Iron Age (Other Keyword)
51-75 (231 Records)
Hillforts are a typical feature of the Iron Age settlement patterns of the north-west Mediterranean (Southern France and North-East of Spain). Their morphology appears as relatively homogeneous, and gives a prominent importance to the domestic sphere, the stone ramparts being often the only clearly communitarian building. The development of these agglomerations –quite small according to central European standards- is broadly contemporary with the beginnings of Greek colonization and with the...
Death and Taxes in the Ancient Assyrian Empire: Pictures of Wealth Inequality in Provincial Settlements (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of mortuary material in archaeology has always related to subjects of identity, beliefs, and resources. Furthermore, it is one of our prime resources for understanding non-elite individuals in the premodern world, especially in societies where historical sources revolve around the ruling elites. This is certainly the case in the ancient Assyrian...
Death, Dying and Horlicks: Structured Deposits as Problematic Stuff in European Prehistory (2018)
Personal possessions are inherent in the construction and maintenance of social identity. In some prehistoric cosmologies, artefacts may even have been integral to an individual’s personhood. As such, they can become culturally and ritually charged objects within a community. What happens then to this social remnant of an individual when they die? Objects that are on the one hand redundant but on the other too problematic to be casually discarded. In the increasingly materialist and consumerist...
Defining Suitability in Mixed Pastoral-Agricultural Societies: A Case Study from Bactria in Northern Afghanistan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the concept of suitability as a guiding parameter for applications of the Ideal Free/Despotic Distribution (IFD/IDD) in cases of mixed pastoral and agricultural economies. We briefly review recent archaeological survey data and research from Central Asia to contextualize how...
Delicate Nucleation in Etruria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Etruria, the urban landscape of first millennium BC central Italy, is renowned for its powerful stable urban places. This projection of power not only conceals the Rise of Rome, which profoundly affected these urban centres, but also the dynamism of the Etruscan urban landscape in the interstices between the metropoles....
Dental Health Assessment of Nil Kham Haeng and Its Implications in Prehistoric Central Thailand (2018)
Three adjacent, chronologically overlapped, and metallurgically active sites in central Thailand were excavated by the Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project (TAP). This study focuses on dental pathology (caries, calculus, periapical abscessing, antemortem tooth loss, linear enamel hypoplasia) observed on human skeletal remains from Nil Kham Haeng (500 B.C.-A.D. 600) to investigate possible foodways and lifeways of its inhabitants. Among approximately 20 individuals represented, 16 have sufficient...
The Diachronic Landscape of Ceremony at the Irish "Royal" Site of Dun Ailinne (2018)
The site of Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin) in County Kildare is one of four major ceremonial sites of the Irish Iron Age. Although numerous ceremonial centers of various size dotted the Irish landscape, Dún Ailinne, along with Teamhair (Tara), Emain Macha (Navan Fort), and Crúachain (Rathcroghan,) stand out due to their size and location. These characteristics indicate that the sites would have been major foci of ceremonial activity, and would have impacted the ceremonial activity itself. Although...
Disability and Accommodation in the Eastern Mediterranean: Case Studies from New Kingdom Egypt and Classical Greece (2018)
Although the archaeology of marginalized groups has been increasingly discussed in recent scholarship, people with disabilities remain largely unstudied. Recent works on this topic have paved the way for a dedicated examination of people with disabilities in the archaeological record. This paper reviews published material to critically examine physical evidence for disability and accommodation in New Kingdom Egypt and Classical Greece, both areas and periods with rich material culture, extensive...
A Diverse Form of Organization in the Pazyryk Culture (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pazyryk Culture, situated in the Altai Mountains of Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China, flourished for a relatively short period, fifth–third centuries BCE. A series of burial grounds from the later phase, fourth–mid-third centuries BCE, reveal the remains of three groups of individuals of high, mid, and lower status....
Diversity and Unity: Different Crop Consumption in East Tianshan Mountains, Northwest China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The region of east Tianshan Mountains, located in east edge of Central Asia, has a diverse natural environment that is suitable for a variety of subsistence. The first millennium BC was a period with fluctuating climate and rapid cultural interactions in this region. This study conducted...
Early Globalization of the Han Empire in Its Southern Frontier and the Expansion of Iron Economic Network (2018)
Even though the framework of early globalization has been proved as effective in illuminating ancient interregional interaction in many regions, its value and contribution to the archaeological study of ancient China has been overlooked in the literature. Focusing on the Han Empire, we employed statistical methods to exam variations in assemblages and frequencies of iron objects, one type of critical state finance in the Han political economies, from burials in the southern frontier of the...
The Early Iron Age and "Hiatus" Occupations: Archaeological and Chronometric Data on Holocene Human Settlement in the Northern Congo Basin, Southern Central African Republic (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, Lupo and colleagues (2018) reported data on the nature and timing of late Holocene human occupation in the northern Congo Basin rain forest, southern Central African Republic and this paper presents new archaeological and chronometric information. Field reconnaissance identified 25 new archaeological sites, including additional iron...
Early Iron Metallurgy in the Caucasus: Filling in a Technological "Missing Link" (2018)
In the study of technological transformations, there is often much discussion of how innovations are conditioned by earlier systems of technical knowledge. Identification of transitional features is often challenging, however, particularly for questions about the origins of iron smelting and its relationship with copper-base metallurgy. This paper discusses some unusual technological features in iron metallurgical debris (circa 8th-6th c. BC) from a fortified hilltop site in the Caucasus,...
Eating like a bird. Millet in Iron Age Italy: Economic, Political or identity choice? (2017)
Recent research reevaluating the evidence for consumption of millet in Archaic and Roman Italy indicates that its role has been underestimated. New findings from Iron Age and Archaic contexts at the Latin settlement of Gabii clearly support a more nuanced and complex situation than the one portrayed by ancient Latin authors and modern scholarship alike. The recovery of significant quantities of millet at Gabii is in sharp contrast with the absence of this crop in similar contexts from Iron Age...
The Economics behind Pottery: The Impact of Romanization on Castro Culture Ceramics in the Littoral Northwest (2018)
Through a comparative analysis of ceramic materials from several archaeological sites including the Cividade de Bagunte, this paper explores the effects of Romanization on the fields of production and consumption belonging to the Castro Culture of northwest Iberia. These sites were chosen because the archaeological materials uncovered reflect differences in social, political, and economic organization from the Iron Age to the Roman period. Further, the proximity of these sites to one another...
Effects of Past and Present Climate Change: Viking Age and Norse Sites in Greenland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation is one of the products of a series of ongoing interconnected, international, interdisciplinary fieldwork projects coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative since 2005 in Greenland. The projects drew on more than a century of prior field research, where four...
The Environmental Setting of Cypriot Rural Sanctuaries (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the first millennium BCE the countryside of Cyprus was marked by a large number of extra-urban sanctuaries. Previous studies have discussed the function of these shrines in demarcating or negotiating political boundaries between the island’s city states, and their decline under Ptolemaic and Roman rule. This study seeks to investigate the environmental...
Environmental Threats To Viking Age and Medieval Norse Sites in Southwestern Greenland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Accelerating Environmental Change Threats to Cultural Heritage: Serious Challenges, Promising Responses" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation is one of the products of a series of ongoing inter-connected, international, interdisciplinary fieldwork projects coordinated by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative since 2005 in Greenland. The projects drew upon more than a...
Estimating the Temporality of Iron Smelting sites in Africa by Coupling Radiocarbon and Archeomagnetism (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The life of African iron smelting sites (duration and production rate) is poorly known because of the low number of dates per site and the dependence on radiocarbon. On two fields in Togo (Bandjeli district) and Benin (Aplahoué district), this methodological communication shows that coupling...
Everything Old Is New Again: Considerations for Re-examining the Previously Excavated Material of Hellenistic- and Roman-Period Armenia (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. Throughout the twentieth century, archaeological investigations into the Hellenistic and Roman periods in Armenia sought to understand the ancient kingdom’s place in the broader Mediterranean sphere. The projects often worked to identify cultures and cultural...
Evolution of Iron Age to Modern Landscapes in the Benoué River Valley, Cameroon (2017)
African landscapes have undergone radical ecological transformations since agriculture was introduced and spread across the continent. In some areas, it appears that grassland was encouraged at the expense of forests and woodlands, for agriculture and to provide fodder for livestock. To this point, most of the evidence for such practices has come secondarily from ocean or swamp cores, not directly from archaeological contexts. In this paper, we present a scenario for landscape evolution and...
An Examination of the Multiple Roles of Wild and Domestic Animals Excavated from the Vat Komnou Cemetery (200 BCE–400 CE) at Angkor Borei, Cambodia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk will discuss the preliminary results of a pilot study focusing on faunal remains from the Early Historic/Pre-Angkorian site of Angkor Borei, Cambodia. Angkor Borei is one of Southeast Asia’s earliest urban centers, located in the Mekong Delta region of southern Cambodia. It was also a prominent...
Excavations at Great Zimbabwe: Commoner Housing versus Elite Enclosures (2018)
Salvage excavations in the 1970s at the famous capital of Great Zimbabwe, southern Africa, uncovered several residential complexes dating to Periods IVb (AD 1300-1450) and IVc (AD 1450-1550). Overall, granaries and middens surrounded closely-spaced houses of commoner families living between the Outer and Inner Perimeter Walls. These high-density concentrations stood in marked contrast to the open spaces typical of elite enclosures. One midden against the Outer Perimeter Wall yielded a copper...
Exploring Settlement Connectivity in the Lower Ave River Valley (Northwest Iberia) during the Iron Age Using Least-Cost Path Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Iron Age, the Ave River Valley of Northern Portugal was one of the most densely populated areas of the Castro Culture, an archaeological culture in Northwest Iberia. Settlements at this time varied in size from small agricultural sites to large urban hillforts. In this poster, I explore the movement of people, and, by connection, goods and...
"Fair Greece, Sad Relic:" Greek Archaeology at the Intersections of Power (2018)
In this paper, I address the challenges faced by Classical archaeologists who wish to practice engaged archaeology in Greece. Two aspects of Classical archaeology’s disciplinary history are particularly important for understanding the relationship between Greek archaeology (as practiced by American archaeologists) and modern Greece: first, Greek archaeology’s early and close relationship with the ideology of Hellenism and, second, the ways in which archaeological work in Greece has intersected...