Iron Age (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Bassett.

The Somali Coast has long been a center of global commerce. At the confluence of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, port cities like Zeila and Berbera witnessed the arrival of Greek and Roman traders (ca. AD200) and Chinese merchants (ca. AD1300). Contacts with Muslim merchants from the Arabian Peninsula (ca. AD800) were particularly transformative, and by the tenth century, communities across Djibouti and Somaliland were converts. Scholars have hypothesized that pre-Islamic "monument sites"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aribidesi Usman.

This paper will report the 2017 excavation at Okete-Kakini site near the king’s (Attah) palace in Idah. Okete-Kakini was the residential area of Attah’s eunuchs (amonoji), one of the two major palace officials who carried out various functions for the Attah. The aim of the investigation is to identify the activities of the palatine elites through an examination of their material culture found in archaeological excavations. It is thought that the members of the palatine groups, like the formal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Luc Houle. Natalia Égüez. Oula Seitsonen. Lee Broderick. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ines Sastre Prats. Brais Currás Refojos.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For a researcher raised on a political-economy archaeological tradition, the assertion that the origin of inequality is not the relevant point in anthropological research is a shake. But after a careful reading of *The Dawn of Everything*, we are still persuaded that social relations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Von Nicolai.

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. In many parts of Temperate Europe, the first aggregated and fortified urban settlements developed in the Early Iron Age. However, many of these settlements disappeared after a few generations. After a period of decentralization lasting at least two centuries, another episode of settlement aggregation took place in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivy Faulkner.

Gift exchange is most often discussed as an economic transaction. Whether goods are exchanged for social, political or cultural capital, the model for examining the practice is based on a commodity framework. However, gift exchange is also a performance, often with prescribed behaviors based on the culture and the individuals participating in the exchange. This behavior clearly falls within the realm of ritual as much as that of trade or economics. In this paper, I discuss gift exchange as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathalie Brusgaard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1st millennium BC and the early 1st millennium AD, nomadic groups inhabited the Black Desert of northern Arabia. These desert societies are elusive, having left behind few material remains and archaeological research having been scarce. What we know about them has been based almost solely on the inscriptions they carved into the basalt rocks. Yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Ryan.

In addition to their functional role as military implements, weapons can also serve as material representations of martial ideology. Research on weapons burials must therefore take into consideration the multifaceted nature of weaponry within a society. During the majority of Japan's Kofun period (mid-3rd century to early-7th century), the archipelago relied on the importation of finished iron products and raw iron materials from the Korean Peninsula. This formed an intimate connection between...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vincent Serneels.

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 project “Stone and Iron by the Rasikajy” started in 2017, focusing on the material remains of iron smelting, soapstone carving, and pottery production in northeastern Madagascar between 700 and 1700 CE. It is a joint project involving scholars from several universities in Switzerland and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Coutu. Judith Sealy.

During the African Iron Age from 800 to 1200 AD, overseas trade began to expand out of southern Africa across the Indian Ocean, which caused an increase in the export of raw materials such as ivory. Archaeological evidence of ivory working has been found on sites across southern Africa dating to this period, including KwaGandaGanda and K2 in South Africa, Kaitshaa and Bosutswe in Botswana and Ingombe Ilede in Zambia. It is unknown whether the raw ivory was obtained locally or traded in, whether...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Haskel Greenfield. Justin Lev-Tov. Ann Killebrew. Annie Brown.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Walter Klippel and his former student Lynn Snyder published finds of butchered dog bones from the Dark Age site of Kavousi in Crete. Other researchers, both before and after that published work, noted such finds elsewhere in Greece as well as in Cyprus, and dating to a wide range of post-Neolithic periods. Butchered dog bones are also known from several Philistine sites in Israel. Here, we consider present a detailed discussion of a butchered, apparently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Reid.

Humans have inhabited southern Ghanaian forest for millennia, and nearly everywhere there are traces of human activity in the deep past. This paper discusses my integration of satellite remote sensing with traditional archaeological field methods to study longue durée continuity and transformation in both West African societies and the landscape itself. I am consolidating previous survey data and expanding upon them using several methods of archaeological survey and remote sensing with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Ritchey. Grace Cesario.

This is an abstract from the "Small Dwellings on the Viking Frontier: New Research from Kotið, North Iceland" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present food production data from the 2022–2023 excavations at Kotið, a small, non-elite Viking Age (ninth century AD) domestic dwelling located in Skagafjörður, North Iceland. Macrobotanical and zooarchaeological remains provide key data to better understand early subsistence strategies, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Sanmark.

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. This paper will address Viking-age ritual sites (cult sites assembly (thing) sites) in Scandinavia and Iceland from the perspective of their seasonality. These sites were used for gatherings of various kinds seemingly at certain points of the calendar year. Calendrical rituals formed a key part of Viking-age religion,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Richardson. Timothy Matney. Britt Hartenberger. Mary Shepperson. Tina Greenfield.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The preliminary season of the Sebittu Project on the Erbil Plain of Iraqi Kurdistan was conducted over four weeks this summer. The project includes seven Neo-Assyrian sites on the plain with the goal of documenting the agrarian economy during the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 900-600 BC) in northern Iraq, the heartland of the Assyrian empire. The initial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadya Prociuk.

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. Among the most dazzling traces of behaviour left behind by the Castro people of the Cividade de Bagunte in northwestern Iberia are the five silver torques discovered together in a hoard in the mid-twentieth century. The items in the Bagunte hoard share stylistic similarities with other Castro torques, but their material, silver...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Gosner. Alexander Smith. Jessica Nowlin. Daniel Plekhov. Seth Price.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sinis Archaeological Project is a new regional survey in west-central Sardinia that explores the landscapes of the Sinis Peninsula and adjacent territories from multi-scalar, diachronic perspectives. The region is a diverse landscape of agricultural plains, coastal areas, and mountainous territory. In antiquity, it was inhabited by both local Nuragic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zenobie Garrett.

This is an abstract from the "On the Periphery or the Leading Edge? Research in Prehistoric Ireland" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Dún Ailinne (Knockaulin) in County Kildare is one of four major ceremonial sites of the Irish Iron Age. The site sits on a large, isolated hill in an otherwise flat landscape on which a large earthen bank and ditch encloses approximately 13 ha of land at the top. Excavations in the 1960s-1970s, as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Troskosky. Erika Ruhl. Sarah Hoffman. Torill Christine Lindstrøm. Ezra Zubrow.

Islands are both understudied and spatially constrained, with often turbulent colonial histories. This paper reconsiders the conceptual basis of intra- and inter-island relationships in the context of archaeology. We argue that islands need not be isolated as geographic, ecologic or cultural entities and have not been so during the proto-historic and prehistoric periods. Using 21st century equilibrium theory and gateway theory we suggest that islands may be in some contexts central places. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Namita Sugandhi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper introduces the MAST project, a multi-year excavation program in South India that is designed to explore the role of small-scale societies in the development of larger interregional social formations. In particular this project will focus on areas of Iron Age and Early Historic occupation and production at the site Tekkalakota, and on the diachronic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Duncan Hurt.

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. The Cividade de Bagunte is an Iron Age and Roman Period hillfort, or *castro, located in the municipality of Vila do Conde in northwestern Portugal. This paper looks at specific features of Bagunte’s architectural remains in order to speculate about past social behaviors. Novel approaches to the spatial and material properties of...

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...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Carolus. Asa Cameron. Amartuvshin Chunag. Joshua Wright. William Honeychurch.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The end of the first millennium BC (ca. 250 BC–AD 150) marks the genesis of Xiongnu, eastern Eurasia’s first nomadic state, which emerged from central Mongolia to successfully integrate one of the largest-scale political configurations in prehistory. This transformative period also marks the appearance of Mongolia’s...

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...