Iron Age (Other Keyword)
176-200 (291 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The utilization of subterranean spaces by humans is cross-temporal and cross-regional. In turn, and sometimes simultaneously, caves have been employed around the world as seasonal or permanent shelters, storage rooms, workshops, burial chambers, and as containers for artistic and ritual actions. In southern France, these last endeavors have been the focus of...
Mortuary Practices in the First Iron Age Romanian Frontier: the commingled assemblages of the Magura Uroiului (2016)
Frontiers are fuzzy spaces, allowing for cultural diffusion and the negotiation of cultural identities. Identity is defined both based on interaction and on exclusion of surrounding groups. Located at the confluence of the Mures and Strei Valleys, the Magura Urioului rock formation stands as a natural fortress dominating the built and natural landscape. The highly visible rock outcropping and surrounding terraces have been continuously used by various groups including the Hallstatt, Celtic and...
Mortuary Practices, Production and Exchanges in the Borderland: A Case Study from the Bukhara Oasis (Uzbekistan) (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 investigates potteries excavated from the Late Iron Age kurgan burials (i.e., burials with an aboveground mound) at the fringes of the Bukhara oasis in present-day central Uzbekistan. Connecting the intensively farmed river oasis and the desert steppe, the border of Bukhara oasis as a frontier zone was also an arena in which complex social and...
The Mosfell Excavations: Viking Archaeology in Iceland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Presents recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) in Iceland’s Mosfell Valley (Mosfellsdalur). Reviews excavations at Leiruvogur Bay at the coastal mouth of the valley and at Hrísbrú, the farmstead of the Mosfell chieftains. These two Viking Age sites formed a 10th century...
Mothers on the Move? Sex- and Age-Related Differences in 87Sr/86Sr in Late Bronze-Early Iron Age Tilburg-Udenhoutseweg, the Netherlands (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urnfield cemetery of Tilburg-Udenhoutseweg was excavated in 2020 yielding a total of 230 cremation graves dating to the Late Bronze-Iron Age. The cremation graves were distributed over the entire cemetery as part of burial monuments, in clusters, or as individual graves. Osteological analyses of all the cremation...
A Multiscalar Approach to Mobility: Interpreting Sulfur Isotope Values within Relative and Absolute Chronological Frameworks (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past 10 years sulfur isotope analysis (δ34S) has become increasingly employed to investigate the movement and mobility of prehistoric people and animals. While the questions can focus on the same type of “one-off” movements often considered when using strontium and oxygen analyses to study human migrations or pastoral economies, the combination of...
Narratives of Rise and Collapse: Fragile Urbanism in Early Iron Age Europe (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. While traditional research on early urbanism has focused predominantly on ‘successful cities’, i.e. urban settlements that show long settlement histories, recently scholarship has also started to pay increasing attention to cases of short-lived agglomerations which only lasted for some decades or generations. In this...
Negotiating Empires: Village Dynamics in Naxcivan, Azerbaijan (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. Archaeological research on empires has focused on centers and periphery, with much less emphasis on the interstices of empires. During the first century of the common era, the polities of the Southern Caucasus were located between the competing empires of Arsacid...
Negotiating Power? Explaining Dispersed Low-Density Mega-sites in Late Iron Age Europe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mega-sites that emerged in the European Late Iron Age (ca. third century BCE–first century CE), often referred to as oppida, have struggled to be understood in the context of traditional concepts of urbanism. Comparative approaches to urbanism have, however,...
Network Models for the Emergence of Transportation Infrastructures in Central Italy (1175/1150─500 BC ca) (2018)
The period between the Late Bronze Age and the Archaic Age is a time of change and development in the Italian Peninsula, leading to the formation of the first city-states. In this study, we focused on the Tyrrhenian regions of Latium Vetus and Southern Etruria, by analyzing the emergence of the network of terrestrial routes as it has been inferred from archaeological evidences. Our goal was to explore the mechanisms that shaped the overall structure of these past transportation...
Never Built in a Day: Contextualizing Urbanism in Iron Age Western Sicily (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iron Age was a transformative period in western Sicily, introducing the indigenous Elymian populations to Aegean and Levantine colonists who brought their own languages, crops, technology, materials, social customs, and ritual systems. Concomitant to the arrival of these foreigners was a transformation of indigenous lifeways. We examine this transformation...
A New approach to warfare (2015)
Lines of evidence, such as weapons, skeletal remains of victims of trauma, iconography, fortifications, etc., that are typically used to argue for the presence or absence of warfare in a society are often ambiguous. As a result researchers frequently reach contradicting conclusions from the same data. In situations where there are few material remains this problem is magnified making conclusions about warfare hard to come to. I put forward a new approach to the discussion of warfare that shifts...
New Discovery of Plant Remains in The West of Tibet (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. In 2017, one grain and 24 spikelets of barley and other prestigious burial objects were found in the No. 2 tomb which is located at Gepa Serul cemetery, Zanda, Tibet, Chian (the region of the upper reaches of Indus River). Up to now, Gepa Serul cemetery is the earliest known in western...
New Perspectives on Warfare in the Iron Age of Wessex (2018)
Wessex, a region of southern England, has been the subject of more study than almost any other region of the UK. While much excavation has focused on the Iron Age little work has focused on the role of warfare at that time. Discussions of warfare have led to antithetical conclusions by researchers utilizing the same material with much of the disagreement stemming from fundamentally different interpretations of equivocal evidence and assumptions about life in the period. Some of this is...
Niche Construction and Iron Smelting Technology: Some Thoughts on the Development of Regional Metallurgical Economies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Linking the evolution of smelting technology to the development of regional economies remains one of the greatest challenges for archaeometallurgy. It is neither possible to explain technological evolution without reference to its costs and benefits in a given...
Niche Construction of Coastal Farming: Archaeobotanical Approach at the Gungokri Site (150 BCE–400 CE) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Social and Environmental Interactions on Coasts and Islands in Korea" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines niche construction and traditional ecological knowledge that was sustained over 550 years along the southern coast in Korea with an example from the Gungokri site. Traditional subsistence method along the coast and islands in Korea was based on a combination of farming and fishery, and we found this...
Objects of Action and the Practice of Empire in Xiongnu Inner Asia (2018)
Material remains of communities and peoples enmeshed in imperial regimes are most often assessed as representations of incorporation into empires. Yet many of the objects in consideration were not so much passive material declarations as they were tools for active demonstrations. Authority, regional and local, derived from membership in exclusive imperial echelons; membership that required more than mere badges of identity but performances of imperially-derived authority. This paper addresses...
Old Data, New Ideas: Analyzing Legacy Survey Data at Khirbat al-Mukhayyat, Jordan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2000–2001, the Tall Madaba Archaeological Project of the University of Toronto conducted an archaeological survey of the site of Khirbat al-Mukhayyat (Jordan) in anticipation of future archaeological excavation, though ultimately, no excavation of the site was conducted. With the formation of the Khirbat al-Mukhayyat Archaeological Project in 2014, an...
On the Periphery of the Iron Age World System: “Animal Style Art” in Southeastern Kazakhstan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The commodification of aesthetic traditions in the Eurasian steppe world may be explored as a method for tracing the economic and political spheres of the larger Eurasian World System in the first millennium BCE. This paper will address the...
ood, Agricultural, and Environmental Risk Management during the Holocene in Mesopotamia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using new microbotanical phytolith evidence, this article discusses what strategies were implemented to manage factors affecting agricultural strategies and staple food during the Late Holocene in a dry climatic condition in the Late Holocene at the Neo-Assyrian large site of Peshdar Plain located in Kurdistan, Iraq, Northern Mesopotamia. Located in the...
"Our Past is Not the Other"—Anthropological Archaeology and Academic Peripheries in Central Europe (2018)
As an archaeologist who practices and teaches holistic anthropology and has long been fascinated by the rich prehistory of Central Europe, I am shy about sharing my anthropological tendencies with German colleagues. When I do, I am often greeted with surprise, confusion, and a polite suggestion that I should be in Papua New Guinea or other places where German anthropologists engage with people who are perceived as different from contemporary Europeans. In Central Europe, archaeology is...
Pagan-Christian Interactions 11th to 13th Centuries CE: The Isotope Evidence (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Balts are generally recognized as the longest persisting pagan-dominated community in temperate Europe, widely practicing until the fourteenth century CE. Historical research documents that trading, raiding, and crusading often brought the Balts into direct contact with Christians in the...
Paleodietary Analysis of Xiongnu Individuals in Zuunkhangai, Mongolia (2018)
The archaeology of the Xiongnu period has grown considerably over the last decade, yet debate still surrounds Xiongnu subsistence practices and the timing for the rise, expansion, and ‘collapse’ of the Xiongnu polity. The problem, in part, has to do with discrepancies between dates that come from the same sites. Some dates have been reported to be earlier when the samples came from human remains. These discrepancies have been attributed to the ‘reservoir effect’. In order to investigate this, we...
Paleoecological and Archaeological Evidence for Iron Age Economic and Ecological Transformation in the Highlands of Western Kenya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Until recently, chronologies of food and iron production activities have been poorly resolved in the western Kenyan highlands, and have been informed largely by historical linguistics and only a handful of radiocarbon dates. New archaeological and microbotanical data are presented that allows reexamination of earlier cultural history models for this region,...
Passing the Paleo Drug Test: Testing for Medicinal Plant Use in the Paleoethnobotanical Record (2018)
For decades, paleoethnobotanical research almost exclusively concentrated on reconstructing past subsistence economies. At 2011’s SAA conference, I presented a paper entitled, Toward A Paleoethnomedicine. I suggested that paleoethnobotanical research should take inspiration from ethnomedicine (a subfield of ethnobotany) and concentrate on analyzing past people’s healing practices and performances. This paper presents a method to operationalize this concept, a technique for analyzing...