10,076 research outputs found

    Coles Creek Culture and the Trans-Mississippi South

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    Certain Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) traits, mostly Coles Creek ceramic traits, but also traits such as temple mounds and certain mortuary patterns, appear at Late Fourche Maline and Early Caddo sites in the Trans-Mississippi South, particularly at sites in the Red River Valley in northwest Louisiana and southwest Arkansas. Explaining how these traits got there and understanding their role in the development of Caddo culture is one of the basic problems in the archaeology of this area. The conventional explanation has long been that they represent a full scale intrusion of Coles Creek culture into the Trans-Mississippi South. Thus Michael Hoffman has created a Crenshaw phase of Coles Creek culture in the Great Bend region of the Red River Valley in southwest Arkansas, and Clarence H. Webb attributed the initial major occupation at the Mounds Plantation site in northwest Louisiana to Coles Creek peoples who laid out the plaza, possibly constructed Mound 2 as a quadrilateral temple substructure, and--at the opposite end of the plaza--established a burial area where Mound 5 sits

    Deconstructing the Sanders Focus and the Sanders Phase : A Reply to Perttula Regarding the Taxonomy and Significance of the So-called Sanders Focus, or Sanders Phase, Pottery of Northeast Texas and Southeast Oklahoma

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    Perttula is correct in pointing out that there are numerical errors in a recently published table of mine. A revised version is presented here as Table 1. Although several of these errors are numerically large and might have caused problems had they gone uncorrected, Perttula is not correct in suggesting that they are serious in the sense that they have affected the conclusions I reached based on the table, the insinuation being that they weaken my Sanders entrepot hypothesis. They do not. That hypothesis is part of the reinterpretation of the archeology and bioanthropology of the Arkansas Valley and the Red River Valley which I have been developing for more than eight years. It could hardly be weakened by errors in this table which is simply a compilation of the pottery of the five so-called Sanders focus/phase types reported from the list of sites with probable Sanders phase components recently proffered by Bruseth, Wilson, and Perttula

    Maltese ceramics and imperial foodways: an exploration of nineteenth-century red wares

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    The archaeological study of recent periods in Malta is in its infancy. Despite the high potential for an historical archaeology of Malta contributing to broader issues such as an understanding of Mediterranean trade and colonialism, as well as the cultural history of Malta, the archaeological resource has remained under-explored. The aim of this article is to address the situation and offer an initial classification and interpretation of local and imported red earthenware ceramics. It will demonstrate the need for such work in relation to answering questions relating to local production, international trade, and foodways

    The making of Britain’s first urban landscapes: the case of late Iron Age and Roman Essex

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    This paper presents preliminary research into the social and economic impact of early urban settlement in Britain, focusing on the case-study area of Late Iron Age to Roman Essex. Through fresh analysis of ceramic assemblages from Colchester and Heybridge, we describe hitherto unrecognised socio-cultural groupings and identities through subtle differences in the deposition of pottery in the generations before and after conquest. The concluding discussion concentrates on problems that we still have to address in describing the economic basis of early urban society in Britain

    A Flexible Corporation: Classic Period House Societies in Eastern Mesoamerica

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    House society models, based on the work of Levi-Strauss but since refined by cultural anthropologists and archaeologists, provide a good model for understanding social organization among the ancient Maya and their neighbors in Mesoamerica based on a comparative study of societies in the Copan Valley, the lower Ulua Valley (Sula Valley), and the Cuyumapa Valley, all in Honduras. Social Houses are flexible, enduring social groupings that define kinship flexibly, recognizing adoption, marriage, shared residency, and other factors as ways to create ties that endure over generations

    Ceramic composition at Chalcolithic Shiqmim, northern Negev desert, Israel: investigating technology and provenance using thin section petrography, instrumental geochemistry and calcareous nannofossils

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    Technological innovations in ceramic production and other crafts are hallmarks of the Chalcolithic period (4500–3600 BCE) in the southern Levant, but details of manufacturing traditions have not been fully investigated using the range of analytical methods currently available. This paper presents results of a compositional study of 51 sherds of ceramic churns and other pottery types from the Chalcolithic site of Shiqmim in the northern Negev desert. By applying complementary thin section petrography, instrumental geochemistry and calcareous nannofossil analyses, connections between the raw materials, clay paste recipes and vessel forms of the selected ceramic samples are explored and documented. The study indicates that steps in ceramic manufacturing can be related to both technological choices and local geology. Detailed reporting of the resulting data facilitates future comparative ceramic compositional research that is needed as a basis for testable regional syntheses and to better resolve networks of trade/exchange and social group movement

    Place and space in early Burma: a new look at ‘Pyu Culture'

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    Ancient Burma (Myanmar) is commonly split into Upper Burma ‘Pyu’ and Lower Burma Mon cultures, an ethnic classification of walled site cultures in the Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwaddy) basin that began with fourth to ninth century C.E. scripts. The early Buddhist archaeology, however, points to multiple groups and spreads far beyond the Irrawaddy drainage system. The Mon typology has profitably been unravelled in Aung-Thwin’s controversial study (2005), but, while his advocacy of the Pyu primacy has been questioned, rudimentary definitions of the first millennium C.E. ‘Pyu culture’ have remained largely unchallenged. The blinkered results of text primacy in defining ethnicity and cultural identity are addressed here, with data from recent discoveries used to identify a relational engagement between the brick walls and terracotta urns typical of early Buddhist cultures in Upper Burma. This localised integration of spatial and spiritual factors is further strengthened by a range of artefacts and indigenous texts

    Application of Image Analysis for the Identification of Prehistoric Ceramic Production Technologies in the North Caucasus (Russia, Bronze/Iron Age)

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    The recent advances in microscopy and scanning techniques enabled the image analysis of archaeological objects in a high resolution. From the direct measurements in images, shapes and related parameters of the structural elements of interest can be derived. In this study, image analysis in 2D/3D is applied to archaeological ceramics, in order to obtain clues about the ceramic pastes, firing and shaping techniques. Images were acquired by the polarized light microscope, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and 3D micro X-ray computed tomography (”-CT) and segmented using Matlab. 70 ceramic sherds excavated at Ransyrt 1 (Middle-Late Bronze Age) and Kabardinka 2 (late Bronze–early Iron Age), located in in the North Caucasian mountains, Russia, were investigated. The size distribution, circularity and sphericity of sand grains in the ceramics show site specific difference as well as variations within a site. The sphericity, surface area, volume and Euler characteristic of pores show the existence of various pyrometamorphic states between the ceramics and within a ceramic. Using alignments of pores and grains, similar pottery shaping techniques are identified for both sites. These results show that the image analysis of archaeological ceramics can provide detailed information about the prehistoric ceramic production technologies with fast data availability

    Jamaan at the pass of Bi’rein. An Iron Age IIB-C Ammonite stronghold in central Jordan

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    In years 2015-2016 the Zarqa Directorate of the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan carried out a rescue excavation at the site of Jamaan, an Iron Age IIB-C Ammonite stronghold 16 Km north of ‘Amman. The site survey and limited soundings allow to plot a plan of the structure, comprising an outer enclosure with a casemate wall, two cisterns, and a square podium tower, and to collect ceramic material dating from Iron Age IIB-C (c. 840-580 BC), as well as the head of a soft limestone statue, possibly depicting a local chief or an official. The latter adds to the relatively conspicuous number of statues from the Kingdom of Ammon, possibly illustrating the production of a non-royal commission
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