP. Increasingly, pottery can be linked to hunter-gatherers; therefore, southern Africa stands out as a place to investigate the contact between these two communities....


Tracing Early Farming Communities in Southern Mozambique by Geophysical Prospection: Current State of Activities, Part 2 (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nikola Babucic. Jörg Linstädter. Sabrina Stempfle. Martina Seifert.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In southern Africa, the appearance of pottery was first recognized in the context of Early Farming Communities (EFC) about 2000 BP. Increasingly, pottery can be linked to hunter-gatherers, therefore southern Africa stands out as a place to investigate the contact between these two communities. In...


Trans-Himalayan Material Culture of India: Special Reference to Steatite Bead (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Amita Gupta. Vinod Nautiyal.

Trans-Himalayan archaeology was always neglected by the historians and Archaeologist. But some recent excavations and my Ph.D field work presented an interesting view of Trans-Himalayan culture. The burial culture of this region dated back to 600-200BCE. I found here the remains of Pyro-technological activities. Steatite bead was first time found in Trans-Himalaya. They are in size from 2 to 4 mm in diameter, 1to3 mm in height, and hole width is about 1 mm. The beads were examined by using SEM...


UAVs, Photogrammetry, and Mortuary Landscapes: A Study of Napatan Cemeteries (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Rose.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the broad implications and applications of UAV or drone surveys to archaeological data sets, through a detailed case study in Nubian archaeology. The author employs drones to map and model Napatan royal necropolises, dating to the 8th century B.C.E. and located in modern day Sudan, using photogrammetry. The primary research objective of...


Understanding Textile Production at Cividade de Bagunte (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Bowers.

This is an abstract from the "The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textiles are a near ubiquitous feature of human society from antiquity through present-day. Unfortunately, most places around the world do not have the environmental conditions that allow for the preservation of textiles and the many tools associated with textile production. At Cividade de Bagunte, the only evidence for textile...


Understanding the Organization of Built Space Using Spatial Statistics in GIS (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only John Duncan Hurt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists who study the hillforts of Northwest Iberia have often used the layouts of individual settlements as the basis for inference and speculation on a wide range of phenomena, largely toward the end of establishing some understanding of the "social structure" of Iron Age communities. This often amounts, however, to little more than informal...


united in blood! Rituals of violence and warfare in Iron Age britain (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Harkleroad.

Discussions of ritual in society often focus on how ritual is used to bring individuals, communities, and larger social groups together. The role of ritual in violent interactions and warfare is less often considered and often what discussion there is focuses on the use of warfare to procure captives for public rituals, such as execution. Virtually ignored in this discussion is the role ritual plays in routinizing violence and warfare and how this ultimately impacts individuals and societies....


Updated Perspectives on Sennacherib’s Siege at Tel Lachish (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...


The Ups & Downs of Iron Age Animal Management on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, Southern England (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Schulting. Petrus le Roux. Yee Min Gan. Gary Lock. Chris Gosden.

As in any mixed farming system, the management of animals doubtless played an important part in Iron Age societies in southern Britain. Economically, they furnished meat, milk, wool and manure, and served as draught animals for transport and tillage. Intersecting with their economic uses, they were also important socially, politically and ritually. It is relatively straightforward to determine the proportional representation and mortality profiles of the major species – cattle, sheep/goat and...


Urban Networks in Early Iron Age Europe: Nucleation and Dispersal (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Fernandez-Gotz.

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. Urbanization is a social process, rather than a final destination. More important than debating whether one specific settlement within a system should be classified as "urban," "proto-urban," or "nonurban" is to analyze the wider processes of settlement nucleation and centralization that take place within the larger landscape,...