Iron Age (Other Keyword)
26-50 (291 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Geological and Technological Contributions to the Interpretation of Radiogenic Isotope Data" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of isotopic analysis of ceramic sherds and locally sourced soils that contribute to our understanding of the origin of ancient Sardis’s ceramic corpus and help clarify the site’s role within the larger interaction network of western Anatolia. A previous study...
Assessing the Suitability of Southern Africa for Archaeological Provenance Studies with Lead Isotopes (2018)
Evidence for trade between southern Africa and the Muslim world dates back to the 8th century CE. However, it is not until the 12th and 13th centuries, with the discovery of alluvial gold in southern Africa, that entanglement between the two regions intensified. As a result, state-level societies emerged and began incorporating aspects of the Muslim identity into their own culture. With the intensification of these trade relations, craftsmen began expanding their repertoire of iron and copper...
Awash in Meaning: Exploring the symbolic and ritual functions of the Iron Age bathing structures of the Iberian northwest. (2016)
Unique to the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, the ceremonial baths of the Iron Age Castro Culture present an entry point for our understanding of the social and symbolic mechanisms at work in Castro society. Not found anywhere else in Iberia, the precise use and meaning of the structures remains controversial. Were they an indigenous development, or a technology borrowed from the Roman world? Was their use related to personal grooming or ritual cleansing? Located within...
Baibalyk: An Early Fortified Town and Trading Center in a Nomadic Pastoral Landscape on the Mongolian Steppe (2018)
Mongolia is well known for its history of nomadic pastoralism and Bronze and Early Iron Age burials and monuments. It wasn’t until later in the Iron Age that the first large fortified towns and urban centers were built by the Uygher and Khitan Khanates. One of these, Baibalyk is believed to have been established in 758 CE by the Uyghur khagan, Bayanchur Khan, as a ceremonial and trading center in the fertile and strategically located Selenge Valley. Later in the 17th Century, Baibalyk is known...
Bantu Arrival in Southern Mozambique: Ceramic Analysis as a Source of Information for Dating, Diversity, Technology Transfer, and Nutrition (2021)
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 2016, a research cooperation between the Eduardo Mondlane University and the German Archaeological Institute was started. Since then, this cooperation performed various surveys and geomagnetic prospection and developed with Hamburg University a dedicated research project which this...
Bayesian Exponential Random Graph Modeling of an Iron Age Burial Network in Northeastern Taiwan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burials provide valuable information to study social structures and discuss social inequality. The relationship between prestige goods among burials may reflect the social relations between individuals, since prestige goods usually relate to social practices of trade, exchange, and gifting. We ask whether European colonial activities in seventeenth-century Taiwan...
Beasts and Feasts in Late Medieval Ireland: The Case from Mcdermot’s Rock (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland triggered a complex swirl of changes that presage dynamics of European colonialism in modern times. One key pattern is the emergence of divides between Anglo-Norman (colonizer) and Gaelic (indigenous) identities. Negotiating differences between “being Anglo-Norman”...
Bending the Urban narrative: Cyclic Cities in Ancient Greece (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urbanization of human settlements is commonly seen as a relatively linear development beginning in the earliest sedentary communities of the Neolithic and ending with the international megalopolises of the present day. A closer scrutiny of the archaeological record, however, clearly shows that this narrative has little bearing on the factual situation....
Bodies Shaping Bodies: Using Butchery to Trace Human-Animal Relationships (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While our relationship encompasses far more than just the dinner menu, food is one of the key ways in which human and animals lives and bodies directly shape one another. Indeed, beyond just the act of eating, how human and animal bodies meet in the context of procurement and processing can...
Bridging the Divides at Azoria: Environmental Archaeology at an Archaic Greek City (2018)
Excavations at the Archaic (7th-6th centuries B.C.) city of Azoria on Crete demonstrate the value of intensive environmental archaeology for understanding an historical Greek context. Texts document the important role of food and dining to ancient religion and politics; however, ancient authors presented a normative picture and excluded details they assumed were common knowledge. Studying plant and animal remains can "ground-truth" ancient sources on foodways and provide contextual nuances not...
Broken Edges: Investigating Jewelry Damage by Violence and Fatigue (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. Many Scandinavian Migration Period gold bracteate pendants of the 5th and 6th centuries show evidence of pre- or post-depositional damage. Impressions of broken edges of the jewelry were made with polyvinyl siloxane (PVS), and the impressions were then analyzed as part of a larger project to...
The “Bronze Age” of Southern Africa: Insights from Isotopes and Trace Elements (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 Southern Africa project (2015–present) uses lead and tin isotopes plus trace element concentrations to infer the geological provenance of copper and tin in Iron Age copper alloys, and to investigate the behaviors responsible for moving these objects from their geological source to the eventual...
The Bronze and Iron Age Sites Saridjar and Karim Berdy, Tajikistan (2017)
The Late Bronze Age site of Saridjar was discovered during a survey of the northern Yakhsu valley in 2010. Excavations in 2012, in 2013, 2015 and in 2016 prove that we are dealing with a 200 x 200 m large settlement with at least three construction phases. The proportion of the hand-made ceramics in all levels varies between 80 and 90%. Only occasionally wheel-made ware appears. Andronovo pottery of the Federovo phase is present in small numbers. At Karimberdy nearly all the pottery was...
Building Community: The Heuneburg Hillfort as Monument and Metaphor (2015)
Walls are assumed to serve as systems of containment and protection in response to social divisiveness but they may also serve to reduce or mask conflict within a society. Their physical form may be entirely expedient, largely symbolic, or some combination of the two. Early Iron Age settlements in west-central Europe were often situated on promontories with wall and ditch systems encircling portions of the occupied terrain but because of the daunting task of excavating such hillfort sites, which...
Cabaceira Pequena Archaeological Site: Initial Data and Interpretations (2021)
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. The Swahili Coast Civilization was a collection of independent polities that stretched across a large portion of the East African Coast from about 800 CE to the early modern period. There are several important sites that have contributed to our understanding of the wider Swahili world in northern...
Calculating moment of inertia of spindle whorls as a method for understanding Iron Age textile production (2016)
Excavations of Iron Age hillfort's in Northwestern Portugal, known as castros, have yielded many spindle whorls, but no extant fabrics due to the nature of preservation in the region. This leaves the question "what types of textile were produced?" In an attempt to answer this question, I calculate the moment of inertia (MI) for spindle whorls collected from three different sites in the Ave River Valley. MI represents the angular momentum of a whorl, allowing for the whorls various...
Can we define a British Iron Age? (2018)
The Iron Age in Britain has traditionally been seen as a period of hierarchical, warrior-based, Celtic societies, characterised by hillforts, defended settlements and elaborate weaponry. The dominant interpretive models have emanated from Wessex – that area of central southern England where the largest and most impressive hillforts are found. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have increasingly recognised the marked regional differences inherent in Iron Age societies across different...
Capturing People on the Move: Spatial Analysis and Remote Sensing in the Bantu Mobility Project, Basanga, Zambia (2018)
From its inception in 2014, the Bantu Mobility Project has sought to recover the various mobilities that made up peoples’ experience of the Bantu Expansions, the spread of over 500 related languages across nearly half the African continent. We have sought to refocus research on the Bantu Expansions away from the macro-scale and onto the specific movements of people, animals, and material goods at various spatial and temporal scales. From an archaeological standpoint this effort necessitates...
Castros and Cordage: Recognizing Contextual Evidence of Iron Age Practice at São Martinho (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Castro settlements, prominent from the Late Chalcolithic through the Iron Age in western Iberia, are often described as hillforts or defensive hilltop villages. The delineation of sites as castros often influences archaeological interpretations, bolstering focus on the strategic advantages of the...
Ceramic Use and Production at Iron Age Bashtepe, Uzbekistan: A Preliminary Petrographic Study (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ceramic corpus at Bashtepe, Uzbekistan, is a complex mix of pottery forms, fabrics, and technology. Some vessels are hand-made, while others are wheel-made. Transport vessels, cooking pots, and fine ware are all present. To better understand the acquisition and local production of this corpus, a preliminary...
Change and Adaptation in Stone Tool Technology in Jordan ca. 1000 BCE (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The decline and replacement of stone tools with their metal counterparts in regions with traditions of metallurgy has been shown to have been a slow and variable process that involved specific types of tools marking the metallurgic transition at different times and in specific contexts. For example, in the region of the southern Levant (Jordan, Palestine,...
Changing Times, Changing Ways? Evidence for Metallurgy at the Cividade de Bagunte (2018)
The Iberian Peninsula has been a rich source of metallic ores for millennia, and the quest for control of those resources has profoundly impacted the history of the Peninsula. Iberia has followed a unique trajectory in the development of metallurgy, with a case for the independent invention of copper smelting in the southwest, and small-scale production of bronze and other metals across the Peninsula until Roman occupation. The advent of Roman imperial control of labour and mines constituted a...
The Chatelaine, Gender, and Diagnostic Artifact Use (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chatelaines suspend multiple items to be employed for such purposes as grooming, tools, or keys and have been widely used from before the Roman occupation of England to well after the Ninth Century. Additionally, they have been used to determine gender identity within Anglo-Saxon Burials. By examining the chatelaine’s use as a diagnostic measure of gender...
The Cividade de Bagunte and the Problems of Castro Architecture (2018)
It is generally accepted that the Castro Culture in northwestern Portugal exhibits a fairly consistent architectural tradition, characterized by the presence of certain construction techniques, structural forms, and organizational schemes. Despite this consensus, there is a pressing need for further research on the topic. Publications dedicated to the study of castro architecture are few, and they have mostly taken a broad approach that focuses on apparent commonalities between sites from across...
The Cividade de Bagunte Archaeological Project (2018)
The Cividade de Bagunte is the most publicized archaeological site of the Municipality of Vila do Conde and is classified as a Portuguese National Monument. Located on a mound with great visibility over the territories to the north and south of the Ave River, approximately 30km north of Oporto city, it called the attention and interest of various archaeologists such as Ricardo Severo and Martins Sarmento, in the end of the 19th century, and F. Russell Cortez in the 1940s. F. Russell Cortez...