Iron Age (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Duncan Hurt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists who study the hillforts of Northwest Iberia have often used the layouts of individual settlements as the basis for inference and speculation on a wide range of phenomena, largely toward the end of establishing some understanding of the "social structure" of Iron Age communities. This often amounts, however, to little more than informal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marta Lorenzon.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Geoarchaeology and Environmental Archaeology Perspectives on Earthen-Built Constructions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation combines the findings of two distinct studies focusing on earthen building materials in different border regions, shedding light on the evolution of earthen architectural practices. The first study delves into the geoarchaeological analysis of earthen materials and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Harkleroad.

Discussions of ritual in society often focus on how ritual is used to bring individuals, communities, and larger social groups together. The role of ritual in violent interactions and warfare is less often considered and often what discussion there is focuses on the use of warfare to procure captives for public rituals, such as execution. Virtually ignored in this discussion is the role ritual plays in routinizing violence and warfare and how this ultimately impacts individuals and societies....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rick Schulting. Petrus le Roux. Yee Min Gan. Gary Lock. Chris Gosden.

As in any mixed farming system, the management of animals doubtless played an important part in Iron Age societies in southern Britain. Economically, they furnished meat, milk, wool and manure, and served as draught animals for transport and tillage. Intersecting with their economic uses, they were also important socially, politically and ritually. It is relatively straightforward to determine the proportional representation and mortality profiles of the major species – cattle, sheep/goat and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Fernandez-Gotz.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urbanization is a social process, rather than a final destination. More important than debating whether one specific settlement within a system should be classified as "urban," "proto-urban," or "nonurban" is to analyze the wider processes of settlement nucleation and centralization that take place within the larger landscape,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Derek Hamilton. Kerry Sayle. Gordon Cook.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the ongoing results on isotopic research on Middle Iron Age (~400–200 cal BC) populations in Wessex and East Yorkshire. The multi-isotopic approach has been employed to infer population mobility for both the inhumed human population at a series of sites and the faunal assemblages from either the associated settlements or directly recovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Steinberg.

The rapid settlement of Iceland has a distinct beginning, but defining the end of the settlement turns out to be difficult. While there are anecdotal stories of earlier settlers, the beginning of large-scale migration to Iceland seems to happen in about AD 870, at the start of Harald Fairhair’s reign, and the time of a distinct volcanic ash layer. The landnám, or land-grab is an important template for our understanding of movements into new landscapes, from the Neolithic Revolution, to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Büster. Ian Armit.

The Sculptor’s Cave in NE Scotland saw a long history of use, from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Medieval (Pictish) period. Late Bronze Age activity is characterised, as in other caves along this stretch of coast, by complex communal funerary practices involving the exposure and processing of human bodies. Veneration continued for many centuries, yet by the Roman Iron Age (c. 3rd century AD) perceptions of the cave had markedly changed. During this period, several adults were decapitated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sonia Machause López.

The power of the underground has attracted ritual practitioners over the centuries. Natural places, such as caves, have some intrinsic sensorial power which helps to create a ritual atmosphere. In the Iberian Iron Age (6th–1st centuries BC), ritual production has been recognized in some caves through the identification of the material patterns, along with other physical and sensorial particularities. Although each cave is different, those cavities in which we find evidence of ritual practice...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelia Hebert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Scythians were a group of people originating in Central Asia that migrated to what is now Ukraine and Southern Russia from the 8th to the 7th centuries BCE. They are well-known for their nomadic way of life, horseback warfare, and apparent lack of a patriarchal society. There is significant evidence that Scythian women were treated as equals to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Alcock.

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. Ancient classical sources tell us that in the late eighth/seventh centuries BCE the armies of Sparta marched on their neighbors to the west, the Messenians, and conquered their wide and fertile lands. Many Messenians fled, but others remained to become the famed “helots” of the Greek world—a population subject to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Terrenato.

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. The urbanization of western central Italy has had a peculiar role in our intellectual history, starting with its most famous fruit, the "eternal" city of Rome. With evident teleology, the narrative about the emergence of the earliest agglomerations in the early first millennium BCE has taken the form of an ascending...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Lee.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women in pastoral nomadic steppe cultures had a higher social status and fluid gender roles than their counterparts in sedentary agricultural regions. Central Asian women (Mongol and Qidan) are historically documented to have made diplomatic, economic, and military decisions in proxy for male relatives. Mortuary evidence for women warriors is inferred from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jay Stephens. David Killick. Shadreck Chirikure.

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. Tin and copper ores around Rooiberg, South Africa, were exploited from 1000–1300 CE until about 1840. Geologists estimated that around 1,000 tons of the tin mineral cassiterite, equivalent to 792 tons of metallic tin, were mined there. Archaeological survey showed only a small amount of evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alina Karapandzich. Paul Nick Kardulias.

Adulation of heroes, including the flawed, militaristic, authoritative men of Homeric epic was an important feature of ancient Hellenic culture. This phenomenon is reflected in cults and shrines built in the Archaic period. How did these so-called "hero cults" form, and can Early Iron Age (EIA) elite burials form a connection between the tomb cults of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and the hero cults of the Archaic and later Classical periods? The purpose of this study is to examine EIA burials whose...