Iron Age (Other Keyword)
201-225 (291 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jellhaug, Norway, is Scandinavia’s second largest prehistoric mound. Dating from the (pre)Viking period, it has a long history of human interaction and interpretation. Built in phases with distinct, selected, and transformed earthly materials, the mound compares with contemporary mounds in that both the...
Pastoral Societies, Holocene Climate and Technology: Perspectives from Iron Age Southern Jordan (Session 4400) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did pastoral societies evolve into more complex social organizations in what is today a hyper-arid desert zone? This paper examines the Iron Age (ca 1200 - 500 BC) data from southern Jordan that indicates relatively little climate change from today, yet the rise of complex pastoral nomadic societies.
Peaks Above, Plains Below: The Deeper Context of Settlement Patterning in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Crete (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of the long-term dynamics of settlement patterning on the Greek island of Crete, with a particular focus on the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. Alongside - or in the absence of - other forms of archaeological data, changes in settlement patterning have been central to debates around political and economic change on the...
Peering into the Glass and What Can It Tell about the Iron Age and the Romans in Northwest Portugal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous analyses of glass sherds from the Cividade de Bagunte, Vila do Conde, Portugal, indicate those glass fragments might have been produced in the Syro-Palestinian region. This paper discusses the results of glass samples from several hillfort settlements and sites connected with the Roman town of Bracara Augusta, Braga, Portugal, analyzed using...
The Penumbra of Castro Archaeology: Evidence and Questions (2018)
The archaeology and socio-cultural practices of Iron Age hilltop fortified settlements (castros) in Northwest Portugal and Galicia present usual and unusual specific problems. From the recognition of the uniqueness of castro cultural practices in the late nineteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth century, castro archaeology has suffered from the inadequate methodologies of earlier excavations, poor temporal controls, a parochial stance toward entertaining unanswered questions, and...
Peopling the Landscape: The Pollen Record and Nomadic Pastoralism in Iron Age Ireland (2018)
The people of the Irish Iron Age are often referred to as ‘invisible’ due to their seeming absence from the archaeological record. Ceramics, so often associated with domestic activities, are not a part of the Iron Age material culture. Burials and domestic settlements dating to the Iron Age exist, but they are the exception to the generally sparse archaeological record. In the absence of sufficient material culture and settlement patterns, other means of studying the people of the Iron Age must...
Performing Feasts and the Use of Animals in Ritual Contexts in Iron Age Ireland (2018)
Activities at large ceremonial complexes are interpreted as regional community endeavors that form group identities and reify social and political structures. Imposing monuments such as Dún Ailinne, Navan Fort, and Rathcrogan have provided tantalizing glimpses into ritual and ceremonial performances of the Irish Iron Age (500 BC-AD 500). Communal feasting has been suggested to be a key practice at these sites during the later periods of use. At feasts, social structure and identity are...
Phoenician Iron Smithing and Cult at Tel Akko, Israel (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations (2010 - 2018) directed by A. E. Killebrew and M. Artzy at Tel Akko, a major eastern Mediterranean Phoenician maritime center and emporium, have uncovered an unprecedented quantity of iron smithing slags, hearths and cultic artifacts, all dating to the sixth - fourth centuries BCE. This assemblage includes fragments of figurines and masks, a...
Phoenician Settlements: A Story of Integration and Cultural Assimilation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the second millennium BCE, the Phoenicians linked east and west through their established trade networks across the Mediterranean. We investigate the extent of Phoenician integration with the communities they settled across the western Mediterranean. Skeletal samples from Phoenician burial sites in Lebanon, Italy, Spain, and Tunisia were collected. We...
Phrygian Cuisine at Kerkenes: a synthesis of ceramic and botanical evidence for food storage and cooking (2017)
At the Iron Age site of Kerkenes in Central Turkey, researchers are using different analytical methods to study cooking and food preparation. Evidence for cooking pots and other ceramic containers used for preparing, storing, and cooking food are found together with a variety of botanical remains. A new project at the site initiated the complementary analysis of ceramic container production and use with plant preparation, storage, and consumption. Situating these data in context, taking...
Pit-House Complexes: A New Form of Rural Domestic Architecture in Hellenistic and Post-Hellenistic Central Asia (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. To date studies of ancient Central Asian rural architecture are marked by an imbalance with much attention focused on the estates of elite landowners and less effective nods to non-elite pithouse structures. Recent excavations at Bashtepa in the Bukhara Oasis of Uzbekistan (2021) have revealed an intermediary form of domestic...
Political Change and the Social Power of Potters at Idalion, Cyprus during the First Millennium BCE (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On Iron Age Cyprus, the polities are described as "city-kingdoms" that are autonomous, independent, and led by kings. Idalion is one such polity located in the south central region of Cyprus. Using petrographic analysis, I investigated the way craft production was impacted by economic, social, and political power...
Post-Charring Bacterial Degradation of Archaeological Lentils by Bacterial Degradation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to common knowledge, the preservation of stable isotope values in archaeological seeds requires that they be charred at low temperatures, because charring reorganizes sugar and protein polypeptides into stable Maillard reaction products. Charred seeds are understood to be resistant to diagenetic...
Prehistoric Pointillism: Rock Art near ‘Amlah, Oman (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art is one of the most ubiquitous archaeological features in southeastern Arabia, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood aspects of the region’s prehistory. Re-occurring motifs of people, weapons, camels, horses, and other animal figures appear in similar forms across the UAE and Oman, and many were produced...
Probable Pathological Evidence of Adult Scurvy, Dating Back to about 200 B.C. in Yuci, Shanxi, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scurvy is a disease resulting from inadequate intake of vitamin C. This can happen to all age groups but has a relatively high prevalence in children and subadults. Subadult scurvy has been studied thoroughly over the past decades; however, little research has been done on adult scurvy. This is because scurvy presents ambiguously in adults; in addition, scurvy...
Pursuing Park Museums and Archaeology in Ghana: A New Frontier in Heritage Education and Development (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How significant are newly established museums and archaeological projects in national parks to the future of Ghana's heritage education and community development? The inauguration of the Museum of Natural and Cultural Heritage at Shai Hills has revealed a promising...
The Queen of Heaven in Iron Age Greece: Analyzing Religious Ideology and Symbolism on Multiple Scales (2015)
In this paper, I approach religion and ideology in the archaeological record through an analysis of iconographic symbols, one that centres on the dialectic between longstanding meanings of symbols as they are transmitted across space and time and the local social, political, and intellectual contexts in which they appear. I situate my analysis within recent models from cultural evolutionary psychology, which see religion, along with its attendant rituals and symbolisms, as an adaptive mechanism...
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Indigenous Responses to Roman Colonial Surveillance in Alentejo, Portugal (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. If visibility is undertheorized in archaeology, then invisibility is doubly so. This paper investigates the avoidance of surveillance in a colonial context. The central Alentejo, Portugal, was, in the first century BCE, home to watchtowers established under the new Roman administration of the region. In this remote...
Reassessing Evidence for Early Iron Production in the Near East (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. Work by David Killick and colleagues has documented rich landscapes of iron production sites in sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, iron smelting and smithing sites have proven far more elusive in the Caucasus and the rest of the Near East. This situation has severely hampered our understanding of iron...
Recent Archaeological Research at Dún Ailinne, an Iron Age Royal Site in County Kildare, Ireland (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. Dún Ailinne is an Iron Age (ca. 600 BCE-400 CE) site in Country Kildare, Ireland. It is considered as one of the Irish "royal" sites. These sites are mentioned in the early medieval literature and are large sites surrounded by an inverted bank and ditch and containing monumental...
Reconsidering Cattle and Power at Great Zimbabwe (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Great Zimbabwe (GZ) is key for understanding precolonial African urban systems. Cattle bones are some of the most common materials recovered from GZ and have played a central role in interpreting the ways power was enacted at the site over time. Scholars use dental wear and eruption data from cattle molars and long bone epiphyseal fusion patterns to argue...
Reconstruction of the Diet at the Iron Age Site of Cvijina Gradina, Croatia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cvijina Gradina, located along the Zrmanja River in present day Croatia, was once one of the largest Liburnian settlements during the Iron Age period (6th – 1st century BC). The settlement was prominent in the region’s economic and sociopolitical sphere, leaving behind significant bioarchaeological evidence of diet to be researched. Based on the fragmentary...
Regional Connections and Variations in the Archaeology of Healing and Disability: The Temples of Asclepius (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Asclepius was worshiped as the god of healing throughout the Mediterranean from c. 500 BCE to 400 CE. Temples to the god "Asclepieia" have been found across the region, from Epidaurus in Greece, to Pergamon in Asia Minor, to Tiber Island in Rome. In antiquity, asclepieia were renowned as places where the sick...
Reinterpreting Archaeobotany in Mainland Southeast Asia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the 1990s, two major archaeobotanical studies were undertaken which shape our understanding of subsistence and agriculture in Prehistoric Mainland Southeast Asia. Although most field archaeologists in Southeast Asia do not routinely collect samples for biological studies, archaeobotanical data has grown...
The Relentless Tide: Swandro, a Multi-period Settlement Being Lost to the Sea (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. The Knowe of Swandro, (Orkney Islands, Scotland) was a large settlement occupied from around 800 BCE to CE 1200 and consists of Iron Age roundhouses, Pictish buildings, and a Viking/Norse settlement, much of which has already been lost to the sea. A substantial Iron Age roundhouse that had been occupied for many generations...