Asia: Southwest Asia and Levant (Other Keyword)
1-25 (41 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From about 1973 through the early 1990’s the University of Pennsylvania group of Maddin, Muhly, Pigott and Stech were among the world leaders in archaeometallurgy. In this presentation I try to situate their work within a brief history of his topic in North America. With two notable exceptions (the consultant...
Analyses of metallurgical remains from Failaka, Kuwait: Exploring the Persian Gulf metals trade in the 2nd millennium BCE (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews the exchange of metals within the greater Persian Gulf region during the 2nd millennium BCE, considering archaeological, archaeometric and documentary evidence. The specific focus is the metallurgical assemblage from Failaka Island (Kuwait) and its implications for the continued production and...
Analysis of Projectile Use-Wear, Adhesive Remains, and Archery Experiment on Epipaleolithic Microliths from Tor Hamar, Southern Jordan (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Epipaleolithic assemblages in the Levant are characterized by frequent occurrences of microliths, and their techno-morphological and chronological studies have clarified detailed cultural history and regional variations in the Levant. While functional studies of microliths recently increased, the relationship between microlith functions and their...
A Biometric Meta-study on the Origins and Spread of Caprine Management in the Northern and Southern Levant (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recently, explanatory models for plant and animal domestication have shifted from single-origin explanations to multiregional frameworks. Despite this, the timing and origins of caprine management across the Fertile Crescent remain the subject of debate, particularly for the southern Levantine region. Here, we compile an extensive database of published...
Commemorating Childhood: The Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology of the Achaemenid Levant (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines the social status of children in the Ancient Middle East, focusing on a fifth-century BCE cemetery at Tell el-Mazar, Jordan. Using mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology methods, the research aims to uncover how children were commemorated within their familial and communal contexts. Bioarchaeological methods will be employed to...
Controlling Inherited Biases and Analytical Procedures for the Zooarchaeologist: A Case Study from the Central Anatolian site of Kaman-Kalehӧyük (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists have tackled numerous questions to reveal human-animal interactions in time and space. In addition to depending on animals for their primary products, that is meat, and secondary products such as milk, muscle-power, and wool, humans have used animals to establish and legitimize status and power, and to represent ideologies, identities,...
Cowries as Social Currency in the Iron Age Levant (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> For shell to be considered a means of payment, they should fulfill several requirements: They must be portable, durable, divisible and recognizable. Historic and ethnographic evidence support the use of cowries as money with the earliest archaeological evidence for extensive use of cowries from Mongolia and China between 2200-220 BCE during the...
Cutting into Butchering Practices: Investigating Butchery Skill at an Early Bronze Age IIIA Urban Community along the Northern Negev (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rise of urban living, particularly in the Southern Levant, often reflects a shift towards market economies and removed relationships with food– the transition from direct to indirect relationships with herding domesticated livestock. However, questions remain regarding if this transition from “direct” to “indirect” translated to all aspects of food...
Dead Sea Tea Party: An Analysis of Variation in Early Bronze Age IV Mortuary Practices in Bâb adh-Dhra`, Jordan (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster explores mortuary practices in the Early Bronze Age IV (EB IV; 2400-2000 BCE) post-urban settlement of Bâb adh-Dhra`, Jordan through the analysis of legacy collections from 1970s excavations by the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain led by R. Thomas Schaub and Walter E. Rast. Bâb adh-Dhra`’s cemetery offers EBA researchers an exceptional...
Early iron metallurgy in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The appearance of iron in southwest Asia in the late second to early first millennium BCE is currently understood as a complex social phenomenon, and yet pinpointing even broad details of a technological emergence that led to a full-fledged Iron Age has proven to be a major challenge. Since the work commemorated in...
Eating Cats and Dogs: Understanding the Collapse of an Early Urban Settlement in the Northern Negev Desert from a Faunal Perspective (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Tell el-Hesi was an Early Bronze Age III (2900-2500 B.C.E.) urban community located in the peripheral region of the Northern Negev Desert in the Southern Levant. Notably, the occupation was short-lived (ca. 100-150 years) and rapidly abandoned before the end of the EB III period, demarcated by drier environmental conditions. Unlike most urban...
Eurasian discoveries in Bronze- an archaeological tribute to Vincent Pigott (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bronze technology transformed the a range of Eurasian societies in prehistory, shaping the economic, political, and symbolic landscape for millennia. In Central Eurasia, tin-bronze (in particular) held a particular role. This paper will explore the innovation and integration of tin-bronze in Central Eurasian...
Exploring Personal Ornamentation at Kharaneh IV: An Aesthetic Analysis of the Shell Bead Assemblage (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. About 20,000 cal. BP, the presently arid desert environment at Kharaneh IV, Jordan, is thought to have been a resource-rich wetland, yet only 12% of the examined shell bead assemblage is associated with terrestrial/freshwater species---the remaining 88% is attributed to marine species sourced from either the Mediterranean or Red Sea, both over 200 km...
Gold and heterarchy: from Crete to Colombia (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The role of metals in prehistoric societies is typically linked to concepts of power and hierarchy. Challenging established assumptions, the project led by Vince Piggott and colleagues in the KWPV of Thailand was one of the first to introduce heterarchy in archaeometallurgy. They demonstrated that large-scale,...
Ground Truth: How Residue and Other Paleobotanic Analyses Are Provoking New Interpretations on the Early Cypriot Neolithic (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the early settlement of Cyprus has changed dramatically over the past few decades. We now know that people were on the island by at least the Epipaleolithic, and that the Neolithic, when Cyprus was permanently settled, is as old as on the mainland. Interdisciplinary research at the rare upland site of Ais Giorkis has revealed...
High-tin Bronze in Southeast Asia: Where Did it Come from, How was it Made, and Who Used it? (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> One noteworthy feature of metallurgy in Southeast Asia is the appearance of quenched high-tin (tin between 20% and 30%) artifacts in the later 1<sup>st</sup> millennium BC. This intractable alloy cannot be worked cold but only hot-worked. Thin-walled (o.2-0.3mm) vessels of quenched high-tin bronze have been...
The Impact of Migration on Ritual Burial Practices during the Hellenistic Period in Central Anatolia (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research examines the Hellenistic Period (ca. 300-100 BCE) human skeletal sample (n=31) and associated storage pit burial contexts at Kaman-Kalehöyük in central Anatolia. The aim is to test the hypothesis that the burial practices observed at the site are consistent with those at sites associated with Celtic language speaking peoples and may be...
Introducing Aswad Terrace in the Hisma Basin: New Discovery of Initial Upper Paleolithic Remains in Southern Jordan (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) is a chrono-cultural concept that is widely used in the Levant, Central–Southeastern Europe and Central–North Asia to characterize unique cultural changes at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. The IUP remains have been recognized as key cultural records that can be related to paleoanthropological and genetic...
Islamic Plant-Ash Glass Trade in the Eastern Silk Roads: New Insight from Nishapur (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islamic plant-ash glass was extensively traded along the Silk Roads, offering insights into inter-regional connectivity and local material culture development in medieval Eurasia. Research on plant-ash glass has largely focused on evidence from the Near East, while the role of plant-ash glasses in the eastern Silk Road societies, including Iran, Central...
Jugha: How Story Mapping Can Reveal Landscape Structural Violence (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Old Jugha, located in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan, was once a prosperous ancient Armenian city with its famous cemetery filled with Khachkars in the borderlands between two adversarial empires, the Ottoman and Persian. Jugha suffered three periods of destruction over three centuries, which have been supported and supplemented through the...
Molly Crowfoot and Elizabeth Crowfoot: Pioneers in Textile Archaeology (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on Grace Mary Hood Crowfoot (Molly; 1877-1957), whose groundbreaking work was foundational in the field of textile archaeology, and on their daughter Elisabeth Grace Crowfoot (1914-2005). Wife of renowned British archaeologist John Winter Crowfoot, Molly trained as a midwife and became a self-taught ethnographer, archaeologist,...
The Motivating Factors of Different Stakeholders for Preserving Archaeological Heritage in Jordan (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The value of archaeological heritage varies from country to country. This poster provides results from a project that used methods from socio-cultural anthropology to investigate the significance of archaeological heritage in Jordan and current preservation efforts there. Interviews were conducted with study participants at four distinct locations across...
Movement, Connections, and Cultural Contact between the Near East and Neighbors during Classical Antiquity through Ancient DNA (aDNA) (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Archaeological material and historical records attest contact between the Near East and the broader Mediterranean during Classical Antiquity (c. 8<sup>th</sup> century BCE to 6<sup>th</sup> century CE), but ancient DNA (aDNA) expands our understanding of the extent and nature of these interactions. Due to scholarly focus on earlier periods and poor...
Osteobiography of Skeletal Remains from the Archaeological Site of Pella, Jordan (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pella at Wooster Project is an ongoing effort to catalogue and digitally publicize an archaeological collection from the site of Pella, Jordan, near modern day Tabqet Fahel. The College of Wooster excavated in Pella between 1967 and 1985, and brought a collection of artifacts to the United States. This poster showcases the analysis of a series of...
Paleoecology of 'Ubeidiya: Deer Dental Microwear Patterns and Implications for Out of Africa I (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recreating past environments is a useful tool in understanding the adaptation and behaviors of human ancestors. To reconstruct the palo-environment of ‘Ubeidiya, a site for migrating hominins during out of Africa I, environmental proxies were examined. Specifically, the vegetation of the site was reconstructed using the dental remains of ungulates and...