Mediterranean (Other Keyword)
1-21 (21 Records)
Methone (located in Pieria, Greece) was a key trading hub in the prehistoric and historic North Aegean, visible in the discovery of an array of workshops, production tools, and imported artifacts, and by some of the earliest evidence for the Greek alphabet in the Mediterranean. The 2014-2016 Ancient Methone Archaeological Project aims to enrich our understanding of the settlement and situate it within the wider Mediterranean world. The principal components of the project–intensive surface...
Animal exploitation in the early prehistory of the Balearic Islands (2016)
The Balearic Islands were the last large islands in the Mediterranean to be settled, as late as the 3rd millennium cal BC. Currently, there is a good zooarchaeological record for the late 3rd and 2nd millennia cal BC, which allows the reconstruction of animal exploitation and management strategies in Mallorca, Menorca and Formentera. The results show that the obtainment of animal resources relied mainly on sheep, goat, cattle and pig husbandry. When this record is compared to the surrounding...
Archaeological Field schools: Teaching Heritage Management. An Example from Menorca (2015)
The archaeological field school is a traditional means of training students in the practical skills of survey, excavation, recording, and artifact processing. Recent discussions about field schools have emphasized the need to approach fieldwork from a holistic perspective and incorporate the theory and practice of archaeological stewardship: preservation, interpretation, management, and public outreach of archaeological resources. In this paper we describe our experience in the development of a...
Contextualizing Iron Age Cypriot State Formation in the Eastern Mediterranean (2016)
During the Archaic period (750-480 BC) the island of Cyprus underwent a dramatic transformation as new city-kingdoms rose to dominate the political landscape of the island. This shift resulted in increased competition for resources, establishment of political boundaries, and emergence of a pronounced social hierarchy within the new polities. The present study aims to investigate the development of these new polities in a broader geographic context, and to explore the ways in which cultural...
Detecting Olive Oil and Other Mediterranean Plant Oils: Experimental Considerations in Differentiating Lipids in Ancient Residues (2016)
This paper presents an experimental research program that assesses the possibility of distinguishing olive oil from other oils derived from Mediterranean plants based on fatty acid profiles. Due to the olive’s prolific use in the region, its oil is often presumed rather than demonstrated to be present in ancient residues. Other residue studies have suggested that different organic products may be differentiated based on specific ratios of fatty acid pairs. To evaluate this approach, a sample of...
Exploring the Roman Occupation and Abandonment of Salemi, Sicily: The Cistern at Largo Cosenza (2015)
Excavations in Salemi, Sicily have discovered a large, bell-shaped cistern dating from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD. This feature appears to be contemporaneous with a large mosaic floor identified nearby in 1893. The Roman cistern contained a wide variety of domestic debris attesting both the economic interconnectivity and independence of this site. This paper discusses the use and abandonment of the cistern, contextualizing the site within the broader, western Sicilian region. ...
House Rules: Cultural Transmission and Egyptian Senet Games (2016)
Egypt has long been the focus of research on ancient board games, as it provides the longest history and greatest variety of games in the ancient world. Despite this, limitations on archaeological interpretation exist because of the unprovenanced nature of the material, as well as a focus on games from tombs of the nobility and pharaohs. Increasingly, evidence from within Egypt in the form of graffiti games on monuments and on ostraca, as well as Egyptian games found in the Levant where...
Introduction—Islands Connected or Unconnected: A Case Study of Malta (2017)
Islands gave birth to many cultural and economic adaptations in prehistory. After an introduction to the symposium, the paper will focus on the small archipelago of Malta, which demonstrates a particularly resilient trajectory of survival set against environmental and economic limitations, that lasted millennia. Compared with the neighbouring areas (Sicily, Sardinia, Italy) Maltese megalithic "Temple" culture presented an unparalleled c.1500 years of unbroken development, and this paper...
Is Mediterranean Island Colonisation Still Interesting? (2017)
Island colonisation took off as a field of comparative archaeological investigation during the 1970s and 1980s, with thought-provoking analyses of regional theatres (primarily Oceanic, Caribbean and Pacific), as well as pioneering efforts to explore wider commonalities and differences between these. In the Mediterranean, the research of John Cherry sought underlying patterns and processes among a mass of empirical data, within which new evidence might find meaning and place. Such evidence has...
Islands and Invasives: The Archaeology of Plant and Animal Translocations (2015)
This presentation aims to show how the progresses of biological knowledge allows archaeology to take advantage of the paleontological and archaeozoological documentation accumulated during the last 40 years on the islands, to increase its set of evidence –admittedly indirect -- on the early seagoing in the Mediterranean. It presents a brief review of the geographical and paleogeographical frameworks as well as the basics of island biogeography and focuses on the different ways in which mammals...
Mediterranean shipbuilding: the case study of Calvi I (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Ship Construction and Shipwrecks: A Journey into Engineering Successes and Failures (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Port of Calvi, located in the island of Corsica, southeast of the French mainland, was for several centuries a center of maritime activity in the Mediterranean. In 1979 French submariner Antoine Roucayrol found the shipwreck named “Calvi I”, the vessel was believed to...
Neolithic Spread Models, Agricultural Islands and Pivotal Parameters: Impressions Gleaned from Simulating the Spread of Agriculture in the West Mediterranean (2016)
The significance of the spread of agriculture cannot be overstated and for this reason strong disagreement continues to arise over the processes responsible for the shift from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic. Four influential models have been proposed for the spread of agriculture in the west Mediterranean and can be applied to the circumstances of the Impresso-Cardial spread: the Wave of Advance Model, the Capillary Model, the Maritime Pioneer Colonization Model and the Dual Model. All four...
"New Technologies": Remote Sensing Tools And Techniques In Italian Underwater Archaeology (2015)
Remote sensing techniques and tools are becoming central in Italian underwater archaeology. Government agencies, universities and research centers have been both applying remote sensing potentials to research and developing new tools and procedures. Many university’s fellowships around the country have been focusing on developing know-how in this field. Italian underwater archaeology remote sensing is nowadays still in its infancy. Nonetheless, National and EU strategies and funding schemes as...
Porotic Hyperostosis, Anemias, and Marssshes in Prehistoric Mediterranean (1966)
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Re-assessing island colonization and exploitation in the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene Mediterranean (2016)
In 1981 one of us (Cherry) first attempted to tease out spatial and temporal patterning in the colonization of the Mediterranean islands by human communities. Since the 1980s, slowly accumulating evidence has suggested that the Mediterranean islands were sporadically exploited by hunter-gatherer-fishers (HGF) during the Epipalaeolithic and Mesolithic. Here, adapting principles from island biogeography, we seek to establish whether or not these patchy data exhibit patterning. We suggest that the...
The Scientific Investigation and Cultural Implications for the Use of Prestigious Substances in the Ancient Mediterranean (2017)
The role of organic residue analysis in archaeological research has shifted from an intermittent side project of interested analytical specialists to becoming standard components of an archaeological research program with a growing number of archaeologists being trained in both excavation and analytical instrumentation. Such developments within the field of archaeology not only highlight the benefits of applying a range of scientific techniques, but also expand the scope of archaeological...
Social complexity and wealth inequality in middle-range society: A complex systems and network science approach to the Prehistoric Bronze Age on Cyprus (2017)
Economic and social leaders create and maintain unequal or dominance relationships within and between communities by controlling labor, and limiting access to technological, material and ideological resources, and trade networks. Through these kinds of actions and interactions, social networks are structured and restructured altering the flow of goods, services and information. From this bottom-up process, social complexity emerges. To understand how the structure of underlying social networks...
The Social Dynamics of Obsidian Use in the Prehistoric Western Mediterranean: Temporal Changes in Maritime Capabilities, Lithic Technology, and Sociopolitical Complexity (2017)
In the western Mediterranean, obsidian was an important lithic material, coming from four Italian islands and found at archaeological sites up to several hundred kilometers away. Analytical studies of many thousands of artifacts have identified their specific geological sources, and revealed chronological and geographic changes in their selective use through the Neolithic and Bronze Ages (ca. 6000-1000 BC). These data are used to assess economic and social dynamics regarding access to and...
Space, Workforce, and Scale of Production: Ethnoarchaeological Approaches to Craft Workshops in Ancient Mediterranean (2017)
More than dots on a map, the craft production loci need to be examined for the space they occupy: their size, organization, and capacity. Spatial analysis can put constraints on workforce size and scale of production, allowing us therefore to reconstruct more accurate models of craft economy. We can also attempt to correlate space occupancy with scales of craft specialization. The "chaîne opératoire" can be examined parallel to the "espace opératoire" to establish what the spatial requirements...
Taking Out the Trash: Resilience and Reuse in a Late Roman Urban Space (2017)
This paper presents analyses of Late Roman pottery from the Gymnasium complex at ancient Corinth, Greece. Ceramic vessels from well-stratified deposits in multiple functional areas of the complex, dating from the late 4th through late 6th centuries CE, provide evidence for patterns of community resilience and adaptive capacity over a period of significant socio-economic change. Analyses of the Gymnasium ceramic assemblage reveal significant shifts in Corinth’s engagement with pan-Mediterranean...
Uncovering the Local Economy: A Ceramic Analysis of Exotic and Local Amphorae at Salemi, Sicily (2016)
Sicily has long been a hotbed of archaeological activity. During the Late Iron Age, Greek, Roman, Punic, and indigenous Elymi groups were involved in a complex network of trade and exchange. At the site of Salemi in western Sicily, there is evidence of participation in a widespread Mediterranean sphere of exchange. For this research, sourcing studies were conducted on transport amphorae to measure the degree of foreign influence on the local economy of Salemi. Preliminary data collected in the...